The Limehouse Golem (2016)

15 Friday Sep 2017

Tags

Bill Nighy, Dan Leno, Daniel Mays, Douglas Booth, George Gissing, Horror, Juan Carlos Medina, Karl Marx, Limehouse, Literary adaptation, Murders, Music Hall, Olivia Cooke, Sam Reid, Thriller

D: Juan Carlos Medina / 109m

Cast: Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Douglas Booth, Daniel Mays, Sam Reid, María Valverde, Eddie Marsan, Henry Goodman, Morgan Watkins

A music hall comedian and musical theatre actor. A Prussian-born philosopher. An English novelist. And an aspiring playwright. All four of them men, and all four suspected of being the infamous Limehouse Golem, a murderer whose latest outrage has claimed the lives of an entire family and their maid. Which of these four men – Dan Leno (Booth), Karl Marx (Goodman), George Gissing (Watkins), and John Cree (Reid) – is the crazed, psychopathic killer, and why?

It’s a measure of the confidence that screenwriter Jane Goldman (adapting Peter Ackroyd’s novel, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem) has in the material that she keeps this central conceit ticking along for so long, because if you stopped to think about it for more than a cursory second, then said conceit would crumble to dust before your eyes. Ackroyd may have presented his story in better ways on the page, but Goldman is hampered by the requirements of a movie interpretation, and the scenes where the murders are re-enacted from the viewpoint of each suspect in turn leads to some very awkward moments indeed. The sight of Karl Marx – a bushy bearded Goodman – acting violently makes for one of the most inappropriately amusing murder scenes in recent cinema history. And the same can be said of Gissing’s turn behind the knife. Leno fares slightly better but that’s mostly thanks to Booth’s florid turn as the theatrical maestro, while Cree, this movie’s Most Likely does mentally unbalanced with too much glee to be even considered as the Golem. So with each of the suspects lacking that certain murderous je ne sais quoi, what’s a mystery thriller meant to do?

The answer is to focus instead on Cree’s wife, Lizzie (Cooke), a member of Leno’s troupe, and soon on trial for poisoning her husband. Cree’s death doesn’t immediately rule him out of being the Golem, but it does prompt Inspector John Kildare (Nighy) to attempt to kill two birds with one stone: to prove that Cree was the Golem, and in doing so, provide his wife with a motive for killing him that would make her a heroine and see her avoid the gallows. Aided by Constable George Flood (Mays), Kildare follows a clue left by the Golem at a murder scene to the British Library and a book by Thomas de Quincey that contains a diary written by the Golem within its pages. With only the four men mentioned above having had access to the book on the day of its last entry, Kildare sets about obtaining samples of the men’s handwriting in an effort to eliminate/incriminate them. Leno, Marx and Gissing are soon ruled out, but Cree’s death remains an obstacle to the truth: before he died he burnt all his personal papers.

With all this investigative work going on, and grisly accountings of the murders punctuating the narrative to boot, the movie recounts Lizzie’s life from sexually abused pre-teen to orphan to theatrical protegé to music hall star. It feels like a soap opera tale given a grim Victorian veneer, and takes up too much of the movie’s run time. For long stretches it’s Lizzie’s back story at the forefront of the material, and the search for the Golem is left feeling as if it’s been relegated to second place, a position that doesn’t feel right for the story or the overall structure. Allied with a number of scenes that see Kildare visiting Lizzie in prison and reassuring her all will be well, the mystery elements are forced to take a back seat as Kildare pursues his twin aims, all of which is likely to lead some viewers into construing that his visits are indicative of some burgeoning romance (Kildare is conscientious it’s true, but nothing fully explains his obsessive determination to save Lizzie from certain death). But wait, Kildare isn’t “interested” in women, he follows another persuasion, a detail the script brings up every now and then in a misguided attempt at adding depth to the character, and which only prompts Flood to reveal his own “interests” in a scene that is as awkwardly written as it is played out.

Lizzie’s theatrical experiences are used as a backdrop for the rise of the Golem, and there are plenty of clues dropped along the way as to the murderer’s identity (fans of this sort of thing will have no problem working out the whodunnit aspect of things). Along the way there are also several music hall interludes, and back stage confrontations, that help to throw suspicion on Leno and Cree respectively, but in an effort to stretch the material even further, there are minor sub-plots that add little to the larger storyline, and by the time the murderer’s identity is revealed, a certain amount of ennui has settled in as scenes are recycled or repeated without adding anything new or relevant to the proceedings. Even the murders themselves, touted as grisly and shocking, prove unambitious in their execution (excuse the pun), and a number of incidental deaths prove equally uninspired (and more than a little predictable).

That said, there are some good performances to be had, with Nighy putting aside all the tics and pauses that usually make up one of his portrayals (and subbing for a too ill to take part Alan Rickman), while Booth (who just keeps getting better and better) is on formidable form as Leno, imbuing the character with a melancholy nature off stage that is at odds with his more ebullient and public persona on stage. Marsan is good value as always as a senior member of Leno’s troupe, Reid plays the anger-driven Cree with a fierce passion, but Mays looks out of place, and Cooke does her best with a role that should be more sympathetic than it actually is, and which suffers from having too much attention focused on it. Medina organises everything in a frustratingly direct manner, with too many scenes and developments lacking the necessary impact, and though he has fine support from the likes of cinematographer Simon Dennis, production designer Grant Montgomery, and costume designer Claire Anderson, it’s not enough for the movie to look good when it doesn’t always feel right.

Rating: 6/10 – a mixed bag overall, The Limehouse Golem captures the squalid nature of the Victorian era with aplomb and sets up its central storyline well, but dials down on the melodrama and the lurid nature of the Golem’s activities; perfectly acceptable then in a “what to watch on a Sunday evening” kind of way, but not quite as formidable in its approach as it needed to be.

It (2017)

14 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Andy Muschietti, Bill Skarsgård, Drama, Finn Wolfhard, Horror, Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Literary adaptation, Pennywise, Review, Sophia Lillis, Stephen King, The Losers Club, Thriller

D: Andy Muschietti / 135m

Cast: Jaeden Liberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff, Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hamilton, Jake Sim, Logan Thompson, Owen Teague, Jackson Robert Scott, Stephen Bogaert

Somebody somewhere knows just how many movie adaptations there are of novels, novellas and short stories (and random ideas) by Stephen King. But having that knowledge will also mean that if they’ve seen all those adaptations, then the ratio of good to bad is going to be firmly on the bad side. For every Carrie (1976) there’s a Graveyard Shift (1990), or an unwanted sequel such as The Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996). Then there are the TV adaptations, but even there the ratio is still predominantly bad over good, with the likes of The Tommyknockers (1993) and Trucks (1997) proving less than successful. However, one TV adaptation that had a better reception was It (1990), and mostly because of Tim Curry’s performance as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. A big screen remake has been in the works since 2009, and after a couple of false starts it’s finally here.

The first thing to mention about It is that it’s a far better adaptation of King’s novel than we could have ever expected. The script – a rewrite by Gary Dauberman of one written by previously attached director Cary Fukunaga and Chase Palmer – gives us several avenues down which we can explore, from the camaraderie of the Losers Club (the group of six boys and one girl who take on Pennywise the Clown), to the troubled history of their hometown of Derry, Maine, and the reluctance of the adults in Derry to acknowledge the evil that lurks in their town. The movie is also a coming-of-age story, as the members of the Losers Club try to overcome their fears and take on an evil entity that identifies and plays on those fears in order to feed every twenty-seven years. Led by Bill Denbrough (Lieberher), who loses his little brother, Georgie (Scott), to the sewer-dwelling clown who calls himself Pennywise (Skarsgård), the Losers Club is a select band of friends who become aware of Pennywise’s presence in Derry, and decide to do something about it. There’s motormouth Richie (Wolfhard), hypochondriac Eddie (Grazer), orphaned Mike (Jacobs), germaphobe Stanley (Oleff), new kid in town and local history buff Ben (Taylor), and in time, strong-willed Beverly (Lillis).

Their friendships are at the heart of the movie, adding a rich layer of emotional consequence that could so easily have been overlooked in favour of the next big scare. Instead, the hopes and dreams and fears of a group of young kids take centre stage, and thanks to the script and Muschietti’s adept direction it’s easy to feel anxious for them, whether they’re being bullied by older teen Henry Bowers (Hamilton) and his cronies, or facing up to the malicious intentions of Pennywise and his abductions of children. As each is drawn into a tighter and tighter circle of responsibility – they all realise that there aren’t any adults who could deal with what’s happening (or want to; there’s a pervading sense that the adults are complicit in Pennywise’s actions) – friendships old and new are tested like they’ve never been tested before, and they discover a heroism in themselves that proves to be their greatest achievement, both individually and as a group. They bicker, they argue, they prove their love for each other – even and especially Beverly – and they unite to defeat Pennywise… for the time being.

With the characters and the performances of the Losers Club locked in, Muschietti is free to concentrate on making It as scary and as terrifying as he possibly can, and he does so by making Pennywise a more vicious and intense incarnation of the Dancing Clown than was the case back in 1990. A little flirtatious, and tempting with it, the sewer-dwelling entity is an unnerving creation made all the more unsettling by the quality of Skarsgård’s portrayal. Using his gangly frame to excellent advantage, Skarsgård adds a serpent-like nuance to his performance, his physical presence (even when still) exuding menace at every turn. Aided by a terrific visual design, inspired in part by Lon Chaney’s portrayal of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Pennywise is the stuff of coulrophobics’ nightmares, and the movie exploits that fear in various clever and impressive ways; for once he’s just as scary out of the shadows as he is within them.

The movie is bolstered by a host of impressive performances from its young cast members, with Lieberher leading the charge as stuttering Bill Denbrough, evincing Bill’s grief at losing his little brother, and looking an unlikely hero in the grand scheme of things with complete conviction. Equally as good (if not slightly better) is Lillis as the tomboyish Beverly, plagued by the unsavoury attentions of her father and finding respite in the company of a group of boys whose own worries and concerns are easier for her to deal with. The unofficial mother and girlfriend of the group, Beverly dares and challenges them to be better than they are. There’s good support from Wolfhard and Taylor, though inevitably, and despite their best efforts, Jacobs, Oleff and Grazer are at the mercy of a script that can’t possibly focus on everyone equally, and so have less to do in terms of the overall narrative.

Structurally, the movie does suffer by having two confrontations between the Losers Club and Pennywise occupying the last hour, and there’s a sense that the longer the movie goes on, the less frightening Pennywise becomes, though this would be to overlook the notion that’s spelt out towards the end that the Losers Club are becoming less and less scared of It, and with their doing so, the entity itself becomes less intimidating. It’s another clever conceit in a movie that is dominated by a plethora of good ideas in terms of the adaptation carved out of King’s novel, and Muschietti’s assured direction is augmented and complemented by Claude Paré’s splendid production design and Chung-hoon Chung’s dread-fuelled cinematography. There are scares to be had throughout, some of them very effective indeed, and the movie maintains a morbid, chilling atmosphere from the first rain-soaked scene to the climactic battle below the streets of Derry. A definite winner as an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, if Muschietti and co are able to maintain this level of consistency in Chapter Two, then 2019 can’t come round quickly enough.

Rating: 8/10 – King’s sprawling tome is transferred to the big screen with a great deal of skill and enviable attention paid to the dynamics of the Losers Club and the vicious nature of its villain, making It a much better option than another more recent King adaptation; visually arresting at times, and a lot more uncompromising than a mainstream horror movie usually aims for (let alone achieves), this is an old-fashioned chiller that is both discomfiting and disturbing – and wants the viewer to know it.

Let Us Prey (2014)

06 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Brian O'Malley, Catch Up movie, Drama, Horror, Liam Cunningham, Police station, Pollyanna McIntosh, Retribution, Review, Thriller

D: Brian O’Malley / 95m

Cast: Liam Cunningham, Pollyanna McIntosh, Bryan Larkin, Hanna Stanbridge, Douglas Russell, Niall Greig Fulton, Jonathan Watson, Brian Vernel

At one point in Brian O’Malley’s debut feature, acerbic police sergeant Jim MacReady (Russell) states, “The world is full of evil. Police stations doubly so.” It’s a perfect summing up of the situation the movie is concerned with, as the small Scottish town of Inveree – population: seven, plus hundreds of crows – finds itself the focus of a night of retribution instigated by a mysterious bearded figure referred to only as Six (Cunningham) (for the cell he’s assigned to). Each person who finds themself in the town’s police station has their secrets, some more obvious than others, but you can bet that by the time the midnight hour arrives that there won’t be any secrets anymore – or perhaps anyone alive.

There’s the aforementioned Sgt MacReady, the officer in charge, a forty-something relic from a previous generation of policing whose caustic approach to people and police procedure hides a very dark personal secret indeed. Then there’s newbie Rachel McHeggie (McIntosh), a police constable working her very first shift at the station who is still dealing with the trauma of events from her childhood. Completing the police roster are PC Jack Warnock (Larkin) and PC Jennifer Mundie (Stanbridge), who share more than the one secret, their relationship one of mutual affinity and dependency. In the cells already is a teacher with a penchant for beating his wife, Ralph Beswick (Watson), and joining him after being arrested earlier by Heggie, is local hooligan Caesar (Vernel). Caesar’s arrest is for apparently hitting Six while driving at speed through the town, but while there’s blood on the headlights, there’s no sign of Six’s body. Later, Warnock and Mundie find Six and bring him to the station, where a head wound he has prompts them to call in a local doctor, Hume (Fulton). And yes, Hume has a terrible secret, just like everyone else.

With everyone in place and Six about to stir things up, Let Us Prey is poised to offer up a smorgasbord of tension, ultra-violence, psychological terror, and heightened realism. What it provides instead is a juiced-up series of extreme physical shocks interspersed with cod-religious truisms, rampant melodrama, and any number of plot developments that feel forced and/or contrived. Along the way, eagle-eyed (and -eared) viewers will spot John Carpenter’s heavy influence, from the movie’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)-style setting, to the electronic-based score by Steve Lynch with its thudding sub-Carpenter phrasing. Not a bad pedigree, by any means, but though imitation may well be the sincerest form of flattery, here it’s used to bludgeon the audience with a succession of moments where violence is meted out in either cartoonish or visceral fashion, and with no clear tone established from one moment to the next.

The movie does open well though, with atmospheric shots of Six emerging from the rocks of a broiling seashore, with spray and fume crashing together in great arcs, and crows littering the sky above. As Six makes his way inland, crossing hills and fields until he arrives at Inveree, the script – by Fiona Watson and David Cairns with additional input from O’Malley – looks as if it’s going to retain the atmosphere it’s already built up, and those opening, highly distinctive and impressive shots will serve as a template for the rest of the movie. Alas, this idea proves short-lived, and the law of budgetary constraints begins to make itself felt, with the police station divided into two main sets: the office space (there’s no front desk or area separating the public from the police), and the cells at the rear. Aiming for an increasingly claustrophobic vibe from the start, the movie settles instead for using these areas as drab backdrops to the main action, bursts of unsettling violence that don’t always fit organically into the overall narrative, and which serve, strangely enough, to take the viewer out of the flow of the story.

The idea of a stranger who knows everyone’s deepest, darkest secrets and who exploits those secrets for his or her own ends isn’t exactly a new concept (J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1954) is probably the best version yet made), and here the use of Six as an instigator for what appears to be divine retribution, albeit through a less than heavenly approach, is given better credence than expected thanks to Cunningham’s resolute performance, and scathing impatience with the denials of others. Cunningham is a character actor whose career hasn’t always allowed him to deliver the kind of performances that would have made him better known, but this is one where he fleshes out the mystery of his character with a seething, pitiless bearing that makes even more sense when his identity is revealed near the end. As the heroine of the movie, McIntosh is another in a long line of cinematic female warriors, taking her lumps but coming through against much greater odds. Her character’s back story (and related “secret”) is used to differentiate her from the other participants, and though the importance of it all is fumbled in terms of how it relates to her involvement now, it does help provide the movie with an ending that is both unexpected and somewhat baffling.

Though O’Malley directs with a great deal of verve, and an appreciation of the genre he’s working in, the movie is still let down by the vagaries of its script and the various directions it takes along the way, as well as some crushingly awful dialogue (sometimes it’s better if characters don’t explain their reasons for murdering/torturing people; the justifications screenwriters come up with always seem to defeat the best of actors). There’s some uneasy humour added here and there to the mix, but on the whole, the movie opts for a fierce, angry tone that it tries hard to escalate the longer events go on. This unfortunately leads to scenes where melodrama swiftly turns to unrepentant psychodrama, and the motives of the characters become less and less persuasive, and more in keeping with the way in which the script needs to tie things up. A good try, then, but like so many low budget horror thrillers, not quite managing to achieve the goals it’s given itself.

Rating: 5/10 – while there’s a fair amount to admire here, in the end Let Us Prey can’t maintain a consistent tone, or make the viewer care about any of the characters, plus it places too much emphasis on providing moments of extreme violence in place of ratcheting up the tension; solid enough to keep viewers watching until the end, and grisly enough to keep gorehounds happy, the movie wastes too many opportunities to provide a more satisfying experience.

Little Evil (2017)

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Adam Scott, Antichrist, Clancy Brown, Comedy, Eli Craig, Evangeline Lilly, Horror, Netflix, Owen Atlas, Review, Satan

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 – August 2017

31 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Argentina, Bad Santa 2, Baires, Bela Lugosi, Benjamín Vicuña, Billy Bob Thornton, Charlie Chan, Comedy, Daniel de la Vega, Darth Vader, David Prowse, Disappearance, Documentary, Drugs, Germán Palacios, Hamilton MacFadden, Honolulu, Horror, I Am Your Father, Jean-Pierre Melville, Julieta Cardinali, Kathy Bates, Marcelo Páez Cubells, Marcos Cabotá, Mark Waters, Mexico, Mystery, New York, Pierre Grasset, Reviews, Roland Winters, Sally Eilers, Sequel, The Black Camel, The Feathered Serpent, The Green Cross Code Man, Thriller, Toni Basterd, Tony Cox, Two Men in Manhattan, White Coffin, William Beaudine

The Feathered Serpent (1948) / D: William Beaudine / 61m

Cast: Roland Winters, Keye Luke, Mantan Moreland, Victor Sen Yung, Carol Forman, Robert Livingston, Nils Asther, Beverly Jons, Martin Garralaga

Rating: 4/10 – while on vacation in Mexico, Charlie Chan finds himself drawn into a mystery involving murder and the search for an ancient Aztec temple; the penultimate Charlie Chan movie, The Feathered Serpent is as disappointing as the rest of the entries made by Monogram, but does at least see the return of Luke as Number One Son after eleven years, though even this can’t mitigate for the tired, recycled script (originally a Three Mesquiteers outing), and performances that aim for perfunctory – and almost achieve it.

The Black Camel (1931) / D: Hamilton MacFadden / 71m

Cast: Warner Oland, Sally Eilers, Bela Lugosi, Dorothy Revier, Victor Varconi, Murray Kinnell, William Post Jr, Robert Young, Violet Dunn, Otto Yamaoka, Dwight Frye

Rating: 6/10 – Charlie Chan investigates when an actress is found murdered, and discovers that her death relates to another murder that occurred three years previously; the second Charlie Chan movie proper, The Black Camel keeps the Oriental detective in Honolulu (where creator Earl Derr Biggers based him), and at the forefront of a murder mystery that has more twists and turns and suspects than usual, and which proves an enjoyable outing thanks to good supporting turns by Kinnell and Young (making his debut and irrepressible as ever), and a more relaxed performance by Lugosi than most people will be used to.

I Am Your Father (2015) / D: Toni Basterd, Marcos Cabotá / 82m

Narrator: Colm Meaney

With: David Prowse, Marcos Cabotá, Gary Kurtz, Robert Watts, Marcus Hearn, Jonathan Rigby, Robert Prowse, James Prowse

Rating: 7/10 – Spanish movie maker Marcos Cabotá hits on an idea to tell the story of the man behind the mask of Darth Vader, and to restage Vader’s death scene with Prowse finally acting the part as he’s always felt he should have done; a likeable documentary, I Am Your Father is a tribute to Prowse’s continued commitment to the role of Darth Vader, and along the way paints Lucasfilm in a very poor light for mistreating him during shooting of Episodes V and VI, and blackballing Prowse since 1983 (over his “revealing” Vader’s death in Return of the Jedi), but the movie is let down by a haphazard structure, and not being able to show the re-shot scene (no doubt thanks to Lucasfilm).

White Coffin (2016) / D: Daniel de la Vega / 71m

Original title: Ataúd Blanco: El Juego Diabólico

Cast: Julieta Cardinali, Eleonora Wexler, Rafael Ferro, Damián Dreizik, Fiorela Duranda, Verónica Intile

Rating: 5/10 – when a young girl (Duranda) is kidnapped by a mysterious cult, her mother (Cardinali) discovers that not even death is an obstacle to getting her back; five features in and Argentinian horror maestro de la Vega still can’t assemble a coherent script to accompany his homages to Seventies Euro horror, making White Coffin a frustrating viewing experience that offers too many moments of unrealised potential, and leaves its cast adrift in terms of meaningful or sympathetic characterisations.

Bad Santa 2 (2016) / D: Mark Waters / 92m

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, Tony Cox, Christina Hendricks, Brett Kelly, Ryan Hansen, Jenny Zigrino, Jeff Skowron, Mike Starr, Octavia Spencer

Rating: 6/10 – against his better judgment, alcoholic ex-criminal Willie (Thornton) teams up with his old friend Marcus (Cox) to steal two million dollars from a charity at Xmas time, which means donning a Santa suit once more; more defiantly scurrilous and offensive than the original, Bad Santa 2 benefits from Thornton’s ambivalent attitude as Willie, a plethora of cruel yet hilarious one-liners, and a great turn by Bates as Willie’s mother, but it also fails to pull together a decent plot, contains too many scenes that fall flat, and can’t quite replicate the energy of its predecessor.

Baires (2015) / D: Marcelo Páez Cubells / 82m

Cast: Germán Palacios, Benjamín Vicuña, Sabrina Garciarena, Juana Viale, Carlos Belloso

Rating: 4/10 – gullible Spanish tourist Mateo (Vicuña) parties with the wrong crowd in Buenos Aires and finds his girlfriend, Trini (Garciarena), threatened with a sticky end unless he transports drugs back to Spain; a thick-ear thriller Argentinian-style, Baires is mercifully short but dreary in its set up and cumbersome in its “thump a villain every five minutes” approach to tracking down the chief villain(s), all of which leaves little room for sympathetic characters, a credible narrative, or anything more than flat-pack direction from Cubells.

Two Men in Manhattan (1959) / D: Jean-Pierre Melville / 84m

Original title: Deux hommes dans Manhattan

Cast: Pierre Grasset, Jean-Pierre Melville, Christiane Eudes, Ginger Hall, Glenda Leigh, Colette Fleury, Monique Hennessy, Jean Darcante, Jerry Mengo, Jean Lara

Rating: 6/10 – when the French UN delegate disappears in New York, the job of tracking him down is given to a reporter (Melville), and a photographer (Grasset) who has his own agenda; practically dismissed by French critics on its first release, Melville’s ode to New York and film noir, Two Men in Manhattan is a nimble yet forgettable movie that prompted the writer/director to move away from the Nouvelle Vague movement he’d helped to create, leaving this as an enjoyable if predictable drama that could have done without Melville’s awkward presence in front of the cameras.

10 Reasons to Remember Tobe Hooper (1943-2017)

27 Sunday Aug 2017

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Career, Director, Horror, Poltergeist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper (25 January 1943 – 26 August 2017)

Like many of his horror movie contemporaries, Tobe Hooper began his career with a bang, but then saw fewer and fewer of his movies gain a similar kind of recognition. And like so many of his contemporaries, he retreated to television, where he worked steadily for around fifteen years. His career was one he might not have been able to predict, though, as during the Sixties he worked as a college professor and documentary cameraman. It wasn’t until he assembled a small cast of college students and teachers and made a small, yet hugely influential feature based upon the infamous Ed Gein, that Hooper stepped into the limelight as a movie maker. The movie, the uncompromisingly titled The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), broke new ground in the horror genre, and is still as uncomfortable to watch today as it was over forty years ago. It also introduced audiences to a new horror icon in the form of Leatherface.

The movie was such a success that Hooper’s future career seemed assured, but projects didn’t always come his way, and some that he took on, such as The Dark (1979) and Venom (1981), led to his being fired once filming had begun. Around this time, Hooper redeemed himself enough to land the job directing a script written by Steven Spielberg, called Poltergeist (1982). To this day, Hooper’s credit as the movie’s director has been continually challenged, with members of the production crew adamant that Spielberg directed the movie and not Hooper. Hooper himself always said that Spielberg did some second unit work “to help out”, but whichever way the truth lies, the movie bolstered Hooper’s reputation but still not enough for him to be working regularly. It wasn’t until he signed a three-picture deal with Cannon Films that it appeared he was fully back on track, but those pictures were heavily cut by Cannon during post-production, and Hooper’s intentions for all three movies were dealt a series of savage blows that helped critics afford Hooper some of the worst reviews of his career so far.

Following his terrible experiences with Goram and Globus, Hooper turned to television where his credits included work on series such as Freddy’s Nightmares, Tales from the Crypt, and Masters of Horror. He made the occasional movie during this period, but a couple of better than average shockers aside, he made the kind of horror movies that made audiences question how the same director could have made something as visceral and uncompromising as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. However he felt about the way his career had turned out, Hooper never complained about his seeming lack of good fortune over the last thirty years, and appeared content to be regarded as the creator of a genuinely disturbing horror movie, and a handful of cult classics.

There was always more to Hooper than most people gave him credit for, and he was always aware that his career could have been so much better in terms of the quality of his movies. But he always persevered and did the best he could with often very limited resources (as he did back in 1974), but there were too many occasions where his skill as a director was at odds with the needs of his producers, and Hooper’s work was bowdlerised in the process. Nevertheless, he continued to work exclusively in horror and science fiction, and unlike, say, George A. Romero or Wes Craven, he never tried to work outside those two genres. Hooper knew where his talents lay; it was just a shame that few producers – including Spielberg – were ever prepared to let Hooper have free rein. If they had, perhaps there would be more classic movies on his resumé than just the one that launched his career.

1 – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

2 – Death Trap (1976)

3 – Salem’s Lot (1979)

4 – The Funhouse (1981)

5 – Poltergeist (1982)

6 – Lifeforce (1985)

7 – Invaders from Mars (1986)

8 – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

9 – Crocodile (2000)

10 – Toolbox Murders (2004)

Rings (2017)

25 Friday Aug 2017

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Alex Roe, Curse, Drama, F. Javier Gutiérrez, Horror, Johnny Galecki, Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Review, Samara, Sequel, Seven days, Video, Vincent D'Onofrio

D: F. Javier Gutiérrez / 102m

Cast: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D’Onofrio, Aimee Teegarden, Bonnie Morgan

Inevitability. In the world of franchise horror, the word is a touchstone for movie makers everywhere. Where there is one horror movie that’s been successful (even moderately so), chances are that someone will come along and make another. And another. And another, until the law of diminishing returns – financial, not artistic – brings an end to the whole terrible enterprise. For a while.

The latest franchise entry to be foisted on us without any kind of encouragement from fans, interested third parties, previous investors, or the terminally bewildered, Rings is a redundant exercise in supernatural nonsense that outstays its welcome right from the very start. Set on a plane, the opening scene plays out like a game of tag as first one passenger then another, and then another, reveals that they’ve all watched the dreaded videotape featuring Samara. It’s seven days on for all of them – just what are the odds? – and there’s nowhere for them to go: the plane’s in the air and the video screens are all working. And sure enough, heeeeeere’s Samara! Inevitably (there’s that word again), the plane crashes, killing everyone aboard. But has the cycle been broken?

Fast forward two years and the answer is an obvious, of course not. A college professor called Gabriel (Galecki) buys a battered old VCR at a garage sale and inevitably it contains a copy of the cursed videotape (just how many copies of this videotape were made?). Inevitably, Gabriel watches it. We’re then side-tracked into the lives of generic teen lovebirds, Julia (Lutz) and Holt (Roe) just as Holt is about to go off to college (guess who’s a professor there?). When Holt stops returning her calls and texts, and she receives a mysterious call from a girl called Skye (Teegarden) asking after Holt’s whereabouts, Julia drops everything and heads to Holt’s college. Soon, she’s met Skye and Gabriel, been introduced to “The Sevens”, a group of students involved in an experiment of Gabriel’s devising that involves Samara’s videotape, and been a passive witness to Skye’s demise. She learns that Holt has watched the tape and has twelve hours left before Samara kills him. Julia watches it too, but when she gets the call to tell her she has “seven days”, the phone burns a mark into her palm, and she has a vision of a door.

All this sets up a road trip to the town of Sacrament Valley, and an investigation into the whereabouts of Samara’s remains (Julia and Holt believe that by cremating her remains, Samara’s curse will be lifted). Soon they’re breaking into tombs, visiting a blind man named Burke (D’Onofrio) who knows some of Samara’s history in the town, and discovering hidden rooms below the church. There’s danger, more danger, continued supernatural threat, death, injury, more death, and a sequel-baiting ending that wants to have its Samara-shaped cake and eat it as well. Does it make any sense? On a convoluted, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-simpler level, no, it doesn’t, and mainly because Samara’s influence is allowed to have an effect beyond the videotape and her murderous follow-up courtesy call seven days later. This allows for the deaths of two characters that are at odds with the basic set up, and an ending that makes no sense because it undermines the admittedly skewed logic created from the start, and the greater mythology of the franchise as a whole – as anyone who remembers the end of The Ring Two (2005) should be able to attest.

So what we have here is a belated series’ revival that should be filed under “cash-in”, or “uninspired knock-off”. It tries to reinvent the wheel in terms of Samara’s origins in an attempt to provide viewers with something different from previous outings, but in doing so, becomes laboured and unaccountably dull. Much of the time spent in Sacrament Valley plods along at a pace that defies audience involvement, and with each new plot “development” the sounds of heads being scratched and confused sighs being released act as a measure of just how stale the script has become. Said script has been cobbled together by David Loucka, Jacob Estes, and Akiva Goldsman (what with this and The Dark Tower, Goldsman isn’t exactly having a banner year – and that’s without his story credit for Transformers: The Last Knight). With its bland central duo, reflexive storyline and make-it-up-as-you-go-along plotting, Rings is a horror movie that aims to be as creepy as its forebears, but then forgets that the old trick of having Samara emerging from a TV has lost much of its original impact. The troubled teen spirit is old hat now, a horror icon who no longer possesses the power to frighten audiences, except in relation to how living in a well isn’t too good for the complexion.

At the helm of all this is Gutiérrez, a director whose last stint behind the camera was in 2008. There are certain moments and scenes where it’s clear he’s opted for a generic approach to the material, but what’s unclear is whether this was due to budgetary constraints or creative decision-making. But what it does is to make the movie drag for much of its latter half, which in conjunction with the script’s grinding to a dramatic halt, leaves the viewer stranded waiting for the movie to become interesting again. But neither the script nor Gutiérrez can overcome the lack of original ideas being put forward, and much as he might try, Gutiérrez lacks the wherewithal to inject a much needed spark into proceedings. The performances are perfunctory and lack depth (which is perhaps inevitable given the material), and the cinematography relies too heavily on scenes being lit as if exploring the wider edges of the frame wasn’t required, or important. Even the movie’s few jump scares are tired approximations of previous jump scares. With so much that’s ineffective and mundane, the only thing the viewer can hope for is that, despite its success at the box office, this is one sequel-cum-reboot that puts off anyone revisiting the curse of Samara anytime soon.

Rating: 4/10 – stereotypical even by horror franchise standards, and lacking a perceptible style all its own, Rings adds nothing of value to the series, instead settling for telling the kind of melodramatic detective story that has been done to death dozens of times before; a movie then that serves only to reinforce just how the franchise has deteriorated since the heady days of Hideo Nakata’s 1998 original.

It Comes at Night (2017)

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

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Carmen Ejogo, Christopher Abbott, Drama, Horror, Joel Edgerton, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Review, Thriller, Trey Edward Shults

D: Trey Edward Shults / 91m

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Riley Keough, Griffin Robert Faulkner

In recent years, low budget horror thrillers have had something of a resurgence, what with It Follows (2014), The Witch (2015), Split (2016), and Get Out (2017) all making an impact with audiences and critics alike. While there are still too many similar movies out there that lack the attention to detail or the originality of these particular examples, it’s heartening to see that some movie makers aren’t just content to rehash familiar stories and plots, and are willing to bringing something different to the table. In addition to the makers of the movies listed above, we now have to add the name of Trey Edward Shults. Making only his second feature, Shults has made a movie that is by turns eerie, unnerving and undeniably tense. It’s a post-apocalyptic thriller that slowly tightens the screws on its characters from the start, and makes no promises of a happy ending for any of them.

We discover things are bad right at the beginning, with Paul (Edgerton), his wife Sarah (Ejogo), and their teenage son, Travis (Harrison Jr), transporting an old man in a wheelbarrow to a clearing in the woods. The old man – who is Sarah’s father – is visibly ill. Paul shoots him, and he and Travis put the body in a shallow grave; they then burn it. The message is clear: anyone found to be contaminated by the disease that has ravaged the rest of the world, will be despatched in a similar fashion. They return to their home deep in the woods, where they barricade themselves inside. This is their life now, and Paul is determined to keep them from harm. That determination is put to the test the next night when they capture an intruder trying to break in. The man’s name is Will (Abbott), and he manages to convince Paul that he was only looking for food and water for himself and his wife, Kim (Keough), and young son Andrew (Faulkner). Satisfied that Will doesn’t have the disease, Paul agrees to travel with him to collect his wife and son.

With Will’s family in the house as well, Paul impresses on the newcomers the rules that have kept him and his family safe, in particular ensuring the only entrance door is kept secure at night. The two families begin to learn to trust each other, but there are odd moments where Travis wonders if the stories Will and Kim tell are entirely true. On an excursion into the woods, Travis’s dog, Stanley, runs off and doesn’t come back. That night, Travis wakes from a nightmare, and in turn, discovers that the entrance door is ajar. Having wakened his father and Will, they discover a badly wounded Stanley just inside the door. Tensions mount when Sarah suggests that a sleepwalking Andrew might have opened the door, while Will and Kim accuse Travis. Tensions mount even further when Travis learns that Andrew may be infected, and Paul decides to finds out for himself…

For much of It Comes at Night, the audience is only given enough to appreciate the immediate situation, and what it means for the two families concerned. There’s no extended scene where someone describes the outbreak of the disease and how it happened, or how quickly it spread, or how easily society fell apart in the wake of the spread. Instead, it’s enough to know that the world has become an entirely dangerous place, and that trust may have become the most precious commodity on the planet. It’s easy to see that Paul is doing his best to protect his family, and it’s clear that he’s given their situation a lot of thought, but it’s also obvious that he’s had to make other, more personal sacrifices along the way, and though much of the story’s focus is on Travis and how he perceives events happening around him, Edgerton’s quiet, brooding performance is the movie’s touchstone. He’s a man who’s dispensed with the idea of social niceties, and if killing means survival, then that’s what he’ll do. Edgerton brings all this to the character, and though he’s sometimes on the periphery of a scene, his presence is as accurate a monitor of the movie’s overall mood as you’d need.

And that mood is pretty intense for most of the movie as the audience waits for the inevitable disintegration of the uneasy combination of two families with differing agendas co-existing in the same claustrophobic property. A veritable maze of a place, the house is a distorting labyrinth that allows for various spy holes and hiding places, and which allows Travis to be the conduit through which the viewer gains a broader understanding of the dynamics of both families, as well as his own growing understanding of the fault lines developing between them. Travis has recurring nightmares relating to the disease, and it’s his fear that gives the audience a way into a scenario that could otherwise have been just a mood piece. There’s a grim inevitability to the way in which this new, insular “society” breaks down, and Shults makes good use of the dread that comes along with it. Will Paul be able to protect his family or will events determine otherwise? And are Travis’s nightmares a foretaste of what’s to come?

For most of the movie’s well-judged running time, Shults handles the character dynamics with confidence and a consistent use of sparse, realistic dialogue. He also ensures that the mottled colour scheme of the property and the surrounding woods adds a melancholy layer to proceedings that is both dispiriting and oppressive. This isn’t a movie that provides much in the way of humour, and though smiles are appropriate on a couple of occasions, what Shults does is to use these moments as a way of leavening the pervading sense of anxiety that he’s building, and to help soften some of the blows to come. Inevitably though, there are a couple of issues that hinder the movie from becoming a complete success. There’s an awkward moment involving Travis and Kim that could best be described as a “seduction scene”, but which isn’t developed any further, and the issue of who opened the entrance door is left unsolved, which feels like a clumsy misstep from a writer/director who for the most part, is in firm control of everything else. It’s a frustrating lapse, as well, because it leaves the viewer waiting to find out who did open it, and for some, it’s likely to occupy their thoughts for the last twenty-five minutes. Those issues aside, though, It Comes at Night is a movie that continues that recent run of effective horror thrillers with more than a dash of style.

Rating: 8/10 – a slowburn thriller with horror overtones, It Comes at Night is also a sombre, doleful survivalist drama that is well-paced, confidently handled by its writer/director, and features a terrific performance from Edgerton; with a palpable sense of impending doom to weigh the characters down, it’s a movie with nihilist leanings and very little intention of sending the viewer away in a happy mood, but in terms of what it wants to achieve, it has to be considered a definite success.

Monthly Roundup – July 2017

01 Tuesday Aug 2017

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47 Meters Down, Action, Alain Desrochers, Animation, Antonio Banderas, Ben Kingsley, Brian Fee, Cars 3, Claire Holt, Comedy, Crime, Cristela Alonzo, Daniel Brühl, Danny Glover, Day of the Mummy, Drama, Girls Trip, Horror, Jessica Chastain, Johannes Roberts, Johnny Tabor, Lesley Selander, Malcolm D. Lee, Mandy Moore, Matthew Goode, Niki Caro, Owen Wilson, Peggie Castle, Phil Daniels, Queen Latifah, Quincannon Frontier Scout, Regina Hall, Reviews, Robbery, Ronnie Thompson, Security, Sharks, The Hatton Garden Job, The Zookeeper's Wife, Thriller, Tony Martin, True story, Warsaw Zoo, Western, William McNamara

The Hatton Garden Job (2017) / D: Ronnie Thompson / 93m

Cast: Matthew Goode, Phil Daniels, Larry Lamb, Clive Russell, David Calder, Joely Richardson, Stephen Moyer, Mark Harris, Jack Doolan

Rating: 6/10 – a group of aging ex-cons decide to rob an underground safe deposit facility in London’s Hatton Garden, but find that too many interested parties want in on the job, and the proceeds; based on the actual robbery that occurred in April 2015, The Hatton Garden Job is a light-hearted, and often lightweight version of actual events, but gets by thanks to some winning performances, a sense that it’s all too, too implausible, and a broad sense of humour that suits the material well enough despite its low budget origins.

The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017) / D: Niki Caro / 126m

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Brühl, Michael McElhatton, Timothy Radford, Val Maloku, Efrat Dor, Iddo Goldberg, Shira Haas

Rating: 4/10 – at the outbreak of World War II, the Warsaw Zoo, run by Antonina and Jan Zabinski (Chastain, Heldenbergh), is commandeered by the Nazis, but it becomes a hiding place for Jews, and an even more dangerous place without its animals; a true story undone by telling it across the whole course of the war, The Zookeeper’s Wife is a turgid, painfully dull movie that is only sporadically interesting and which wastes the talents of its cast by making their characters’ plight seem like its been lifted from an unsuccessful soap opera.

Day of the Mummy (2014) / D: Johnny Tabor / 77m

Cast: Danny Glover, William McNamara, Andrea Monier, Eric Young, Philip Marlatt, Michael Cortez, Brandon deSpain

Rating: 4/10 – an archaeological trip into the Egyptian desert in search of a lost tomb sees its members at the mercy of a mummy, while they try and find a sacred stone said to be worth millions; a found-footage movie that like most doesn’t know how to make the most of the format, Day of the Mummy stretches its audience’s patience at every turn, and literally reduces Glover’s role to the bottom left hand corner of the screen, something that could be construed as “video-phoning” in his performance.

Security (2017) / D: Alain Desrochers / 92m

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Ben Kingsley, Liam McIntyre, Gabriella Wright, Chad Lindberg, Cung Le, Katharine de la Rocha, Jiro Wang

Rating: 5/10 – ex-Army veteran Eddie (Banderas) takes a night security job at a mall, and on his first night, finds himself fighting off a band of mercenaries hired to kill the teenage girl who’s taken refuge there; another Die Hard rip-off (when will they stop coming?), Security does have committed performances from Banderas and Kingsley as hero and villain respectively, but lacks sufficient invention to make this anything other than a pale echo of similar and better movies.

Quincannon, Frontier Scout (1956) / D: Lesley Selander / 84m

aka Frontier Scout

Cast: Tony Martin, Peggie Castle, John Bromfield, John Smith, Ron Randell, John Doucette, Morris Ankrum, Peter Mamakos, Edmund Hashim

Rating: 6/10 – when the Army discovers someone is selling rifles to the Indians, it’s down to experienced scout Quincannon (Martin) to get to the bottom of it all; while there’s nothing new here, thanks to Selander’s astute direction, Quincannon, Frontier Scout zips along at a decent pace and delivers on its basic premise, but not even Selander can mitigate for a pretty awful performance from Martin, a singer who really should have ignored his agent on this one.

Cars 3 (2017) / D: Brian Fee / 102m

Cast: Owen Wilson, Cristela Alonzo, Chris Cooper, Nathan Fillion, Larry the Cable Guy, Armie Hammer, Ray Magliozzi, Tony Shalhoub, Bonnie Hunt

Rating: 6/10 – Lightning McQueen’s days on the race track are numbered, but only he doesn’t get it, until racing for a new team begins to show him that there’s more to life than being Number One; Pixar redeem themselves somewhat after the complete and utter disaster that was Cars 2, but this is still tepid stuff that struggles to make the impact it needs, leaving Cars 3 looking nostalgic for the first movie, and trading on that movie’s glories to make itself look good.

Girls Trip (2017) / D: Malcolm D. Lee / 122m

Cast: Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tiffany Haddish, Mike Colter, Kate Walsh, Larenz Tate, Deborah Ayorinde

Rating: 6/10 – self-help guru Ryan (Hall) decides it’s time that she and her three best friends (Latifah, Smith, Haddish) should reconnect while in New Orleans for the annual Essence Festival, but having a good time proves more difficult than she, or they, could have ever imagined; yet another female-centric variation of The Hangover, Girls Trip wants to be raunchy and out there (the urination scene), but ends up instead as a warm and fuzzy ode to sisterhood that conforms to expectations, but is rescued by the committed performances of the “girls” themselves.

47 Meters Down (2017) / Johannes Roberts / 89m

Cast: Mandy Moore, Claire Holt, Matthew Modine, Chris Johnson, Yani Gellman, Santiago Segura

Rating: 6/10 – two sisters (Moore, Holt) on vacation in Mexico find themselves stranded in a shark cage at the titular depth, and they only have an hour to save themselves before their oxygen runs out; better than it sounds thanks to Roberts’ hand on the tiller, 47 Meters Down isn’t beyond making some silly mistakes (let’s have Modine’s captain recite the perils of nitrogen narcosis – twice), being too repetitive once on the sea bed, and building up tension only to allow it to dissipate to no great effect.

Shock Waves (1977)

31 Monday Jul 2017

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Brooke Adams, Catch Up movie, Death Corps, Drama, Horror, John Carradine, Ken Wiederhorn, Luke Halpin, Nazis, Peter Cushing, Review, Thriller, World War II, Zombies

aka Almost Human

D: Ken Wiederhorn / 85m

Cast: Peter Cushing, Brooke Adams, Luke Halpin, Fred Buch, Jack Davidson, D.J. Sidney, Don Stout, John Carradine

Horror movies in the Seventies went through a kind of sea change. By the middle of the decade, Hammer were on their last legs having exhausted their Dracula and Frankenstein franchises, and the big Hollywood studios had yet to embrace the genre as fully as they could have, content to leave it to low budget production companies such as Amicus and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. In Europe, horror movies were more concerned with providing sleaze than monsters, and further afield there were sporadic releases that rarely made an impact beyond their own borders. Zombie movies were still few and far between despite the success of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), and movies where the protagonists were zombie Nazis were even rarer, with only The Frozen Dead (1966) predating the eerie chills of Shock Waves.

The movie begins in typical fashion, with a group of strangers on a chartered boat that’s seen better days, just like its crusty old captain, Ben (Carradine). The rest of his crew amounts to Keith (Halpin), who seems to be there just to steer the boat, and Dobbs (Stout), the booze-living galley hand. The passengers are a mixed bunch as well, consisting of middle-aged couple Norman and Beverly (Davidson, Sidney), and younger couple Chuck and Rose (Buch, Adams). Norman is already complaining about the age of the boat and the cost of the trip, but when the sky turns crimson and the boat’s instruments don’t respond, he really has something to complain about. An night-time encounter with a mysterious freighter leads to the boat needing repairs, but in the morning, Ben has disappeared. Believing he’s headed towards a nearby island, everyone gets in a dinghy and heads for shore. They find Ben but he’s dead. They also find a hotel, long abandoned – or so they think. Instead they find themselves challenged by a German-sounding stranger (Cushing).

The stranger insists they leave immediately, and tells them of a boat they can use to get off the island. In the meantime, Dobbs is killed, and his body discovered by Rose. Seeking answers, the group confront the stranger, who tells them of a secret experiment that the Nazis carried out during World War II, an experiment to create a ruthless super-soldier. The result was a soldier not living and not dead, and too difficult to control. When the war ended, the stranger, an SS Commander, was charged with disposing of the super-soldiers under his command, and so he sunk their ship. But now they have returned, and will continue to kill everyone they encounter. As far as getting off the island is concerned, avoiding the Death Corps will be difficult enough, but as fear and terror take hold, those who remain alive begin to fight amongst themselves…

If it’s a gore-soaked, ripped-out entrails kind of zombie movie that you’re after, then be warned: Shock Waves is not the movie for you. In fact, this is possibly the first and only post-1968 zombie movie where not even a single drop of blood is spilt. Instead, director Wiederhorn (making his first feature), and co-writer John Kent Harrison concentrate on creating an unnerving, atmospheric chiller-thriller that does its best to be macabre rather than gory, and which largely succeeds in its aim. There’s something to be said for any horror movie that eschews blood and gore in its efforts to make viewers feel unnerved and uncomfortable, and though the movie suffers due to genre-standard scenes where the characters run from place to place without actually getting anywhere, the scenes that involve the implacable zombie Nazis have a certain frisson about them. At one point they emerge from the surf, one by one, and stand as if waiting for a signal only they can hear; it’s genuinely creepy.

Wiederhorn is to be congratulated on being so constrained, and relying on menace and a febrile atmosphere to accentuate the occasional shocks. He’s helped by the choice of location, which isn’t an island at all, but several sites in Florida, including an area of swampland that the characters are forced to take flight and stumble through time and again as they try and escape, but though all that running about quite aimlessly seems to be just a way of padding out the running time, like all swampland, it has an unpleasant, threatening vibe that slowly makes itself felt the longer everyone crashes around it. Wiederhorn and DoP Reuben Trane do well to create such a hostile, potentially deadly environment… and that’s without the zombies. Also, there are times, notably at the beginning when the sky turns red, that the movie feels like it’s heading into full-on Twilight Zone territory, and these moments add to the growing sense of unease that the movie promotes in its opening half hour.

But while there’s plenty of effective atmosphere to be had, the movie is less successful when it comes to its motley crew of characters. Cushing and Carradine are old hands at this sort of thing and manage their roles accordingly, while Adams, in her first leading role, has little to do but pose or swim in a bikini. Ex-Flipper star Halpin fares better as the nominal hero, but everyone else is saddled with the usual horror stereotypes: the long-suffering wife, the outwardly macho/inwardly cowardly adult jock, the self-important malcontent, and the booze-fuelled worrier. Once Ben is killed off the script disposes of the rest of the characters in predictable fashion (and order), without once attempting to make them more relatable. This, however, shouldn’t be much of a surprise, as creating likeable characters never seems to be a priority in horror movies, and Shock Waves is no different. But what is notable about it is that in the context of when it was released, it dared to be different in its approach and with its “monsters”. Many more zombie Nazi movies have followed in the years since, and some can be considered better movies overall, but with apologies to The Frozen Dead, this is the grandaddy of them all, and still as diverting and sinister as it was forty years ago.

Rating: 6/10 – if you can put aside the genre conventions and occasional dumb-ass decision-making, Shock Waves is a grim, intense horror movie that makes good use of its “bad guys” and has a palpable sense of disquiet about it; still more of a curio than a cult movie, it’s better than it looks but is hamstrung by poor production values and some very choppy editing. (29/31)

Bruiser (2000)

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

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Catch Up movie, Drama, George A. Romero, Horror, Jason Flemyng, Leslie Hope, Mask, Murder, Peter Stormare, Review, Thriller

D: George A. Romero / 95m

Cast: Jason Flemyng, Peter Stormare, Leslie Hope, Nina Garbiras, Andrew Tarbet, Tom Atkins, Jonathan Higgins, Jeff Monahan, Marie V. Cruz, Beatriz Pizano

Henry Creedlow (Flemyng) is one of Life’s true put-upons. Married to a woman, Janine (Garbiras), who no longer loves him, Henry fares no better at work, where he’s a mid-level executive for a magazine called Bruiser. The magazine’s owner is a sleazy mini-despot called Miles Styles (Stormare). Styles chides and insults and derides his staff, and acts as if they’re all inconsequential in comparison to himself. Henry is friends with Miles’ wife, Rosemary (Hope), who works as a photographer at the magazine; she’s unhappy because she knows that Miles is sleeping around at every opportunity. What neither of them knows though is that Miles is having an affair with Janine. At a party at Miles’s house, Henry sees his wife in a compromising situation with Miles and he confronts her about it afterwards. Janine is dismissive of his feelings and berates him for being “nothing” and “a nobody”. The next morning, Henry discovers something terrible: his face is covered by a white mask similar to the one Rosemary made, only he can’t remove it.

The mask has a strange effect on Henry. At first he hides from their maid, Katie (Pizano), until he sees her stealing money from his wallet. When he confronts her it’s a different story from the night before, and later, when he overhears Janine arranging to meet Miles, he follows her to the Bruiser offices. Rosemary is also there and she catches Miles and Janine in the act. After she leaves, and while Miles chases after her, Henry deals with Janine in his own way. The police become involved, and it’s not long before they’re looking for Henry, who is righting all the wrongs that have been done to him in the past. Finally, the only one who’s left is Miles. At a company party that Henry has arranged, he stalks his boss while the police come ever closer to catching him.

The movie that always slips past unnoticed whenever there’s any discussion of George A. Romero’s career, Bruiser was the last feature he made before returning exclusively to the world of zombies (with 2005’s Land of the Dead). It was also the first movie he made away from Pittsburgh. It’s certainly an odd movie, a French/Canadian/US co-production that’s a valiant attempt by Romero to do something out of the ordinary. That it doesn’t succeed entirely is perhaps not so surprising, as Romero’s ambition is stifled by budgetary constraints and an allegorical narrative that likely seems far more heavy-handed than he originally intended. Romero was well used to working with limited budgets – something which is sorely in evidence here – and Bruiser is one of those times when he was forced to work with some very strict, prescribed resources. But there are problems too with Romero’s script, and though he’s on top of the material, the plot takes several short cuts on its way to a less than satisfying conclusion.

The worm-has-turned scenario that Romero adopts lacks subtlety throughout, but as the movie progresses it becomes clear that Romero isn’t too concerned with how sophisticated his narrative is, or how it might be perceived. Henry’s aggrieved nature is the central focus here, and Romero signals this through a series of fantasy sequences where Henry imagines killing the people who upset him. These are the movie’s most extreme moments, designed to illustrate the depth of Henry’s pain at being ignored or belittled, and Romero stages them with gusto, hinting at the possibility that Henry has psychotic tendencies, a mental health problem that can’t be solved just by his being assertive or regaining his self-confidence. This gives the early scenes an edge as the viewer tries to work out just what it will be that will push Henry over the edge. And then comes that mask…

The mask is an amazing creation, and it proves eerie to look at no matter how many times we see it. But as an allegory, or a motif, for how Henry is regarded by his peers it’s a little too obvious, though still highly effective. Behind it, Flemyng is required to give a portrayal that’s mostly about body language – each time he angles his head he’s giving the viewer a very good idea of what he’s thinking or feeling – and his vocal performance, laced with a wicked, black humour, relays the various new emotions Henry is feeling with poise and precision. It’s a confident, nuanced performance, even when the script pushes things closer to melodrama than is required, and Flemyng, whose skill as an actor is often overlooked, keeps Henry from becoming just another revenge-happy psycho with a permanent axe to grind. Romero may occasionally let him down when it comes to some of the dialogue, but Flemyng avoids a few obvious bear traps and is consistently good throughout.

Less successful is Stormare’s over the top turn as Miles. Given free rein to chew the scenery and anything else in reach, Stormare is like a bull in a china shop, pushing the limits of his character’s hedonism in terms of words if not thankfully, deeds (the sight of him in what suspiciously look like spanks is another of the movie’s “highlights”). He’s like a pantomime villain, but one that you can’t take seriously, and Stormare at least is wise to this, and imbues Miles with a requisite lack of self-awareness. It’s a showy, breathless performance, but it does work well against Flemyng’s more measured portrayal. Sadly, Hope and Garbiras aren’t afforded quite so well rounded characters to play, with Hope stranded as Henry’s potential true love interest, and Garbiras stuck with being an admittedly very attractive, but dislikeable shrew.

As a thriller, the movie has its moments, and Romero still knows how to set up a compelling murder scene, but the setting for the movie’s conclusion, a Bacchanale party that features the band, The Misfits, gets away from him, and it’s undermined by some injudicious editing courtesy of Miume Jan Eramo. Better in terms of understanding what Romero is looking for is Adam Swica’s low-level camerawork which heightens Henry’s sense of displacement, and long-time collaborator Donald Rubinstein’s energetic, jazz-based score. In the end, Bruiser isn’t able to overcome many of the problems that hold it back from being an accomplished and entertaining diversion, but it’s also not as bad as its reputation might suggest.

Rating: 6/10 – a low-key yet mostly absorbing outing from a director who was never fully allowed to make the movies he wanted to make (and how he wanted to make them), Bruiser is a movie whose potential can be glimpsed throughout, even though it’s not been achieved fully; aided by a great performance from Flemyng, the movie does its best to provide a compelling narrative, but too many stumbles along the way make too much of a difference – unless you can forgive Romero for lacking the wherewithal to achieve greater things. (17/31)

10 Reasons to Remember George A. Romero (1940-2017)

16 Sunday Jul 2017

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Career, Director, George A. Romero, Horror, Movies, Zombies

George A. Romero (4 February 1940 – 16 July 2017)

Although best known for his series of zombie movies, George A. Romero’s desire to make movies came about when he saw The Red Shoes (1948), a movie so far removed from the genre that made him famous that it’s intriguing to wonder just where his career would have taken him if he’d followed in the footsteps of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and not fallen in with the low budget horror arena where he spent pretty much all his career. He was also a huge fan of The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), a movie he would rent on 16mm from the very same rental company that Martin Scorsese used.

But a career creating those kind of artistic endeavours wasn’t to be. Romero started out by making TV commercials and industrial training movies in and around his home town of Pittsburgh. In 1968, he and some friends all contributed $10,000 so he could make his first feature. The result was an unqualified success, and Night of the Living Dead became a movie that would influence an entire sub-genre of horror. From then on Romero was pigeon-holed as a horror director, and though he made a number of movies that didn’t involve zombies or extreme gore effects (usually courtesy of Tom Savini), Romero was always grateful that his first feature allowed him to have a movie making career.

Romero would return to zombies five more times in his career, and though the law of diminishing returns had set in by number five, Diary of the Dead (2007), there was still enough of Romero’s patented social commentary to make the last three in the series interesting to watch at the very least. But Romero’s work away from marauding members of the undead, often provided examples of the best that he could do. Martin (1978) is a creepy, unsettling modern vampire tale, with a great performance from John Amplas, and Knightriders (1981) is a counter-culture movie that features probably Romero’s best assembled cast, and a knowing, mordaunt sense of humour. He was capable of so much more but spent too much time developing projects that inevitably never got off the ground, such as a TV version of Stephen King’s The Stand, or movies such as Resident Evil (2002) where he was slated to direct. An affable, knowledgeable, and likeable figure within the industry, Romero will be missed for all the subtexts he put in his movies and for the way he made zombies “cool”.

1 – Night of the Living Dead (1968)

2 – Season of the Witch (1972)

3 – The Crazies (1973)

4 – Martin (1978)

5 – Dawn of the Dead (1978)

6 – Knightriders (1981)

7 – Creepshow (1982)

8 – Day of the Dead (1985)

9 – The Dark Half (1993)

10 – Bruiser (2000)

Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985)

15 Saturday Jul 2017

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Alan Clarke, Alun Armstrong, Bruce Payne, Catch Up movie, Challenge match, Drama, Horror, Phil Daniels, Review, Snooker, Vampire

D: Alan Clarke / 89m

Cast: Phil Daniels, Alun Armstrong, Bruce Payne, Louise Gold, Eve Ferret, Richard Ridings, Don Henderson, Neil McCaul

There are some movies that seem to have been made expressly with the intent that they become cult items some time after their initial release. The world’s only vampire snooker musical, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire is such a movie, a one-off that’s unlikely to ever be remade, rebooted, or given a sequel. It’s also very much a product of its time, a musical fable built around the real life rivalry between British snooker players Ray Reardon (the green baize vampire) and Jimmy White (Billy the Kid). Small in scale and very cheaply made, and dismissed by contemporary critics and audiences at the time, the movie has gained a certain caché over the last thirty-two years. Rarely seen these days, but available on DVD if you know where to look, the movie makes the most of its limited budget and if you’re in the right mood, offers a viewing experience that might just capture your interest.

The story is a simple one: Billy the Kid (Daniels) is an up and coming snooker prodigy. Just twenty years old, two years before he was discovered by T.O. (The One) (Payne), who now acts as his manager and promoter. Having made a name for himself, Billy is being touted as the next World Champion. He’s flash, he’s arrogant, he plays unsanctioned exhibition matches for money, and he’s as good as he says he is (maybe even better). His attitude earns him the ire of former nine times World Champion Maxwell Randall (Armstrong). A war of words erupts between them in the press, fuelled by manipulative journalist Miss Sullivan (Gold), and soon there’s talk of a challenge match.

T.O. brokers a deal with a loan shark called the Wednesday Man (Henderson) (T.O. is in his debt), and the match goes ahead with the added stipulation that whoever loses has to stop playing professional snooker. Randall shows off his prowess by winning the first frame with a maximum break of 147. He goes on to win the next seven frames, giving himself a seemingly unassailable lead of eight frames to nil, with the match being played over seventeen frames. During a break, Billy – who’s in shock at how badly he’s faring – and T.O. discover something about the match that changes everything, and when play resumes, a lucky break gives Billy the opportunity to play his way back into the match. It all comes down to the final frame. Which player will be able to hold their nerve and win the match… and how will they do it?

Shot in what looks like the basement of an old abandoned cement factory, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire is definitely one of the oddest movies you’re ever likely to see, but even with its low budget production values and its over-reliance on sports tropes – the talented newcomer with something to prove, the aging player who resents the newcomer’s apparent disrespect for him and the sport, the manager with financial problems who puts the newcomer’s career on the line, the journalist who foments discord as part of her own agenda, the shadowy figure (here the Wednesday Man) who pulls all the strings behind the scenes – the movie still has a charm that makes it an easy watch, and by the end you can see why it’s gained something of a cult following over the years, and despite being very rough around the edges.

A collaboration between two creative talents for whom this would not have been a predictable choice, the movie has a solemn, well-constructed screenplay by Trevor Preston, and highly stylised direction by Alan Clarke. Both men had backgrounds in more gritty and realistic TV dramas such as the excellent Out (1978 – Preston), and the controversial Scum (1977 – Clarke). Though the screenplay does play things “by the book” and follows a well established template, Preston strays far enough from the template on occasion to make the story more intriguing, such as providing Randall with a home where vampire-related paraphernalia gives rise to the idea that he really is a vampire, and it’s not just a nickname. Also, Preston doesn’t give Billy a girlfriend who’s there solely to tell him how good he is and cheer from the sidelines. And the inclusion of rival sets of fans for the players gives rise to a battle of the classes that should seem out of place, but isn’t at all.

For his part, Clarke keeps the characters hemmed in thanks to the claustrophobic nature of the various sets, and this gives the feel of their being in a pressure cooker environment, where every little slight and criticism is blown up out of all proportion, and emotions run more intensely than they would do otherwise. However, this does give the movie a very theatrical feel, with Randall’s living room looking like a stage set, and the setting for the match, with its spectators’ galleries on three sides, also giving the impression of watching a filmed play rather than a movie. Clarke thankfully compensates for this through the editing, and although the movie never shakes off this notion fully, Clarke’s staging and framing of the action helps smooth things over as well.

As a musical, the movie is on less firmer ground than it is as a sports tale, and though the inclusion of several well written songs (lyrics by Preston, music by George Fenton) gives the movie a boost from time to time, not all of them work as well as they should. The opening song, Green Stamps, will baffle anyone born after 1991, while Kid to Break‘s repetitive nature quickly undermines the intended potency of the song as a whole, which seems to have been written as the snooker equivalent of a football chant. Two songs do stand out though: the vituperative I Bite Back, with its chorus and vocal counterpoint from Eve Ferret (it’s also the one song that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Broadway or West End musical), and the exuberant Snooker (So Much More Than Just a Game), sung by the match’s flamboyant compere, Big Jack Jay (McCaul).

The performances are spirited and engaging, with Daniels wisely abandoning his usual cheeky chappie demeanour, and Armstrong hissing his lines with thinly restrained anger. Both actors are on good form, taking the bare bones of their characterisations and fleshing them out beyond Preston’s original intentions, and looking very comfortable and authentic at the snooker table. Payne, whose career has never really recovered from his being the bad guy in Passenger 57 (1992) (though he was very good indeed in it, better than Wesley Snipes), is the surprise here, giving gambling addict T.O. a much broader, more sympathetic reading than was probably on the page, and making him the most interesting character in the movie. One thing that should be noted though, is that none of the cast are particularly good singers, and their voices aren’t always up to the challenges of the songs, which is a pity as the ways in which they interpret them, are very good indeed.

Rating: 7/10 – much better than it looks (just ignore Clive Tickner’s murky photography), and sounds (Randall’s squeaky shoes are a distraction), Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire is quirky enough and original enough to warrant closer inspection and a better reputation; Clarke squeezes a lot out of Preston’s screenplay, the cast are all on fine form, the songs reflect and enable the narrative, and the whole daft nature of the material – which is taken very seriously indeed – is exactly what makes it work as well as it does. (15/31)

NOTE: At the moment there’s no trailer available for Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire.

The Skin I Live In (2011)

13 Thursday Jul 2017

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Artificial skin, Catch Up movie, Drama, Elena Anaya, Horror, Jan Cornet, Marisa Parades, Pedro Almodóvar, Psychological thriller, Review

Original title: La piel que habito

D: Pedro Almodóvar / 120m

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet, Roberto Álamo, Eduard Fernández, José Luis Gómez, Blanca Suárez, Susi Sánchez, Bárbara Lennie

What happens when a multi-award winning and very well respected director gets it completely wrong? The answer is a movie called The Skin I Live In. Since making his first feature, the anarchic Folle… folle… fólleme Tim! (1978), Pedro Almodóvar has presided over Spanish moviemaking like a benevolent enfant terrible, promoting home grown talent while making his own idiosyncratic movies and gaining an international reputation for flamboyance, passion and high-camp melodrama. He’s a true original, and a writer/director who has always been unapologetic about the movies he’s made, and their content (anyone who’s seen the opening five minutes of Matador (1986) will know what I mean). But sometimes, even the most innovative and instinctive of directors will take on a project they really should have steered well away from, and The Skin I Live In is Almodóvar’s. In attempting to fuse his usual movie making style with a genre he’s never worked in before, the director of such modern classics as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and High Heels (1991) has made his most unconvincing and mundane movie to date.

The movie begins with an old-fashioned two-pronged mystery; who is the woman (Anaya) being kept in a locked room by renowned surgeon Dr Robert Ledgard (Banderas), and why? As with all good mystery thrillers, there are no answers that are immediately forthcoming, just a number of clues and a few clever hints. What is clear is that Ledgard has been researching and cultivating an artificial skin that is resistant to fire and insect bites. And soon it becomes clear that he has been using this artificial skin on the young woman (whose name we learn is Vera). And for a while, that’s the movie. There’s a housekeeper, Marilia (Paredes), but she doesn’t appear relevant to the storyline or the plot. Oh, wait, here comes her criminal son, Zeca (Álamo), who’s on the run and needs a place to hide. When he realises there’s an attractive young woman in the house, he has one thing on his mind: sex, and whether she’s willing or not. Fortunately, Ledgard returns home (a little late, to be fair) and Zeca is “taken care of”.

It’s at this point that the script, by Almodóvar and his brother Agustín, decides its time to reveal just what is going on, and why. Cue a late-night confession from Marilia, a flashback from Ledgard’s perspective, and then, more intriguingly, a lengthier flashback from Vera’s point of view. This passage reveals almost everything you could need to know about what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how it’s all happened in the first place. The why, somewhat inevitably, is borne out of revenge, with Ledgard targeting a young man, Vicente (Cornet), for a particular misdeed that has gone unpunished. This futher explains what’s happening, and how it has all come about, but with the flashbacks out of the way, the movie begins to unravel as it heads for a melodramatic but also muted ending. And that’s without a coda that would work better as the beginning of a whole other movie.

Almodóvar has been quoted as saying that The Skin I Live In is “a horror story without screams or frights”. That may sound clever, or even something of a challenge to achieve, but the problem is that while Almodóvar may be good at exploring the lives of those living on the margins of Spanish society (very good in fact), when it comes to horror it’s obvious he doesn’t have the grounding or the knowledge to put together the kind of terrifying experience required of genuinely good horror movies. Instead, Almodóvar plays with his Frankenstein-lite scenario in such a way that he leeches all the horror out of it and leaves the audience with a soap opera melodrama that occasionally acts as a psychological or psycho-sexual thriller. Almodóvar isn’t really interested in making a horror movie; instead he seems more interested in seeing if he can fit horror themes into one of his standard dysfunctional family tragedies.

The result is a movie that proves disjointed and erratic when it comes to the characters and their motivations (Ledgard does a lot of things that are baffling or poorly thought through by the script), and which seems happier in observing things from a distance – much as Ledgard does with Vera. This makes it harder for the audience to engage or sympathise with the characters, and scenes where this might be regarded as essential in terms of building or maintaining tension, remain flat and unremarkable. Almodóvar is better off having his characters express their emotions, no matter how histrionic they might be, but here he opts for a restrained approach that gives the movie a chilly, displaced feel. It’s another bad decision that affects the movie greatly, and leaves the cast adrift completely. Banderas (reuniting with Almodóvar after a twenty-one year gap) plays Ledgard as a man determined on revenge but who makes some very strange choices along the way, while Anaya has the awkward task of denying her character’s back story while at the same time, needing it to perform her role adequately.

Ultimately, it’s a movie that doesn’t work because its director doesn’t know what kind of movie it should be in order to work. With that in mind, Almodóvar’s attempts at making his audience squirm, end up doing so, but for all the wrong reasons. Dread is replaced by unwarranted black humour, terror never has enough time to establish itself, and outright horror is knocked down and killed by a reliance on turgid melodrama. The movie may look good – Antxón Gómez’s production design is perfect for expressing the clinical, sterile environment that Ledgard inhabits – and it may have a surprisingly romantic score courtesy of Alberto Iglesias, but these are plusses that are unable to make up for the wayward, tonally artless moments that Almodóvar peppers his script with. When a horror movie fails in asserting itself as a horror movie and never quite realises where and why it’s going wrong, therein lies the true horror.

Rating: 4/10 – despite occasional moments where Almodóvar reminds us of his auteur status, The Skin I Live In is a movie whose purpose and raison d’être is never compelling enough to warrant the viewer’s full investment of their time; with way too many scenes in its last half hour that provide bafflement instead of suspense, the movie is proof that some directors should stick to what they know, and know what they should stick to. (13/31)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

02 Sunday Jul 2017

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Akihiro Kitamura, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Dieter Laser, Drama, Germany, Horror, Review, Surgery, Thriller, Tom Six

D: Tom Six / 88m

Cast: Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura, Andreas Leupold, Peter Blankenstein

If you’ve ever thought that hype and horror go together like Tom Cruise and Scientology (in that they both support each other), then The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is a prime example of that particular maxim. Even its production, where the investors were kept in the dark about the nature of the “conjoining” writer/director Tom Six had in mind, added to the perception that here was a movie that was setting out deliberately to shock audiences and in the worst imaginable way possible. And soon, the hype took over, as word got out that Six’s movie would show people joined mouth-to-anus as part of a medical experiment carried out by the movie’s main character. And just that idea, that you would see three people joined together in such a way – with their mouths actually grafted onto someone else’s anus – was all the movie needed to attract a huge amount of attention. And outrage. Let’s not forget the inevitable outrage. Regarded by many as “sick” and “depraved”, the movie’s success was assured from the moment it’s raison d’être became known.

But more often than not, hype has a nasty way of proving itself to be unfounded. The greater the outrage, the less outrageous a movie usually is. The more critics charge a movie with being “disgusting” the less likely it is that it will be. And The Human Centipede (First Sequence) fits these requirements almost perfectly. It’s ostensibly a horror movie, it has a shocking central idea, and it makes no apologies for its existence. In short, it’s a success exactly because of the approbrium heaped upon it. But is it “sick”, “depraved”, or “disgusting”? The answer is an easy one: No.

What Six did was to take a crazy idea for a horror movie, pull together the funding needed to make it, and then give his project as much pre-release build-up as he could before unleashing it on a very suspecting world. And most everyone saw what he wanted them to see: a movie described as “sick”, “depraved”, and “disgusting” but which wasn’t. The movie that Six actually made was very much a standard monster movie with an opening section that riffed on slasher movies in an effort to lull audiences who weren’t aware of the movie’s content into thinking they were going to see yet another masked psycho feature. And so we’re introduced to Lindsay (Williams) and Jenny (Yennie), two Americans touring Europe who’ve reached Germany and find themselves stranded on a dark and lonely country road, and with no idea where they are (and surprise, surprise, they can’t get a phone signal). Instead of sticking to the road they head off into the woods, get even more lost, and bicker between themselves until they discover a house handily located in the middle of said woods. A safe haven at last. Or is it?

Of course, we all know the answer to that one, as the house is the home of the man we’ve seen right at the beginning of the movie aiming a sedative gun at a truck driver who’s defecating behind some bushes. One glass of water with a Rohypnol chaser (for Jenny), and a sedating injection (for Lindsay) later, and the man of the house, retired surgeon Dr Josef Heiter (Laser), has the girls cuffed to surgical gurneys in his basement and being prepped for an advanced procedure of his own design. But the truck driver has been a poor choice and has to go. And so, Japanese tourist Katsuro (Kitamura) finds himself abducted and taking the driver’s place. Lindsay makes an escape attempt, which in turn inspires Heiter’s admiration for her, and his decision to make her the middle part of his human centipede. The operation goes ahead, the three are joined together, and for a long while the movie forgets that it needs to expand on its basic premise and that seeing three people in what look like oversized nappies crawling around on the floor isn’t very enthralling. Thank God, then, that two cops (Leupold, Blankenstein) come looking for any missing tourists the doctor may be keeping hidden, and the movie can head for the finish line without any further delay.

If much of the previous paragraph sounds as if the movie isn’t being taken too seriously, then that’s because it isn’t. You only have to look at the image above to know that this is a movie that shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone, and even less so as a horror movie. While it does include a number of traditional horror tropes – the mad doctor, the creature that never wanted to be born, the creature turning on its creator – The Human Centipede (First Sequence) never aspires to doing anything remotely meaningful with them, or provide any subtext beyond a risible connection with experiments carried out by the likes of Dr Josef Mengele during World War II. This leaves the movie looking and sounding rather flat once the human centipede is put together. Kitamura shouts a lot, Williams and Yennie groan and cry a lot, and Laser struts around like the ruler of a kingdom only he can see.

This is a movie where we’re supposed to be horrified at the sight of three people connected in a way that wouldn’t look too out of place in a porn movie. Does this make the movie “sick”, “depraved” or “disgusting”? (Spanish audiences didn’t think so; they found the movie funny, and laughed throughout screenings.) Ultimately, this is a minor horror movie elevated through hype into something that it’s not. Six should be congratulated for bringing his movie to a wider public awareness, but it’s also a movie that betrays its Seventies Euro-horror and Cronenbergian influences at every turn. And if you’re holding out for some gore-soaked thrills, you’ll be disappointed there as well: what little there is has been done before, and on too many occasions to make Six’s efforts stand out from the crowd. If it’s real body horror you’re after, then go see Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989). Now there’s a movie where mouth to anus really is just the beginning.

Rating: 4/10 – an uninspired horror movie that holds back from being as exploitative as it sounds, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is a triumph of carefully planned marketing and narrative shortcomings; bolstered by Thomas Stefan’s antiseptic production design and Goof de Koning’s angular cinematography, the movie promises a lot that it never follows through on, and in the end is too reliant on the so-called “shock value” of its basic premise to be anywhere near as effective as it should be. (2/31)

A Field in England (2013)

01 Saturday Jul 2017

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Ben Wheatley, Catch Up movie, Drama, English Civil War, Hallucinations, Horror, Michael Smiley, Peter Ferdinando, Reece Shearsmith, Review, Richard Glover, Ryan Pope, Thriller

D: Ben Wheatley / 90m

Cast: Julian Barratt, Peter Ferdinando, Richard Glover, Ryan Pope, Reece Shearsmith, Michael Smiley

The British writer/director/editor Ben Wheatley has made six movies to date, all of which have been greeted warmly by critics, but less so by audiences. So what does this say about the movies Wheatley makes? Or the critics that review them so favourably? Or the audiences who aren’t as moved as the critics? Well, like any discerning director, Wheatley makes the movies he wants to make. He’s not singing or dancing to anyone else’s tune, and he’s never been just a director for hire. His movies are personal to him (and his co-writer/co-editor, and wife Amy Jump), and he brings his own unique visual aesthetic to them. Perhaps it’s this individuality of purpose that makes him so popular with the critics. But still, wider audiences haven’t taken to Wheatley’s movies, and he remains a movie maker with a great deal of critical caché but very little box office appeal.

Is this fair? Possibly not, but Wheatley’s distinctive approach to making movies isn’t always as welcoming as it could be. His fourth movie, A Field in England, is probably the best example of how his distinctive approach can get in the way of making a movie accessible, or even fundamentally appealing. Set during an English Civil War battle, the movie begins with Reece Shearsmith’s cowardly alchemist’s assistant, Whitehead, crashing through a hedge and cowering in fear from his pursuer, Commander Trower (Barratt). Rescued by a soldier named Cutler (Pope), the pair also encounter a couple of deserters, an alcoholic called Jacob (Ferdinando) and his witless companion, Friend (Glover). They decide to leave the battle and travel to an alehouse that Cutler tells them isn’t far away. They begin crossing a field that’s ringed by mushrooms, and Cutler forces Jacob and Friend to eat them. Things begin to a turn for the weird when the men seemingly haul an Irishman named O’Neill (Smiley) from out of the ground. He quickly assumes control of the group and convinces them that there is treasure buried in the field, and traumatises Whitehead into become a kind of human divining rod in order for them to know where to dig.

What follows is a series of events and episodes that may or may not be the result of the men ingesting the mushrooms, as hallucinations and psychotic breaks affect the whole group except for O’Neill (who may be real and then again he might not be; his provenance is doubtful). And this is the point where what occurs, and what follows, can’t be trusted. If you accept that Wheatley has sent his characters on a really strange trip, then you can go with the flow quite easily and just accept what you’re seeing without worrying about what it might all mean. But if you do need to know what it all means, then the rest of the movie is going to be problematic for you.

Wrongly or rightly, deliberately or accidentally, A Field in England is a movie that takes a huge stylistic and narrative gamble around the half hour mark and never looks back. It maintains a semblance of traditonal storytelling but filters it all through a succession of moments of bravura visual and sonic experimentation. At one point, while being chased by O’Neill, Whitehead shoves mushroom after mushroom into his mouth and Wheatley uses it as a cue to transport the viewer into Whitehead’s mind and expose them to the kaleidoscopic and fantastical visions that the character is experiencing. It’s a tremendous feat of editing, combining fractured and composite visuals with an overwhelming audio conflation of natural sound and music, and it’s far and away the standout moment… but, exceptional as it is, it’s also indicative of the way in which Wheatley and Jump have decided to treat the narrative, and the material as a whole.

As the movie progresses, and the characters experience vision after hallucination after extended fever dream, it becomes clear that the story, such as it is, has been abandoned in favour of transporting the viewer into a world where anything Wheatley and Jump can come up with is the new norm, and regardless of whether it makes sense or not. What makes this all the more frustrating is that the dialogue and the characterisations, which were so redolent during the movie’s first half hour, are also abandoned, and the characters – literally – all become pawns to be moved around the field at random, and until Wheatley can set up the final showdown between Whitehead and O’Neill (which ends with a line from Whitehead that has Eighties action movie cliché written all over it; not bad for a movie set during the English Civil War). In the end, the viewer has no choice but to go along with what’s happening, because Wheatley isn’t giving them a choice; and if it doesn’t make sense – which a lot of it doesn’t – then it’s too bad.

But where the movie scores highly is in its imaginative cinematography, courtesy of DoP Laurie Rose (who has lensed all of Wheatley’s movies). The crisp, pin-sharp black and white images are hugely immersive, and close ups are rendered in such a precise, detailed fashion that there are several moments where the urge to pause the movie and savour the image is irresistible. It’s a movie that’s staggeringly beautiful at times, and if it’s ever released in a 4K UHD version it would be an even more incredible viewing experience. Full marks too to sound designer Martin Pavey and composer Jim Williams for combining their work in a way that adds so much resonance to the images, and helps accentuate the profoundly disturbed states of mind of the characters once their real “journey” has begun. Without these elements – the imagery and the soundtrack – A Field in England would definitely suffer further, but thankfully they more than make up for the errant narrative and directorial choices that Wheatley has made.

Rating: 6/10 – impressive visuals and an equally impressive soundscape aren’t enough to stop A Field in England from being a disappointing, and frustrating viewing experience; loaded with style and directorial flourishes, it neglects its storyline in favour of these approaches, and leaves the movie struggling to retain any meaning, which makes it an exercise in style that overwhelms any substance it may have had in the beginning. (1/31)

Monthly Roundup – June 2017

30 Friday Jun 2017

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Attack of the Killer Donuts, Bakery, Barbara Kent, Before the Flood, Carole Lombard, CHIPS, Climate change, Comedy, Crime, Dax Shepard, Documentary, Dough, Drama, Fisher Stevens, Grief Street, High Voltage, Horror, Howard Higgin, Jerome Holder, John Goldschmidt, John Holland, Jonathan Pryce, Justin Ray, Kay Linaker, Kayla Compton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Peña, Murder, Mystery, Ralph Morgan, Raymond Cannon, Reviews, Richard Thorpe, Scott Wheeler, The Outer Gate, Thriller, William Boyd

Attack of the Killer Donuts (2016) / D: Scott Wheeler / 85m

Cast: Justin Ray, Kayla Compton, Ben Heyman, Michael Swan, C. Thomas Howell, Fredrick Burns, Kassandra Voyagis, Chris De Christopher, Lauren Compton, Alison England, Michael Rene Walton

Rating: 3/10 – Johnny (Ray) works in a donut shop, while his mad scientist uncle (Swan) works in his basement lab cooking up a formula that – surprise! – will eventually turn donuts into flesh-hungry, bloodthirsty… donuts; bottom of the barrel stuff that aims for kitschy fun but misses by a mile, Attack of the Killer Donuts wears its sugar-coated heart on its sleeve, but is too awful in its execution to make up for its many, many, many faults, or the fact that it’s run out of steam before the first victim is put out of their misery (unlike the audience).

Before the Flood (2016) / D: Fisher Stevens / 96m

With: Leonardo DiCaprio, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Al Gore, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, John Kerry

Rating: 8/10 – actor and UN Messenger of Peace on Climate Change, Leonardo DiCaprio explores the ways in which the world is still refusing to acknowledge the effects of greenhouse gases and the need to switch to renewable energy; DiCaprio is a passionate environmental activist who has access to many of the “big players”, and his targeted globe-trotting highlights the natural disasters that are occurring all around us, all of which makes Before the Flood a worthy successor to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and an important, and sadly necessary, acknowledgment that we’re still not doing enough to turn things around and ensure our collective futures.

Dough (2015) / D: John Goldschmidt / 95m

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Jerome Holder, Phil Davis, Ian Hart, Pauline Collins, Andrew Ellis, Malachi Kirby, Natasha Gordon, Melanie Freeman, Daniel Caltagirone, Andy de la Tour

Rating: 7/10 – an aging Jewish baker (Pryce) takes on an apprentice (Holder) whose second job as a drug dealer leads to the bakery’s sales going through the roof when an unexpected ingredient finds its way into the dough mix; a genial, inoffensive movie that features winning performances from Pryce and Holder, Davis as the kind of smarmy business developer who belongs in a pantomime, and a pleasant sense of its own shortcomings, Dough is a cross-cultural comedy drama that is amusing for the most part but which lacks the substance needed to make it more engaging.

Grief Street (1931) / D: Richard Thorpe / 64m

Cast: Barbara Kent, John Holland, Dorothy Christy, Crauford Kent, Lillian Rich, James P. Burtis, Larry Steers, Lloyd Whitlock

Rating: 5/10 – there are plenty of suspects, but just who did kill less than popular stage actor Alvin Merle (Kent), and why?; a locked room murder mystery where everyone with a motive is assembled Agatha Christie-style at the end to reveal the murderer, Grief Street is a brash, enjoyable whodunnit whose villain will be obvious to anyone who’s seen more than a handful of similarly plotted movies, but the movie more than makes up for this thanks to spirited performances from its cast, and Thorpe’s relaxed directing style.

The Outer Gate (1937) / D: Raymond Cannon / 63m

Cast: Ralph Morgan, Kay Linaker, Ben Alexander, Eddie Acuff, Charles Brokaw

Rating: 5/10 – when an up-and-coming employee (Alexander) is sent to prison for embezzlement, his employer (Morgan) is the first to believe in his guilt, but when the truth is revealed and he’s released from jail, the employee sets about getting his revenge; directed by Cannon in a crude, rudimentary way, The Outer Gate is nevertheless a movie that plays to the strengths of its gosh-you-won’t-believe-it screenplay, Morgan’s low-key, passive performance, and a surprisingly grim fatalism, all of which make it more intriguing than it appears to be on the face of things.

High Voltage (1929) / D: Howard Higgin / 63m

aka Wanted

Cast: William Boyd, Carole Lombard, Owen Moore, Phillips Smalley, Billy Bevan, Diane Ellis

Rating: 4/10 – when a bus load of passengers is stranded thanks to heavy snow, they take refuge in an abandoned church, only to find they’re not alone; a dialogue heavy drama made in the early days of the Talkies, High Voltage is a well acted if dreary experience that tries hard to make itself interesting but falls short thanks to its focus on (already) stereotypical characters and the period’s need for a neat, everything-wrapped-up-satisfactorily ending.

CHIPS (2017) / D: Dax Shepard / 101m

Cast: Michael Peña, Dax Shepard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Rosa Salazar, Jessica McNamee, Adam Brody, Isiah Whitlock Jr, Kristen Bell, Justin Chatwin

Rating: 4/10 – rookie motorcycle cop Jon Baker (Shepard) is teamed up with newly transferred Frank Poncharello (Peña) in the California Highway Patrol, and soon finds himself tracking down a bunch of dirty cops led by veteran Ray Kurtz (D’Onofrio); forty years on from its origin as a TV series, CHIPS is given a big screen reboot thanks to fanboy Shepard, but is only moderately successful in its efforts to drag the show kicking and screaming into the 21st century, leaving it completely dependent on how you feel about Shepherd and Peña as a comedy duo, and its less than inspired script.

Oh! the Horror! – The Windmill Massacre (2016) and The Void (2016)

29 Monday May 2017

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Aaron Poole, Charlotte Beaumont, Drama, Holland, Horror, Hospital, Jeremy Gillespie, Kenneth Welsh, Nick Jongerius, Review, Steven Kostanski

The Windmill Massacre (2016) / D: Nick Jongerius / 85m

Cast: Charlotte Beaumont, Bart Klever, Patrick Baladi, Noah Taylor, Fiona Hampton, Adam Thomas Wright, Tanroh Ishida, Ben Batt, Kenan Raven, Derek Howard

A motley crew of tourists, some of whom are running to escape their past. A sightseeing trip to several of Holland’s windmills. A tour bus that breaks down close to a windmill that isn’t on any map. A woman (Beaumont) who witnesses the murder of one of the day trippers. A movie that treads such a familiar and uninspiring path that it might as well have been marked, Cliché Road.

The serial killer with a supernatural raison d’etre is such a staple now of the horror genre that any new wrinkle on such a well established theme has to really go the extra mile to be effective. Alas, The Windmill Massacre only has its location to help differentiate it from all the other serial killer horror movies out there. And when you can’t even come up with a coherent origin story for your supernatural killer – here it comes in two parts and the makers haven’t realised that they don’t make a convincing whole – then your movie is at a disadvantage before it’s even begun.

Having such a disparate set of characters doesn’t help either. There’s Beaumont’s Aussie nanny, on the run after killing her abusive father (Howard); Baladi’s uptight dad taking his haemophiliac son (Wright) on an impromptu term-time holiday; Taylor’s coke-snorting art historian; Ishida’s innocuous yet resourceful Japanese student; Hampton’s ambitious French photographer; and Batt’s Marine fleeing from an incident with a Dutch prostitute. They’re rounded off by tour guide Abe (Klever), whose attitude ranges from nonchalant to incredibly nonchalant. If the viewer manages to connect with any of them then that says more about the viewer, because all are stock characters who don’t inspire any sympathy.

To be fair the movie does attempt to provide a slightly different motive for its burn victim villain – he’s there to claim the lives of sinners – but in the end it doesn’t matter what his motivation is, as long as he rids the unlucky viewer of the characters’ company and in as timely a manner as possible. This leads to a series of deaths that attempt to pay homage to the kill sprees found in Eighties horror movies but which only manage to do so in a derivative, obligatory fashion; and there’s a twist that won’t surprise anyone. Some of the cast try too hard, some barely register, and director Nick Jongerius can’t inject enough energy into proceedings to make a difference. There are a couple of loose ends that aren’t tied up, but the average viewer won’t care, as long as they don’t have to make the same trip again.

Rating: 3/10 – yet another horror movie that creates a set of rules to govern its villain’s behavour and demise – and then ignores them all in order to set up a potential sequel, The Windmill Massacre is tiresome, and subordinate to ideas better used elsewhere; it just goes to show that low-budget European horror can be just as bad as its US cousin, and just as predictable.

The Void (2016) / D: Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski / 90m

Cast: Aaron Poole, Kenneth Welsh, Daniel Fathers, Kathleen Munroe, Ellen Wong, Mik Byskov, Art Hindle, Stephanie Belding, James Millington, Evan Stern, Grace Munro

A lonely backwoods road. A deputy dozing in a patrol car. A man who stumbles out of the woods covered in blood. A rush to the nearest hospital even though the man isn’t wounded.

And let’s stop right there. Whatever you might be looking for in watching The Void, be advised that a story which makes sense will not be forthcoming. From the outset, The Void is a movie that, thanks to writers and directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, opts for keeping its audience (and its characters) firmly in the dark (or the void, if you prefer). It has no sense of its own internal logic – such as it is – and plays fast and loose with motivation, coherence, and dramatic licence. Stupid things are done by pretty much all the characters, and there’s enough lug-headed dialogue going around to crunch open a portal to another dimension – Oh, hang on a moment, that’s what’s happening here, isn’t it?

This is a movie that seems to have a strange kinship with The Fast and the Furious franchise (bear with this). In that series, each movie is constructed by coming up with the OTT setpieces first and the plot and storylines second. Here it seems as if the creature effects and their place in the screenplay were devised first of all, and then a plot bolted on later. That plot makes no sense, and whenever the movie seems like it’s going to explain exactly what’s going on it finds a way to avoid doing so. Even when the chief villain starts spouting pseudo-intellectual gibberish in his efforts to explain things it soon becomes obvious that he’s just spouting any old drivel that sounds esoteric. Somewhere in there is the notion that physical metamorphosis can be brought about through ritual and the intervention of beings older than time, but that’s the best the movie can do to justify the events that are taking place.

What can be discerned is that there is a cult operating in and around the kind of backwoods community where the local deputy is as much a doofus as he is a potential hero; that everyone in the hospital where the deputy and the man from the woods end up will die; that the creatures people “evolve” into will be low-lit and obscured by careful framing and ultra-careful editing; and that all this will happen in the kind of isolation that only occurs in low-budget horror movies. The movie trades on its retro-Eighties gore effects and sub-Lovecraftian tone but these can’t compensate for some truly awful performances (particularly from Poole), character motivations so dire they’re wince-inducing, and a number of plot “developments” that prompt the characters into putting their lives in danger over and over and over again. In many ways this is an ill considered project that lacks the zest and ideas needed to make it a breakout movie – which seems to have been the aim.

Rating: 3/10 – horror movies don’t have to make complete sense (though it would be nice if they tried), and The Void adheres to that idea with apparent relish; with no explanation offered for anything that happens, it’s a movie that tries hard to be effective on a visceral level but which ultimately fails to be anything more than yet another dumb horror that mistakes enthusiasm for quality.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

12 Friday May 2017

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Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Drama, Horror, Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender, Prequel, Review, Ridley Scott, Sci-fi, Sequel, Thriller, Xenomorph

D: Ridley Scott / 122m

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Amy Siemetz, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby, Uli Latukefu, Tess Haubrich

When the Alien franchise was given a new lease of life with official prequel Prometheus (2012), audiences were teased with the idea that they would finally learn just where the series’ chief villain, the xenomorph, came from. Prometheus, though, raised far more questions than it provided answers, and while it introduced the Engineers and went some way to showing the xenomorph’s origins (though not the reasons for its creation), the intended link between this first prequel and the original Alien (1979) remained obscure, and still far from being revealed. With Alien: Covenant, audiences could be excused for believing that some of those unanswered questions would be addressed, and the connecting story expanded on. But with at least two further prequels (sequels to the prequels?) planned, and possibly a third, the message here is frustratingly clear: don’t expect to learn anything you didn’t already know.

After the cod-theological leanings of Prometheus, the latest in the saga opts instead for cod-philosophical leanings, and spends time musing on notions of creation and acknowledging one’s place in the scheme of things. But the movie – scripted by John Logan and Dante Harper from a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green – isn’t interested in exploring these notions in relation to the human contingent of the story, but instead in relation to two androids: David and Walter (both Fassbender) who represent opposite ends of their creationist cycle. David is the prototype, while Walter is the later model built to surpass the limitations of the original. Together they talk about their creator’s expectations for them, and then their own. But while on the surface these musings appear in keeping with the wider story of the xenomorph’s creation (whatever that may be), they don’t add as much depth to the material as may have been intended. Instead, they provide a basis and a reason for a third act “reveal” that exists purely to set up the next installment.

Before then, we’re introduced to the latest group of dinner dates for the murderous xenomorph. Only this time it’s either a neomorph (“infant” version) or a protomorph (“adult” version), but either way it still behaves like its forebear(?), has acid for blood, screeches like a banshee, and kills anyone in its path. This time around, the movie’s motley band of victims is the crew of the colony ship Covenant. A group of terraformers en route to an Earth-like planet called Origae-6, their cargo consists of two thousand colonists all in cryo-sleep, and a thousand embryos all in cold storage. While the crew also enjoys their cryo-sleep (they’re seven-and-a-half years away from reaching their destination), Walter carries out a variety of assigned tasks and monitors the ship and its personnel. A blast of unexpected solar energy damages the ship, and Walter wakes up the crew – all except for the captain, whose cryo-pod refuses to open. Thanks to the damage to the ship’s systems, the captain burns to death in his cryo-pod, which leaves Oram (Crudup) in charge.

A distress signal picked up from a planet that apparently doesn’t exist on any celestial maps reveals a human origin, and prompts Oram to redirect the Covenant to check it out. With the planet appearing to support human life, and being only a few weeks’ to get to, the reservations of chief terraformer Daniels (Waterston) are acknowledged but unheeded. Leaving chief pilot Tennessee (McBride) and two other crewmembers on board, Oram, along with Daniels, Walter, and the rest of the crew descends to the planet’s surface. There they find an anomaly in the form of wheat, a crashed spaceship, danger in the form of spores that infect two of the crew, and an unexpected rescuer when said spores precipitate the deaths of more than the infected. With a massive magnetic storm hindering their return to the Covenant, Oram and the remaining crew must find a way to survive the deadly intentions of the protomorph, and a more sinister danger lurking in their midst.

Those who found themselves dissatisfied with the direction taken in Prometheus will be pleased with this return to the series’ more basic roots, but even though it’s a step in the right direction, the problem with the movie overall is that it doesn’t offer anything new, and it doesn’t come close to replicating the tension and sense of dread that made Alien such an impressive outing. It tries to, and the script is clearly designed and constructed to provide gory set pieces at regular intervals in honour of the series’ abiding commitment to shocking audiences with jolts of body horror, but for anyone who’s seen all the previous movies in the franchise, this is a retread of scenes and set ups that were far more effective the first time round. Likewise the introduction of the various characters as regular joes, a device used to very good effect in Alien, but which here is truncated in favour of getting on with the action. Inevitably this means that when the crew starts to be whittled down, it doesn’t have the same effect as in the past, and Waterston’s plucky terraformer aside, it’s difficult to care about anyone as well.

In many ways, Alien: Covenant is a stripped down series’ entry that concentrates more on reliving old glories than advancing the franchise’s intended long-form narrative. Whatever happens in Alien: Awakening (2019?), it’s to be hoped that it reverts to telling the story begun in Prometheus and which should eventually connect with Alien. Here there are still more questions to be answered, and there’s a suspicion that the writers are already painting themselves into a corner, and that the decision to make a handful of prequels instead of just one all-encompassing prequel is beginning to look more than a little unsound. This has all the hallmarks of a movie made in response to the negative reaction afforded Prometheus, and if so, you have to wonder what this movie would have been like if the reaction had been positive. More of the same? Further exploration of the Engineers and their motivations? More pseudo-religious theorising? Less rampaging alien attacks and gory killings? It looks as if we’ll never know.

With the characters reduced mostly to alien-bait, only Fassbender and Waterston make any impact, though it is good to see McBride playing it completely straight for once. Fassbender is a mercurial actor but he always seems to have a stillness about him that seeps through in all his performances. Here as both David and Walter, that stillness is used to tremendous effect, and whether he’s waxing lyrical about art and music as David, or looking concerned as Walter, Fassbender provides two endlessly fascinating portrayals for the price of one. Waterston is equally impressive in a role that will inevitably draw comparisons with Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, but Waterston is canny enough not to make Daniels as strong-willed as Ripley, nor as valorous. Though she’s the movie’s nominal heroine, Daniels retains a vulnerability that Ripley didn’t have at all, and Waterston is a winning presence, her last act heroism borne out of desperation rather than determination.

Third time around, Ridley Scott ensures the movie looks as beautiful and darkly realised as his other entries, but somehow fails to make the movie as tense and compelling as Alien, or as intellectually portentous as Prometheus. He does ensure that the movie rattles along at a fair old lick, but with the script providing a series of “greatest hits” moments for him to revisit, Scott’s involvement doesn’t always appear to be as purposeful as in the past. There are too many moments where the movie’s energy seems to flag, and the tension dissipates as a result, leaving the viewer to wonder, if a director’s cut should be released in the future, will it be shorter than the theatrical version? And not even he can avoid making the movie’s coda look uninspired and predictable, all of which begs the question, should someone else sit in the director’s chair for the rest of the prequels?

Rating: 6/10 – a fitful, occasionally impressive second prequel/first sequel, Alien: Covenant revisits the haunted house horror tropes that made the first movie so successful, but finds little inspiration to help it fulfill its intentions; another missed opportunity to make the series as momentous as it was nearly forty years ago, where the story goes from here remains to be seen, but in continuing Scott et al really need to remember that a satisfying mystery requires a satisfying answer, something that this entry seems to have forgotten about entirely.

Monthly Roundup – April 2017

30 Sunday Apr 2017

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A Street Cat Named Bob, Aaron Eckhart, Action, Andy Mitton, Annette O'Toole, Anybody's Nightmare, Biography, Bob the Cat, Brad Peyton, Charles Barton, Chinook, Clark Freeman, Comedy, Crime, Crime Doctor, Dakota Johnson, Delayed Action, Documentary, Drama, Edward Dryhurst, Fifty Shades Darker, Gibb McLaughlin, Horror, Incarnate, Island of Doomed Men, James Foley, James Nunn, Jamie Dornan, Jason Bateman, Jesse Holland, John Harlow, Josh Gordon, Julie Suedo, June Thorburn, Kirby Dick, Kirby Grant, Literary adaptation, Luke Treadaway, Michael Gordon, Michael Powell, Mike Mizanin, Office Christmas Party, Patricia Routledge, Peter Lorre, Possession, Reviews, Robert Ayres, Roger Spottiswoode, Silent movie, The Claydon Treasure Mystery, The Marine 5: Battleground, The Night of the Party, The Woman from China, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Tristram Powell, True story, Warner Baxter, We Go On, Will Speck, William Beaudine, WWE Films, Yukon Vengeance

Fifty Shades Darker (2017) / D: James Foley / 118m

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eric Johnson, Marcia Gay Harden, Eloise Mumford, Bella Heathcote, Rita Ora, Luke Grimes, Victor Rasuk, Max Martini, Kim Basinger

Rating: 4/10 – Christian Grey (Dornan) successfully woos back Anastasia Steele (Johnson), tries to go “straight” in the bedroom, and then narrowly avoids an attempt on his life – and that’s it for Round Two; flashy and trashy at the same time, Fifty Shades Darker continues the series’ commitment to providing two hours of inane, tedium-inducing material each time, and by never going as far as it might in the sexual activity department, making this yet another slickly produced teaser for the real thing.

A Street Cat Named Bob (2016) / D: Roger Spottiswoode / 103m

Cast: Luke Treadaway, Ruta Gedmintas, Joanne Froggatt, Anthony Head, Darren Evans, Beth Goddard, Ruth Sheen, Caroline Goodall, Bob the Cat

Rating: 7/10 – a recovering drug addict and talented busker, James Bowen (Treadaway), adopts a cat he calls Bob and in doing so finds a reason to stay off drugs and rebuild his life – with unexpected results; though A Street Cat Named Bob charts a particularly diffcult period in the life of the real James Bowen, the movie avoids being too depressing by emphasising the bond between Bob and his musician “owner”, and by resolutely aiming for feelgood, something at which it succeeds with a great deal of charm, and thanks to an endearing performance from Treadaway.

The Woman from China (1930) / D: Edward Dryhurst / 82m

Cast: Julie Suedo, Gibb McLaughlin, Frances Cuyler, Tony Wylde, Kiyoshi Takase

Rating: 7/10 – a Chinese criminal, Chung-Li (McLaughlin), kidnaps the girlfriend (Cuyler) of a ship’s lieutenant (Wylde) in order to satisfy his lust for her, but doesn’t reckon on one of his accomplices (Suedo) having feelings of her own for the same ship’s lieutenant; a late in the day silent movie, The Woman from China is a British production that has a Dickensian feel to it, narrowly avoids stereotyping its villain (very narrowly), and thanks to Dryhurst’s talent as a writer as well as a director, remains a well crafted thriller that is ripe for rediscovery.

We Go On (2016) / D: Jesse Holland, Andy Mitton / 85m

Cast: Annette O’Toole, Clark Freeman, Giovanna Zacarías, Jay Dunn, Laura Heisler, John Glover

Rating: 5/10 – Miles (Freeman) is terrified of dying and wants incontrovertible proof of life after death, so he offers a reward to anyone who can provide it, but the responses he gets aren’t exactly what he was expecting; a paranoid chiller that doesn’t quite have the focus it needs to be interesting throughout, We Go On nevertheless contains some really creepy moments, and a fiercely maternal performance from O’Toole that elevates the material whenever she’s on screen, but overall it falls short in too many areas, and particularly the way in which it’s been assembled, which leaves it feeling haphazard and hastily stitched together.

Yukon Vengeance (1954) / D: William Beaudine / 68m

Cast: Kirby Grant, Chinook, Monte Hale, Mary Ellen Kay, Henry Kulky, Carol Thurston, Parke McGregor, Fred Gabourie

Rating: 4/10 – when a lumber company’s wages keep being stolen while en route to the nearest town, Canadian Mountie Rod Webb (Grant) and his faithful sidekick Chinook are sent to investigate; a remake of Wilderness Mail (1935), Yukon Vengeance is also the last in a series of ten movies Grant and Chinook made together between 1949 and 1954, and is pleasant enough if you go in not expecting too much, but it’s hampered by poor performances from Hale and Kay, uninterested direction from Beaudine (usually much more reliable), and material that offers no surprises whatsoever (though that shouldn’t be a surprise either).

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) / D: Kirby Dick / 98m

With: Kirby Dick, Kimberly Peirce, Matt Stone, John Waters, Kevin Smith, Maria Bello, Wayne Kramer, David Ansen, Mary Harron, Allison Anders

Rating: 6/10 – moviemaker Kirby Dick decides to try and find out just what goes on behind the secretive doors of the Motion Picture Association of America, and hires a private investigator to do so, while also eliciting the opinions of moviemakers who have had run-ins with the MPAA; Dick adopts a partisan approach to the material, but in the end, This Film Is Not Yet Rated doesn’t discover anything that viewers couldn’t have worked out for themselves without seeing it, and wastes a lot of time with Dick’s choice of private investigator as they sit outside the MPAA offices and take down car number plates for very little return (both investigative and cinematic).

The Claydon Treasure Mystery (1938) / D: H. Manning Haynes / 64m

Cast: John Stuart, Garry Marsh, Annie Esmond, Campbell Gullan, Evelyn Ankers, Aubrey Mallalieu, Finlay Currie, Joss Ambler, Richard Parry, Vernon Harris, John Laurie

Rating: 5/10 – following a disappearance and a murder, crime writer Peter Kerrigan (Stuart) becomes involved in a centuries old mystery at a country house, while attempting to work out just who is willing to kill to benefit from said mystery; what could have been a nimble little murder mystery is let down by Haynes’ solemn direction, and too much repetition in the script, but The Claydon Treasure Mystery does feature a handful of entertaining performances and a clever solution to the mystery.

Delayed Action (1954) / D: John Harlow / 58m

Cast: Robert Ayres, June Thorburn, Alan Wheatley, Bruce Seton, Michael Balfour

Rating: 5/10 – a suicidal man (Ayres) agrees to play the part of a businessman to meet the crooked demands of another (Wheatley), and forfeit his life at the end of the agreement, but doesn’t reckon on having a reason to live – a woman (Thorburn) – when the time comes; a sprightly little crime drama, Delayed Action never really convinces the viewer that Ayres’ character would agree so readily to the offer made to him, and Ayres himself is a less than convincing actor in the role, but the short running time helps, and Wheatley’s arrogant, preening master criminal is the movie’s trump card.

The Night of the Party (1935) / D: Michael Powell / 61m

aka The Murder Party

Cast: Malcolm Keen, Jane Baxter, Ian Hunter, Leslie Banks, Viola Keats, Ernest Thesiger, Jane Millican, W. Graham Brown, Muriel Aked

Rating: 5/10 – at a dinner party, hated newspaper proprietor Lord Studholme (Keen) is murdered, but which one of the many guests – all of whom had reason to kill him – actually did the deed, and why?; Powell was still finding his feet as a director when he made The Night of the Party, and though much of it looks like a filmed stage play (which it was), it’s exactly the movie’s staginess that robs it of a lot of energy, and stops it from becoming as involving and engaging as other movies of its ilk, and that’s despite some very enjoyable performances indeed.

Office Christmas Party (2016) / D: Josh Gordon, Will Speck / 105m

Cast: Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, T.J. Miller, Jennifer Aniston, Kate McKinnon, Courtney B. Vance, Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park

Rating: 5/10 – with their office being threatened with closure, manager Clay (Miller) and several of his staff decide to throw a massive Xmas party in the hope that it will help secure a contract with businessman Walter Davis (Vance) and so save everyone’s jobs; only fitfully amusing, Office Christmas Party probably sounded great as an idea, but in practice it strays too far from the original concept, and has its cast going firmly through the motions in their efforts to raise a laugh, although McKinnon (once again) stands out as an HR manager who makes being uptight the funniest thing in the whole misguided mess of a movie.

The Marine 5: Battleground (2017) / D: James Nunn / 91m

Cast: Mike Mizanin, Anna Van Hooft, Nathan Mitchell, Bo Dallas, Curtis Axel, Heath Slater, Naomi, Sandy Robson

Rating: 4/10 – now a paramedic, Jake Carter (Mizanin) finds himself trapped in an underground car park and fending off a motorcycle gang who are trying to kill the injured man (Mitchell) who has just killed their leader; five movies in and WWE Films have used a low budget/low return formula to ensure that The Marine 5: Battleground remains a dreary, leaden-paced “action” movie that features a lot more WWE Superstars than usual, more glaring plot holes than you can shove the Big Show through, and proof if any were needed that playing hyper-realised athletes every week isn’t a good training ground for acting in the movies, no matter how hard WWE tries to make it seem otherwise.

Incarnate (2016) / D: Brad Peyton / 91m

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Carice van Houten, Catalina Sandino Moreno, David Mazouz, Keir O’Donnell, Matt Nable, Emily Jackson, Tomas Arana

Rating: 4/10 – a scientist-cum-paranormal investigator (Eckhart) can induce himself into the minds of people possessed by demons and cast them out, but he comes up against a stronger adversary than any he’s encountered before: the demon that took the lives of his wife and son; a neat twist on a standard possession/exorcism movie, Incarnate suffers from the kind of muddled plotting, heavyhanded sermonising, and stereotypical characterisations that hamper all these variations on a horror movie theme, and in doing so, marks itself out as another nail in the coffin of Eckhart’s mainstream career, and a movie that lacks substance, style, wit, and credibility.

Crime Doctor (1943) / D: Michael Gordon / 66m

Cast: Warner Baxter, Margaret Lindsay, John Litel, Ray Collins, Harold Huber, Don Costello, Leon Ames, Dorothy Tree

Rating: 7/10 – a man (Baxter) found unconscious at the side of the road wakes with no memory of his past, but over time builds a new life for himself as a leading criminal psychologist – until his own criminal past comes calling; the first in the Crime Doctor series is a solid, suspenseful movie bolstered by strong performances, a surprisingly detailed script, and good production values, making it an above average thriller and hugely enjoyable to watch.

Island of Doomed Men (1940) / D: Charles Barton / 68m

Cast: Peter Lorre, Rochelle Hudson, Robert Wilcox, Don Beddoe, George E. Stone, Kenneth MacDonald, Charles Middleton

Rating: 6/10 – a Government agent (Wilcox) allows himself to be arrested and imprisoned in an effort to make it to an island owned by sadistic diamond mine owner Stephen Danel (Lorre), and then expose Danel’s use of ex-cons and parolees as slave labour; a seedy, florid atmosphere is encouraged and exploited by Barton as Island of Doomed Men allows Lorre to give one of his more self-contained yet intense performances, and which also shows that some Production Code-era movies could still be “exciting” for reasons that only modern day audiences would appreciate – probably.

Anybody’s Nightmare (2001) / D: Tristram Powell / 97m

Cast: Patricia Routledge, Georgina Sutcliffe, Thomas Arnold, Nicola Redmond, David Calder, Malcolm Sinclair, William Armstrong, Rashid Karapiet, Louisa Milwood-Haigh, Scott Baker

Rating: 5/10 – the true story of Sheila Bowler (Routledge) who in the early Nineties was arrested, tried and convicted of the death of her late husband’s aunt (despite a clear lack of evidence), and who spent the next four years fighting to have her conviction overturned; a miscarriage of justice story bolstered by Routledge’s dignified, sterling performance, Anybody’s Nightmare betrays its British TV movie origins too often for comfort, features some truly disastrous acting (step forward Thomas Arnold and Louisa Milwood-Haigh), but does make each twist and turn of Bowler’s legal case as shocking as possible, and in the end, proves once again that truth really is stranger than fiction.

The Belko Experiment (2016)

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

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Adria Arjona, Belko Industries, Bogota, Drama, Greg McLean, Horror, John C. McGinley, John Gallagher Jr, Murder, Review, Thriller, Tony Goldwyn, Tracers

D: Greg McLean / 89m

Cast: John Gallagher Jr, Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C. McGinley, Melonie Diaz, Owain Yeaman, Sean Gunn, Brent Sexton, Josh Brener, David Dastmalchian, David Del Rio, Rusty Schwimmer, Gail Bean, James Earl, Abraham Benrubi, Gregg Henry, Michael Rooker

On the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia, Belko Industries has an office building where its mostly American, relocated staff, help other American companies set up in South America. The office building has been open for a year, and the eighty American staff that work there have what are called “trackers” implanted in the back of their heads in case of kidnappings. If any member of staff is kidnapped, these “trackers” will make them easy to find and rescue. One day, Mike Milch (Gallagher Jr), a Belko employee, arrives to find the local Colombians who work there are being sent home, and this is being overseen by a group of security guards Milch has never seen before. Inside the building, Evan (Earl), the building security guard, admits he doesn’t know what’s going on, and neither does anyone else, not even the COO, Barry Norris (Goldwyn).

While the staff talk over this strange development, new starter Dany Wilkins (Diaz) begins her first day, while Norris’s assistant, Leandra Jerez (Arjona), bemoans the unwanted attention of colleague Wendell Dukes (McGinley). Unwanted because he won’t take no for an answer, and also because she’s in a relationship with Milch. As the rest of the morning gets under way, a tannoy announcement heard throughout the building informs everyone that unless two people are killed in the next thirty minutes then more people will die as a consequence. No one takes the announcement too seriously, even when shutters come down that seal everyone inside the building (though the roof remains accessible). When no one is killed, four people die when the “trackers” in their heads explode.

Realising the danger from the “trackers”, Milch tries to remove his but the voice from the tannoy announcement starts a countdown to its being detonated. Milch stops, and the next time the voice gives instructions they’re even more chilling than the last: unless thirty people are killed in the next two hours, sixty people will be killed just as randomly as the previous four. From this, two distinct factions form amongst the employees: those who, like Milch, think no one should be killed (and an alternative solution found to their predicament), and those who, like Norris, think that thirty deaths is better than sixty. What follows pits employee against employee, and engenders a complete breakdown of morality and compassion.

Working from an old script by James Gunn, The Belko Experiment – to paraphrase the title of a Werner Herzog movie – could almost be called James Gunn, James Gunn, What Have Ye Done. While the basic premise is sound, here the “execution” is less than satisfactory, as the finished product lacks clarity, subtlety, and is only consistent in its lack of clarity and subtlety. If Gunn was attempting to write a straightforward schlock horror movie combining equally straightforward ideas regarding the erosion of social and moral restraints in a highly charged atmosphere, then in one sense that’s what he’s done. But if that is the case, and though much of that approach to the material is still in place, director Greg McLean’s interpretation still leaves a lot to be desired.

Following on from the dreadful outing that was The Darkness (2016), McLean makes only partial amends with this, focusing his efforts too quickly on getting to the kind of indiscriminate carnage that is the movie’s raison d’etre. Forget social commentary, forget a knowing critique of office politics, this is all about seeing how fast a group of (apparently) average people can descend into homicidal rage and leave rational thinking behind. On that basis alone the movie is more successful (the answer is quicker than you can say “exploding head”). But once all the niceties are done and dusted, and we get to know who’s going to be a hawk and who’s going to be a dove, then it’s on with the murky motivations and desperate attempts at credibility.

It’s always problematical when you have characters such as Milch proclaiming that no one should be killed, and then, by the movie’s end he’s on a par with psycho colleagues Norris and Dukes in terms of how many people he’s despatched. It’s not addressed because it doesn’t suit the needs of the movie, and yet if it had, it would have gone some way towards giving the movie some much needed depth. As it is, Milch takes to murdering his colleagues with as much gusto as he can manage, and any blurring of the lines that was intended on the part of the script is forsaken in favour of more killing. But with the body count rising, the movie feels rushed and even more implausible, and the problem of killing off the remaining seventy-six employees becomes more important than any moral considerations.

It could be argued that to expect any depth in a movie that’s only concerned with coming up with as many inventive deaths as it can in ninety minutes (death by tape dispenser anyone?), is something of a fool’s errand, but The Belko Experiment also lacks style and wastes its talented cast. Saddled with woefully underwritten characters who practically scream “stock!” every time they speak, the likes of Gallagher Jr, Goldwyn and Arjona get to mouth platitudes and banalities at every turn. Spare a thought for McGinley though; his character is so relentlessly one dimensional it’s amazing he doesn’t disappear when he turns to the side. There’s no one to care about – surprise, surprise – and as the movie progresses, the average viewer might feel justified in wanting to get inside the building and culling the employees themselves.

With its stock characters, muddled narrative, and laboured editing courtesy of Julia Wong, The Belko Experiment is unlikely to impress anyone but the most ardent gore fan. They’ll enjoy the numerous exploding heads, and one particularly impressive skull injury, but there’s really little else to recommend a movie that poses lots of questions at the beginning of the experiment, and then forgoes providing any answers. With a coda that attempts an explanation for what’s happened that’s as baffling as it is shallow, as well as shamelessly trying to set up a further movie, the movie should best be viewed as an old-style exploitation flick given a modern polish. However, that would be doing a disservice to old-style exploitation flicks.

Rating: 4/10 – insipid and unconvincing, The Belko Experiment is yet another nail in the coffin of Greg McLean’s directing career; it also acts as further proof that when successful writer/directors have old scripts to hand, they shouldn’t always be made into movies.

The Transfiguration (2016)

22 Saturday Apr 2017

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Chloe Levine, Debut, Drama, Eric Ruffin, Horror, Michael O'Shea, Milo, Review, Vampires

D: Michael O’Shea / 97m

Cast: Eric Ruffin, Chloe Levine, Aaron Moten, Carter Redwood

Milo (Ruffin) is a fourteen year old who lives with his older brother, Lewis (Moten), in the apartment they shared with their mother before she died. Milo is a loner, with no friends, no other family, and he’s regularly bullied by some of the children at his school. He is fascinated by vampires, and spends a lot of his spare time watching vampire movies. When we first meet him, Milo is in a bathroom stall drinking the blood of a man he’s just killed.

Milo’s vampiric behaviour is dictated by a monthly schedule that he’s worked out, and he chooses his victims at random. He uses a blade disguised as a pen to stab them in the neck, and it’s from the wound that he drinks their blood. But he’s not always able to keep the blood down, and he has none of the traditional signs that identify a vampire: he can go out during daylight, he doesn’t have fangs, and he still casts a reflection. But in the past he has mistreated and killed small animals, something his school counsellor is aware of. However, Milo reassures her that he doesn’t do that anymore, though unsurprisingly, he stops short at telling her why.

When a girl around his age, Sophie (Levine), moves into Milo’s building, they begin a tentative friendship. In her own way, Sophie is as much a loner as Milo. She has self-esteem issues, is bullied by her grandfather, and like Milo, both her parents are dead (she lives with her grandfather). They watch Milo’s collection of vampire movies together, and spend time getting to know each other. Meanwhile, Milo continues his killing pattern. Away from the apartment and school, Milo falls foul of a local gang led by Andre (Redwood). When he’s stopped in the street by a couple out to score some cocaine, he lures the man into a basement. The man ends up being killed by one of Andre’s gang, and Milo is taken in for questioning by police as a potential witness. He says nothing though, and is released, but in such a way that it makes it look as if he has snitched. Andre promises him that “it’s not over” between them, but Milo’s carefully constructed world is shaken properly when Sophie discovers notebooks Milo has written, notebooks that set out how to hunt people, and the best ways of killing them for their blood…

There’s much to admire in writer/director Michael O’Shea’s debut feature (expanded from his 2014 short, Milo). It’s a strong amalgamation of an indie teen drama and a low-key horror movie, and the melding of those two genres has created a deceptively powerful feature that moves slowly (and yet deliberately), and which brings an uneasy tone to the material. You could argue that the narrative concerns a teenage boy who wants to be a vampire, or conversely, that it concerns a teenage boy who wants to be normal. That’s what makes the movie tick: Milo wants to be a vampire, but once he meets Sophie, he wants to be a normal teenage boy as well. It’s this duality that drives the character of Milo and makes his situation so desperately sad. He has persuaded himself that he is a vampire – of sorts – but equally, he wants to have friends and be a normal child as well. But can he? Is it too late?

In keeping with its downbeat tone, The Transfiguration offers no easy answers, keeping the audience guessing if Milo is a real vampire or not right until the end (though for some viewers the answer will be a little more cut and dried). When it moves and sounds like a horror movie, O’Shea shows great promise, and there are moments where Milo’s behaviour, allied to Ruffin’s ability to provide a thousand-yard stare when needed, creates a chilling, morbid antipathy that suits the material and makes it unexpectedly expressive in terms of examining the inner life of a fourteen year old sociopath. Milo is quite detached from the world around him, only connecting with it if it can add to his obsession with vampires. We see the moment where he changes from being merely interested in vampirism to adopting the mantle of a bloodsucker. It’s a disturbing scene, made all the more disturbing for the way in which O’Shea portrays it as both a sacrificial offering and a rite of passage.

Having Sophie come into Milo’s life allows for some hope to form that Milo can be “saved”, that it’s not too late for him to be a part of the “real” world. As their friendship develops, O’Shea has Milo yearn for a simpler life (albeit one still spent watching vampire movies), and he begins to make an effort in that direction. But his craving for blood, and the secret life he leads proves too much. When he realises he’s missed that month’s date for hunting, Milo takes a bigger risk than he’s ever done before, and his actions show just how overwhelming his obsession has become. Just like the psychopath who needs to kill more and more victims to feel a continued sense of purpose, so Milo learns that he can’t escape the life he’s taken on. And so he does the one thing he can to save himself, and to save Sophie.

Like many first-time directors though, O’Shea is guilty of letting some scenes go on beyond their natural length, and including others that remain superfluous no matter how much they might feel integral to the script. There are also certain stretches where it seems as if the material is waiting for the right moment to move forward, and is hanging around on purpose until it arrives. As a result of this, the movie’s pace is often uncomfortably slow. Fortunately, O’Shea is on firmer ground when it comes to the relationship between Milo and Sophie, and he’s blessed by two impressive performances from Ruffin and Levine. Ruffin’s serious, sincere approach makes Milo all the more believable – and sympathetic – and in his scenes with Levine he displays a maturity that makes his performance all the more credible. Likewise, Levine imbues Sophie with a kind of damaged, yet reluctant vulnerability, as if her being aware of her situation isn’t about to define her if she can help it. In their scenes together, Ruffin and Levine share a chemistry that is completely convincing in terms of their characters finding common ground and coming to depend on each other.

As an ambitious melding of two distinct genres, The Transfiguration is a welcome change from the usual, run-of-the-mill offerings seen these days, and though it’s not entirely successful, its faults can be readily forgiven. O’Shea has made a movie that tells its story with a great deal of attention to detail, and in a robust, satisfying manner. More of a considered indie/arthouse horror than an out-and-out scarefest (and all the better for being so), O’Shea’s debut feature explores themes of alienation, morbid obsession, and emotional dysfunction, and in places, is genuinely unsettling. A surprise hit at Cannes in 2016, this will still only appeal to a certain audience, but if you have the time and the patience, it’s well worth seeking out.

Rating: 8/10 – a carefully constructed urban horror movie, The Transfiguration won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it is a tremendous addition to the small group of vampire movies that actually have something to say about the subject; boasting a superb performance from Ruffin, and a denouement that is both sad and uplifting, this is intelligent, vivid stuff that marks O’Shea as a moviemaker to watch out for in the future.

Hey Everyone, It’s Mike Mendez! – The Last Heist (2016) and Don’t Kill It (2016)

10 Monday Apr 2017

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Action, Bank robbery, Comedy, Demon Hunter, Dolph Lundgren, Drama, Henry Rollins, Horror, Kristina Klebe, Mike Mendez, Review, Thriller, Torrance Coombs, Windows Killer

2013 saw the relatively unheralded release of a low-budget creature feature called Big Ass Spider! It was silly but it was also huge fun, and it was obvious that the makers had a fondness for the material that kept things from being too silly, or derivative of other similar movies. Then in 2015, SyFy brought us the latest in their ongoing series of movies designed to make audiences want to pluck out their own eyes, or take psychotropic drugs, in an effort to forget what they’ve just seen. That movie was Lavalantula, a Sharknado-style offering that accentuated the comedy while still providing a fair few thrills along the way.

Both these movies were directed and edited by Mike Mendez, and if you’ve followed his career since his debut at Sundance, Killers (1996), then you’ll already know that even if he’s got the most risible of material to work with, somehow he still manages to elevate it beyond its limited expectations. He’s a director who’s able to take the most unlikeliest of projects and put a massive spin on them. This doesn’t make them into out-and-out classics, but it does make these movies far more bearable to watch than they have any right to be. So if you like low-budget features that are low on concept and even lower on potential, but are still enjoyable for a reason you can’t quite put your finger on, chances are it’s a Mike Mendez movie you’re watching.

The Last Heist (2016) / D: Mike Mendez / 84m

Cast: Henry Rollins, Torrance Coombs, Victoria Pratt, Michael Aaron Milligan, Mark Kelly, Kristina Klebe, John J. York, Mykel Shannon Jenkins, Camilla Jackson, Nick Principe, Ken Lyle, Courtney Compton, Fay DeWitt, John O’Brien

What are the odds? You’re the leader of a group of heavily-armed bank robbers intent on stealing something very valuable from the vault of a decommissioned bank, and you discover that one of the civilians in the building – and the very one who isn’t a hostage – is a serial killer who is equally intent on killing everyone and taking their eyes as trophies. How does something like that happen? Why does it happen? Because this is the main idea behind The Last Heist, a movie that mixes horror, crime and action all together in a hodgepodge of a script that seriously doesn’t know how to actually mix them all together in the first place. Give thanks to writer Guy Stevenson for managing to be so diligent in messing things up from the start.

But then give thanks to Mike Mendez for taking Stevenson’s messy script and injecting it with some much needed energy and directorial awareness. What he does that is so remarkable, is that he doesn’t try to fix the things that can’t be fixed. Take for example, the bank’s location. To get to it, you have to enter a security code that opens a gate, then walk through what looks like a loading area into a small square where the bank itself is located. But this doesn’t look like a bank; instead it looks like an old rundown supermarket that’s recently closed. There’s a sign above the door that is never clearly seen – probably because it doesn’t have the word bank in it. And inside the bank it’s no better. It looks equally rundown, and there are corridors in back and floors above that seem to go on for ever. Seriously, the vault feels like it’s miles away. But Mendez isn’t interested in trying to make things look correct. He’s got his sets and he uses them to his best advantage, but he’s not focused on them. He’s got other things to worry about.

Mainly, that’s the cast. Mendez wisely concentrates on the performances, and in particular on often small moments within the action that offer a surprising amount of depth, depth that was unlikely to have been in Stevenson’s script originally. Rollins, naturally, is the serial killer, who does what he does because God has told him to. When he claims his first victim inside the bank, the unfortunate Tracey (Klebe), he does so with a calmness of manner that is eerily unnerving. As she bleeds out, he recites a monologue about the darkness within everyone, and his gentle tone and sympathetic ministrations are at odds with the grisly nature of his trophy collecting. Both actors are good here, and the scene is unexpectedly moving as Tracey fights against dying until she doesn’t have any strength left to do so. There are other moments like these dotted throughout the movie, as Mendez lets the characters reveal different sides of themselves, and though not everyone benefits from this kind of attention, there’s enough introspection between the action beats to offer a different perspective on things.

That said though, Mendez is lumbered with a number of clumsy plot developments that either muddy the waters or seem out of place, especially one very late reveal that feels like it was tacked on during shooting. Elsewhere, and once the body count inside the bank mounts up, Rollins is allowed to do his thing with impunity, while outside, first cop on the scene, Detective Pascal (Pratt), has to contend with a couple of comedy cops who want to go in guns blazing, and who act like they’re both six year olds who should be on Ritalin. Mendez is very good at strengthening the humour in his movies, and there are examples of very dark comedy scattered about in The Last Heist, but on this occasion the cops’ juvenile behaviour is another problem he chooses to ignore. It’s frustrating when things like that happen, but overall the rest of the movie, despite its failings, still feels like it’s a better movie than it is, and Mendez makes it so through sheer determination and no small amount of directorial wizardry.

Rating: 4/10 – a movie where individual scenes often carry more weight than the movie as a whole, the script for The Last Heist takes huge liberties with logic and credibility (as this kind of movie often does), but is saved by having Mendez in the director’s chair; with better-than-average performances, and a sure-footed sense of its own failings, Mendez elevates the material through his commitment to the project and a never-say-awful approach that helps immensely.

Don’t Kill It (2016) / D: Mike Mendez / 84m

Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Kristina Klebe, Tony Bentley, James Chalke, Miles Doleac

If you go down to the woods today… you’ll be possessed by a demon who leap frogs from person to person every time his host body is killed. This is what happens to a hapless hunter and his dog, and soon the small town of Chicory Creek (yes, really) is overrun by murders of whole families. But, wait. Help is at hand in the form of Jebediah Woodley (yes, really) (Lundgren), a demon hunter who knows exactly what the town is up against and who offers his services to the town sheriff (Bentley) and hometown girl-turned-FBI agent, Evelyn Pierce (Klebe). Of course, he’s taken for an interfering nutcase and promptly locked up, but when the sheriff and Evelyn see for themselves what the demon can do, their disbelief evaporates in seconds and they’re soon asking what can be done. Jebediah’s answer? Capture the demon while it’s in a human host, have someone willing to take fast-acting poison, and then get that person to kill the demon’s host body. The demon goes into the person who’s on the brink of dying, and its spirit is released, making it easy to capture and imprison.

Simple, huh? Well, in a year where we were advised not to breathe, think twice or look twice, or even hang up, not killing a murderous, psychopathic demon seems like a less than reasonable request, and naturally it proves more difficult than even Jebediah expects. Hampered by his own experiences, Jebediah is the kind of certain-minded hero who rarely gets it right until Lady Luck smiles on him and a solution to the problem of the demon is arrived at. Until that happens, the script has him carry around a large, heavy-looking net gun in the hopes of capturing the demon, while he gets to know Agent Pierce. The script here is slightly more polished than the one for The Last Heist – it doesn’t try to be more than what it is, for starters – but it still has no time for logic or credibility (it’s a middling supernatural version of The Hidden (1987), for Dolph’s sake), and it sprints from scene to scene with all the unsightly haste of a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Here, Mendez concentrates on the murders and making them as horrific as he can; and on the humour. Shotgun blasts and meat cleaver blows are shown with both clinical detachment and a surreal complicity made on the viewer’s behalf that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Mendez doesn’t shy away from showing the horror of these moments, and though the movie sheds “real” victims as it goes, those early scenes carry a surprising amount of intensity. He’s also able to draw out the comic absurdity of the situation, such as when the town pastor (Chalke) is exhorting Jebediah to leave his church. The pastor flings holy water at Jebediah from a small vial, but the amount that keeps coming out is way too much for the vial to hold. And when the pastor abjures Jebediah with the words, “The power of Christ compels you!”, our trusty hero replies, “I’m pretty sure that’s from The Exorcist“.

There are other moments where the humour rescues the drama, and stops the movie from being laudable merely for the impressive splatter effects, courtesy of special effects wizard Robert Kurtzman and his team. This time around, Mendez doesn’t concentrate as much on the performances, but instead he focuses on the pace and the rhythm of the movie, and in keeping the tone just this side of entirely ridiculous (even though it is). The result is a standard-narrative horror movie that belies its low-budget origins and bland location work to provide a more diverting and enjoyable Dolph Lundgren movie than most of us are used to. Lundgren himself is wryly amusing, and Klebe makes for a good foil for the aging action hero, but full marks must go to Tony Bentley, as the sheriff who leaves a major crime scene because he’s too scared and is never seen again. That’s a scene that shows Mendez’s skills as a director, and which is only marred by Klebe’s dialogue, which makes her sound desperate instead of authoritative. Again, Mendez overcomes several hurdles in his quest to make a better movie out of Don’t Kill It than it deserves, and he does so with style. He may not have the biggest budgets, or the casts he deserves, but Mendez is still able to overcome those problems thanks to his usual commitment and enthusiasm.

Rating: 4/10 – once again, Mendez’s involvement in a movie project means that it doesn’t turn out to be as bad as it could have done, and Don’t Kill It works far better than it has any right to; on the whole, still a bad movie, but flecked throughout with Mendez’s trademark attention to detail in one or two areas (and always to the movie’s benefit), and the occasional nod and a wink that says, “We know it’s bad, but hey, it could have been so much worse.”

Monthly Roundup – March 2017

01 Saturday Apr 2017

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Action, Adventure, Alistair Sim, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Bette Davis, Brie Larson, Charlie Day, Collide, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Dougray Scott, Drama, Eran Creevy, Eugenio Ercolani, Felicity Jones, Fist Fight, Gordon Harker, Guiliano Emanuele, Horror, I.T., Ice Cube, Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It, Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday, James Cagney, James Frecheville, Jimmy the Gent, John Moore, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Kong: Skull Island, Michael Curtiz, Mystery, Nicholas Hoult, Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D'Amato, Pierce Brosnan, Review, Richie Keen, Samuel L. Jackson, Steve Barker, The Rezort, Tom Hiddleston, Walter Forde, Zombies

Fist Fight (2017) / D: Richie Keen / 91m

Cast: Ice Cube, Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell, Dean Norris, Christina Hendricks, Kumail Nanjiani, Dennis Haysbert, JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Alexa Nisenson

Rating: 3/10 – meh; lame on levels you wouldn’t have thought possible (Bell’s character wants to have sex with a pupil – and doesn’t think it’s wrong), Fist Fight is a virtually laugh-free exercise that wastes the time of everyone concerned, and its unsuspecting audience.

I.T. (2016) / D: John Moore / 95m

Cast: Pierce Brosnan, James Frecheville, Anna Friel, Stefanie Scott, Michael Nyqvist

Rating: 3/10 – meh; lame on levels you wouldn’t have thought possible (Brosnan’s character is a tech mogul who doesn’t know the first thing about the tech he’s promoting), I.T. is a virtually tension-free exercise that wastes the time of everyone concerned, and its unsuspecting audience.

Collide (2016) / D: Eran Creevy / 99m

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Felicity Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Marwan Kenzari, Aleksandar Jovanovic, Christian Rubeck, Erdal Yildiz, Clemens Schick, Johnny Palmiero

Rating: 6/10 – Hoult’s backpacker finds himself mixed up with rival gangsters Hopkins and Kingsley, and using his driving skills to stay one step ahead of both of them; the focus is squarely on the action, which is a good thing, as Collide‘s plot is as all over the place as the various cars Hoult throws about on German autobahns, but when it’s bad it’s Hopkins intoning “I’m the destroyer of worlds” bad.

Jimmy the Gent (1934) / D: Michael Curtiz / 67m

Cast: James Cagney, Bette Davis, Allen Jenkins, Alan Dinehart, Alice White, Arthur Hohl, Mayo Methot

Rating: 7/10 – in an effort to woo back his former secretary (Davis), Cagney’s brash racketeer attempts to put a classier spin on his finding “lost” heirs business, and finds himself mellowing when a case challenges his compromised ethics; worth watching just for the pairing of Cagney and Davis, Jimmy the Gent is a typically fast-paced, razor sharp romantic comedy that may seem predictable nowadays but is nevertheless a minor gem that is effortlessly entertaining.

Kong: Skull Island (2017) / D: Jordan Vogt-Roberts / 118m

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Thomas Mann, Corey Hawkins, Toby Kebbell, Tian Jing, John Ortiz, Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Richard Jenkins, Terry Notary

Rating: 5/10 – an expedition to a mysterious island in the Pacific yields dangers galore for its participants – Jackson’s crazed Army Colonel, Hiddleston’s ex-SAS captain, Larson’s anti-war photographer, Goodman’s duplicitous government official et al – not the least of which is an angry hundred-foot gorilla called Kong; while Kong: Skull Island may be visually arresting, and its action sequences pleasingly vivid, the lack of a decent plot and characters with any kind of inner life makes the movie yet another franchise-building letdown.

The Rezort (2015) / D: Steve Barker / 93m

Cast: Dougray Scott, Jessica De Gouw, Martin McCann, Elen Rhys, Claire Goose, Jassa Ahluwalia, Lawrence Walker

Rating: 4/10 – after a viral outbreak that turned its victims into flesh-hungry zombies is contained, an island resort opens that offers survivors the chance to hunt down and exterminate zombies with little or no risk of harm – but the resort is targeted from the inside and a group of holiday makers find themselves becoming the hunted; a strong idea that runs out of steam by the halfway mark, The Rezort leaves its cast stranded with a standard “run from this place to the next and look desperate” approach that drains the movie of any tension and makes it all look as generic as the next zombie movie.

Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday (1939) / D: Walter Forde / 90m

Cast: Gordon Harker, Alistair Sim, Linden Travers, Wally Patch, Edward Chapman, Philip Leaver, Kynaston Reeves

Rating: 7/10 – a seaside holiday for Inspector Hornleigh (Harker) and his trusty sidekick, Sergeant Bingham (Sim), leads inevitably to a murder case involving an inheritance and a criminal outfit who target their victims with the unwitting aid of döppelgangers; the second of three movies featuring Harker’s irascible policeman and Sim’s less-than-sharp second-in-command, Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday is a simple, easy-going, undemanding bit of fun that manages to combine drama and comedy to good effect, and which still holds up nearly eighty years later.

Inspector Hornleigh Gets on It (1941) / D: Walter Forde / 87m

aka Mail Train

Cast: Gordon Harker, Alistair Sim, Phyllis Calvert, Edward Chapman, Charles Oliver, Raymond Huntley, Percy Walsh, David Horne

Rating: 7/10 – despite being sidelined from regular detective work through a stint investigating thefts at an army barracks, Hornleigh and Bingham find themselves on the trail of Fifth Columnists; the last in the short-lived series, Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It is as sprightly and entertaining as the previous two instalments, and allows Huntley to make this priceless observation: “One of them’s tall, bald, looks intelligent but isn’t. The other’s short, sour-faced, doesn’t look intelligent but is.”

Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D’Amato (2017) / D: Eugenio Ercolani, Guiliano Emanuele / 69m

With: Joe D’Amato (archive footage), Luigi Montefiori, Michele Soavi, Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi, Antonio Tentori, Carlo Maria Cordio, Mark Thompson-Ashworth

Rating: 3/10 – Aristide Massaccesi (aka Joe D’Amato)’s career in movies is assessed by some of the people who worked with him closely when he first started out; at sixty-nine minutes, Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D’Amato is a documentary that feels like it lasts twice as long, thanks to Ercolani and Emanuele’s decision to let their interviewees ramble on at length (and usually about themselves instead of D’Amato), and a random assortment of clips that don’t always illustrate what’s being talked about.

Wolves at the Door (2016)

21 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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1969, Drama, Elizabeth Henstridge, Horror, John R. Leonetti, Katie Cassidy, Manson Family, Tate murders, Thriller, True story

D: John R. Leonetti / 73m

Cast: Katie Cassidy, Elizabeth Henstridge, Adam Campbell, Miles Fisher, Lucas Adams, Spencer Daniels, Jane Kaczmarek, Chris Mulkey, Eric Ladin

Here on thedullwoodexperiment it’s often the case that a review will question why a movie was made in the first place. Sometimes it just seems incredible that no one – seriously, no one – saw how a movie was progressing during production and didn’t say anything along the lines of, “Hey guys, this isn’t really very good, shouldn’t we just call it quits and save ourselves the embarrassment?” With low-budget movies it’s a little more forgivable. Fewer resources and an inexperienced cast and crew should always be taken into consideration, even if the end result fails to meet any and all expectations; at least the movie makers have tried their best (and even if their best proves to be their worst). Good intentions can mean a lot.

But then there are movies that are made by established, world-renowned production companies such as New Line Cinema, and/or released by equally world-renowned distributors such as Warner Bros. These movies get a wider shot at audiences than those made by independents or first-timers, and have a wider chance of making their production costs back. But when you watch them, it’s like watching a movie where the least amount of thought and consideration has gone into them, from the script to the cinematography to the editing to the soundtrack to the acting to the directing to the whole tone of the thing. It’s like watching the movie version of a contractual obligation.

And so we have Wolves at the Door, the latest movie to fit the criteria listed above. Based on “true events”, the movie recounts what happened over two particular nights in Los Angeles in August 1969. First we witness the early morning home invasion of a couple (Kaczmarek, Mulkey) that results in the couple being frightened for their lives but suffering no actual physical harm. A detective (Ladin) tells them that there have been a lot of similar incidents recently, but that this is something different. Cue the next evening and four friends having dinner together. The quartet – eight months pregnant Sharon (Cassidy), and her friends, Jay (Fisher), and couple Abigail (Henstridge) and Wojciech (Campbell) – are commiserating over Abigail’s imminent trip to Boston. They head back to Sharon’s home, intending to continue their “commiserations”.

Another friend, Steven (Adams), is there too, but he’s spending more time with the property’s caretaker, William (Daniels), who lives in a separate building. When he parts company with William, Steven encounters a strange man and woman who stop him from leaving the estate. Meanwhile, Wojciech, upset by Abigail’s decision to move to Boston, decides to get some air. He too encounters the strangers. Inside, Jay settles on the sofa to watch TV while Sharon and Abigail begin to hear strange noises. At one point, they see a strange woman in the house. Though scared, they still attempt to find out why the woman is there, but soon they both realise that there’s more than just the one stranger, and that the four friends are all in danger.

If you made the effort you could watch Wolves at the Door without knowing anything about it; which would be a blessing of sorts. If you managed to avoid reading any reviews, or hearing any word of mouth reports, or even seeing the poster with its give-away tagline, then there’s a certain degree of intrigue that will attach itself to the viewing experience. You’d be asking yourself why is all this happening, and you’d also be waiting for the four friends to turn the table on their attackers and come out on top (after the requisite amount of violent reprisals and bloodshed). But this isn’t that kind of movie, and it’s that tagline that gives it all away. For yes, this isn’t based on “true events” in the sense that it takes something that happened and fashions a different story around those events. No, this is a movie that takes those events and purports to be a recreation of those events – mostly.

Putting aside the movie’s appropriation of the Tate murders for mild exploitation purposes, what is more distressing is the absence of any connection with the characters themselves, and especially as they’re based on real people. The movie leaves Sharon Tate and her friends with no discernible personalities, lets the cast behave like approximations of the people they’re portraying, and doesn’t even try to engage the audience’s sympathy for the terrible things that happen to them. The viewer can only watch, distant and uninvolved, as the Manson Family members terrorise and attack the four friends (and Steven), and keep their motives unexplained (until the movie’s coda). It could all be happening to any group of strangers, and again it’s odd that with the movie being based on “true events”, the producers have decided to adopt an approach that reduces the impact of real people being attacked and killed to that achieved by a below-average slasher movie.

It doesn’t help that Gary Dauberman’s script is uninterested in telling a coherent story in the first place. The story of the Tate murders is one that’s ripe for a powerful, impactful movie, but this plods along employing standard horror movie clichés and failing to provide any tension. Despite the short running time, there are still plenty of scenes that could be removed and not be missed thanks to Dauberman’s disjointed approach to structure, and the absence of any appreciable imagination. He also has a tin ear for dialogue, saddling the cast with the kind of lines that would defeat even the most inspired casting. In terms of the cast, Cassidy and Henstridge are the nominal stars, but they’re soon reduced to crying, hiding, running about and making stupid decisions without any regard for logic or credibility, while everyone else involved has to hope that their performances survive the arbitrary decisions made by director Leonetti and editor Ken Blackwell at the assembly stage.

As the director, John R. Leonetti reminds audiences why he’s better off in his regular day job as a cinematographer, but at the same time, leaves those same audiences perplexed by his encouraging the kind of dimly-lit, murky photography that leaves this movie looking so bland and unremarkable, and which adopts the same kind of predictable framing and shot construction that we’ve seen so many, many times before in the realm of low-budget horror. All of this adds up to a flat, generic, dull movie that someone should have pointed out wasn’t going to work however much everyone tried – because it doesn’t seem as if anyone was. So once again, audiences are left with a movie that doesn’t work, is beyond lacklustre, and which can’t even manage the energy to be at least partially interesting.

Rating: 2/10 – a movie that reinforces the idea that some projects are just exercises in going through the motions, Wolves at the Door takes a real life tragedy and makes it seem trivial in comparison; and as if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s just plain awful.

Get Out (2017)

17 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, Daniel Kaluuya, Drama, Horror, Jordan Peele, Mystery, Paranoia, Racism, Review, Thriller

D: Jordan Peele / 104m

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel, Lakeith Stanfield, Stephen Root, LilRel Howery

Chris Washington (Kaluuya) is a young, gifted photographer whose work is beginning to be noticed. He’s also black and in a relationship with Rose Armitage (Williams), who is white. Invited by her parents to come stay for the weekend, Chris is anxious about meeting them, fearing they might be uncomfortable with their daughter dating a black man. But Rose reassures him, and tells him that her parents haven’t a racist bone in either of their bodies, and if he could have, her father would have voted a third time for Barack Obama. They set off, but along the way their car collides with a deer, causing some damage but not enough to stop them from reaching Rose’s parents’ home. Once there, her parents – Missy (Keener) and Dean (Whitford) – greet them both warmly, but Chris is perplexed by the odd behaviour exhibited by the Armitages’ housekeeper and gardener, Georgina (Gabriel) and Walter (Henderson), who are both black.

Later that evening Chris meets Rose’s brother, Jeremy (Jones), whose behaviour is provocative and aggressive. He also continues to observe Georgina and Walter behaving strangely. When Missy persuades Chris into sitting with her, he finds that she’s hypnotising him, and he ends up in the Sunken Place, a limbo he can’t return from. At least, that’s what he believes, as he wakes the next morning, confused about what’s happened to him but finding his smoking habit is now cured. He also finds his mobile phone has been somehow disconnected from its charger. At an annual get together that the Armitages hold for their friends, Chris is surprised to see another black man arrive with a much older white woman. But the black man behaves just as oddly as Georgina and Walter, even going so far as to grab Chris and yell at him to “get out”. Chris voices his suspicions that there is something sinister going on, and Rose agrees to leave with him. But when Chris discovers evidence that makes him scared for his life, leaving proves to be far more difficult than he could have ever imagined.

Ever since its debut at the Sundance Festival back in January this year, Get Out has attracted a lot of attention for being a horror movie that takes a satirical look at contemporary racial attitudes in the good ole US of A. The movie certainly paints a satirical portrait of white liberal hubris that’s hard to ignore, but its basic premise – once it’s revealed – plants the movie firmly in paranoid thriller territory. So while there are some standard horror tropes on display, they take a firm backseat to the mystery that is carefully developed by first-time writer/director Jordan Peele, and which proves far more satisfying for its Twilight Zone stylings than for any horror trappings Get Out may be trying to appropriate.

This isn’t to say that the movie is unsure of just what kind of a movie it wants to be, far from it. It’s just that appearances can be deceiving, and Peele instills his tale of racial profiling and assimilation with so many genuinely unsettling moments that mistaking Get Out for a horror movie is only natural – and that’s without its ultra-violent, cathartic final fifteen minutes. But in terms of Peele’s acidulous look at the state of racism in modern day America, the movie is on much firmer ground. Chris’s fear that Rose’s parents won’t approve of him reflects the lingering sense of outrage over miscegenation that still resonates within the US. Despite all the advances made since the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties, Peele is saying these attitudes still prevail, subconsciously perhaps, but then that’s the point: they’ve never really gone away, and they never will. Whisper it if you must, but racism is endemic to the American psyche.

That’s a pretty blatant way of putting it, but Peele is much more subtle than that, and finds various clever ways of getting his message across. This allows the movie to flesh out its subplots – notions surrounding the nuclear family, self-determinism, and social acceptance – unencumbered by the need to be forthright or didactic. Peele is confident enough in his central narrative that he can give these subplots their due, while also playing around – successfully – with the movie’s tone. It starts off as a relationship drama, slightly anecdotal, but set up in such a way that Rose’s parents seem like just another liberal white couple with awkward yet good intentions. The introduction of Walter and Georgina and their odd behaviour allows the thriller elements to begin to take centre stage, and Peele handles the growing uncertainty of what’s really happening with a sureness of touch that’s surprising in someone making this kind of movie for the first time.

Following on, the movie descends into paranoid conspiracy territory, with Chris’s fears amplified by each successive clue he discovers, and with each one serving to reinforce his paranoia. And then we’re in full-on horror mode, as Peele pulls out all the stops to give the viewer a rousing, blood-soaked resolution. Peele displays complete control over the material, keeping each tonal shift feeling organic and unforced. And he keeps the irony spread throughout the movie, allowing it to show itself and act as a counterpoint to the serious nature of the overall material. But Peele’s comedic background won’t be denied either, and there are times when the movie is flat out funny. This is largely due to the inclusion of Chris’s friend Rod (Howery), a Transport Security Administration (TSA) officer who acts as the movie’s comic relief. Again, it’s a measure of Peele’s confidence in his material that he unites these disparate elements and makes them mesh together to such good effect.

But while there is much to recommend Get Out, Peele does drop the ball at times, with some scenes feeling unnecessary or out-of-place – the car-deer collision and its racist cop aftermath, a telephone conversation between Rose and Rod – and his command of the camera (one of this movie’s key strengths) failing him at key moments. But these don’t harm the movie insomuch as they draw attention to themselves when they occur, making for a handful of jarring moments that crop up here and there. At all other times, Peele and his crew, including DoP Toby Oliver, editor Gregory Plotkin, and production designer Rusty Smith, combine to make Get Out one of the boldest and most assured first feature’s for some time.

Peele is aided immeasurably too by his talented cast, with the UK’s Kaluuya giving a measured, yet nervy performance, perfectly displaying the disquiet Chris experiences and the misgivings Chris feels during his visit. As Rose, Williams is all sunny smiles and reassuring glances, though her character also possesses a wicked sense of humour. Keener and Whitford bring an understated menace to proceedings, but Jones is once more on barely restrained psycho duties, leaving Henderson and Gabriel to add real unease to their portrayals. And then there’s Howery, stealing the movie with a succession of one-liners, all of which lead up to a bona fide final line classic: “Man, I told you not to go in that house.”

Rating: 8/10 – a multi-faceted racial drama/horror/mystery hybrid with satirical overtones (and undertones as well), Get Out is one of the more polished and convincing thrillers you’re likely to see in 2017; well thought out, constructed and delivered, its writer/director deserves all the praise that’s been coming his way, and if he wants to give up his comedy day job and make more movies like this one, then that will be absolutely fine.

Oh! the Horror! – Train to Busan (2016) and XX (2017)

12 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Annie Clark, Anthology, Christina Kirk, Don't Fall, Drama, Gong Yoo, Her Only Living Son, Horror, Jovanka Vuckovic, Karyn Kusama, Melanie Lynskey, Review, Roxanne Benjamin, South Korea, The Birthday Party, The Box, Thriller, Yeon Sang-ho, Zombies

Train to Busan (2016) / D: Yeon Sang-ho / 118m

aka Busanhaeng

Cast: Gong Yoo, Jung Yu-mi, Kim Su-an, Ma Dong-seok, Kim Eui-sung, Choi Woo-shik, Ahn So-hee, Choi Gwi-hwa, Jung Suk-yong, Ye Soo-jung, Park Myung-sin

Seok-woo (Gong) is a workaholic whose marriage has ended in divorce, and who neglects to spend time with his young daughter, Soo-an (Kim). When she insists he goes with her to Busan to visit her mother, he feels guilty enough to do it. They board the train in Seoul, but just before it departs a young woman gets on who proceeds to have convulsions. One of the train attendants goes to help her, but she’s attacked by the woman, and within moments both have become zombies. The pair attack the rest of the passengers in that section of the train. Seok-woo grabs his daughter, and heads as far down the train as he can, while behind them, more and more passengers become victims. Only the fact that the zombies seem unable to work out how to open the doors between compartments keeps the remaining unharmed travellers from suffering the same fate.

As the train journey continues it soon becomes clear that the zombie outbreak is spreading throughout South Korea. The train eventually stops at Daejeon, which appears deserted. But once they’ve got off the train, the passengers discover that they’re not as safe as they thought. Back on the train, they find themselves separated by several zombie infested compartments. One group, including Seok-woo, fight their way through to the other passengers, only to find the others – under the direction of paranoid businessman Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung) – barring them from entering the safety of their compartment. When they finally do get in, they’re forced to quarantine themselves in another section. And then the zombies get in as well…

A major success in South Korea (being the first movie from there in 2016 to be seen by over ten million viewers), Train to Busan takes its zombie cues from movies such as 28 Days Later… (2002) and World War Z (2013). Here the afflicted are fast, rapacious, and all kitted out with special contact lenses. The difference between these and any other zombie is their inability to notice any of the living if the living don’t move, or if they’re all in the dark (Seok-woo and co’s efforts to unite with the other passengers relies on the train travelling through several tunnels). There’s a clear sense of peril as the train embarks on its journey, and director Yeon and writer Park Joo-suk do their utmost to ramp up the tension, killing off the cast with a determined frequency, until only a handful are left (though you’ll probably be able to guess just who quite early on).

There are attempts at underscoring it all with a degree of social commentary, but unless you’re familiar with South Korean life, much of it will pass you by. That said, what will be more comforting is the number of stereotypes on display in terms of the characters, from Ma’s tough-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside father-to-be, to Kim Eui-sung’s self-serving, Machiavellian businessman. The movie wastes no time on fleshing them out as characters, and instead, focuses on the action, which includes a spectacular train wreck, and several gripping on-board encounters between the unaffected and the (dis)affected. The cast, particularly Jung as Ma’s pregnant wife, and Gong, play their parts with conviction, and the entire mise en scene is given an eerie verisimilitude thanks to Lee Hyung-doek’s crisp, strangely homogensied cinematography.

Rating: 7/10 – an above average entry in the zombie sub-genre of horror movies, Train to Busan has lots of neat directorial flourishes, and isn’t afraid to acknowledge its influences (especially in the final scene); refreshingly direct, and making good use of its largely claustrophobic settings, the movie is solidly made and definitely worth spending two hours in its company.

XX (2017) / D: Jovanka Vuckovic, Annie Clark, Roxanne Benjamin, Karyn Kusama / 81m

Cast: Natalie Brown, Jonathan Watton, Peter DaCunha, Melanie Lynskey, Sheila Vand, Casey Adams, Breeda Wool, Angela Trimbur, Morgan Krantz, Christina Kirk, Kyle Allen, Mike Doyle

A portmanteau of four stories wrapped up in an interstitial animated tale, XX opens with Vuckovic’s The Box, in which a young boy, Danny (DaCunha), is allowed a peek inside the box a man on the subway says is a present, and thereafter refuses to eat. His parents (Brown, Watton) think it’s all just a phase, but then his sister starts refusing to eat as well, followed by the father. Come Xmas and all three are wasting away, but seem happy and resigned about it. Soon, the mother is riding the subway in the hope of finding the man with the box, and learning what was inside it. In Clark’s The Birthday Party, a mother (Lynskey) trying to organise her young daughter’s birthday party finds an obstacle to everything going well in the form of her recently dead husband. She tries to hide the body, but interruptions and other problems get in the way until she comes up with an ingenious, but risky, solution – if only no one looks too closely at the giant panda.

The third tale, Benjamin’s Don’t Fall, sees two couples on a trip to the desert. They find an ancient cave painting that depicts a demon. Later that night, one of them, Gretchen (Wool), is attacked. She turns into a murderous creature, and tries to kill her friends. In the final story, Kusama’s Her Only Living Son, Cora (Kirk) is a single mother who wants nothing to do with the father of her only son, Andy (Allen). But as he approaches eighteen, she begins to find that he’s not exactly the child she thinks he is, and that there are dark forces surrounding him, forces that have an agenda for him that she has either suppressed, or is completely unaware of.

XX is being promoted heavily thanks to its four female directors – five if you count Sofia Carrillo’s animated contributions – but it’s an approach that should have been avoided, because what may have sounded like a good gimmick in the planning stages, soon wears out any promise it held by the end of the first story. Now, that’s not to say that the four women behind the camera aren’t necessarily up to the challenge, it’s just that they’re unable to overcome the limitations inherent in the movie’s format. With each tale running under twenty minutes, they’re over before they’ve barely begun, and the resulting lack of defined characters, predictable storylines, hurried plot developments, and quickly applied scares/gory moments means that there’s very little substance with which to engage the audience.

Benjamin’s tale suffers the most, having four characters that we never get a chance to even halfway care about before they’re being killed off. Elsewhere, credulity is stretched to breaking point by The Birthday Party‘s central conceit, and the parents in The Box not doing more to seek help for their son apart from making just one trip to the doctor’s. The various tales are also short on atmosphere, or a sense of dread, leaving each one to slip by without meeting many of the viewer’s expectations. It’s an admirable effort, but one that tumbles helplessly and expectedly into the pit of fruitless endeavours. The performances are mostly perfunctory (though Lynskey stands out from the crowd), and the look of each tale only occasionally rises above being bland and uninspired. The idea of women doing horror is a sound one, and shouldn’t be discouraged, but on this occasion, it doesn’t work as well as it could.

Rating: 4/10 – four talented directors, four underwhelming tales, one frustrating movie – XX is all this and more, an idea that needed stronger material than that shown; if there is to be an XX 2, then maybe the directors shouldn’t be the writers as well, and maybe the running time should be expanded on, allowing for a greater emphasis on characterisation, atmosphere and increasing tension.

Monthly Roundup – February 2017

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alexis Wajsbrot, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Barbara Hale, Bill Douglas, Black mirror, Boys' school, Bryce Dallas Howard, Comedy, Damien Macé, David Lowery, Disney, Don't Hang Up, Drama, Edwin L. Marin, Fantasy, Friend Request, Gambling, Garrett Clayton, Gregg Sulkin, Horror, Insomnia, Internet, Joanna David, Lady Luck, Lawrence Huntington, Life on the Road, Literary adaptation, Marius Goring, Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, Oakes Fegley, Pete's Dragon, Prank calls, Remake, Reviews, Ricky Gervais, Robert Young, Romance, Saxon Logan, Simon Verhoeven, Sleepwalker

Life on the Road (2016) / D: Ricky Gervais / 96m

aka David Brent: Life on the Road

Cast: Ricky Gervais, Ben Bailey Smith, Tom Basden, Jo Hartley, Tom Bennett, Mandeep Dhillon, Andrew Brooke, Andy Burrows, Steve Clarke, Michael Clarke, Stuart Wilkinson

Rating: 5/10 – post-Wernham Hogg, David Brent (Gervais) is now a salesman with dreams of becoming famous by putting together a band, Foregone Conclusion, and going on tour; the gulf between Life on the Road and The Office (2001-03) can be gauged within the first ten minutes as Gervais treats his most enduring (and sympathetic) character with a complete disregard for Brent’s development, and by being unnecessarily cruel to everyone else, making this a chore to sit through, and only slightly more enjoyable than Special Correspondents (2016).

Pete’s Dragon (2016) / D: David Lowery / 103m

Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Karl Urban, Oona Laurence, Robert Redford, Isiah Whitlock Jr

Rating: 7/10 – following a car crash that kills his parents and leaves him lost in the woods, a young boy called Pete is “adopted” and cared for by Elliot, who just happens to be a dragon, a situation that continues until civilisation comes calling in the form of a logging operation; a good-natured remake of the 1977, Pete’s Dragon original offers good performances all round, beautiful New Zealand backdrops, a lovable dragon, and keeps it all light and airy, all of which compensates for a script that wavers too often in its attempts to put Elliot in any real danger from Urban and his men.

Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1948) / D: Lawrence Huntington / 92m

Cast: Marius Goring, David Farrar, Greta Gynt, Raymond Huntley, Edward Chapman, Mary Jerrold, Ralph Truman

Rating: 8/10 – when a new teacher at an all-boys’ school, Mr Traill (Farrar), proves more popular with the pupils, and the school nurse (Gynt), than the older Mr Perrin (Goring), personal and professional jealousies lead to an unexpected tragedy; an adaptation of the novel by Hugh Walpole, Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill expertly creates a hothouse environment for its title characters, but never comes down fully on the side of either, making this a surprisingly jaundiced view of male rivalry, and a movie that features an exemplary performance from Goring.

Don’t Hang Up (2016) / D: Alexis Wajsbrot, Damien Macé / 83m

Cast: Gregg Sulkin, Garrett Clayton, Bella Dayne, Jack Brett Anderson, Parker Sawyers, Sienna Guillory

Rating: 5/10 – two phone pranksters, Sam (Sulkin) and Brady (Clayton), find themselves on the receiving end of a psycho(?) who’s willing to play their own game against them, with increasingly disturbing and violent results; basically the first ten minutes of Scream (1996) stretched to breaking point, Don’t Hang Up will soon have you rooting for the psycho as Sam and Brady behave as stupidly as you might expect, even to the point of continually picking up the phone, or answering their mobiles, just so the story can advance a bit further.

Lady Luck (1946) / D: Edwin L. Marin / 97m

Cast: Robert Young, Barbara Hale, Frank Morgan, James Gleason, Don Rice, Harry Davenport, Lloyd Corrigan

Rating: 7/10 – Mary (Hale), who’s staunchly anti-gambling marries Scott (Young), who does his best to reform, but a trip to Las Vegas – on their honeymoon, no less – soon puts their marriage in jeopardy; a lightweight romantic comedy featuring smooth performances and a pleasing sense of its own absurdity, Lady Luck is carefree, populist piece of entertainment that hits a few dramatic potholes along the way to its final scene, but is nevertheless an enjoyable way to spend ninety-seven minutes.

Friend Request (2016) / D: Simon Verhoeven / 92m

Cast: Alycia Debnam-Carey, William Moseley, Connor Paolo, Brit Morgan, Brooke Markham, Sean Marquette, Liesl Ahlers, Shashawnee Hall, Nicholas Pauling

Rating: 4/10 – the suicide of one of her classmates leads Laura to regret unfriending her on social media, a decision that has dire consequences for her and her friends, as her classmate’s ghost seeks revenge from beyond the grave; in amongst the horror motifs and distressed editing techniques that are now a depressing norm of the genre, Friend Request does have some pertinent things to say about popularity and the perils of social media, but it’s done in such a ham-fisted, unconvincing way that all that effort goes to waste very quickly.

Sleepwalker (1984) / D: Saxon Logan / 50m

Cast: Joanna David, Bill Douglas, Nickolas Grace, Heather Page, Fulton Mackay, Michael Medwin, Raymond Huntley

Rating: 7/10 – two couples at an isolated farmhouse share an evening deriding each other’s class and social values, unaware that the sleepwalking tendencies of one of them will lead to blood being spilt; part curdled Abigail’s Party and part baroque thriller, Sleepwalker has much to say about middle class angst, the antagonism inherent in middle class relationships of the time, and sets it all against the backdrop of a social evening from hell.

Under the Shadow (2016)

16 Thursday Feb 2017

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Avin Manshadi, Babak Anvari, Djinn, Drama, Horror, Mother/daughter relationship, Narges Rashidi, Review, Tehran, Unexploded bomb

D: Babak Anvari / 84m

Cast: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi, Bobby Naderi, Arash Marandi, Aram Ghasemy, Soussan Farrokhnia, Ray Haratian, Hamid Djavadan

Tehran, the late Eighties. Shideh (Rashidi) is a former medical student who finds herself unable to resume her studies due to her prior involvement with left-wing political groups. She disposes of most of her old medical books but keeps one that was a gift from her mother. With the city under continual threat from random bomb attacks by Iraq, Shideh still wants to stay where she is with her daughter, Dorsa (Manshadi). Her husband, Iraj (Naderi), wants them to go and live with his parents away from the shelling, but Shideh refuses. When Iraj is conscripted, the matter becomes a moot point, but before he leaves, he tells Dorsa that her favourite doll, Kimia, will keep her safe from harm.

Soon after, neighbours the Ebrahimis take in an orphaned cousin, a young boy. During an air raid, he whispers something in Dorsa’s ear and hands her a charm meant to ward off evil spirits. Shideh finds it later in Dorsa’s room and throws it away. Afterwards, Dorsa develops a fever and begins having nightmares; Shideh has similar dreams as well. When a missile strikes the building they live in, causing a large crack in the ceiling, the impact also renders Dorsa unconscious; at the same time, Kimia goes missing. As a result, Dorsa’s behaviour becomes erratic, and she keeps trying to get into the flat on the floor above, insisting that Kimia is inside. She also tells Shideh that someone is moving around in their own flat, a mysterious woman that only she can see.

From one of their remaining neighbours, Shideh learns that a djinn can possess a person, and will steal a favourite item in their efforts to ensnare and take control of that person. Soon, Shideh and Dorsa are the only people left in the building. Shideh’s nightmares increase in both frequency and intensity, until she has no choice but to leave and go to Iraj’s parents. But Dorsa won’t leave unless she has Kimia back. Shideh makes one last desperate search for the doll, and in the process learns a horrifying truth: that the one last medical text book she kept is no longer in the locked drawer where she had hidden it, but has been replaced by Dorsa’s doll. Even more intent on leaving, the pair attempt to do so but find that it’s not so easy, and that the supernatural force Shideh has tried to deny, is determined to stop them.

Under the Shadow has proven to be a surprise hit since its first screening at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, what with a glowing critical reception, and audiences finding themselves entranced by the low-key, thoughtful approach adopted by writer/director Babak Anvari. Having recently won a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, the movie is a subtle, menacing chiller that takes a simple premise and builds on it in such a way that when the terror of Shideh and Dorsa’s situation begins to form in earnest, the tension builds with it until it becomes almost unbearable. Anvari succeeds at this by keeping the scares to a minimum and using them to punctuate the narrative instead of making them the focus. As the tension mounts, each scare or shock adds to the overall effect, and increases the sense of dread that the movie has created.

It’s a movie where the atmosphere inside Shideh’s flat is stifling and claustrophobic right from the start. Her relationship with Iraj is strained, his lack of understanding of how she feels when her studies are curtailed a prime mover in her decision to remain in Tehran. But Shideh herself is equally lacking in empathy when Iraj is conscripted, more concerned that he’s kept it from her until the last moment. With her marriage on rocky ground, Shideh focuses on Dorsa, but finds that their relationship has become even more strained than it is with her husband. Dorsa’s insistence on finding Kimia and the presence of someone else in the flat challenges Shideh’s attempts at keeping order in both the flat and her life. As she becomes more and more affected by her nightmares, and the growing sense that Dorsa may be right – despite everything her practical mind tells her – Shideh’s ability to tell reality from fantasy becomes increasingly fraught.

Where a mother’s determination to protect her daughter from harm is a staple of dramas the world over, here it’s made all the more effective by Anvari’s considered approach to both Shideh and Dorsa and the unexpected relationship that develops between them as their situation becomes more and more imperilled. There are moments where Dorsa is fully in control and Shideh is behaving in thrall to her daughter’s obsessive needs over Kimia. Anvari makes these moments credible through Shideh’s own need to keep Dorsa safe at all costs, and while Shideh resists the idea that there’s a supernatural reason for her daughter’s “condition”, her struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy drives her to make concessions when necessary. She doesn’t necessarily agree with her daughter’s claims, but she does recognise that her daughter believes what’s she’s saying.

The effectiveness of Shideh and Dorsa’s relationship is a key component of Anvari’s script, but it’s also his development of the danger that threatens them that makes as much of an impact. The disintegration of their nuclear family gives way to a more serious threat, as the djinn’s presence in the building promotes fear and anxiety on a level that permeates the narrative, and which also allows the level of dread to grow and develop at a slow, deliberate pace that makes things all the more intimidating and terrifying. By the time they try to leave the building, Anvari has made the presence of the djinn – represented by the spookiest chador you’re ever likely to see – such a palpably unnerving entity that it’s very nature: ordinary yet intrinsically threatening, makes it a truly terrifying opponent.

The movie is also effective because of its background, a period of Iranian history where the country was experiencing constant strife thanks to the ongoing hostilities with Iraq. The missile that crashes into the building is seen as the means by which the djinn arrives, as if it were a chemical weapon attached to the shell and designed to spread confusion and terror amongst the Tehran populace. Shideh’s inappropriate political leanings also reflect the non-status of many women at the time, their role reduced to that of being a mother, and with all the social restrictions that apply (after a particularly vivid nightmare, Shideh escapes outside but is apprehended by the police for not being covered up in public; when she is brought home, she does her best to hide the shame she feels but doesn’t want to feel).

Kit Fraser’s deliberately drab, minimalistic cinematography highlights the uphill struggle experienced by Shideh in trying to keep Dorsa safe, and his use of shadow and light in certain shots evokes an uneasiness that Anvari exploits to the movie’s full advantage. Likewise, the score by Gavin Cullen and Will McGillivray is used to support the growing, unhealthy atmosphere inside Shideh’s flat, and to punctuate those moments when the djinn’s evil aura adds dismay and menace to the proceedings. It’s all wrapped up by Anvari neatly and convincingly, and at a modest running time, is easily one of the best horror movies of recent years.

Rating: 9/10 – expertly constructed by its writer/director (making his feature debut), Under the Shadow is a goosebump-inducing tale of paranoia and possession that makes the most of its limited resources; a refreshing take on the home invasion/urban terror sub-genre of horror movies, the movie succeeds by playing it straight, and by layering everything that happens with sincerity and a large helping of credibility.

Trailers – Speech & Debate (2017), The Bad Batch (2016) and Unlocked (2017)

14 Tuesday Feb 2017

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Ana Lily Amarpour, Drama, Horror, Jason Momoa, Michael Apted, Noomi Rapace, Previews, Thriller, Trailers

Based on the off-Broadway play by Stephen Karam (who also provides the screenplay), Speech & Debate concerns a trio of troubled teenagers who are all struggling to find their places in life, and most urgently, their school. Held back from expressing themselves by the repressive, hypocritical dictates of their school heirarchy, the trio – played by Liam James, Sarah Steele and Austin P. McKenzie – decide to resurrect the school debate club, and by doing so, attempt to challenge and overcome the rigid strictures they encounter on a daily basis. Steele was in the original stage production, and from the trailer it looks as if she’ll steal the movie – that last excerpt is a killer – but the rest of the cast appear on form as well, and if the use of Mika’s We Are Golden is anything to go by, then the movie’s likely to have a killer soundtrack as well. It’s been a while since we’ve had a decent teen-themed movie; maybe Speech & Debate will be the movie to rekindle our appreciation for them.

For her follow up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), writer/director Ana Lily Amarpour changes locations from the Iranian ghost town Bad City, to a Texas wasteland inhabited – not by vampires – but by cannibals. Amarpour has a distinct, vivid visual style (as can be seen in the trailer), and she isn’t afraid to depict violence in all its hideous glory, but she’s just as interested in ideas and the development of her characters as she is any bloodshed. The presence of Jason Momoa will no doubt attract a number of fans looking forward to another movie he’s in this year (Braven – obviously), but with the likes of Jim Carrey, Giovanni Ribisi and Keanu Reeves on board, the chances that Amarpour’s odd love story set against an equally odd backdrop will cement her growing reputation as an indie movie maker to watch out for.

And so it’s Noomi Rapace’s turn to kick ass and take names later as a modern day action heroine in Michael Apted’s by-the-numbers Unlocked. Twists and turns and betrayals every five minutes appear to be the order of the day, and the casting of John Malkovich, Toni Collette, Orlando Bloom, and Michael Douglas in lead roles is a strong nod to the level of credibility the movie is aiming for. But despite all this, Unlocked could still turn out to be quite respectful in its ambitions, and worth more of your time than you’d expect. Director Apted isn’t exactly inexperienced, and he certainly doesn’t need to make a generic action movie any more than he needs to, but his presence behind the camera is encouraging, and though the trailer doesn’t have the “wow” factor it needs to stand out from the crowd, it could still surprise us all… possibly.

Poster of the Week – Der Januskopf (1920)

01 Wednesday Feb 2017

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Conrad Veidt, Der Januskopf, F.W. Murnau, Horror, Josef Fenneker, Lost movie, Poster of the week, Silent movie

If you haven’t heard of Der Januskopf, then it’s not entirely surprising. Despite being directed by F.W. Murnau, with cinematography by Karl Freund, and starring Conrad Veidt (all at the height of their powers), this thinly disguised version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde hasn’t been seen since its initial release, and is now considered a lost movie. While we’re unlikely to ever see the movie, especially after all this time, what we do have is its poster, and one that shows another creative artist working at the peak of their powers.

Josef Fenneker – whose signature can be seen near the bottom right hand corner – was a prolific designer and illustrator whose work in Berlin had already won him great acclaim before he was approached to create the poster for Murnau’s “appropriation” of Stevenson’s novel. It’s a typical Fenneker poster, with Veidt’s already angular features highlighted and exaggerated by sharp, slashing lines and deep, troubling shadows. His eyes are distorted so that they don’t look fully formed, or are undergoing some kind of violent transformation (hmmm…). Veidt’s forehead, usually curving and soft, is represented by two angular planes of flesh that look as if they’ve been joined together haphazardly, with no regard for symmetry. Or maybe the bones beneath them are splitting and fusing, and that’s causing the distortion. Whichever it is, one thing is clear from Veidt’s anguished expression: it’s painful.

And yet, Veidt’s face isn’t all tortured flesh and bone. His lips, fully bee-stung and tapering at one corner to a point that could impale someone if they weren’t careful. They’re full, tempting, at odds with the rest of Veidt’s features, inviting even, a feminine pout that tempers Veidt’s expression of pain and which proves hard to avoid looking at. But then his jaw line reflects that agony again, jagged in its delineation, and almost as if Fenneker has made slicing motions with his brush in order to get the full effect.

Below that jaw line is a surprise, a throat so distended and goitre-like it acts as a further horrible reminder that Veidt – or at least his character, Dr Warren – is undergoing a terrible change in appearance. It’s almost as if his alter ego, the villainous Mr O’Connor, is making his way up and out, and will be forcing Veidt’s strikingly realised lips wide apart in his efforts to be free (what kind of monster is going to be revealed?). But almost as if this amount of horror isn’t enough, there’s also the shock of seeing Veidt’s hand, reduced to cadaverous bones and reaching out as if to claw his throat open and release the beast within.

With Veidt’s on-screen character so grotesquely depicted – contemporary audiences would most likely have been horrified by Fenneker’s creation – all that’s left is to provide a suitable background for the central image. Using swathes of yellow and grey to paint an unhealthy miasma around Veidt, the effect is of a man not only enduring a terrible (and terrifying) physical transformation, but having to do so while surrounded by an atmosphere that seems to exemplify sickness and disease. Or maybe it’s meant to represent that curiously German concept of schadenfreude, and the colours have been chosen to represent the character’s emotional and intellectual turmoil. Whichever view is right – indeed, if either of them are – Fenneker’s poster remains a startling, arresting work of art, and a testament to his prowess as an interpreter of German silent cinema.

NOTE: There’ll be more from Josef Fenneker throughout February 2017.

Monthly Roundup – January 2017

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

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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.

Oh! the Horror! – The Disappointments Room (2016) and The Bye Bye Man (2017)

13 Friday Jan 2017

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Cressida Bonas, D.J. Caruso, Douglas Smith, Drama, Grief, Haunted house, Horror, Kate Beckinsale, Lucas Till, Lucien Laviscount, Paranoia, Review, Stacy Title, Supernatural

The Disappointments Room (2016) / D: D.J. Caruso / 85m

Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Mel Raido, Duncan Joiner, Lucas Till, Gerald McRaney, Celia Weston, Jennifer Leigh Mann, Ella Jones, Marcia DeRousse

After the tragic death of their baby daughter, Dana (Beckinsale) and David (Raido), and their son, Lucas (Joiner), relocate to a rundown, rural dream home. Haunted by their daughter’s death, Dana soon begins to hear the sounds of a baby crying, and also the sound of dripping water. She traces the dripping water sounds to a leak from the roof, but still hears a baby crying and other noises; she also sees a strange dog outside. David is oblivious to all this, and doesn’t think it’s at all mysterious when Dana discovers a hidden room in the attic that isn’t on the plans. Investigating it further the next day, she finds herself locked in and threatened by a malevolent force. Hours pass, but when she finally manages to get out of the room, she learns that only minutes have passed, and not hours; and that David is worried she’s not taking her medication (to help her deal with her grief).

With the help of a local historian (DeRousse), Dana discovers that the house has a disappointments room, a room that would have been used to hide away a child born with a deformity or some such, and which would have been highly embarrassing to its (usually) upper class family. Dana’s research uncovers a previous owner, Judge Blacker (McRaney), whose daughter, Laura, was believed to have died in childbirth. But Dana suspects Laura was the inhabitant of the disappointments room, and that it’s her spirit that is haunting the house. With a local workman (Till) helping restore the house, and Dana becoming increasingly disturbed by the things she’s seeing, the truth behind the disappointments room slowly begins to unfold, and Dana begins to understand that there’s a far more malevolent force at work…

For a horror movie to have the word “disappointment” anywhere in its title is asking for trouble (or it’s being incredibly reckless). And The Disappointments Room, ah, doesn’t let us, or itself, down in that respect. It’s yet another haunted house movie where things happen for no reason at all, and scenes take place that are by-and-large independent of each other and only fit together if the viewer is lucky. The script – by director Caruso and Wentworth Miller – likes to play with visual motifs, like a child’s kite seen in historical photos floating above the house, even though it would have been proof of a child’s existence when there shouldn’t have been any; and it likes to have things happen outside the house when it’s clear that the ghost responsible for all the shenanigans doesn’t stray outside at all (so shouldn’t have that much influence).

Away from the kind of plot holes that you could fit an entire haunted house through twice over, the movie aims very low in its attempts to be scary or frightening, and falls back too often on the kind of traditional haunted house set ups that now invoke yawns rather than tension. Against such a plain, derivative backdrop, Beckinsale has no option but to put in a generic genre performance and walk away with as much dignity as she can manage. The rest of the cast lack for things to do, especially Raido, and Caruso’s directorial style largely involves ignoring how tedious and pedestrian the script is, and that the whole thing – though no more preposterous than usual – lacks energy and any kind of visual panache. It’s a glum, uninvolving movie to watch, and it isn’t helped by Brian Tyler’s overbearing, cliché-driven score.

Rating: 3/10 – bad horror movies are ten a penny these days – in fact, they’re ten a penny on most days – but The Disappointments Room is a particularly bad horror movie, one that can’t be bothered to be better than it is; hackneyed, with poor/lazy performances, and a terrible sense of its own effectiveness, it outstays its welcome within the first five minutes, and never once feels as if it’s about to surprise the viewer or give them something/someone to care about.

The Bye Bye Man (2017) / D: Stacy Title / 96m

Cast: Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Doug Jones, Michael Trucco, Jenna Kanell, Erica Tremblay, Marisa Echeverria, Cleo King, Faye Dunaway, Carrie-Anne Moss, Leigh Whannell

In 1969, a reporter, Larry Redmon (Whannell), goes on a killing spree in the town of Madison, Wisconsin. Fast forward forty-seven years and three university students – couple Elliot (Smith) and Sasha (Bonas), and best friend John (Laviscount) – rent an old house on the outskirts of town, and soon they’re having more than their fair share of weird experiences. After a housewarming party, a friend of Sasha’s, Kim (Kanell), performs a cleansing ceremony, but it doesn’t work. Soon she’s telling them that “something” is coming. Later, Elliot finds a sheet of paper with the words “Don’t think it” and “Don’t say it” written on it over and over again. These words are a caution relating to a supernatural entity known as the Bye Bye Man. If you say or think his name, he will come for you and he will make you do terrible things – like Larry Redmon did.

Soon the trio are seeing things and their own inner fears are being exploited. Elliot digs into the origins of the Bye Bye Man, while at the same time becoming ever more certain that Sasha and John are sleeping together. Sasha becomes increasingly ill, while John becomes more and more paranoid. When Kim is killed, the police become involved. And when Elliot tracks down Larry Redmon’s widow (Dunaway), he discovers a way to defeat the Bye Bye Man. But when he returns to the house, circumstances dictate that he might never get the opportunity to use his newfound knowledge, as the Bye Bye Man is there already…

A better tagline for The Bye Bye Man would be “Don’t try it, don’t see it”, as this adaptation of The Bridge to Body Island, a chapter from Robert Damon Schneck’s non-fiction book The President’s Vampire, is one of the most poorly written, directed, and acted horror movies of recent years. Aside from the bravura pre-credits sequence where Larry Redmon goes on the rampage, The Bye Bye Man struggles at almost every turn in its attempts at telling a cohesive, halfway credible story, and fails to deliver any tension, any shocks, any drama, or any let-up from the crushing banality of Jonathan Penner’s screenplay. It’s as if Penner has watched a dozen or so recent horror movies featuring supernatural creatures, taken the worst aspects of those movies’ scripts, and put them all together to make this movie look and sound as atrocious as possible.

Things are further compounded by Title’s haphazard, scattershot approach to the material, directing most scenes as if she had no idea what was going to happen next (which would be odd, as Penner is her husband). She’s also unable to elicit one decent performance from anyone in the whole movie; even the likes of Dunaway and Moss have no chance when faced with such terrible dialogue and even worse character motivation. Bonas favours one facial expression throughout (sleepy), Laviscount does angry young man whatever the scene, and Smith is so bad you hope the Bye Bye Man gets him first. Things are further hampered by James Kniest’s unimaginative framing and cinematography, and worst of all, Ken Blackwell’s laissez-faire editing, which takes the movie to new depths of awfulness.

Rating: 3/10 – sometimes you wonder how some horror movies get a general release and don’t go straight to video, and The Bye Bye Man is one such horror movie; a real stinker, it insults its audience at every turn, can’t even rustle up an origin story for its title character, tries for franchise levels of integrity that are never achieved, and should be used as an object lesson in how not to make a supernatural creature feature.

Poster of the Week – The Unearthly (1957)

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Horror, John Carradine, Poster of the week, The Fifties, The Unearthly, Tor Johnson

Another jam-packed poster from the Fifties, this tells you all you need to know about the movie it’s promoting in so many sections it’s a wonder they had room for the title. A ghastly horror movie made on a B-movie budget and with Z-movie aspirations, The Unearthly has to be seen to be believed (yes it’s that bad/good), and yet, this particular broadsheet once again confirms that often enough, the humble poster has more to offer than the movie it’s advertising.

The eye literally has too many places it can go at first glance, but the top left hand corner is a good place to start. “Lured!” it says, a comment that is at once alluring itself – lured? lured by what exactly? – and also slightly dangerous in intent. Lured – that can’t be good. And so it proves: the rest of the strapline makes it clear with its reference to monsters. But the poster’s designer then adds something that’s a little bit clever and unexpected. He or she drags the word “monsters…” down towards the doorway that an amply proportioned woman is about to enter. While John Carradine looks in her direction, almost urging her through the doorway, the woman looks uncertainly, and worriedly, behind her. (Modern day audiences might wonder if she’s thinking, does my bum look big in this? She probably isn’t, though.) It’s a neat way of drawing the viewer’s attention in a specific direction, and having a shapely damsel in imminent distress is always an attention grabber.

Across the middle of the poster is the title, with its large, uneven lettering and promise that “there’s no escape from…” The red letters against the sickly green background make for an effective colour counterpoint, and there’s definitely no escaping that. And then there are those eight images from the movie itself, several of which feature men transformed into hairy beasts with wild, staring eyes (Carradine’s evil Dr Conway performs illegal experiments to prolong life but for some strange, inexplicable reason they always go wrong; talk about persistence over experience). These identikit Mr Hydes look like the special effects department raided the Cro-Magnon man exhibit at the nearest natural history museum, and as such are about as frightening as hairy mannequins can get.

Other images display one of Dr Conway’s ill-fated operations, a man trying to embrace the bars of his cell, and dear old Tor Johnson carrying a bosomy starlet. If for no other reason than that the movie featured Tor Johnson, you’d know it was bad; he played the same character in every one of his movies and, sad to say, he was awful in all of them. With Tor’s expression-free features on the poster, any remaining likelihood that the movie will be worth watching is despatched immediately. And further evidence that suspicions about the movie should be encouraged lie with the credits and the director’s name: Brooke L. Peters. Never heard of him? That’s no surprise, as it’s a pseudonym for Boris Petroff. Never heard of him? That’s no surprise either.

While the credits occupy a modicum of space and focus on the leading actors, the poster manages to include one last “surprise”: a rosette declaring that the movie is “guaranteed to frighten”. Similar claims were foisted on dozens of low budget horrors during the Fifties, almost as if the makers were daring people to come and watch their movie. But the rosette is a nice touch – if a trifle over-confident – and as a final flourish to the poster and its overall effectiveness, it’s a little like having a piece of cake with a cherry on top. The Unearthly may not be the best movie in the world – it’s probably not even the best movie released on 28 June 1957 – but this poster has far more going for it than the movie, and has too many elements that work well individually and taken as a whole. A deceptively clever poster then, and one where its design and construction can be rightly celebrated.

And for fans of dear old Tor Johnson, here’s a lobby card where he features more prominently:

Monthly Roundup – December 2016

31 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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50's sci-fi movie, A Perfect Man, Action, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Ana Girardot, Barry Sonnenfeld, Cameron Mitchell, Cat, Cell, Chandler Riggs, Christopher Walken, Comedy, David Tomlinson, Devil's Crag, Diana Dors, Drama, Edward Kemmer, Eliminators (2016), Flight to Mars, Frances O'Connor, Giant from the Unknown, Hard Target 2, Horror, Hostile takeover, Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary, James Bobin, James Nunn, Jennifer Garner, John Cusack, Johnny Depp, Kevin Spacey, Lesley Selander, Literary adaptation, Marguerite Chapman, Mars, Maurice Elvey, Mercy (2014), Mia Wasikowska, Murder, Myanmar, Nine Lives, Peter Cornwell, Pierre Niney, Reviews, Rhona Mitra, Richard E. Cunha, Robert Knepper, Roel Reiné, Sally Fraser, Samuel L. Jackson, Scott Adkins, Sequel, Shirley Knight, Stephen King, The Mad Hatter, The Red Queen, Thriller, Tod Williams, Vargas, Wade Barrett, Wonderland, WWE Films, Yann Gozlan

Cell (2016) / D: Tod Williams / 98m

Cast: John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Clark Sarullo, Ethan Andrew Casto, Owen Teague, Stacy Keach, Joshua Mikel

Rating: 4/10 – a mysterious cell phone signal turns people into crazed, zombie-like creatures, but one man (Cusack) is determined to find his son while society disintegrates around him; a Stephen King adaptation (and co-scripted by him), Cell is another reminder that his work rarely translates well to the screen, and this is no exception, being dramatically incoherent, a waste of its talented cast, and lumbered with an ending that makes absolutely no sense at all.

A Perfect Man (2015) / D: Yann Gozlan / 104m

Original title: Un homme idéal

Cast: Pierre Niney, Ana Girardot, André Marcon, Valéria Cavalli, Thibault Vinçon, Marc Barbé, Sacha Mijovic

Rating: 7/10 – aspiring author Mathieu Vasseur (Niney) isn’t getting anywhere until he finds an unpublished novel and claims it as his own, a move that leads to fame, fortune, blackmail, and ultimately, murder; a clever, twisty thriller that benefits from a splendidly nervous, anxious performance from Niney, A Perfect Man may have many familiar elements, but it’s a movie with a great deal of style, and it holds the attention in such a way that there are times when you won’t realise you’re holding your breath.

Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary (1953) / D: Maurice Elvey / 80m

Cast: David Tomlinson, Diana Dors, Bonar Colleano, Sidney James, Diana Decker, Audrey Freeman, MacDonald Parke

Rating: 5/10 – returning to the UK with his new bride (Decker), US soldier Laurie Vining (Colleano) is horrified to learn that he may still be married to his first wife, glamour girl Candy (Dors), a situation that leads to his desperately trying to avoid his new bride – or anyone else – from finding out; a bedroom farce based on a successful stage play, Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary has dated somewhat, but for fans of the cast and this type of Fifties UK comedy, there’s much to enjoy, from the frantic mugging of Colleano and Tomlinson, Elvey’s efficient direction, and a surprisingly nuanced performance from Dors.

Eliminators (2016) / D: James Nunn / 94m

Cast: Scott Adkins, Wade Barrett, Daniel Caltagirone, James Cosmo, Ty Glaser, Olivia Mace, Lily Ann Stubbs

Rating: 3/10 – when a home invasion means his Witness Protection identity is compromised, ex-Federal Agent Martin Parker (Adkins) finds himself the target of a hitman (Barrett) and forced to go on the run; a WWE Films production shot on location in and around London, Eliminators is a bog-standard actioner that stretches credulity, invites disbelief, and warrants avoidance as it does its best to cram in as many dull action scenes as it can in ninety minutes, and serves as yet another reminder that being a WWE superstar doesn’t mean you can act.

Giant from the Unknown (1958) / D: Richard E. Cunha / 77m

aka The Diablo Giant; Giant from Devil’s Crag; Giant from Diablo Point

Cast: Edward Kemmer, Sally Fraser, Bob Steele, Morris Ankrum, Buddy Baer, Jolene Brand, Gary Crutcher, Billy Dix

Rating: 4/10 – animal mutilations and murder plague a small town – and that’s before a giant Spanish conquistador is released from suspended animation by a lightning bolt, and threatens both the town’s inhabitants and the research team trying to ascertain if the legend about him is true; not the best example of a Fifties “creature feature”, Giant from the Unknown takes so long to get going that it’s nearly over before it’s begun, features a raft of irritating performances, and is so flatly directed by Cunha that once the Giant is awakened, you can’t help but pray that he’s the first victim.

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) / D: James Bobin / 113m

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Rhys Ifans, Matt Lucas, Lindsay Duncan, Leo Bill, Ed Speelers, Geraldine James, Andrew Scott, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Barbara Windsor, Timothy Spall, Matt Vogel, Paul Whitehouse

Rating: 5/10 – Alice (Wasikowska) returns to Wonderland to save the Mad Hatter (Depp) from suicidal depression(!) and the attentions of Time (Cohen) and the Red Queen (Carter) who are working in tandem and holding the Hatter’s family hostage for no convincing reason you can think of; another sequel no one asked for (and nowhere near as successful as its predecessor), Alice Through the Looking Glass is ravishing to look at, boasts some fine visual effects, and a great performance by Cohen, but everything else is a mess: bloated, derivative, witless, and with yet another wasteful performance from Depp (who clearly can’t be bothered).

Hard Target 2 (2016) / D: Roel Reiné / 104m

Cast: Scott Adkins, Robert Knepper, Rhona Mitra, Temuera Morrison, Ann Truong, Adam Saunders, Jamie Timony, Peter Hardy

Rating: 4/10 – ex-MMA fighter Wes Baylor (Adkins) finds himself in Myanmar with one simple objective: reach the Thai border while he’s pursued by a motley group of “hunters” who are out to kill him; a movie that definitely comes under the heading of “another sequel no one asked for”, Hard Target 2 is betrayed by its low budget origins, a script that lurches from one unmemorable action scene to another, and Knepper’s one-note portrayal of the villain.

Nine Lives (2016) / D: Barry Sonnenfeld / 87m

Cast: Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Garner, Christopher Walken, Robbie Amell, Malina Weissman, Cheryl Hines, Mark Consuelos, Talitha Bateman

Rating: 3/10 – businessman Tom Brand (Spacey) has no time for his wife (Garner) and daughter (Weissman), so what better way for him to learn the value of family (and some humility in the process) than by stranding his mind in the body of a cat?; the kind of inane, superficial comedy that Hollywood churns out with mindless regularity, Nine Lives gives Garfield 2 (2006) a run for its money in the stupid stakes, and hammers another nail into the coffin of Barry Sonnenfeld’s once-glorious career.

Flight to Mars (1951) / D: Lesley Selander / 72m

Cast: Marguerite Chapman, Cameron Mitchell, Arthur Franz, Virginia Huston, John Litel, Morris Ankrum, Richard Gaines, Lucille Barkley, Robert Barrat

Rating: 5/10 – the first manned flight to Mars gets there safely only to learn that the planet is inhabited, and by a human-like race that may or may not have an ulterior motive for helping them return to Earth; early-Fifties sci-fi hokum that throws in a tepid romance and some very, very short skirts for the female cast, Flight to Mars retains an odd charm – perhaps because of its naïve approach – that helps alleviate some of the more daffy moments the script insists on doling out.

Mercy (2014) / D: Peter Cornwell / 79m

Cast: Frances O’Connor, Shirley Knight, Chandler Riggs, Joel Courtney, Mark Duplass, Dylan McDermott, Amanda Walsh, Hana Hayes, Pepper Binkley

Rating: 4/10 – after a spell in a nursing home, Grandma Mercy (Knight) comes home to be looked after by her family – daughter Rebecca (O’Connor) and grandsons George (Riggs) and Buddy (Courtney) – but soon exhibits strange behaviour, behaviour that includes warning George that a supernatural force is coming to get him; adapted from the short story Gramma by Stephen King (yes, him again), Mercy aims for creepy and menacing, yet succeeds instead in being confused and uninspired, and with laboured direction and performances, a situation that devotees of King adaptations will appreciate, having been there many times before.

Blair Witch (2016)

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Adam Wingard, Black Hills, Burkittsville, Callie Hernandez, Drama, Horror, James Allen McCune, Review, Sequel, The Woods, Witch

D: Adam Wingard / 89m

Cast: James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Corbin Reid, Brandon Scott, Wes Robinson, Valorie Curry

Twenty years after his older sister, Heather, disappeared in the Black Hills woods outside Burkittsville, Maryland, James Donahue (McCune) comes into possession of a video that he believes is evidence that his sister is – somehow – still alive. Determined to find out for sure, he co-opts film student Lisa Arlington (Hernandez) – who is making a documentary about Heather’s disappearance and James’s search for answers – and friends Peter (Scott) and Ashley (Reid) into going with him. The night before they’re due to set off into the woods, they meet locals Lane (Robinson) and Talia (Curry), who agree to go with them.

Having set up camp on the first night, Lane tells the rest of the group stories he’s heard about the history of the Blair Witch. That night, noises from the surrounding woods wake James and Lisa; they discover Lane outside the camp and looking scared. The next day, the group discover lots of stick figures hanging from the trees and that they’ve slept until two o’clock. Freaked out by this, they decide to go back, but after several hours of trying to retrace their steps, they find themselves back at the campsite. Circumstances lead to Lane and Talia leaving the group and attempting to make their own way back.

The remaining four are forced to stay there overnight. Peter disappears, and when James tries to find him he encounters Lane and Talia instead. They tell him they’ve been lost in the woods for five days. The couple are allowed to stay in camp, though Lisa is suspicious of them. James sets his alarm for seven o’clock in the morning, but when it goes off it is still pitch dark. There are also, more, larger stick figures hanging from the trees. Lane runs off, and something happens to Talia that terrifies the rest. James, Lisa and Ashley become separated. When James and Lisa find each other again, they hear what they think is Ashley screaming. With it now raining heavily, they discover the same house where James believes he’ll find his sister…

When The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, it was a massive, unexpected success. Made on a budget of $60,000, it accrued nearly $250 million worldwide and to this day, is one of the most successful independent movies ever produced. It spawned a sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) that was the antithesis of the original’s tone and approach, and which was so mangled in post-production by distributors Artisan Entertainment, that they wrecked any chances of it being even a fraction as successful as its predecessor. And now, we have a second sequel, one that ignores the events of Book of Shadows, and attempts to recreate the style and tone of the original movie.

The key word here is “attempts”. Writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard have decided, somewhat wisely, to take viewers back to the Black Hills woods, but in doing so, have unwittingly reminded everyone just why The Blair Witch Project was such a major success. It was a movie that dared its audience to say this isn’t real, that three people haven’t really disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the Black Hills woods in Maryland. It also made a virtue of its found-footage approach, and was all the more impressive for it. It was a simple, very effective way of detailing the increasing terror being experienced by Heather and her two friends, Mike and Josh. But since then, the found-footage genre has been done to death and back again, and its very moribund nature is the biggest obstacle any movie maker has to overcome in tackling a movie such as this one. We’ve seen too many people who are lost in the woods and are being menaced by malevolent forces. We’ve seen too many movies where the footage consists of distressed video images that tell us nothing of what’s happening, and are often set up just to provide jump scares.

And Blair Witch is no different. Barrett and Wingard – who are no slouches when it comes to horror movies – fail to provide us with anything new, or memorable. Instead they fall back on the tried and tested formula of several other, similar movies – A Night in the Woods (2012), Evidence (2011), and Willow Creek (2013), to name but a few – and make the same mistake that everyone else makes: they don’t provide us with anyone to care about. This leaves the movie feeling more like a (very) belated cash-in designed to wring a few more dollars out of an unsuspecting fanbase and/or potentially interested public. The makers went to a lot of trouble to ensure that Blair Witch wasn’t on anyone’s radar during its production, and right up until its first showing at this year’s Comic-Con, it was known as The Woods. Perhaps they already knew this wasn’t going to be as good as they’d hoped.

In the end, the movie falls way short of being a worthy successor to The Blair Witch Project, and it falls way short of being even an above average found-footage movie. Several times, and particularly during the events that take place in the house, there are shots that are clearly made by a third person. The editing, by Louis Cioffi, is haphazard and draining, stretching some scenes out to longer than necessary, while truncating others unnecessarily, and Wingard’s control of the material is similar in execution, with a lack of focus that undermines the narrative – such as it is – and keeps the audience at a distance.

The movie makes yet another huge mistake in showing the Blair Witch herself (however briefly), where the original didn’t have the inclination or the need, being scary enough without her – and it doesn’t help that she looks like the second cousin of the creature from [Rec] 2 (2009). When a sequel doesn’t follow through on one of the most important and effective decisions its predecessor made, then you know that no one’s paying close enough attention. And if they’re not, why should you?

Rating: 4/10 – professionally made but lacking in real smarts, Blair Witch arrives like an unwanted guest at a funeral – they knew the deceased, but can’t think of anything worthwhile to say about them; a sequel that squanders its predecessor’s legacy, it soon runs out of things with which to engage the audience and worse still, it can’t even come up with an ending that is even halfway as disturbing as the fate that befell Heather.

Xmas Classics – Christmas Evil (1980)

20 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Brandon Maggart, Drama, Horror, Jeffrey DeMunn, Jolly Dream, Lewis Jackson, Review, Santa Claus, Toy factory, Xmas, You Better Watch Out

Original title: You Better Watch Out

D: Lewis Jackson / 100m

Cast: Brandon Maggart, Jeffrey DeMunn, Dianne Hull, Andy Fenwick, Brian Neville, Joe Jamrog

Xmas is a time for family – or so they say. If you’re young Harry Stadling, Xmas is a time for discovering that Santa Claus is actually your father playing dress-up and spending adult time with your mother rather than coming down the chimney and leaving presents for you and your brother, Philip. Disillusioned by this terrible discovery, Harry’s view on Xmas becomes twisted. As an adult, Harry (Maggart) spies on the children in his neighbourhood and makes notes on their behaviours in two large volumes: Good Boys and Girls 1980 and Bad Boys and Girls 1980. He works as a senior employee at a factory that makes children’s toys, but he’s tolerated more than respected, and one of the men who works the line, Frank Stoller (Jamrog), exploits his good nature. As Xmas approaches, Harry’s need to make people conform to his view of the importance of the Yuletide season – or his “tune” as he calls it – leads to his dressing up as Santa Claus on Xmas Eve and distributing presents.

Except, Harry’s plan doesn’t work out as he’d hoped. As well as handing out gifts for everyone at a children’s hospital, Harry finds himself handing out retribution to those who don’t share his love of Xmas, or respect how special it is. With his exploits attracting the attention of the police, Harry finds himself chased by a bloodthirsty mob who don’t take kindly to the “Xmas cheer” he’s dispensing. A narrow escape leads him to seek out his brother, but Philip (DeMunn) has his own issues surrounding Harry and the festive period, issues that mean a further escape for Harry, but not quite the one he’s looking for…

Christmas Evil is not your typical slasher movie set at Xmas, and is vastly different from movies such as Black Christmas (1974) or Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984). For one thing, it takes its time in establishing the mental state of its central character, the emotionally detached Harry. This is very important to the overall storyline, as writer/director Jackson strives to make Harry a character the audience can at least have some sympathy with, and not regard as just some whack job intent on killing people for no reason (or because he got a present without any batteries, or a Barbie doll instead of Action Man). This means the movie gets off to a slow start, as Harry struggles to maintain an outward air of calm – as much as he can, at least – while everyone around him fails to recognise how important Xmas is to him.

Once the prologue set in 1947 is over with (and Harry’s childhood rejection of the Xmas myth is in place), the movie begins a few months before Xmas actually comes around. This again allows Jackson the time and space to show the gradual deterioration of Harry’s mental state, and the casual malice he endures both at work and closer to home through his brother, Philip. With Philip feeling obliged to look after Harry as well as his own family, there’s a tension and an animosity there that Harry feels deeply. At one point he watches from outside his brother’s home, and sees the perfect picture of a happy family at Xmas-time. Etched on Harry’s face is a mixture of dismay and envy that explains everything you need to know about Harry’s view on Xmas, and why he’s so torn by his feelings about it. He can’t quite reconcile the good with the bad, or the notion that there can’t be one without the other.

While Harry finds himself struggling to find a balance that will help him deal with his feelings, certain events conspire to push him towards more violent responses, including the offhand remarks of his bosses at the factory, and the (until then) suppressed need for revenge on Frank Stoller. It’s notable that for every bad thing that Harry does, he does an equally positive thing as well, and Jackson is clever enough to ensure – even if this is a “slasher” movie – that Harry’s predicament can’t be viewed in plain old black and white. He’s helped in large part by the performance of Maggart as Harry, a singular portrayal that is surprisingly nuanced beneath all the outer trappings of increasing mania and moral confusion. Maggart’s career is littered with television appearances (including an episode of ER in 1995 where he played a Santa Claus figure), and very few movies; this is his finest hour without a doubt. Imbuing Harry with a strangely affecting melancholy, and showing his descent into madness by reining in any possibility of histrionics, Maggart gives an intuitive, unforgettable performance, and Jackson is wise enough to give him the room to explore the character as fully as he can.

But while on the acting front this is Maggart’s movie, on the cinematography side it’s Argentinian DoP Ricardo Aronovich’s. Persuaded by Jackson to work on the movie, Aronovich’s sombre lighting design and tight close ups on Maggart’s face make for a claustrophobic, unnerving visual approach to the material. There are moments where he also creates a kind of chiaroscuro effect, particularly when Harry is being chased by the torch-wielding mob, the flames creating an odd halo effect that seems almost supernatural. His framing and spatial awareness is impressive too, making much of what takes place look and feel like the real world and not some composite assembled for yet another movie.

In the end, Jackson’s commitment to his own script and the way in which it should be presented, pays off handsomely. At first glance, Christmas Evil looks like a hundred other gory slasher movies from the early Eighties, with their high body counts, splatter effects, and invincible killers. It also looks and feels like a low-budget slasher flick – Aronovich’s involvement notwithstanding – and it has a grimy, gloomy atmosphere that isn’t exactly an original approach. But as noted above, the movie takes its time before it provides its first kill, and it and all the subsequent kills are shot as cutaways, put together neatly and given a disturbing air by editors Corky O’Hara and Linda Leeds. These scenes have an almost sordid feel to them, thanks to the combination of mood and lighting, and Harry’s inability to quell his angry feelings.

There’s humour too, threaded throughout the movie, and like in any good, serious drama, it’s allowed to take centre stage on just the one occasion, when the police are trying to get witnesses to identify Harry from a line up of Santas. Otherwise, Jackson focuses on themes relating to family, loyalty, unmerited expectations, greed, and the endemic hypocrisy that the festive season seems to instill in everyone, where the phrase “goodwill to all men” really is just that: a phrase. There’s a sense that he’s tried to “keep it real”, and while he may not succeed in everything he’s attempted, he’s definitely got more right than he has wrong.

Rating: 8/10 – a superior horror thriller, featuring a great performance from Brandon Maggart, and a remarkably astute screenplay from its director, Christmas Evil is a much better movie than anyone could have ever expected (John Waters calls it “the greatest Christmas movie ever made”); as a portrait of one man’s struggle to make sense of his own conflicted feelings about the Yuletide season (and with a subtext of PTSD thrown in for good measure), it’s unexpectedly compelling, and makes good use of its Xmas backdrop, limited budget, and confident, measured pacing.

NOTE: The following trailer has French subtitles.

Poster of the Week – Giant from the Unknown (1958)

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

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Horror, Movie poster, Poster of the week, Richard E. Cunha, Screencraft Enterprises Inc

Giant from the Unknown (1958)

At first glance, the poster for Giant from the Unknown seems like a random collection of typographical styles, two primary colours and one secondary colour, a damsel in distress, and a lightning effect that appears to have been included for no particular reason at all. And that’s without the titular giant’s werewolf-like appearance (“My, what a lot of chest hair you have.” “All the better to frighten you, my dear… hopefully”). But it’s a poster that is deceptively effective – or effectively deceptive? – and which uses the apparently random nature of its elements to provide a strangely compelling overall image.

The movie itself is about – and I quote – “A very large, degenerate, Spanish conqueror [who] is freed from suspended animation by lightning and goes on a killing spree in a small town.” So that explains the lightning bolt. Then there’s the depiction of the Giant (who we now know is from Spain and not the Unknown – wherever that is). The artist has come up with an image that, ultimately, is misleading, but with its unruly hair and wild-eyed stare, and allied to a hairy, sharp-nailed hand, is much more of a beast than a giant. Fortunately he’s also proportionately bigger than the woman he’s menacing (though you do have to wonder what his little finger is doing). He’s a commanding figure when all’s said and done, and his stare seems to be directed right at you, which is unnerving considering he’s just an image on a poster.

The woman he’s towering over should be more eye-catching, what with her flimsy red dress, splash of hair, petrified gaze, and exposed flesh. The artist has seen fit to remove the strap from over the woman’s right shoulder, an excision that is at once exploitative and also a way to further highlight her vulnerability. The Giant doesn’t exactly look lascivious, but the inference is clear: that flimsy red dress won’t be there for long once he catches her. Of course, this is from 1958, and there was absolutely no chance of the poster image being replicated within the movie, but certain target audiences of the time would have hoped like crazy that it was.

The largely green background aids the two central images to stand out more, and gives the title a chance to “pop”, it’s sharp-edges and crowded conjoined lettering serving to accentuate the strangeness of the movie. (It’s also interesting to speculate that the woman is reaching desperately to grab the word “the” and maybe save herself.) Above the title is the movie’s tagline, a typical piece of hyperbole that even moviegoers of the time wouldn’t have been fooled by. The typeface used is unexpectedly dull, and doesn’t fit the random nature of the other elements – unless that’s the point of it, and a touch of random dullness was somehow a requirement.

The remaining type details the main cast members, and is in a more traditional black. But there’s an obvious – glaringly obvious – omission: the name of the director (in this case Richard E. Cunha, who was also the movie’s DoP). Either this was a tremendous oversight, or a deliberate decision by Screencraft Enterprises, Inc.; either way, not seeing a director’s name on a poster doesn’t exactly add confidence in the finished product’s likelihood of being good/entertaining/worth seeing, even if it is called Giant from the Mountain.

But all in all, this is a poster that, while largely generic for the time it was produced, exerts a strange fascination, and has an odd hypnotic nature to it. It’s a diamond in the rough, a poster that’s truly from the Unknown, and a better advert for the movie than it perhaps deserves. It’s certainly better than this Mexican lobby card that was used (note the difference between the artist’s impression and the actual Giant):

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to let me know.

Monthly Roundup – November 2016

01 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Adam Schindler, All'ultimo sangue, Andrew Stanton, Animation, Annalise Basso, Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies, Beth Riesgraf, Bury Them Deep, Colin Firth, Comedy, Craig Hill, Dominik Hartl, Drama, Elizabeth Reaser, Ellen DeGeneres, Ettore Manni, Felicity Jones, Finding Dory, Fort Osage, Gabriela Marcinková, Home invasion, Horror, Inferno (2016), Laurie Calvert, Lesley Selander, Literary adaptation, Mike Flanagan, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Paolo Moffa, Patrick Dempsey, Plague virus, Prequel, Renée Zellweger, Rod Cameron, Romance, Romantic comedy, Ron Howard, Rory Culkin, Sequel, Sharon Maguire, Shut In, Ski-ing, Thriller, Tom Hanks, Western

Bury Them Deep (1968) / D: Paolo Moffa (as John Byrd) / 109m

Original title: All’ultimo sangue

Cast: Craig Hill, Ettore Manni, Giovanni Cianfriglia (as Ken Wood), José Greci, Francesco Santovetti, Luciano Doria, Pino Patti (as Giuseppe Sorrentino), Ruggero Salvadori

Rating: 5/10 – when an Army payroll is stolen by notorious outlaw Billy Gun (Cianfriglia), expert tracker Clive Norton (Hill) is hired to get it back, but in the process he finds himself up against a variety of obstacles, not the least of which is Billy’s brother, El Chaleco (Manni); an average Spaghetti Western given a much needed dose of energy thanks to Manni’s muscular, spirited performance as the conniving El Chaleco, Bury Them Deep rarely rises above its perfunctory level, and despite cramming in several lengthy action sequences.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) / D: Mike Flanagan / 99m

Cast: Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson, Henry Thomas, Parker Mack

Rating: 6/10 – it’s 1965, and the Zander family – single mother Alice (Reaser) and her two daughters, Lina (Basso) and Doris (Wilson) – become imperilled by an evil spirit thanks to the misguided use of a ouija board; a prequel to the events seen in Ouija (2014), this does nothing new in terms of scares and special effects, but thanks to the involvement of Flanagan, at least gives you characters you can actually relate to and care about, and which is a rare and valuable thing indeed.

Finding Dory (2016) / D: Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane / 97m

Cast: Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Ed O’Neill, Kaitlin Olson, Hayden Rolence, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Sloane Murray, Idris Elba, Dominic West, Bob Peterson, Kate McKinnon, Bill Hader, Sigourney Weaver

Rating: 7/10 – Dory the blue tang fish (DeGeneres) starts having flashbacks to when she was younger and lived with her parents, and these in turn prompt her to try and find them, much to the continuing consternation of clown fish Marlin (Brooks) and his more positive son Nemo (Rolence); a sequel to one of Pixar’s most cherished movies, and one of this year’s most anticipated releases, Finding Dory lacks the original movie’s winning charm, and settles instead for being a guilty pleasure retread of Finding Nemo, while being saved from a lower score thanks to DeGeneres wonderful, and still inspired, vocal performance.

Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016) / D: Sharon Maguire / 123m

Cast: Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Sarah Solemani, Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson, Neil Pearson, Joanna Scanlan, Kate O’Flynn, Celia Imrie, Ed Sheeran

Rating: 7/10 – at the dreadfully old age of forty-three, Bridget (Zellweger) feels like love is passing her by, until two one night stands – with old flame Mark Darcy (Firth) and new beau Jack Qwant (Dempsey) – lead to her being pregnant but unsure as to which one of them is the father; a welcome return for Bridget, and with much of the pizzazz and feelgood humour of the first movie, but the whole “who’s the father?” storyline is a poor conceit to hang a whole movie on, and it shows, leaving standout moments such as Bridget miming to House of Pain’s Jump Around, as a much better reason for splurging on this latest installment.

Shut In (2015) / D: Adam Schindler / 90m

aka Deadly Home; Intruders

Cast: Beth Riesgraf, Rory Culkin, Martin Starr, Jack Kesy, Joshua Mikel, Leticia Jiminez, Timothy T. McKinney

Rating: 5/10 – when Anna (Riesgraf), who’s agoraphobic, doesn’t attend her recently deceased brother’s funeral, the three men who arrive at her home to rob her soon find that Anna has a dark secret that will endanger them all; a brave attempt to do something different in the home invasion genre, Shut In nevertheless remains an intriguing idea that never coalesces into a completely successful whole, but does feature a terrific performance from Riesgraf.

Inferno (2016) / D: Ron Howard / 121m

Cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ben Foster, Ana Ularu, Ida Darvish

Rating: 6/10 – despite suffering from short term memory loss, symbologist Robert Langdon must endure a race against time in order to stop the release of a deadly toxin that will wipe out billions of people; another year, another Dan Brown adaptation, but this time it’s an adaptation that’s at least bearable, thanks to Tom Elkins’ and Daniel P. Hanley’s editing skills, an enjoyable, knowing performance from Khan, and a script that doesn’t hang around getting bogged down by endless exposition, which, considering Brown’s reliance on it in his novels, is a massive step forward should The Lost Symbol or any further novels be adapted for the screen.

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) / D: Dominik Hartl / 77m

Cast: Laurie Calvert, Gabriela Marcinková, Oscar Dyekjær Giese, Margarete Tiesel, Karl Fischer, Patricia Aulitzky, Kari Rakkola

Rating: 5/10 – a formula for producing snow proves extremely harmful if ingested, and soon the guests at a remote mountain top ski resort are knee deep in zombies, both human and animal; similar in tone to the Dead Snow movies, Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies combines daft humour with gross-out gore and flying body parts a-plenty, but as usual with this type of movie, it pays lip service to cohesive plotting, or credible characters, and focuses instead on providing a series of inventive zombie kills – which is pretty much the only aspect it gets right.

Fort Osage (1952) / D: Lesley Selander / 72m

Cast: Rod Cameron, Jane Nigh, Morris Ankrum, Douglas Kennedy, John Ridgely

Rating: 6/10 – homesteaders looking to head west through Indian country are exploited by a crooked businessman (Ankrum) and have their lives put at risk by his decision to cheat said Indians out of the rewards of a peace treaty, leaving would-be wagonmaster Tom Clay (Cameron) to get the bottom of all the corruption; an enjoyable way to spend seventy-two minutes thanks to Selander’s typically intuitive direction, Cameron’s no-nonsense approach to dialogue, and the joy of watching so many standard Western tropes being trotted out and given such a good airing.

Poster(s) of the Week – Witchfinder General/The Conqueror Worm (1968)

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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American International Pictures, Horror, Michael Reeves, Poster of the week, The Conqueror Worm, Tigon, Vincent Price, Withchfinder General

When movies are released with an alternative title, often there’s a new poster created to go with the change of name. And sometimes the new poster proves to be better than the original (though more often there’s no difference either way). In 1968, the British production company Tigon released a movie based on a novel by Ronald Bassett called Witchfinder General. The movie was directed by wunderkind Michael Reeves, and starred Vincent Price in what would come to be regarded as one of his very best performances.

The above poster was used in the UK, and while it has a lot to say for itself in terms of the activity presented within its frame, it’s not the best example of a horror movie poster from the period. The title is shown in large block capitals, but more in the style of an historical epic rather than the low-budget horror movie it’s actually about. And the image of Vincent Price, with its backdrop of rising flames, isn’t the best representation of the actor you’re ever likely to see, what with his beady eyes and protruding lower lip. There are – unfortunately – lots of other areas where the poster design lacks imagination, and in the case of the woman on the left hand side with her arms raised who looks like she’s wearing a bikini, quality control. There’s a riot of activity going on across the image, and while some of it – the burnings, Price’s black-cloaked figure – are relevant to the movie, there’s far more that isn’t, and there’s a sense that a cast of thousands has been assembled to match the intensity of the material (completely unlikely, though, as a plan to shoot the Battle of Naseby was scrapped as it would involve hiring too many extras). And then there’s the typeface, underlined in red for no reason at the top, taking up the bottom fifth of the poster, and leading to the central images being squashed between the two. In short, it’s a messy, jumbled effort and does the movie it’s advertising no favours.

In the US it was a whole different ballgame (as it usually is). Co-producers on the movie, American International Pictures, wanted to play up the presence of Vincent Price and link it in to the various Edgar Allan Poe movies they’d produced earlier in the decade. Of course, Reeves’ tale of Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General takes place roughly two hundred years before Poe’s career made him famous, so there can’t be any kind of connection at all, but AIP were the kind of company that wouldn’t let a simple thing like an historical mismatch get in the way of selling a movie. And as for that title, well it’s not very witch-y, is it?

The title change does have a certain charm, and on its own it’s an ominous enough combination, but it doesn’t adequately reflect the content of the movie. The poster though, for all its adherence to the lie that this is an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe tale, gets much more right than its British predecessor. The admonition to stay home with your children if you’re too squeamish is straight out of low-budget horror movie marketing for the time, but for once, it’s not false advertising. Reeves’ approach to the material was to highlight the sadism and the cruelty of the period, and while the UK censors took umbrage at some of the scenes in the movie and they were removed, US viewers saw the movie in a version that was virtually intact. And instead of a pouting, disapproving-looking Price staring out at you, AIP went with a mangled skull with one eye still in place, its tousled, straw-like hair like roots growing out of the skull itself. It’s definitely an arresting image, and one that isn’t constrained by the more orderly typeface seen at the top left and along the bottom of the image. It’s also the kind of horrifying image you might see in an illustrated version of Poe’s stories, and not a tale of witch-hunting in 17th century England. But it works, almost completely, with the only caveat being that its depiction of the crosses Hopkins’ victims are tied to, don’t match up to those in the movie (and really, that’s just a minor gripe at best).

So, to be clear, AIP took a movie they’d co-financed, they changed the title, they made it look and sound like another of their Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, they added an image with no relevance to the content of the movie at all, and they did it with full awareness that they were misrepresenting their own movie. And yet – it works, and more powerfully than Tigon’s version. Maybe there’s a lesson in there, somewhere, but one thing’s for sure, sometimes artistic licence really is the way to go.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to comment.

10 Horror Sequels/Remakes to Avoid in 2017

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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2017, Horror, New movies, Previews, Remakes, Sequels

With Halloween and all things spooky just around the corner – unless you’re the BFI and you have the chance to screen John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween (1978), which you do, though not on 31 October, but on the 17th instead – here are ten horror movies you would do well to steer very, very clear of in 2017.

1 – Friday the 13th – After their dreadful remake of the original Friday the 13th (1980), back in 2009, Platinum Dunes try again with another version. Originally planned for release this year, the movie has been put back to October of next year, and with very little in the way of a plot or storyline to be had, this seems to be a production that’s either being made as part of a contractual obligation, or as another attempt at making a quick buck off of Jason Voorhees’s fan club.

2 – Rings – First there was the Japanese original, Ringu (1998), then the inevitable US remake, The Ring (2002), along with sequels from both countries. And now Sadako Yamamura is back, crawling out of another (the same?) well, and killing more people who’ve watched her doing so. The trailer for the movie shows events happening on board a plane, which begs the question: how is everyone on board going to receive a phone call seconds after the video has ended?

3 – World War Z 2 – The first movie started off strong then fell to pieces in its final third, but made enough money to (financially) warrant a sequel. Scheduling problems saw director J.A. Bayona leave the project early on, and little is known – surprise, surprise – about the plot except that it follows on directly from the first movie. Brad Pitt is back, but right now there’s no word on who will be joining him, and with so much up in the air at the moment, there’s a good chance that the movie won’t even see the light of day.

4 – Saw: Legacy – Proving yet again that if you’re making a horror movie series, and you include the words The Final Chapter in what is supposedly the last in the series, then all it means is that a further sequel will turn up eventually. Saw: Legacy is a continuation of the series, but one that nobody really wants or needs. With Jigsaw having been killed off long ago, let’s hope this one doesn’t get bogged down in trying to connect itself with previous outings, and tries at least to do something different, though the phrase, “Let’s play a game”, now seems a little ironic.

5 – Amityville: The Awakening – If ever there was a property that needed to be torn down and never built on again, then it’s 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. Not because of the terrible, tragic events that occurred there in November 1974, but because it might stop movie makers from flogging this particular cinematic dead horse (this is the ninth movie overall). That it’s attracted a crop of well-known names – Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gabriel Mann and Bella Thorne – might encourage some viewers, but with none of the previous entries having garnered much critical support between them, this is unlikely to be any different.

6 – Annabelle 2 – The first movie somehow managed to gross over $250m at the international box office, so a sequel was inevitable, but the basic plotline makes it all sound more confusing than it needs to be, as it seems to provide another origin story for the doll with the rosy cheeks. It’s in the hands of David F. Sandberg (Lights Out), but this is unlikely to stray too far from its The Conjuring roots to be any more effective or challenging (except maybe to watch).

7 – Suspiria – The original, superbly directed by Dario Argento, is a classic Italian horror, and a movie that is a perfect illustration of the phrase “lightning in a bottle”. Argento was never able to replicate or even come close to the power of his now-signature movie, and there’s no indication here that director Luca Guadagnino will manage to come close to it either. And as if to further handicap the movie’s chances of being anywhere near as good as the original, the producers have seen fit to hire Chloë Grace Moretz – a seriously bad move; haven’t they seen Carrie (2013)?

8 – Insidious: Chapter 4 – Another horror sequel where the basic plot is unknown (even to the makers?), this at least brings back Lin Shaye as troubled psychic Elise Rainier, so there’s a degree of quality attached to this movie, but with this many trips to the well already, the likelihood of returning scribe and creator Leigh Whannell fashioning anything really scary is limited. Consistently good box office returns have gotten the series this far, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

9 – Halloween: The Night Evil Died – With Laurie Strode no longer around to fend off or foil her tortured brother, Michael Myers, this outing (the eighth, ignoring Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1983) and the two sequels made by Rob Zombie) has no option but to fall back on the time honoured tradition of there being a wider family presence for Michael to kill in a variety of semi-cool ways. The series ran out of steam a long while back, and as with every other movie on the list, it seems that the producers haven’t caught on yet.

10 – Hellraiser: Judgment – It’s hard to believe perhaps – and especially because most of the previous entries have gone straight to video – but this will be the tenth Hellraiser movie, and in keeping with that particular milestone, much is being promised by writer/director Gary J. Tunnicliffe. But this has the air of a movie being made to ensure Dimension Films retain the franchise rights, and if history has anything to say about that particular motive, then this will be very disappointing indeed.

Mini-Review: The Greasy Strangler (2016)

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

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Big Brayden, Big Ronnie, Comedy, Disco, Drama, Elizabeth De Razzo, Horror, Jim Hosking, Michael St. Michaels, Murder, Sky Elobar, Thriller

D: Jim Hosking / 93m

Cast: Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar, Elizabeth De Razzo, Gil Gex, Joe David Walters, Abdoulaye NGom, Sam Dissanayake, Holland MacFallister, Mel Kohl

Big Ronnie (St. Michaels), an ex-disco entrepreneur back in the Seventies, lives with his middle-aged son, Big Brayden (Elobar). When they’re not bickering, they run a tour guide business where they show unsuspecting tourists various sites “supposedly” connected to the heyday of disco. Big Ronnie likes his food cooked in a lot of oil and grease, the oilier and greasier the better, because when he’s not chiding Big Brayden, or ripping off tourists, he’s the Greasy Strangler, a maniacal killer who has claimed several victims so far and whom the police are no nearer catching than when he started.

Big Ronnie and Big Brayden’s relationship is shaken up by the appearance of Janet (De Razzo). Much to Big Ronnie’s displeasure, Janet takes a shine to Big Brayden, and they begin dating. This makes Big Ronnie so angry that he claims more victims, including friends such as Oinker (Walters). Big Brayden begins to have his suspicions about the Greasy Strangler’s identity, and when Big Ronnie behaves “all smooth” and persuades Janet to be his girlfriend, the stage is set for a showdown between father and son, killer and self-appointed vigilante, that will (inevitably) change their lives forever – but not necessarily in a way that either could have foreseen.

Already being hailed as a cult favourite, and having a level of critical approval that most low-budget, indie horrors would themselves kill for, The Greasy Strangler is a funny, awful, side-splitting, appalling, blackly comic, dreadful movie that works very well in stretches but makes too much use of verbal and visual repetition to pad out its running time. Depending on your tolerance, conversations involving the phrase “bullshit artist” may prove to be annoying, as might seeing over and over again, Big Ronnie getting cleaned up in a car wash after a bout of killing as the Greasy Strangler. Co-writer/director Jim Hosking appears to be striving for some kind of banality here, a further example of the monotonous lives that Big Ronnie and Big Brayden live – they do little beyond the tours, eating together, and arguing – but it’s a device that soon wears out its welcome.

Alternatively, the movie is on firmer ground when it’s trying to be shocking and distasteful. Prosthetic penises and exploding eyeballs are the order of the day, and there’s a pleasing, sleazy Eighties vibe to it all (the special effects reflect the quality of the period). It’s also very funny in a “you shouldn’t really be laughing” kind of way, particularly in the ongoing war of attrition that makes for the relationship between Big Ronnie and Big Brayden; dysfunctional doesn’t even cover it. St. Michaels and Elobar are both excellent, pushing a number of physical and emotional boundaries in the script’s pursuit of ever more alienating content. Love ’em or want to get as far away from ’em as possible, Big Ronnie and Big Brayden are characters you won’t forget in a hurry, and the movie is on very firm ground when they’re on screen together.

Rating: 7/10 – a breath of welcome bad air in a year where few movies have dared to be different, The Greasy Strangler doesn’t always overcome its low-budget origins, but it does have a number of moments where the viewer will be thinking “No way“; bold in both tone and content, the movie never tries to be likeable or elicit sympathy for its lead characters, meaning it is what it is, and it’s entirely unapologetic about everything it depicts, which in this genre, is exactly what it should be doing.

Oh! the Horror! – The Darkness (2016) and Lights Out (2016)

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Anasazi, David F. Sandberg, Diana, Drama, Grand Canyon, Greg McLean, Horror, Kevin Bacon, Maria Bello, Radha Mitchell, Review, Teresa Palmer, Thriller

The Darkness (2016) / D: Greg McLean / 92m

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, David Mazouz, Lucy Fry, Matt Walsh, Jennifer Morrison, Parker Mack, Paul Reiser, Ming-Na Wen

In The Darkness, a family returns home from a trip to the Grand Canyon, unaware that their autistic son has released an ancient supernatural force that had been imprisoned in a secret Anasazi location. Once the feuding Taylors – dad Peter (Bacon), mum Bronny (Mitchell), teenage daughter Stephanie (Fry), and son Michael (Mazouz) – get settled back into the routine of sniping at each other and generally ignoring the fact that their combined behaviours are slowly tearing the family apart, the inevitable strange things start to happen. First, the taps in the kitchen turn on by themselves…

… and with that, any aspirations to be or do anything different for the remainder of the movie goes so far out of the window you’re not even sure if it’s landed anywhere. The Darkness is a shockingly bad amalgam of horror tropes and the supposed best bits from other horror movies. But in the main it’s Poltergeist (1982) that gets ripped off the most here, from the American Indian connection to the spiritual healer recommended to Peter by his boss (Reiser), and all the way to the portal that opens up in Michael’s bedroom.

With the script having been cobbled together by director Greg McLean, Shayne Armstrong and Shane Krause, the movie ambles along on creative life support before it reaches the end and gives up the ghost entirely. Along the way it attempts to add depth by giving the Taylors their own personal demons to face as well as the ones formerly held at bay by Anasazi rituals. Peter once had an affair (though of course it didn’t mean anything), Bronny has a history of alcohol abuse, and Stephanie is bulimic (though one trip to the doctor’s seems to sort that one out). Personal demons, supernatural demons – what has this poor misguided family done to deserve all this? (What’s that? The supernatural demons are metaphors? Oh, right…)

There’s no shortage of cringeworthy moments in The Darkness (though the demons going by the collective name of Jenny is probably the best/worst), and the cast appear to have given up quite early on – Bacon in particular looks like he’s wondering if he could drop a few scenes and thereby lessen his involvement – but it’s McLean’s lack of focus on both the performances and the material that hurts the movie the most. With the script on only nudging terms with credibility – and yes, this is a horror movie, and yes, credibility is often the first thing to go when one is being made – it still needed a firmer hand at the controls, but McLean, now a long, long way from the glory days of Wolf Creek (2005) just lets the movie drift to a unsatisfactory finish that is at least in keeping with how unsatisfactory the rest of the movie has been.

Rating: 3/10 – meh horror that lacks commitment from all concerned, and offers nothing new… at all; daft, confusing, muddled, and dramatically inert for long stretches, The Darkness will make you feel uneasy – but, sadly, not for the right reasons.

Lights Out (2016) / D: David F. Sandberg / 81m

Cast: Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Maria Bello, Billy Burke, Alicia Vela-Bailey, Andi Osho

Martin (Bateman) is a young boy whose stepfather is killed in a very violent fashion. His mother, Sophie (Bello), already on medication for depression, is acting strangely. She talks to someone called Diana (Vela-Bailey) who doesn’t appear to be real. But one night Martin sees the hand of an unnatural figure in his mother’s room. Scared, he finds it difficult to sleep properly, and instead, falls asleep at school. When this happens for a third time, and the school can’t get hold of Sophie, they contact his older sister, Rebecca (Palmer). Rebecca left home years before, shortly after her father (Sophie’s first husband) decided to leave for good himself. Rebecca looks after Martin, but thanks to the intervention of Child Services, isn’t allowed to do so full-time.

With the aid of her would-be boyfriend Bret (DiPersia), Rebecca finds herself quickly coming to terms with the fact that Diana is real – desite having died many years before – and needing to do something about the wraith’s deadly attacks on Martin and herself. Armed with the knowledge that Diana’s attacks only take place in the dark thanks to the extreme heliophobia she suffered from when she was alive, Rebecca and Martin take steps to protect themselves, and to get Sophie to admit that her childhood friendship with Diana is allowing the spectre to exist. But Diana has other plans…

Expanded on from his 2013 short movie of the same name, David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out is an efficient, no-nonsense horror thriller that takes its basic premise – lights on: no ghost, lights off: there it is – and finds various clever ways of keeping the central conceit from getting too stale too quickly, even at eighty-one minutes. While Diana’s back story only partially explains her reason for haunting Sophie and her family, and Diana herself isn’t quite as frightening as she’s meant to be, nevertheless, Sandberg succeeds in making her as credible a character (in the circumstances) as can be, and manages to achieve the same success with Sophie, Martin and Rebecca. Sandberg is helped by strong performances all round – Palmer is particularly good as Rebecca – and a script by Eric Heisserer that does its best in avoiding the pitfalls of dishing up too many horror movie clichés (though it does serve up two unsuspecting police officers as victims of Diana’s wrath, just to keep the momentum going).

The movie is strong on atmosphere, with certain scenes having a clammy, claustrophobic feel to them that isn’t entirely to do with the characters being in confined spaces, and Marc Spicer’s cinematography makes the darkness that surrounds the characters for most of the movie as threatening as possible thanks to some very good lighting choices and some expert framing. The look of the movie is of primary importance in how scary it is, and Sandberg provides viewers with a mix of generic visuals and heightened situations that is surprisingly uncomfortable to watch at times. It’s not entirely successful – Bret is a seriously one-note character, the basement of Sophie’s house conveniently reveals a secret that otherwise would never have been known, a confrontation with Sophie about Diana (and her death) features some very stilted and ill-chosen dialogue – but on the whole it’s a far better movie than expected.

Rating: 7/10 – a horror movie that dares to be different, and succeeds for the most part, Lights Out has a creepy central premise that’s handled well and makes for some effective jump scares (for a change); inevitably, a sequel has already been greenlit, but this is an effective, self-contained movie that stands on its own and proves that intelligence and horror can go hand in hand, and not just wave to each other in passing.

Monthly Roundup – September 2016

30 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Andrew Asper, Antoine Fuqua, Ben-Hur, Chris Pratt, Denzel Washington, Drama, Elizabeth Mitchell, Fantasy, Florence Foster Jenkins, Frank Grillo, George Montgomery, Ghostbusters (2016), Glenn R. Miller, Historical drama, Horror, Hugh Grant, Ione Butler, Jack Huston, James DeMonaco, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Meryl Streep, Paul Feig, Review, Richard Boone, Robbers' Roost, Sidney Salkow, Stephen Frears, The Magnificent Seven (2016), The Purge: Election Year, Thriller, Timur Bekmambetov, Toby Kebbell, Western, Zoombies

The Purge: Election Year (2016) / D: James DeMonaco / 109m

Cast: Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell, Mykelti Williamson, Joseph Julian Soria, Betty Gabriel, Terry Serpico, Edwin Hodge, Kyle Secor

Rating: 6/10 – several years after the events in The Purge: Anarchy (2014), ex-cop Leo Barnes (Grillo) is now head of security for Presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Mitchell) – whose anti-Purge stance has made her a significant target come the latest Purge night; more of the same from writer/director DeMonaco, with the villainous Founding Fathers coming in for more grief thanks to the series’ need to avoid repeating itself, but without it actually finding a solution to the problem, all of which leads to The Purge: Election Year sounding good on paper, but proving instead that it’s an idea that’s already running out of steam.

Ben-Hur (2016) / D: Timur Bekmambetov / 125m

Cast: Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell, Rodrigo Santoro, Nazanin Boniadi, Ayelet Zurer, Pilou Asbæk, Morgan Freeman, Sofia Black-D’Elia

Rating: 3/10 – meh; a waste of time, money, resources, the cast, the crew, and another unwanted remake which ruins the one thing it should have moved Heaven and Earth to ensure it got right: yes, the chariot race, a sequence that’s assembled and edited so badly that you won’t have any idea what happens to Messala (Kebbell) other than that he loses.

Robbers’ Roost (1955) / D: Sidney Salkow / 83m

Cast: George Montgomery, Richard Boone, Sylvia Findley, Bruce Bennett, Peter Graves, Tony Romano, Warren Stevens

Rating: 6/10 – revenge is on the mind of cowboy Jim Wall (Montgomery) as he tries to track down the killers of his wife, some of whom he suspects may be part of a notorious gang of cattle rustlers led by Hank Hays (Boone); an average Western bolstered by a strong cast, Robbers’ Roost is rough and tough and bristling with repressed macho energy, all of which is channelled – eventually – into a less than exciting showdown, and an about-face by Hays that undermines both the character, and Boone’s enjoyable portrayal of him.

Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) / D: Stephen Frears / 111m

Cast: Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Rebecca Ferguson, Nina Arianda, Stanley Townsend, Allan Corduner, Christian McKay, David Haig, John Sessions, Brid Brennan

Rating: 7/10 – the true story of musically misguided socialite Florence Foster Jenkins (Streep) as she determines to bring her less than gifted voice to the unsuspecting ears of the public; as light and fluffy as a soufflé (and as enjoyable), Florence Foster Jenkins tries to be serious from time to time, but nothing can detract from Florence’s whimsical nature or the script’s determination to be nicer than nice, even when it needs to be a tad dramatic, such as when Florence’s husband (a terrific Hugh Grant) is shown to be having an affair, or Florence faces jeers rather than cheers from her audience.

The Magnificent Seven (2016) / D: Antoine Fuqua / 133m

Cast: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Peter Sarsgaard, Haley Bennett, Luke Grimes, Matt Bomer

Rating: 4/10 – a land-grabbing, thieving, murdering businessman (Sarsgaard) plays nasty with the small town of Rose Creek and threatens to ruin them all, leaving them with only one choice: to hire a band of mercenaries who’ll save the town and defeat the evil land baron; leaden and uninspired, Fuqua’s remake features characters you don’t care about, a huge body count that quickly becomes tedious to watch, and a cast that move about like they’re wading in treacle searching for some much needed motivation (not that they’re likely to find any, as it’s something the script isn’t interested in exploring in any real depth).

Zoombies (2016) / D: Glenn R. Miller / 87m

Cast: Ione Butler, Andrew Asper, LaLa Nestor, Kim Nielsen, Marcus Anderson, Brianna Joy Chomer, Ivan Djurovic, Aaron Groben, Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau

Rating: 3/10 – somehow monkeys become infected with a virus that brings on zombie-like symptoms, and before you can shout “No, don’t open the door!”, they’re loose in the grounds of a massive zoo just days before it opens to the public; rubbish on a bargain basement level, Zoombies is lame in so many ways you’d need more time than the movie plays for to go through it all – and that’s if you can at least stomach the movie’s incessant inanity, and it’s seriously worst-ever gorilla suit.

Ghostbusters (2016) / D: Paul Feig / 116m

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Chris Hemsworth, Neil Casey, Michael Kenneth Williams, Matt Walsh, Andy Garcia, Cecily Strong, Ed Begley Jr, Charles Dance

Rating: 3/10 – more meh; a perfect example of just how out of tune some movie makers are when it comes to remakes, Ghostbusters is so lame it makes Ghostbusters II (1989) look like a masterpiece of comic horror fantasy, and labours consistently under the impression that if you put four comediennes together in the same room, instant hilarity will be the result – an idea that this farrago lays to rest speedily thanks to Feig and Katie Dippold’s creatively moribund screenplay (and let’s try to forget the awful cameos from Murray, Weaver, Ackroyd, and Hudson).

The Girl With All the Gifts (2016)

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Colm McCarthy, Drama, Fungal infection, Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close, Horror, Hungries, Literary adaptation, M.R. Carey, Paddy Considine, Review, Sennia Nanua, Thriller

D: Colm McCarthy / 111m

Cast: Sennia Nanua, Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Anamaria Marinca, Fisayo Akinade, Anthony Welsh, Dominique Tipper

In the future, humanity has been infected by a variety of fungus known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. Victims lose the power to think and reason, and the basic need to eat living flesh becomes paramount. For this reason, the victims are called Hungries. But they won’t eat each other, only those who aren’t infected, and with the infection being passed on through blood and saliva, it’s even more important not to get bitten. Civilisation is in ruins, and what few survivors there are, are holed up in places like the army base located somewhere outside London. It’s here that the army, apparently under the command of Sgt. Parks (Considine), is working with a scientific team led by Dr Caroline Caldwell (Close), in an effort to find a cure for the fungal infection. Their best hope? Synthesizing an antidote from the brains and spinal columns of children who are second generation Hungries.

Second generation Hungries – children born with the infection – are able to think and reason but still hunger for flesh. There’s around twenty of them at the base, all kept in cells, and all kept in restraints when they attend their “schooling”. Their teacher, Helen Justineau (Arterton), is well-liked but naïve. She has a “class” favourite, Melanie (Nanua). Melanie is ten years old and very intelligent, even though she has no experience of the outside world, and she dotes on Helen as a surrogate mother. Meanwhile, Dr Caldwell is working her way through the children, using them (and then disposing of them) in her efforts to find a cure.

Inevitably, the base is overrun. In the melee that follows, Melanie saves Helen from being attacked, and they in turn are saved, unwittingly, by Sgt. Parks in an armoured vehicle. They, along with Dr Caldwell and two privates, Dillon (Welsh) and Gallagher (Akinade), escape into the nearby countryside. Their aim is to get to another base called the Beacon, but in order to do so, they find themselves having to travel through a Hungry-infested London, and having to rely on Melanie to help get them through…

At no point in The Girl With All the Gifts is the word zombie used or referred to. But this is clearly a movie featuring zombies, and there’s a significant amount of zombie carnage going on, but M.R. Carey’s adaptation of his novel of the same name isn’t really interested in all that. It’s an important part of the narrative, certainly, but the focus here is on watching Melanie become self-aware, and what that will ultimately mean for the non-Hungries she’s travelling with. As she learns more and more about the world she’s a part of, Carey’s best trick is to let Caldwell – so intent on doing good and saving the world – provide the impetus for the irrevocable choice that Melanie makes at the end of the movie (you’ll have to see the movie to find out what that is).

Along the way, Melanie’s interactions with Parks and Helen – her default step-parents, if you like – allows her to become more emotionally aware as well. Her initial doting on Helen, a young child’s needy infatuation, becomes more intense and more meaningful. Likewise, Parks’ simmering mistrust of Melanie and her motives gives way to mutual respect and trust, and Melanie learns from this as well. And when Gallagher is in danger from a group of feral Hungry children, it’s Melanie’s liking for him as an older brother that prompts her to insist they rescue him. All Melanie wants is to have a family around her, and even Caldwell fits into the mix as a grandmother figure. And thanks to the clarity and consideration found in Carey’s script, this need is defined without coming across as too laboured or too obvious.

It’s the personal relationships that anchor the movie, along with McCarthy’s strong, confident direction (all the more impressive for this being only his second feature), Kristian Milsted’s bleak yet arresting production design, and an eerie, unsettling score courtesy of Cristobal Tapia de Veer. With zombie movies virtually ten a penny these days, and with most looking to stand out from the crowd by virtue of any gimmicky concept they can come up with e.g. Zoombies (2016), The Girl With All the Gifts avoids such narrative and structural conceits by playing it completely straight and by applying studious attention to the details (though that’s not to say the script gets it right all the time; there are a handful of decisions made by the characters that don’t always add up).

The performances too are a major plus. Arterton, an actress whose career has never really taken off in the way that may have been expected, plays Helen with a quiet, sincere focus that gives the character a surprising depth. Considine is on equally fine form, Parks’ initial animosity toward Melanie giving way to the already mentioned respect, and the actor revealing an emotional quality to the character that could so easily have been overlooked. Close has the toughest role, as Caldwell’s single-minded pursuit of a cure creates more problems than it does answers, and leaves the character perilously near to being one-dimensional. But Close avoids this by imbuing Caldwell with an awareness of the cost to herself from her actions.

But this is Nanua’s movie. She gives such a finely nuanced performance that it’s hard to believe that this is her feature debut. As Melanie develops both emotionally and in terms of her relationships with the adults around her, Nanua displays a maturity that is quite impressive for her age, and her understanding of Melanie’s needs and desires is often very affecting. She tempers this with a no-nonsense, direct approach that matches the mood of the movie, and which allows her to dominate the scenes she’s in, making her more than a match for her more experienced co-stars. Wherever her career takes her, Nanua is off to a very good start, and her portrayal here is award worthy.

Rating: 8/10 – a post-apocalyptic thriller that boasts a clutch of very good performances and a tremendous sense of time and place, The Girl With All the Gifts is a surprisingly effective, and affecting, movie that breathes new life into a mostly moribund genre; it may not be the prettiest movie to watch, and it doesn’t shy away from being uncompromising when needed, but this is a genuinely rewarding movie that shouldn’t be missed.

Welcome to the World of High Concept/Low Return – Don’t Breathe (2016) and The Shallows (2016)

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Blake Lively, Blind man, Drama, Dylan Minnette, Fede Alvarez, Home invasion, Horror, Jane Levy, Jaume Collet-Serra, Medical student, Mexico, Murder, Review, Robbery, Seagull, Shark, Stephen Lang, Surfing, Thriller

Don’t Breathe (2016) / D: Fede Alvarez / 89m

Cast: Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Stephen Lang, Daniel Zovatto, Franciska Töröcsik

You can hear the pitch even now: “What if these thieves tried to steal a lot of money from someone, and that someone was blind and he trapped them in his house and turned the tables on them?” A grateful production executive greenlights the project in seconds, and sometime later, the finished project is hitting screens with all the fanfare required of an original thriller (Don’t Breathe is being advertised and touted as a horror movie. It’s not; but more of that later.)

However, the grateful production executive clearly abdicated any responsibility for the project once he gave it the go-ahead. If he hadn’t, then maybe he could have insisted that the basic storyline, the marginally interesting characters, and the increasingly silly narrative be better developed before filming began. Sadly, it wasn’t, and the intriguing pitch that started everything off goes nowhere fast before throwing itself head first into the Comedy Zone in its last twenty minutes.

Every year the critics – and audiences – latch on to a movie they believe is a cut above the rest when it comes to other thrillers/horror movies/comedies etc. Don’t Breathe is one such movie, but as it does so little to justify its elevated importance, it’s tempting to wonder if the critics – and audiences – have seen a completely different cut of the movie; and if they have, why aren’t we allowed to see it? The basic premise is somewhat intriguing – three delinquents, Rocky, Alex and Money (Levy, Minnette, Zovatto), decide to go for broke on their next robbery/home invasion, but come up against a blind man whose resourcefulness (and unnerving ability to be in the wrong place at the right time) puts them in a life or (mostly) death situation.

Alvarez is a rising star in the horror firmament, and his remake of Evil Dead (2013) was better than expected. But here he’s in classic thriller territory, with a group of “innocents” being pursued by a relentless killer (Lang’s preternatural blind man), and finding themselves pushed beyond their limits. And though Alvarez is undoubtedly talented, here it’s obvious that he doesn’t have any answers when a script breaks its own rules – repeatedly. The blind man is referred to as an Army veteran, and because he’s played by Lang, we know he’s going to be a hard man to beat. But where a blind person’s other senses are often enhanced, here they come and go on a whim and a prayer. One minute he can hear extremely well, enough to pinpoint someone’s position in a ventilation system, the next he can’t hear a heavily wounded Minnette sneak up on him.

The problem with Don’t Breathe is that it wants to be a thrill ride with bloody (but non-horror) moments, but it forgets to add the thrills. A string of attempts to escape the house are repeatedly set up for Rocky and Alex to fail (Money exits stage left early on), and the plot’s major “twist” seems at first to be “great”, but it’s more of a way to keep the plot from collapsing in on itself (and pad out what would otherwise be a pretty meagre running time). In the end, the script, by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, runs out of steam and values unfortunate laughs over the muted tension it’s achieved earlier on. And as for the coda, well, let’s just say that clumsy is as clumsy does, and the end of the movie is very, very clumsy indeed.

Rating: 5/10 – with no one to care about or root for, Don’t Breathe becomes an exercise in soulless thriller tropes that let’s down the viewer continually once the blind man makes his presence felt; notwithstanding an eerie sequence in the basement when the lights go out, and some excellent production design, the movie will have long-standing fans of the sub-genre yawning at the absurdity and hamfisted nature of it all.

The Shallows (2016) / D: Jaume Collet-Serra / 86m

Cast: Blake Lively, Óscar Jaenada, Angelo José Lozano Corzo, José Manuel Trujillo Salas, Brett Cullen, Sedona Legge, Diego Espejel

As with Don’t Breathe, you can hear the pitch just as clearly: “What if a surfer, a lone woman even, gets trapped on a rock two hundred yards from land, but can’t get there because there’s a huge great shark stopping her?” And once again, a grateful production executive greenlights the project in seconds, and sometime later, the finished project is hitting screens with all the fanfare required of an original thriller. And yet…

The problem with The Shallows, however, is that, like Don’t Breathe, you don’t get a chance to really care about the main character, Nancy (Lively). We get to spend an awful lot of time with her, and while her predicament is scary enough on its own, it isn’t really enough in general terms for it all to work as well and as harmoniously as it would like. We get some back story – Nancy’s making a pilgrimage to the beach her mother, who has died recently, fell in love with twenty-five years before – but it’s very perfunctory and serves to pad out the script at the movie’s beginning. Then we have an extended section that shows just how good a surfer Blake Lively’s stunt double is, before Nancy’s leg gets chomped on and she makes it to the rock (along with an injured seagull).

And then the movie does something unforgivable: it makes Nancy’s predicament boring to watch. As if realising that having its heroine stranded on a rock with nowhere to go isn’t quite as cinematic as it hoped, the movie brings in a drunken Mexican (and brings back two surfers from earlier on), and serves them up to the shark as a way of re-engaging the audience’s interest (the drunkard’s death is particularly nonsensical, and any viewer who doesn’t hang their head in despair at the way in which he goes to his death, should give up now if they think it makes any sense whatsoever). Then it’s full speed ahead to the final showdown, Nancy vs shark, and the kind of over the top outcome that provokes laughter instead of relief.

After a string of uneven yet mostly effective thrillers starring Liam Neeson – Unknown (2011), Non-Stop (2014), Run All Night (2015) – Collet-Serra seems unable to do anything positive with Anthony Jaswinski’s tension-free script. From the decision to shoot most of the movie against a green screen (making most shots and scenes look false and oddly lit), to failing to address issues of continuity (how do the two surfers fail to see the drunkard’s remains on the beach when they come back?), Collet-Serra allows the fractured narrative to play out with barely an attempt at tightening things up, or avoiding treating the viewer like a numpty (sure, you can “stitch” a bite wound with just a couple of pieces of jewellery and not bleed out – no problem).

As the injured yet resourceful Nancy, Lively is a good enough actress that she can overcome some of the more bizarre decisions her character makes – resetting a seagull’s dislocated wing, anyone? – but for most of the time she’s either yelling in pain or shouting for help. Some of the earlier scenes are geared around showing off her figure, and there’s a particularly gratuitous surfboard-cam cleavage shot that adds nothing to the sequence it appears in, but as the movie progresses she keeps covered up and her predicament is kept to the fore – until the end when she’s required to strip back down to her bikini. We may be in the twenty-first century but in certain regards, it seems, the times they aren’t a-changin’ (or are ever likely to).

Rating: 4/10 – a thriller that plays out by the odd numbers alone, The Shallows does everything it can to fall short of expectations and commitment; with its unhappy use of CGI, and an overbearing score courtesy of Marco Beltrami, it’s a movie that brings apathy and indifference to the table in ever increasing portions.

Trailers – Christine (2016), Nocturnal Animals (2016) and Annabelle 2 (2017)

15 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Amy Adams, Annabelle 2, Antonio Campos, Christine, David F. Sandberg, Drama, Horror, Jake Gyllenhaal, Literary adaptation, Miranda Otto, Previews, Rebecca Hall, Suicide, Tom Ford, Trailers, True story, TV reporter

Thankfully, Christine is not an unwanted, unexpected remake of the 1983 John Carpenter movie about a haunted car, but instead the true life tale of a haunted woman, Christine Chubbuck. Chubbuck was a US TV news reporter working in Florida during the late Sixties, early Seventies. She battled depression and suicidal thoughts before killing herself live on TV in July 1974. In telling her story, director Antonio Campos and screenwriter Craig Shilowich have created a compelling, richly detailed account of Chubbuck’s life and struggle with her personal demons, and the movie features what many critics are already describing as a “career-best” performance from Rebecca Hall. From the trailer we can see that the era when Chubbuck was alive has been painstakingly recreated, and that the cinematography by Joe Anderson is an integral part of what makes the movie look and feel so fresh and nostalgic at the same time. A tragic tale, to be sure, but Christine seems keen to be true to Chubbuck’s awkward yet painfully endearing persona, and which also doesn’t appear to shrink from exploring the “issues” that led to her untimely death at the age of just twenty-nine.

Based on the novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright, Nocturnal Animals is Tom Ford’s first movie since A Single Man (2009). A movie that features a narrative full of twists and turns, it sees Amy Adams’ art gallery owner apparently threatened by the existence of a novel written by her ex-husband (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). The novel reads like a revenge tale, a way of his getting back at her for something she did to him that was really terrible. She recognises herself in the story, and comes to believe that he’s written it deliberately to make her afraid that the story will come true. Adams, after her disappointing turns in the likes of Big Eyes (2014) and the less than stellar DC outings involving Superman, here gets to grip with a meaty, dramatic role that better suits her abilities than having to play second fiddle to a green screen. But it’s still, first and foremost, a Tom Ford movie: stylish, elliptical in places, and beautifully lensed by Seamus McGarvey, making it a feast for the senses as well as the intellect.

The inclusion here of the first, teaser trailer for a sequel to a spin-off movie that nobody really wanted, is, on the face of it, a little strange in itself (the original didn’t even merit inclusion in the Monthly Roundup it should have been a part of; yes, it’s that bad). But three things warrant giving the trailer for Annabelle 2 the equivalent of a hall pass: one, that’s Miranda Otto holding the cross, an actress who rarely makes bad movies; two, its director is David F. Sandberg, fresh from his success as the main creative force behind Lights Out (2016); and three, it keeps things commendably brief and doesn’t rely on a manufactured jump scare to get you, well… jumping out of your seat. These may not be enough to stop the movie from being as bad as its predecessor, but for the moment, this is one teaser trailer which understands that, when it comes to horror, less really is more.

I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016)

12 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Billy O'Brien, Christopher Lloyd, Clayton, Dan Wells, Drama, Funeral home, Horror, Laura Fraser, Literary adaptation, Max Records, Murders, Review, Serial killer, Sociopath

D: Billy O’Brien / 103m

Cast: Max Records, Christopher Lloyd, Laura Fraser, Christina Baldwin, Karl Geary, Dee Noah, Lucile Lawton, Anna Sundberg, Raymond Brandstrom, Michael Paul Levin

Welcome to the small US town of Clayton where the mutilated remains of one of the townsfolk ends up at the Cleaver-run funeral home. It’s actually the second such corpse to end up there, but the owner, April Cleaver (Fraser), isn’t too happy about the boost in business – given the circumstances. The same can’t be said for her son, John (Records), who views (literally) the bodies with a kind of excitement. Which isn’t surprising, as John has been recently diagnosed as a sociopath.

John ticks all the boxes for incipient sociopathy: bedwetting, pyromania and animal cruelty, but he’s self-aware and has a set of rules that he follows in order that he doesn’t act out on his violent impulses. He has a friend, Max (Brandstrom),

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