The Cured (2017)

19 Thursday Oct 2017

Tags

David Freyne, Drama, Ellen Page, Horror, Ireland, Maze Virus, Review, Sam Keeley, Thriller, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Zombies

D: David Freyne / 95m

Cast: Ellen Page, Sam Keeley, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Stuart Graham, Paula Malcomson, Oscar Nolan

In the near future, the Maze Virus has almost caused the end of civilisation as we know it. In Ireland it has affected three quarters of the population, with millions having been turned into slavering, flesh-hungry zombies. However, a cure has been found, and it’s been administered to all the sufferers, but only around seventy-five per cent of the affected have responded positively to the cure. Now, they’re back to something resembling normal: they no longer want to eat human flesh, they don’t have to worry about the virus reasserting itself, and they are being allowed to reintegrate back into the society that only a short while ago was hunting them down and exterminating them. But there’s a catch, an unforeseen side effect of the cure: they remember everything they did, everyone they killed and ate, while they were affected.

This proves particularly troublesome for Senan (Keeley), a young man who upon his release from a military quarantine, is allowed to move into the home of his widowed sister-in-law, Abbie (Page). Abbie’s husband (and Senan’s brother) has been missing since the outbreak, but Senan knows what happened to him, a secret he shares with fellow survivor Conor (Vaughan-Lawlor). As more and more of the recently cured attempt to pick up their lives where they left off, they find themselves encountering prejudice and discrimination at every turn, with only Abbie and a research scientist at the military quarantine, Dr Lyons (Malcomson) (who is looking for a cure that will work for all the affected) providing any support amongst the uninfected. With growing animosity towards them, the cured seek to secure their rights as human beings, but through the kind of insurgency that the country has historically had to deal with. With Conor taking the fight to the authorities, Senan’s loyalty to Conor is called to account as he tries to protect Abbie and her son, and his nephew, Cillian (Nolan). But Conor has a darker plan than just fighting for the rights of the cured…

A fresh twist on the zombie movie, The Cured does what all the best zombie movies do: it tells its story against a recognisable social and political backdrop, and adopts a measure of gloomy sincerity that grounds the material even as it makes it overly serious. There’s very little time or room for humour here, as David Freyne’s debut feature paints a terrifying portrait of a period where social order nearly collapsed and four years of bloodthirsty savagery has left deep, unimaginable scars on a nation’s psyche. The cured, it’s made clear, aren’t to be trusted. Worse still, they’re figures of fear, shunned by the majority of the uninfected who show little faith in the idea of an effective and non-reversible cure. With two previous reintegrations having failed, it’s no wonder the cured are required to report to the military each week, as if they were on probation. Freyne, working from his own script, shows the worry and the anxiety shown on both sides, as distrust builds between them and Conor seeks to exploit the concerns of the cured while focusing on his own agenda.

The political backdrop is perhaps inevitable given Ireland’s troubled history, and Freyne charts a clear allegorical course through the narrative that adds depth to the drama and a layer of inevitable tension in the movie’s latter stages. Some of it is simplistic in nature, but it’s carried off with a great deal of style which helps immensely as the style on show is somewhat grungy and dimly lit (which isn’t a bad thing, as Piers McGrail’s cinematography will attest). Page’s character is an American whose place in Ireland is neatly ascribed to a mix of the personal (her son) and the political (US restrictions on travellers from countries with infected populations). She’s also a journalist who can anticipate what’s going to happen, but in one of the movie’s few stumbles, is instructed to forget the potential for a new outbreak and attend the opening of a new McDonalds instead. It’s at moments like these that allegory mixes well with fatalism, and the future becomes increasingly bleaker and bleaker.

Away from the political and social upheaval, the relationship between Senan and Conor is given plenty of room to grow, and Freyne uses it to explore the nature of their connection before they were cured. This connection is one of the movie’s better ideas, and is used sparingly but effectively to show both how bad things were, and how much worse they will be if Conor gets his way. Senan is wracked by guilt at what he did while infected, but Conor is willing to re-embrace the monster he became. Senan is desperate to retain every last ounce of his humanity, and is wracked by nightmares. Conor allows himself to be subsumed by anger and a lust for personal power, discarding his own humanity out of a misguided sense of injustice. Freyne keeps their personal dynamic at the heart of the movie, and though it’s often at the expense of Abbie and her journey toward an unwanted revelation, it’s more than effective thanks to committed and sincere performances from Keeley and Vaughan-Lawlor.

Freyne also finds time and space to offer moments of genuine horror and pathos, and provides a well staged, and convincing breakdown of law and order in the movie’s final stretch that belies the movie’s low budget. And like an increasing number of movies these days, there are plenty of well placed and very loud sound effects to facilitate a number of (mostly) successful jump scares, but these aren’t really needed thanks to the morbid atmosphere that’s already been created at the beginning. With Freyne threading notions of loss and grief into the already gloomy narrative, there’s as much to think about in The Cured as there is to take in visually. This is an intelligent, and intelligently handled, zombie movie that stumbles only occasionally, but when it does it’s not enough to derail the momentum that it builds up quite skilfully and to such credible effect.

Rating: 8/10 – easily one of the better zombie movies released in recent years, The Cured is a thoughtful, well crafted movie that is confidently handled by its writer/director; with an emotional core that helps anchor the tragedy at the movie’s forefront, this is a horror movie that works on several levels and all with a great deal of aplomb.

NOTE: There’s no trailer for The Cured available at the moment. When there is it’ll be added here.

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)

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)

Monthly Roundup – March 2017

01 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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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.

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

12 Sunday Mar 2017

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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.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

13 Sunday Mar 2016

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Burr Steers, Drama, Elizabeth Bennet, Horror, Jane Austen, Lena Headey, Lily James, Literary adaptation, Mr. Darcy, Parody, Regency England, Review, Sam Riley, Seth Grahame-Smith, Thriller, Zombies

D: Burr Steers / 102m

Cast: Lily James, Sam Riley, Matt Smith, Jack Huston, Bella Heathcote, Douglas Booth, Lena Headey, Sally Phillips, Charles Dance, Ellie Bamber, Millie Brady, Suki Waterhouse

From the 1814 Alternate Universe Almanac, 21 January:

Revealed to a waiting world with all the fanfare that the firm of Butan, McKittrick, Oliver, Portman, Savitch, Shearmur & Thompson can muster, these kindly souls have enjoined us to a world that has no equal or predecessor in the annals of the flickering image. Miss Jane Austen’s latest novel, published to great acclaim last year, has been fashioned into a drab, humourless affair that strains the credulity of every right-thinking person in the land, and which purports to imagine an England overrun by an army of the dead.

Preposterous you may say, and this author would heartily agree with you. Concocted with a clear disdain for the exquisite talent of Miss Austen, Mr. Burr Steers and Mr. Seth Grahame-Smith – both Americans, no doubt – have taken her sterling work and made a mockery of its literary merits by inserting strange creatures that resemble vampires, but with the exception that they seek flesh to eat rather than blood to drink. It is not uncommon to find examples of this kind of unabashed traducery made as low entertainment for the masses, but it is for the more discerning viewer of these “tragedies” to be of one voice with his equally appalled brethren and shout loudly, “No more! No more repellent travesties created to provide succour for the poor in spirit and the easily tempted! No more!”

A crueller distraction could no more be found than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The subtlety of Miss Austen’s prose is retained for the most part, but be not gladdened by this admission, for it is used in such a paltry way that readers familiar with Miss Austen’s work will be distraught at the way in which emphasis is abandoned in favour of recitation, and her characters speak as if they had not the wit to understand their own utterances. It is a folly to assume that Mr. Steers and Mr. Grahame-Smith have generated this debacle with any concern for the respect Miss Austen’s work has accrued since her debut some two years ago. While it can be said that the settings they have chosen give some degree of pleasure to the eye, as do the ladies chosen to portray the Bennet sisters, it is nevertheless an endeavour that lacks finesse, and proves of little consequence once experienced from beginning to end.

Be warned: the inclusion of “zombies” marks a low point in our nation’s proud literary and (short-lived) zoetropic history. What possible good can come of this exhibition’s existence it’s doubtful anyone will be able to determine, and this august periodical can see no reason for its existence beyond a scurrilous and repugnant attempt to separate the hoi polloi from what little earnings they make – earnings that would no doubt be put to better use in the purchase of potatoes for the nurturing of their families. For make no mistake, here is no nurturing of the mind or the finer senses to be gained from viewing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It is an ill-conceived distraction, filled with moments that are both violent and reprehensible, and which paint such a dismal alternative to the beauteous world we live in that one must question the motives of the men and women who have found this a suitable piece to put before the public.

There can be no doubt that the assembly called upon to inhabit the various roles Miss Austen went to great pains to construct – and with such great artistry – have little to offer in terms of imagination or grace. Special mention must go to the esteemed Mr. Dance, an actor of such renown that his presence here is difficult to fathom, surrounded as he is by artists who lack the graces God gave them to fully articulate the feelings and emotions that occupy our hearts and minds on each and every blessed day of our existence. That Miss Austen wrote of romantic involvement with such subtlety and perspicacity appears to have been put aside in favour of feeble declarations of ardour, declarations that carry the barest weight of conviction.

In conclusion, the efforts of Mr. Steers and Mr. Grahame-Smith have proved to be of such a disservice to those of us who champion the potential of the zoetropic arts that we would be forever indebted to them if they refrained from making any further assaults on our senses. Let us say again: “No more!”

Rating: 3/10 – a dire movie that plods along in search of a reason to exist (like its titular creatures perhaps), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sounds like a great twist on an old classic, but in truth is uncomfortable to watch as a period piece, and as a horror movie; when the zombies have more personality – and evoke more sympathy – than your main characters, then you have a movie that’s in trouble in more ways than one, and this movie courts trouble like an aging Lothario looking to impress one young woman too many.

Oh! the Horror! – Old 37 (2015) and Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alan Smithee, Ambulance, Bill Moseley, Christopher Landon, Comedy, David Koechner, Epidemic, Gruesome murders, Horror, Joey Morgan, Kane Hodder, Lawrence of Alabia, Logan Miller, Murder, Olivia Alexander, Review, Sarah Dumont, Scouts, Thriller, Tye Sheridan, Zombies

Old 37 (2015) / D: Alan Smithee / 80m

Cast: Kane Hodder, Bill Moseley, Caitlin Harris, Olivia Alexander, Brandi Cyrus, Margaret Keane Williams, Robert Bogue, Sascha Knopf, Jake Robinson, Devon Spence, Kenneth Simmons, Catherine Blades

Anyone who read my review of The Vatican Tapes (2015) will, hopefully, remember my comment that “watching contemporary horror movies is a pastime perfectly suited for the unabashed masochist”. Having now watched Old 37 in the same week, I feel I ought to count myself as one of those armchair hopefuls, and the trauma of having seen two dreadful horror movies just days apart is prompting me to rethink seeing any more of them in the foreseeable future.

By now you’ll have guessed that Old 37 is pretty bad, but that description is just skimming the surface of how awful it all is. One very big clue is the name of the credited director, Alan Smithee, the pseudonym directors use when they no longer want their names attached to the movies they’ve made (directors who’ve done this include Dennis Hopper, Arthur Hiller, Rick Rosenthal and Stuart Rosenberg, and it’s the regular name used by Michael Mann when his movies are edited for TV). Here, the unhappy director in question is Christian Winters, and it doesn’t take long for the viewer to realise he made exactly the right choice.

From its opening in 1977 with bogus paramedic Jimmy (Simmons) being watched by his two young sons, Darryl and Jon Roy, as he kills the female victim of a road accident and then licks the blood from one of her wounds, to its modern day setting and close look at the life of teen Amy and her “friends”, who like nothing more than getting themselves involved in road accidents where someone dies and they refuse to take any responsibility, Old 37 takes so many left turns and diversions in its attempt to tell a coherent story that most viewers will probably give up trying to follow the “narrative” quite early on. The script, by Paul Travers and Joe Landes (and based on a dream Travers had), is frankly, a hodgepodge of scenes that barely connect with each other, and which at times can have no other reason for being there other than to pad out the otherwise meagre running time.

It’s too ludicrous in too many places, from the subplot involving Amy’s breast enlargement, where she appears to have the operation and leave the hospital on the same day (and in a tight-fitting top), to the adult Jon Roy (Hodder) wearing a mask over his lower face to hide a disfigurement, one that, when revealed, makes him look more goofy than horrific. One of the characters is burnt alive but makes a comeback later on, Amy’s mother proves to have an “inappropriate” boyfriend, the idea of “Old 37” is abandoned in favour of a revenge plot, and any attempts at credibility are suffocated at birth. The acting is atrocious, with special mention going to Moseley, who can’t inject menace into any of the threats Darryl makes, and Alexander as the acid-tongued Brooke, a role that grates from the moment the actress tries for bitchy but ends up as merely petulant.

Rating: 2/10 – with so many unforced errors in the script, and what remains proving the result of very poor judgment on the writers’ part, Old 37 is horrific for all the wrong reasons, and isn’t helped by some very poor performances; a waste of everyone’s time, and best avoided by anyone who’s even halfway considering watching this – no, really, avoid it.

Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015) / D: Christopher Landon / 93m

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller, Joey Morgan, Sarah Dumont, Halston Sage, David Koechner, Cloris Leachman, Lukas Gage, Niki Koss

With Old 37 reinforcing the idea that low budget horror movies should be avoided at all costs (but not all of them, of course), it’s with a great deal of relief that Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse shows just how good a low budget horror movie can be. The difference? Well, actually, there are several. Here, the story – simple as it is – makes sense most of the time, and what narrative inconsistencies there are, aren’t so bad that they hurt the movie or bring the viewer up short. The performances are solid, and there’s a great sense of camaraderie between Sheridan, Miller and Morgan (and Dumont as well) that gives the movie an emotional core that isn’t always found in such movies. And Landon doesn’t allow the absurdity of the storyline to overwhelm the dramatic elements, keeping the more fanciful or gross out moments sufficiently in check (the trampoline sequence is a great case in point).

By mixing absurdist humour with lashings of latex and well-integrated CGI gore, the script – by Carrie Evans, Emi Mochizuki, and Landon – strikes a delicate balance between the two, as well as including a handful of heartfelt moments to offset the seriousness of the group’s predicament. It’s this “human focus” that aids the movie tremendously, and keeps the viewer rooting for the scouts and their stripper – sorry, cocktail waitress – comrade. There’s also the ongoing fate of their scout leader, played by Koechner, a dogged, determined man for whom the real downside of being a zombie is that he has even less respect than when he was alive/human.

While the quartet try to find the whereabouts of a secret party that Ben’s not-so secret crush (Sage) has gone to, the zombie hordes increase and in amongst the head blasting and the physical humour there are some nice visual flourishes, like the signpost that says Haddonfield is forty miles away, or the zombie whose T-shirt says YOLO. It’s little moments like these that add to the innate fun of the situation, and if you’re not amused by the idea of zombie cats (see above), then this really isn’t the movie for you.

The movie treads this fine line because between comedy and horror with relative ease (though some one-liners fall flat), and as the stakes increase for our merit badge warriors, the movie sees fit to put them increasingly in harms way, and to the point where you begin to suspect that one of them might not make it through either intact or alive. And when Augie (Morgan) reveals he’s put together a homemade bomb (“What are you, the Taliban?”), it’s at a point in the movie where a sacrifice wouldn’t be unexpected, and where the idea of only two of them getting out alive begins to hold some caché. Landon is good at this kind of narrative uncertainty, and gets the most out of both the script and the cast in these moments (though not forgetting that these kids are virgins, and when do virgins ever die in horror movies, 2000’s Cherry Falls aside, that is).

For sheer unadulterated, occasionally sophomoric humour, the movie is a clever twist on an old formula, and it gives its teen cast more than enough chances to shine, and each of them does. Sheridan is on winning form as the nerdy looking Ben, and Miller is suitably abrasive as the self-centred, selfie-obsessed Carter. But it’s Morgan as the dedicated scout Augie who steals the show, his often wide-eyed and wondering features perfectly suited for the outlandish exploits he and his fellow scouts find themselves involved in. And praise too for Dumont, who despite being garbed in cut-down shorts and bust-enhancing top, sidesteps any accusations of sexism by making her character, Denise, easily more ballsy than any of her male comrades.

Rating: 7/10 – a hugely enjoyable horror comedy that delivers pretty much throughout, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse has enough charm and low budget panache to meet the needs of genre fans everywhere; packed with moments to make you smile and go “Wow!” (and often at the same time), this is one horror treat that deserves cult status and to be a big hit on home video.

Cooties (2014)

22 Tuesday Sep 2015

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4th grade, Alison Pill, Cary Murnion, Comedy, Drama, Elijah Wood, Fort Chicken, Horror, Infected meat, Jonathan Milott, Leigh Whannell, Pupils, Rainn Wilson, Review, Teachers, Virus, Zombies

D: Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion / 88m

Cast: Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill, Jack McBrayer, Leigh Whannell, Nasim Predad, Ian Brennan, Jorge Garcia, Cooper Roth, Miles Elliot, Morgan Lily, Sunny May Allison, Armani Jackson, Peter Kwong

Clint Hadson (Wood) is a would-be writer who finds himself back in his home town of Fort Chicken and making ends meet as a substitute teacher at the same elementary school he attended fifteen years ago. On his first day he finds the teachers are an odd mix, while the pupils in his class, particularly Patriot (Roth), are an unruly bunch who give him a hard time. Another of the pupils in his class, Shelly (Allison), is being bullied by Patriot but when he tugs at a ponytail and it comes off in his hand leaving a raw open wound where it was attached only seconds before, he finds himself being attacked by Shelly and having a chunk taken out of his cheek. Shelly runs off after the attack, while Clint takes Patriot to the nurse’s station.

Talking about it afterwards in the teachers’ lounge with Lucy McCormick (Pill), who was at school with Clint at the same time, they are oblivious to the situation that’s developing outside in the playground, as Shelly infects Patriot’s friend, Dink (Elliot), and he in turn begins infecting the other children. As the children’s behaviour turns savage, some of the teachers try to intervene but they’re quickly overwhelmed… and eaten. At the same time, PE teacher Wade Johnson (Wilson) – who’s shooting hoops in a corner of the playground – and the rest of the staff who are watching from the teachers’ lounge, begin to realise that what they’re seeing is an outbreak of zombie children.

Wade makes it back inside the school building, but the now ravenous pupils soon find their way in, and the remaining teaching staff hole up in the music room for safety; along the way they find Calvin (Jackson) who is unaffected. Wade is all for making a dash for his truck, while Clint thinks they should try and get help from the outside. But Lucy has a better idea: they should wait until 3pm when the parents arrive to pick up their children, and signal to them from the roof. But when the time comes only one parent arrives and she’s despatched as quickly as she arrived. Clint and the rest now head down to the hall where they find another unaffected child, Tamra (Lily). And when the hall is overrun, it’s the janitor, Mr Hatachi (Kwong), who comes to their rescue. Now barricaded in the basement, and with no choice but to find a way out, Clint and Wade come up with an idea between them that, if all goes well, will see them free of the school and its murderous pupils.

These days, zombie movies are a dime a dozen, and most are instantly forgettable, so any movie using them as the central protagonists really needs to bring something new and/or different to the table. And thanks to Leigh Whannell, creator of the Saw and Insidious franchises, Cooties certainly fits the bill, taking the (accepted) innocence of youth and destroying it with unrestrained malice. The idea of feral kids isn’t a new one, but here it’s taken to the extreme, with teachers being torn limb from limb, and entrails spread about with gory abandon. It’s a bloody exercise that’s reminiscent of the inmates taking over the asylum, but done here with a layer of crass humour to offset the blood spatters.

Be warned though: the movie isn’t as polished, or as funny as the trailer makes out, thanks largely to the script’s decision to keep the teachers moving from one breachable room to another, and by some poor choices when it comes to some of the characters’ quirks and foibles (Pedrad’s angry feminist practically accuses Clint of being a potential rapist without being properly introduced, while Tracy (McBrayer) talks about his partner’s lovely balls – his tennis partner that is). When the movie attempts to subvert the genre it’s on firmer ground, as when Whannell’s scientifically knowledgeable Doug announces he’s discovered the cause of the outbreak to be a virus, and has done so by rooting around in Clint’s vomit and “anal leakage”; when the rest of the staff voice their disgust he rebukes them by saying he wore gloves – and holds up his hands which are clearly glove-free.

Making children into zombies turns out to be a whole lot of fun by itself, and the young cast are clearly having fun with it all, especially Roth and Allison who are the Adam and Eve of the zombie outbreak. The kids aren’t funny at all (which is a relief), and their ferocity is well-gauged, leaving the humour to the adults, and in particular to Wilson, whose bullish PE teacher is ill-equipped to deal with the finer emotions such as love and trust, and who finds it impossible to say “dual rear wheels” (one of the movie’s funnier moments). There’s a great deal of physical humour too – Lucy whacking one of the kids with a plastic umbrella, Wade constructing a weapon out of a tennis ball launcher – as well as a couple of inspired visual gags. It all works intermittently, but still has enough energy and verve to see it through, despite the obvious low budget and presumably short shooting period.

The performances are engaging, with Wood evincing wide-eyed surprise at the sudden, horrific turn of events, while Wilson plays Wade as a stubborn jackass who comes good in the end, and Pill does perky and bubbly before having a Rambo moment that leaves Wilson, for once, upstaged and put in his place. Garcia is the pot-smoking school guard who can’t believe what he’s seeing from the safety of his van, and Kwong is the fierce Oriental janitor who wants to tell the story of the caterpillar and the frog (you have to wait until after the end credits to hear the end of the story). In the directors’ chairs, Milott and Murnion keep things moving but don’t always get the rhythm right, and some scenes are shot with a flatness of style that hurts the movie by virtue of standing out so easily.

Rating: 6/10 – enjoyable hokum that fans of the comedy-horror genre will lap up, Cooties still struggles to maintain a clear focus, and rarely feels as confident as it should do; that said, it is good fun, and has a winning approach that does let some level of disappointment to be overlooked, but in the end, the chase elements are wearying, and there’s not enough balance in the way the differing components are assembled.

Zombie Mash-ups

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

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Animation, Comedy, Drama, Historical drama, Musical, Romance, Spoofs, War, Zombies

Ah, the zombie. Poor, pitiful, flesh-rotting, animated corpse searching for one thing and one thing only: food (preferably of the screaming human kind). Like many horror sub-genres, there’s always been the temptation to combine these marauding munch-aholics with other genres, or take them places you might not expect them to be a part of, like the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016). Zombie Strippers! (2008) is another example, or you could have Pro Wrestlers vs Zombies (2014 – actually, maybe not). But while Zombie Fight Club (2014) or Zombie Hamlet (2012) might sound fun in terms of their crossover appeal, the fact remains that there are plenty of movies that could be reworked to include zombies, and still retain the values that made them the great movies we all know and love. Here then are ten examples of movies that might have benefitted from a more undead approach.

Arsenic and Old Zombies (1944)

Frantic comedy starring Cary Grant as a nephew to two spinster aunts who have been mercy killing their lodgers and burying them in the basement. As he tries to work out what to do about it, and keep it all a secret from his girlfriend, things are made even more complicated when the murdered lodgers rise from the dead and try to take their revenge.

A Zombie in Winter (1968)

King Henry II of England has a dilemma: having been bitten by a zombie he needs to ensure his successor is a) worthy of the crown, and b) not eaten by Henry before it can be arranged. With time running out, Henry must negotiate the treacherous waters of palace intrigue, and avoid questions about the mounting number of servants in his household who are being found partially devoured.

The Dirty Dozen Zombies (1967)

Desperate times call for desperate measures and with the outcome of World War II finely balanced on a knife edge, it’s up to tough Army major Lee Marvin to recruit a suicide squad for a dangerous mission. Going behind enemy lines to steal vital plans, Marvin’s pick of dead soldiers brought back to life with the promise of full restoration, get the job done with a minimum loss of limbs and a maximum amount of gnawing.

Mr. Zombie Goes to Washington (1939)

It’s politics gone mad as a newly appointed senator (James Stewart) bucks the system and endemic corruption when a bill that fosters land graft is bulldozed through the Senate, and the planned development disturbs a cemetery full of zombies. Using a long-unused statute to protect their rights to eternal peace, the senator takes to the floor of the Senate to overturn the decision and expose the corrupt officials behind the bill.

Father of the Zombie (1950)

Spencer Tracy is the unlucky father whose daughter’s impending wedding is thrown into doubt when she comes home with a strange bite on her arm and begins to show signs of cannibalism. Even when she attacks and takes a chunk out of the groom’s mother, Tracy manages to keep the wedding on track (and his daughter from eating the guests).

Snow White and the Seven Zombies (1937)

Early Walt Disney classic sees Snow White fleeing the dastardly intentions of the Queen and finding sanctuary in the forest with seven zombies. When she eats a poisoned apple and falls into a deep sleep they struggle to stop themselves from gorging themselves on her, but find it helps to frequently sing “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off for lunch we go”.

A Connecticut Zombie in King Arthur’s Court (1949)

Danny Kaye is the unfortunate zombie cast back in time to Arthurian England and pressed into helping Arthur defeat Merlin’s plan to take over the kingdom, while trying to hide his condition and the hunger that comes over him at jousting tournaments when he sees the knights who are, to him, food in a can.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Zombie? (1966)

Pain and humiliation are the order of the day as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton play a married zombie couple who’ve lost sight of how much they used to chase down and devour young couples who remind them of their pre-zombie existence. Filled with angst and an existential dread of remaining undead forever, Taylor and Burton are terrific as the couple who’d rather flay each other than their unsuspecting dinner guests.

Zombie on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

It’s high drama in the Deep South as long-held family secrets are brought out into the open, including the love that dare not speak its name: that of a human for a zombie. Paul Newman is excellent as the confused human whose willingness to be a buffet for his “close” zombie friend puts his marriage at risk, his inheritance, and in a scene heavily censored at the time, his chances of having a child.

The Fabulous Zombie Boys (1989)

Two brothers, professional musicians, play small clubs and make enough to get by, but when they take on a singer (Michelle Pfeiffer) and both are subsequently bitten in a zombie attack, their attraction for her leads to jealousy, wounded pride, bitterness, and no small amount of mutual munching. Notable for the scene where Pfeiffer is forced to slide around the top of a piano to avoid the brothers’ attempts to turn her into a mid-show snack.

Monthly Roundup – June 2015

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

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Action, Animation, Beyond the Reach, Black Samurai, Blood, Brian Cox, Bulldog Drummond Comes Back, Bulldog Drummond in Africa, Children of the Corn: Genesis, Chris Evans, Chyler Leigh, Crazy Sexy Cancer, Crime, Curse of the Witching Tree, Daphne, Documentary, Dolph Lundgren, Drama, Drunk Wedding, E.E. Clive, Echelon Conspiracy, Ed Burns, Espionage, Every Secret Thing, Faults, Forrest Tucker, Fred, Gambling, Green Dragon, Gunsmoke in Tucson, Horror, Human trafficking, Imogen Poots, Indie movie, Jennifer Aniston, Jeremy Irvine, John Barrymore, John Howard, Kris Carr, Leland Orser, Leticia Dolera, Louis King, Mark Stevens, Martin Sheen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Douglas, Miguel Ferrer, Mojave Desert, Movies, Murder, Noboru Iguchi, Not Another Teen Movie, Owen Wilson, Pamela Springsteen, Paul Bethany, Peter Bogdanovich, Prague, Predator: Dark Ages, Reviews, Rhys Ifans, Riley Stearns, Scooby-Doo! and the Samurai Sword, Serial killer, Shaggy, Shane West, She's Funny That Way, Skin Trade, Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers, Thailand, The Four-Faced Liar, The Night Flier, The Posthuman Project, The Reconstruction of William Zero, Thriller, Tony Jaa, uwantme2killhim?, Vampire, Velma, Ving Rhames, Witch's curse, Zombie Ass: The Toilet of the Dead, Zombies, [Rec]³ Génesis

This month, the roundup is bigger than usual thanks to spending three weeks in sunny France, in an area where the Internet was an occasional luxury rather than a constant presence. But in between drinking copious amounts of beer and wine, and sampling far too much cheese and local bread, there was quite a bit of movie watching going on. These are the movies I watched in a gite in the middle of the gorgeous Brittany countryside, almost all of them a reminder that when life is this good you can forgive quite a bit…

The Posthuman Project (2014) / D: Kyle Roberts / 93m

Cast: Kyle Whalen, Collin Place, Josh Bonzie, Lindsay Sawyer, Alexandra Harris, Jason Leyva, Rett Terrell, Will Schwab

Rating: 5/10 – a group of teens develop super powers thanks to a device created by the dastardly uncle of one of them, and must thwart his plan to use it for immoral profit; pretty much a low-budget, amateur version of The Fantastic Four, The Posthuman Project relies on its not inconsiderable charm to help the viewer get past its rough edges, but the acting and the dialogue leave an awful lot to be desired, sometimes too much so.

Predator: Dark Ages (2015) / D: James Bushe / 27m

Cast: Adrian Bouchet, Amed Hashimi, Sabine Crossen, Ben Loyd-Holmes, Jon Campling, Joe Egan, Philip Lane, Bryan Hands

Rating: 7/10 – a group of mercenaries led by Thomas (Bouchard) set off to hunt the mysterious creature killing people and animals in a nearby forest – and find something even more deadly than they expected; a fan-made short that adds a novel twist to the Predator saga, Predator: Dark Ages is a welcome distraction that confirms that, sometimes, the big studios don’t always have the right idea when it comes to their franchise characters.

Drunk Wedding (2015) / D: Nick Weiss / 81m

Cast: Christian Cooke, Victoria Gold, Dan Gill, Anne Gregory, J.R. Ramirez, Nick P. Ross, Genevieve Jones, Diana Newton

Rating: 4/10 – when a couple decide to get married in Nicaragua, they and some of their friends are given hand-held cameras to film it all… with predictably awful, drunken, outrageous, and potentially life-altering effects; if your idea of comedy is seeing someone urinating on another person’s back, then Drunk Wedding is the movie for you, and despite its lowbrow modern day National Lampoon-style approach it still manages to hold the attention and is surprisingly enjoyable – if you don’t expect too much.

Zombie Ass: The Toilet of the Dead (2011) / D: Noboru Iguchi / 85m

Original title: Zonbi asu

Cast: Arisa Nakamura, Mayu Sugano, Asana Mamoru, Yûki, Danny, Kentaro Kishi, Demo Tanaka

Rating: 5/10 – while on a trip to the woods, Megumi (Nakamura) and four older friends find themselves under attack from zombies who have emerged from the bowels of an outhouse – and only her martial arts skills can save them; a wild, wild ride from one of the masters of Japanese Shock Cinema, Zombie Ass: The Toilet of the Dead is equal parts raw, uncompromising, witless, and gross, but it’s also a movie that just can’t be taken at all seriously, and on that level it succeeds tremendously, providing enough WtF? moments to make it all worthwhile.

Faults (2014) / D: Riley Stearns / 89m

Cast: Leland Orser, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Ellis, Beth Grant, Jon Gries, Lance Reddick

Rating: 8/10 – down on his luck cult expert Ansel (Orser) sees a way out of debt and a chance to regain some self-respect when a couple (Ellis, Grant) ask him to abduct and de-programme their daughter (Winstead), but he soon finds himself out of his depth and facing up to some hard truths; a tour-de-force from the always excellent Orser – and with a solid supporting performance from Winstead – Faults is an unnerving look at a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the ways in which his broken life have led him to a motel room where his own personal beliefs come under as much scrutiny as his captive’s.

She’s Funny That Way (2014) / D: Peter Bogdanovich / 93m

Cast: Imogen Poots, Owen Wilson, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Aniston, Will Forte, Kathryn Hahn, Illeana Douglas, Debi Mazar, Cybill Shepherd, Richard Lewis, Ahna O’Reilly, Joanna Lumley

Rating: 6/10 – theatre director Arnold Albertson has a secret: he gives prostitutes money in order that they can set up their own businesses, but when his latest “project”, aspiring actress Isabella Patterson (Poots) lands the starring role in his latest production, it all leads to the kind of deception and duplicity that will test the notion that the show must go on; a modern attempt at a screwball comedy, She’s Funny That Way doesn’t have the sheer energy that made movies such as His Girl Friday (1940) or Bringing Up Baby (1938) so enjoyable, but Bogdanovich knows his stuff and keeps the movie entertaining for the most part, even if it doesn’t stay in the memory for too long afterwards.

Curse of the Witching Tree (2015) / D: James Crow / 102m

Cast: Sarah Rose Denton, Lucy Clarvis, Lawrence Weller, Jon Campling, Caroline Boulton, Danielle Bux

Rating: 2/10 – divorcée Amber Thorson (Denton) moves into an old house with her two children (Clarvis, Weller) only for strange phenomena to start happening that’s connected to a witch’s curse, and which leaves them all at risk of supernatural forces; woeful in the extreme, Curse of the Witching Tree is amateurish nonsense that is badly directed, poorly acted, contains defiantly stilted dialogue, suffers from below-par photography, is tension-free throughout, and stands as an object lesson in how not to make a low-budget British horror movie.

Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (1937) / D: Louis King / 64m

Cast: John Barrymore, John Howard, Louise Campbell, Reginald Denny, E.E. Clive, J. Carrol Naish, Helen Freeman

Rating: 5/10 – when dastardly villains Mikhail Valdin (Naish) and Irena Saldanis (Freeman) kidnap Phyllis Clavering (Campbell), the girlfriend of Captain Hugh Drummond (Howard), they send him on a merry chase where each clue he finds leads to another clue as to her whereabouts – but no nearer to finding her; the first of seven movies with Howard as the dashing sleuth created by H.C. “Sapper” McNeile, Bulldog Drummond Comes Back is as cheap and cheerful and antiquatedly entertaining as you might expect, and benefits enormously from a cast and crew who know exactly what they’re doing.

Every Secret Thing (2014) / D: Amy Berg / 93m

Cast: Diane Lane, Elizabeth Banks, Dakota Fanning, Danielle Macdonald, Nate Parker, Common

Rating: 7/10 – several years after two young girls are incarcerated for the murder of a younger child, their return to their hometown is marred by the disappearance of a little girl, and the belief that one or both of them is responsible; a stilted attempt at an indie film noir, Every Secret Thing features good performances – particularly from Macdonald – and focuses on the emotional effects a child abduction can have on everyone involved, but it never develops a sense of urgency, though its key revelation at the end carries a wallop that helps dismiss what will seem like a narrative impasse up until then.

Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011) / D: Joel Soisson / 80m

Cast: Kelen Coleman, Tim Rock, Billy Drago, Barbara Nedeljakova

Rating: 3/10 – a couple (Coleman, Rock) break down on a desert highway but manage to find shelter overnight with a old preacher (Drago) and his much younger, foreign bride (Nedeljakova), but soon find that what’s in the preacher’s barn is much more menacing than the old man himself; placing the action largely away from Gatlin, Nebraska may have seemed like a smart move but this tired, dreary, and just downright dull entry in the franchise shows just how bad things have gotten since the 1984 original, and just why Children of the Corn: Genesis should remain the last in the series to be made.

Skin Trade (2014) / D: Ekachai Uekrongtham / 96m

aka Battle Heat

Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Tony Jaa, Michael Jai White, Ron Perlman, Celina Jade, Peter Weller

Rating: 6/10 – when cop Nick Cassidy (Lundgren) is powerless to stop his wife and daughter being killed, he determines to go after the crime boss responsible, Viktor (Perlman), and destroy his human trafficking network, which means travelling to Thailand and teaming up with detective Tony Vitayakul (Jaa), who’s also out to put a stop to Viktor’s illegal behaviour; with its human trafficking backdrop giving it an unexpected depth, Skin Trade is not just a brainless, slam-bang action movie, but instead a very well-made (for its budget) revenge flick that features some great fight scenes – particularly one between Lundgren and Jaa – and uses its Thai locations to very good effect.

The Reconstruction of William Zero (2014) / D: Dan Bush / 98m

Cast: Conal Byrne, Amy Seimetz, Scott Poythress, Lake Roberts, Melissa McBride, Tim Habeger

Rating: 6/10 – when the brother (Byrne) of a scientist (also Byrne) wakes from a coma, it’s not long before he begins to suspect that this identity may not be that of the scientist’s brother, and that he’s a pawn in a much bigger conspiracy, but the truth proves even stranger and more disturbing than he realised; a spare, almost antiseptic movie about notions of identity and individual consciousness, The Reconstruction of William Zero features terrific performances from Byrne, but lacks consistency of pace and sometimes feels as if Bush has taken his eye off the ball and taken a while to find it again, which leaves the movie often feeling flat and lifeless.

Not Another Teen Movie (2001) / D: Joel Gallen / 89m

aka Sex Academy

Cast: Chyler Leigh, Chris Evans, Jaime Pressly, Eric Christian Olsen, Randy Quaid, Mia Kirshner, Deon Richmond, Ed Lauter, Paul Gleason, Mr T, Molly Ringwald

Rating: 5/10 – at John Hughes High School, popular jock Jake Wyler (Evans) accepts a bet that he can’t take an ugly girl and transform her into the prom queen, but when he picks out Janey Briggs (Leigh), and begins to spend time with her, it makes him begin to question whether he should have made the bet in the first place; a predictably irreverent teen movie that parodies all those dreadful teen comedies from the Eighties, Not Another Teen Movie has more heart than most, and thanks to Mike Bender’s script contributions, is also quite funny in its knowing way, and gives viewers a chance to see the future Captain America back in the day when his skill as an actor wasn’t quite as honed as it is now.

Bloomington (2010) / D: Fernanda Cardoso / 83m

Cast: Allison McAtee, Sarah Stouffer, Katherine Ann McGregor, Ray Zupp, J. Blakemore, Erika Heidewald

Rating: 7/10 – former child actress Jackie (Stouffer) attends Bloomington college, and finds herself having an affair with one of the professors, Catherine (McAtee), until the offer of a comeback threatens to end their relationship before it’s fully begun; an intelligent, finely crafted romantic drama, Bloomington has two great central performances, and an emotional honesty that is only undermined by the clichéd nature of Jackie’s need to return to acting, and Cardoso’s over-reliance on silent longing as a sign of emotional upheaval.

Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988) / D: Michael A. Simpson / 80m

Cast: Pamela Springsteen, Renée Estevez, Tony Higgins, Valerie Hartman, Brian Patrick Clarke, Walter Gotell

Rating: 5/10 – Angela Baker (Springsteen), having decimated most of the staff and children at Camp Arawak, and now judged to be safe around others, begins sending unruly teenagers “home” from Camp Rolling Hills – which in reality means killing them for any and all perceived infractions that Angela takes a dislike to; a much better sequel than expected, Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers gets by on Springsteen’s preppy performance, some not-too-gory deaths, and Simpson’s confident touch behind the camera, as well as that dreadful musical interlude: The Happy Camper Song.

Gunsmoke in Tucson (1958) / D: Thomas Carr / 80m

Cast: Mark Stevens, Forrest Tucker, Gale Robbins, Vaughn Taylor, John Ward, Kevin Hagen, William Henry, Richard Reeves, John Cliff, Gail Kobe

Rating: 6/10 – brothers Jedediah (Stevens) and John (Tucker) are on opposite sides of the law, but when Jedediah becomes involved in a land dispute between cattle ranchers and farmers, his sense of right and wrong is put to the test, and he has to choose sides in the upcoming fight for the choicest plot of land; a robust, earnest Western, Gunsmoke in Tucson is a staid, respectable movie that doesn’t stray too far from its basic plot, and skimps on any psychological undertones in favour of a straight ahead anti-hero vs. the bad guys scenario that makes for a pleasant diversion.

Beyond the Reach (2014) / D: Jean-Baptiste Léonetti / 91m

Cast: Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irvine, Ronny Cox, Hanna Mangan Lawrence

Rating: 6/10 – arrogant businessman Madec (Douglas) hires tracker Ben (Irvine) in order to bag some game out of season, but when he shoots and kills an old man by mistake, Madec refuses to accept responsibility for his actions and when Ben stands his ground over the issue, finds himself being hunted instead through the harsh Mojave Desert; an occasionally tense two hander that will do little for either actor’s career, Beyond the Reach ramps up the contrivance levels with each successive narrow escape that Ben makes, and with each missed shot that Madec makes, leading to the inevitable conclusion that this is one movie where credulity needs to be left at the door – an idea that is further enhanced by the movie’s risible conclusion.

Blood (2012) / Nick Murphy / 92m

Cast: Paul Bettany, Mark Strong, Stephen Graham, Brian Cox, Ben Crompton, Naomi Battrick, Zoë Tapper, Adrian Edmondson

Rating: 5/10 – when a young girl is found murdered, the police, led by Joe Fairburn (Bethany) immediately set their sights on local child molester Jason Buleigh (Crompton), but when their prime suspect has to be let go for lack of evidence, Joe and his brother Chrissie (Graham) decide to take the law into their own hands, with terrible results; grim, visually depressing, and with a script that has more holes in it than a string vest, Blood has only its performances to recommend it, particularly those of Bethany, Graham and Cox, as well as the sense to know that its tale of a proud man’s downfall is always more interesting when you don’t know just how far they’ll fall.

Echelon Conspiracy (2009) / D: Greg Marcks / 102m

aka The Conspiracy; The Gift

Cast: Shane West, Ed Burns, Ving Rhames, Martin Sheen, Tamara Feldman, Jonathan Pryce, Sergey Gubanov, Todd Jensen

Rating: 3/10 – computer security tech Max Peterson is given a mysterious phone that helps him gain a small fortune, but in doing so he finds himself embroiled in a plot to ensure that the NSA’s super computer, Echelon, gains the upgrade it needs in order to spy on everyone globally; so bad on so many levels, Echelon Conspiracy wastes its (mostly) talented cast, flirts with credibility before running away from it at high speed, offers laughs in places where they shouldn’t be, and is the cinematic equivalent of a car crash.

Crazy Sexy Cancer (2007) / D: Kris Carr / 90m

With: Kris Carr, Jackie Farry, Melissa Gonzalez, Brian Fassett, Aura Carr, Kenneth Carr, Leslie Carr, Oni Faida Lampley, Bhavagan Das

Rating: 7/10 – when aspiring actress Kris Carr was diagnosed with cancer, she decided to make a visual record of the process of dealing with it, and the various ways in which other cancer sufferers have done so, and supported by the cameraman/editor who became her husband, as well as family and friends; an uplifting, positive message for anyone dealing with cancer, or who knows someone who is, Crazy Sexy Cancer is the kind of documentary that doesn’t attempt to overdo the physical and emotional strain of being in such a situation, but which does nevertheless offer plenty of poignant moments in amongst the hospital visits, and shows Carr to be a determined, aggressive would-be survivor.

The Night Flier (1997) / D: Mark Pavia / 94m

Cast: Miguel Ferrer, Julie Entwisle, Dan Monahan, Michael H. Moss, John Bennes, Beverly Skinner, Rob Wilds, Richard K. Olsen, Elizabeth McCormick

Rating: 7/10 – hard-nosed, disreputable reporter Richard Dees investigates a series of murders carried out at small airstrips that appear to be the work of a vampire, but his initial scepticism gives way to reluctant belief as he talks to witnesses, and sees the injuries the victims have sustained; a well-crafted movie that betrays its low budget and scrappy production design, The Night Flier is still one of the better Stephen King adaptations thanks to Pavia’s confident handling of the material, Ferrer’s see-if-I-care performance, and some impressively nasty effects work courtesy of the KNB Group.

Killer by Nature (2010) / D: Douglas S. Younglove / 90m

Cast: Ron Perlman, Armand Assante, Zachary Ray Sherman, Lin Shaye, Haley Hudson, Richard Riehle, Richard Portnow, Svetlana Efremova, Jason Hildebrandt

Rating: 3/10 – troubled by nightmares of murder and sleepwalking, teen Owen (Sherman) undergoes therapy with Dr Julian (Perlman), a therapist who believes that a person’s essential nature is handed down through bloodlines – a theory originated by convicted murderer Eugene Branch (Assante), and who is connected to Owen in a way that causes Owen to believe he might be the perpetrator of a series of murders that mimic Branch’s modus operandi; a thriller that can’t decide if it’s tepid or overwrought, and then settles for both (sometimes in the same scene), Killer by Nature is a humdinger of a bad movie, and proof positive that sometimes the old saying that “if you can, it doesn’t mean you should” relates to far too many movies for comfort – especially this farrago of awful performances, pseudo-intellectual posturing, and deathless direction.

Scooby-Doo! and the Samurai Sword (2009) / D: Christopher Berkeley / 75m

Cast: Frank Welker, Casey Kasem, Mindy Cohn, Grey DeLisle, Kelly Hu, Kevin Michael Richardson, Sab Shimono, Keone Young, Gedde Watanabe, George Takei, Brian Cox

Rating: 6/10 – on a trip to Japan, Scooby-Doo and the gang become involved in the search for a mystical sword, while trying to thwart the efforts of the ghost of the Black Samurai to beat them to it; a middling entry in the series that at least provides a different backdrop than the standard old dark house (or mine, or hotel, or funfair…), and which allows Shaggy and Scooby to be the heroes we all know they really are deep down, while displaying a pleasing awareness of Japanese culture.

[Rec]³ Génesis (2012) / D: Paco Plaza / 80m

Cast: Leticia Dolera, Diego Martín, Ismael Martínez, Àlex Monner, Sr. B, Emilio Mencheta, David Ramírez, Miguel Ángel González

Rating: 7/10 – a young couple’s wedding day is disrupted for good when one of the guests takes a bite out of another one, leading to a frenzied free-for-all among the guests and a fight for survival for those not affected by whatever’s causing people to become zombies – including the bride and groom, who have become separated in the mêlée; half found footage, half professionally filmed, [Rec]³ Génesis acts as a prequel to the events of the first two movies but is let down by both the change in location, and the absence of Claudia Silva, as well as a sense that by going backwards in terms of the outbreak and its possible cause, the makers are treading water until an idea as to how to carry the story forward from [Rec]2 (2009) comes along.

uwantme2killhim? (2013) / D: Andrew Douglas / 92m

Cast: Jamie Blackley, Toby Regbo, Joanne Froggatt, Jaime Winstone, Liz White, Mark Womack, Louise Delamere, Stephanie Leonidas, Mingus Johnston

Rating: 7/10 – popular schoolboy Mark (Blackley) leads a secret life on the Internet, where he invests his time and emotions in relationships with people he’s never met, but when of those people ask him to stop their younger brother, John (Regbo), from being bullied, what follows sets Mark on a dangerous path to murder; based on a true story, and told with a glum sense of foreboding throughout, uwantme2killhim? is an engrossing (though slightly frustrating) recounting of one of the strangest cases of the last fifteen years, and features two very good performances from Blackley and Regbo, though they have to fight against a script that favours repetition over clarity, but which still manages to flesh out what must have been a very strange relationship between the two boys.

Bulldog Drummond in Africa (1938) / D: Louis King / 58m

Cast: John Howard, Heather Angel, H.B. Warner, J. Carrol Naish, Reginald Denny, E.E. Clive, Anthony Quinn

Rating: 7/10 – on the very day that Drummond (Howard) is finally due to marry his long-suffering girlfriend Phyllis (Angel) he becomes embroiled in the kidnapping of his old friend Colonel Nielsen (Warner), and finds himself travelling to Morocco – with Phyllis, butler Tenny (Clive) and old pal Algy (Denny) in tow – in order to rescue him; the fourth in the series is perhaps the funniest, with Howard allowed to spread his comedic wings, and even the villain (played again by Naish) given some splendidly dry remarks to make in amongst the threats of death by hungry lion, and a bomb on Drummond’s plane.

The Four-Faced Liar (2010) / D: Jacob Chase / 87m

Cast: Daniel Carlisle, Todd Kubrak, Emily Peck, Marja-Lewis Ryan, Liz Osborn

Rating: 8/10 – five friends – couples Greg (Carlisle) and Molly (Peck), Trip (Kubrak) and Chloe (Osborn), and single lesbian Bridget (Ryan) – experience various ups and downs in their relationships, especially when Trip has a one night stand, and Molly finds herself attracted to Bridget; a refreshingly honest look at what relationships mean to different individuals, and how they affect the people around them, The Four-Faced Liar is an effective, well-written drama that benefits from good performances all round, a soundtrack that supports the mood throughout, and Chase’s confident approach to Ryan’s script.

Opstandelsen (2010)

06 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Casper Haugegaard, Church, Denmark, Funeral, Gore, Horror, Jonas Bjørn-Andersen, Mads Althoff, Marie Frohmé Vanglund, Review, Splatter, Zombies

aka Resurrection

D: Casper Haugegaard / 50m

Cast: Marie Frohmé Vanglund, Mads Althoff, Jonas Bjørn-Andersen, Asta Stidsen, Roxanne Tirkov, Peter Althoff, Hans Maaløe

At the funeral of Simon (Peter Althoff), one member of his family is noticeably absent from the service: his brother Peter (Mads Althoff). Peter’s other brother, Johannes (Bjørn-Andersen), and his sister, Esther (Vanglund), go to look for him. They find him in the toilets, snorting cocaine. He and Johannes argue, but Peter is dismissive when Johannes tells him the family is through supporting him with his drug problem. Johannes and Esther return to the service; Peter continues to take cocaine.

With the drug affecting him substantially, Peter makes his way to the service. When he does he finds scenes of carnage, with everyone under attack from the newly risen dead. Scrabbling away he seeks refuge in another room and is joined by Johannes, Esther, and their younger sister, Maria (Stidsen). Johannes finds a trap door and they all follow him down into the room below; in the process, Peter blacks out.

When he comes to, he finds they are trapped in a small room beneath the church, and with no safe way out. Maria has been injured and with no way for her to stem the bleeding, Esther cradles her as she dies. While the two brothers argue about what to do, Maria comes back to life and attacks Esther. Peter and Johannes restrain her but have little option in the end but to kill her. The shock of it all has a terrible effect on Esther and she retreats into her own mind.

Peter takes control of the situation and they leave the room, finding themselves in a maze of underground corridors and rooms. Coming under attack from the undead at almost every turn, they fight their way to ground level but become separated, leading each of them into confrontations that will decide their eventual fate.

A very, very low budget exercise in zombie terror, Opstandelsen is a compact feature that works better as a calling card to the industry than as a fully realised project. The decision to shoot this as a short film was a wise one, and shows just how padded out by endless running around in tunnels/corridors/woods other horror movies have become. It also helps the movie hit an above average number of dramatic high points, with the beleaguered trio facing (and fending off) attack after attack in their efforts to escape from the church.

The low budget necessitates some inventive responses to the challenge of presenting a church-bound zombie apocalypse, and while some work very well indeed – Maaløe’s fire and brimstone preaching from the pulpit (and practically blaming everyone there for what’s about to happen), an attack on Johannes through a door, Esther’s confrontation with her mother (Tirkov) – there are others that don’t, most notably the use of camera lights as the only form of illumination during a chase sequence below ground. The editing is determinedly choppy during several of the attacks and it’s difficult to work out just what is going on (it gives the impression that some of the zombie make up and effects weren’t that great during those scenes). It’s a shame, as these scenes would otherwise be quite effective at adding further energy to a movie that wastes little time in putting its main characters at risk and showing in gory detail what can happen to them.

There are things to be said for briefly introducing characters before letting the action take hold, but here it does lead to some problems, the main one being the way that Peter shakes off the effects of some very excessive coke-snorting to become as focused as he does (either he’s very used to it or the cocaine wasn’t as pure as it looks). And the way in which Johannes earnestly prays to God for protection – giving the impression he may fold under the pressure – isn’t followed up or allowed to get in the way of his subsequent heroics. Otherwise, the narrative follows a fairly standard formula, whittling down its cast until there’s only one survivor, and leaving things open-ended as to where the story might go next.

With a strong, heavily stylised visual aesthetic in play, Opstandelsen is often potent stuff, with its gruesome splatter effects used sparingly and with unflinching attention to detail, leaving the unprepared viewer to deal with some purposely raw and violent imagery; fans, however, will lap it up. Haugegaard drives the action forward, making the movie a kinetic treat, allowing only the briefest of pauses once the trio leave the room below the trap door. Some of the more violent, dramatic scenes are abetted by having Lasse Elkjær’s pounding score jacked-up in volume, and the soundtrack is beefed up as well, making all the lip-smacking zombie sounds that much more appalling to hear. As an attempt to further highlight the awfulness of what’s happening, it’s unnecessary, but it does fit in with the movie’s unsubtle, in-your-face approach to the material.

Rating: 6/10 – very rough around the edges, and with performances that are perfunctory if not memorable, Opstandelsen is a short that bodes well for Haugegaard’s future projects; seriously grim and grisly throughout, fans of zombie movies will find much to enjoy even if the storyline offers very little that’s new.

State of Emergency (2010)

23 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Chemical plant, Horror, Jay Hayden, Review, Thriller, Tori White, Turner Clay, Warehouse, Zombies

D: Turner Clay / 90m

Cast: Jay Hayden, Tori White, Scott Lilly, Kathryn Todd Norman, McKenna Jones, Andy Stahl

Low-budget often means minimal resources. It can also mean inventive outcome. Such is the case with State of Emergency, a movie that, at face value, is a zombie movie but which never uses that word once to describe the victims of a chemical plant explosion.

After a tense prologue, we see Jim (Hayden) and his partner Emilie (Jones) running across open countryside. Emilie is bleeding from a wound in her side. As they rest under a tree, Emilie dies. Jim carries her body to a nearby stable block where he hides out. Up tip now the audience doesn’t know what’s happening, but whatever it is, it can’t be good. It’s only when Jim is attacked by another man that we begin to realise what’s going on, and the possible reason why.

Later, Jim meets a couple, Scott (Lilly) and Julie (Norman), who have taken refuge in a warehouse; with them is a young woman called Ix (White). They have plenty of food and water, and weapons; feeling safe, they have decided to wait for help to arrive. And all the while, “people” are gathering outside the warehouse… That’s the meat of the movie right there: the anxious wait for help to arrive while a growing threat gets nearer and nearer.

Full marks to writer/director Clay for making State of Emergency such a compelling movie. It’s difficult enough to put a fresh spin on the zombie genre, but he pulls it off. Not referring to the affected as zombies helps tremendously; after all, in the real world, if something like this was to happen, would we even call them that if we didn’t have George A. Romero to thank? And where Clay really comes up trumps is with the committed performances of his cast. Hayden does exceedingly well with his everyman role, projecting the right amount of vulnerability alongside a steely determination to survive. Lilly has the more difficult male role, his character trying to be braver than he is and almost dying because of it, but he’s equally good even though he has less screen time. As Ix, White plays defensive and scared mixed with an entirely credible teen obnoxiousness before she strikes a rapport with Jim; the scene where she opens up to him is one of the movie’s best.

As for the affected – remember, they’re not zombies – Clay has another good idea: if there’s no one around for them to attack they mostly stand still or walk in whatever direction (apparently) takes their fancy. When they do spot someone, they charge at them, snarling. This one-two combination of stillness and berserker speed is disconcerting; when it happens to Jim at the stables it’s a shock, even though Clay has set things up so the audience knows something nasty is about to happen.

With a clear nod to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), State of Emergency lacks that movie’s rising hysteria and ghoulish shock moments (there’s no daughter in the basement), but it does ratchet up the tension. The siege elements are handled with aplomb and Clay shows an aptitude for quick, yet concise characterisation. Jim is someone the audience can identify with, as are Scott and Julie, and when they are put in danger, the movie lacks that sense of detachment that you’d find in most other zombie movies. (I’ve seen quite a few zombie movies in the past year, from Zombie Farm, a more traditional, voodoo-based effort, to World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries, a poor sequel to the original Zombie Diaries, and they all suffer from the same two problems: characters that you don’t care about, and – this bugs me the most – zombies who suffer from disfiguring facial injuries from the word go – I mean, how does that work exactly? You die, come to as a zombie and wow! your jaw’s hanging off by a tendon or two. Here, the affected have bloodshot eyes and what looks like a bad case of necrotising fasciitis – and that’s it, no missing bits, no decomposing limbs or extremities. Memo to other would-be directors of zombie movies: make sure you watch State of Emergency first.)

Rating: 7/10 – a tense, effective “zombie” movie that keeps you hooked from start to finish; well-acted and free from the usual absurdities/deficiencies that otherwise seem endemic to the genre.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.

Zombex (2013)

07 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Chandler Pharmaceuticals, David Christopher, Drama, Emily Kaye, Horror, Jesse Dayton, Lew Temple, Malcolm McDowell, New Orleans, Review, Zombies

D: Jesse Dayton / 81m

Cast: Lew Temple, Malcolm McDowell, David Christopher, Emily Kaye, Desiree McKinney, Pierre Kennel, Sid Haig, John Doe, Corey Feldman

An attempt at bringing something new to the zombie genre, Zombex has a fast-tracked drug devised to help the residents of New Orleans worst affected by the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, brought front and centre as the reason why people are transformed into flesh-eating monsters (the word zombie isn’t actually used in the movie). The drug is the brainchild of Dr Soulis (McDowell); he works for Chandler Pharmaceuticals. The company, led by Rush Chandler (Kennel), refuses to accept any blame for the chaos and death happening in New Orleans and employs a private security consultant Katie Ann (Kaye) to provide a “final solution” involving the killing and removal of all the affected. Also caught up in Chandler’s rearguard action are radio DJ Aldous Huxtable (Temple), and musician Charlie Thibideaux (Christopher). Huxtable uses his radio show to rail against Chandler Pharmaceuticals; when he receives a package from the military containing an antidote to the drug created by Soulis, he determines to travel to Austin, Texas where there are further supplies, and to bring more of the antidote back to New Orleans. Thibideaux, whose parents are among the first victims of the drug, agrees to help him.

For the first thirty minutes or so, Zombex succeeds in its aim of telling a different story from the standard zombie outing. The characters are introduced with an economy and flair that bodes well for the rest of the movie, and Dayton’s script, while keeping the narrative fragmented at first, is sure-footed and absorbing. Some of the dialogue isn’t quite as convincing but Huxtable’s on-air rants are certainly entertaining. Then Thibideaux and Huxtable hit the road for Austin, and the movie’s confidence in itself begins to wane.

As a road movie, Zombex is where things begin to go seriously wrong. The tension drains away, Huxtable and Thibideaux pick up Katie Ann and her subordinate Thea (McKinney), and the journey is peppered with random attacks that serve to thin the cast and provide a series of gory moments that are an awkward mix of practical effects and CGI. There are equally awkward digressions: an unnecessary sex scene between Katie Ann and Thea (watched by Thibideaux), a repeat of a scene involving Thibideaux outside his parents’ house, and the attack on Rush Chandler and his family (this last example is troubling because it’s never clear where Chandler lives or works but the impression is given that it’s outside New Orleans and the affected are supposed to be restricted to that area). And the movie ends abruptly, with the rug pulled out from under the audience.

Budgetary considerations aside, Dayton, making his first outing as a writer/director, manages to keep things (mostly) interesting throughout, though events become increasingly risible. There’s the small matter of Katie Ann being a dancer in a club as well as a security consultant – it’s how she and Thibideaux first meet – and the issue of her wearing hot pants and a low-cut top from the time she meets Thibideaux and Huxtable despite having been seen killing the affected in faux-combat gear. (Thea’s change of costume is even more revealing.) The affected pop up all over the place: at the side of the road, out of lakes, even appearing suddenly in a room in a secure building. And one character’s fate – while packing an emotional heft lacking from the rest of the movie – comes across as an idea Dayton had while writing the script and decided to keep in, even though the reason behind it is tenuous at best.

The cast provide mixed performances, with Temple a stand out as the verbose, never-quite-knowing-when-to-keep-quiet DJ. Christopher copes fairly well with the dialogue but uses only a couple of expressions from start to finish, while Kaye has the amateur’s talent for stressing the wrong syllables and distorting the meaning of what’s being said. McDowell looks bored but still manages to shine in a role that requires him to spout a terrible amount of exposition, Kennel plays it one-note as the self-centred Chandler, while Haig reminds everyone why he only gets cameo roles these days: he’s just plain bad (and in possibly the world’s worst military outfit; he looks more like the commandante of a South American dictatorship than an army man). And let’s not forget Feldman, who enters the first of his two scenes as if he’s late and the scene’s been filming past his entrance.

The photography by Allan Curtis is bright and energetic, and Dayton frames each scene with a more experienced eye than you’d expect. Further on the technical side, Zombex features some good make up effects, and the music by Stuart Rau is quietly atmospheric and supports the action well. Zombex is well-mounted from start to finish, and looks like a movie with a much bigger budget.

Rating: 5/10 – let down by its road movie mentality, Zombex struggles to maintain and capitalise on its early promise; not the car wreck it could have been but still a disappointment.

thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

Tag Archives: Zombies

The Cured (2017)

Shock Waves (1977)

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

Monthly Roundup – March 2017

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

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

Oh! the Horror! – Old 37 (2015) and Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)

Cooties (2014)

Zombie Mash-ups

Monthly Roundup – June 2015

Opstandelsen (2010)

State of Emergency (2010)

Zombex (2013)

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