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Possum (2018)
Garth Merenghi's Dullplace
Possum is a (very) slight yarn about shamed puppeteer Richie (Sean Harris) returning to the decaying home of his childhood. Richie spends his days wandering an undisclosed part of Norfolk ( population 10?) to the accompaniment of a Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack. There's a child abduction case lurking in the shadows too. Could Richie be involved, and what is that ghastly apparition nesting in the bowels of his bag?
Yeah, on paper, this one sounded like it'd be right up my street. So its with heavy heart I regret to inform you that Holness' debut in the writer/director chair is a major disappointment.
Based on a self-penned short story (and showing every inch of it) Holness' painfully derivative Lynchian pseudo art-horror would have been rightly rejected before a frame had been shot had his name not been attached to it.
However, it's less Eraserhead and more Frank Henenlotter's Basketcase gatecrashing David Cronenberg's Spider without the wit & intrigue of any of them. Surprise & suspense evaporate within the first 20 minutes and it spends the rest of its time hitting the same dull beat until the non-too-shocking anti-climactic reveal.
I do appreciate the repetitive nature of the narrative is intentional and is absolutely fundamental to the vivid picture it attempts to paint of a nightmare in a damaged brain. But the lack of variation in tone and design (not to mention locations) make for a very ugly and oppressive viewing experience, and not in the way it's creator would hope.
The performances are unconvincing too: Alun Armstrong as Richie's seedy Uncle Maurice, devours the scenery amateur-dramatics Bill Sykes style, whilst Harris (an actor I've irrationally had it in for since his rancid space-crusty turn in Prometheus) goes full method with one-note, misery-guts mug and mannered mannequin body contortions. And true to Lynch-clone fashion, he does it decked out in a gormless-looking, buttoned to the neck grey shirt.
Its ironic then that, the only positive thing to say about him (and Possum as a whole) is the major contribution he makes to the creepy-crawly thing you can see on the poster. The arachnid is sublime, and the only thing you'll remember long after you've forgotten the film.
Mandy (2018)
Lynch via Zombie
A Hell spawned psychedelic horror cartoon made flesh from the Son of Rambo featuring a Nicholas Cage vodka-cleansing meltdown in a Clockwork Orange décor bathroom?!? No, don't pinch me, this isn't a dream/nightmare, this is a living breathing reality - and if you're quick enough, you can catch it on the big screen where it deserves to be seen.
On paper, Mandy is nothing more than a standard nuts & bolts revenger: Lumberjack Red Miller (Cage) hunts down wrong-uns who've seriously mistreated his other half (a supernaturally unrecognisable Andrea Riseborough in the title role). Cue bloody eye-for-an-eye retribution and you-know-the-drill etc.
In the hands of director and co-writer Panos Cosmatos however, the visual aesthetic is content and king: performances, dialogue, composition ad infinitum, are stylised to within an inch of their beautiful lives in a slow-burning, virtue-in-vices action-horror that shamelessly worships at the altar of John Norman book covers and the fanboy soiled, dog-eared pages of Metal Hurlant magazine. It explicitly bows before unfashionable fantasy icons Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, boldly wearing cosmetic homages to their work like a barbarians' shield of honour on its claret soaked sleeve, often to brilliant effect.
Cosmatos finds room too for acid-casualty Cenobites on wheels, ghoulish anime' interludes, dueling chainsaws and Linus Roache's religious cult leader lunatic (the wickedly christened Jerimiah Sand) paying unapologetic tribute to Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet...and - is that a Friday The 13th reference I can hear? Toss in Don Dohler, anal sex, chuck-up cheese goblins and some well timed humour, and voila! - we.have.Mandy (think Mastodon: The Movie directed by David Lynch and you're half way there).
My only complaint is, it doesn't take things quite as far as it should have done. Mandy is left a little bit wanting at times, almost as if Cosmatos held back on the accelerator for fear of landing his Heavy Metal meditation on life, the universe and broadsword thingamajigs the wrong side of 'tasteful', thereby disqualifying it from the almost unanimous cheers of goodwill its warmly received from the critical elite (the 95% rating at Rotten Tomatoes is richly deserved, but one can't help feel that the exact same voices of praise would have spat on Mandy if it had been directed by Rob Zombie).
Cage should have been madder, the bad guys badder, the blood bloodier and the drug-stuff druggier to take it from plain ole' OTT, to the orbit of Jupiter (or Saturn) where it truly belongs. If Mr Panos had pushed it just that little bit further, then I'd be able to push it to full marks and (possibly) my movie of the year spot.
But don't let that (smallish) gripe put you off. Mandy is still a stunningly shot, cinematic blast from start-to-finish with the best soundtrack of the year courtesy of the late Johann Johannsson (RIP). And there's not a Barry Manilow song in sight.
Prospect (2018)
Grungey Space Western
Lo-Fi Sci-Fi indie flick orbiting the uneasy alliance between a young orphaned girl, Cee, and cut-throat gold digger, Ezra, as they seek good fortune on a perilous alien moon.
The sci-fi trappings - rusty space-suits, cranky spaceships etc - are authentically rendered, and the unchartered terrain, a sort of Ewok-free Moon of Endor, breathes with atmosphere thicker than a Frank Herbert Dune doorstop. But they're merely cosmetic ticks papering over a slight tale that would play out exactly the same with buckskins and horses in the wild west.
The story's repetitive narrative and episodic structure quickly reveal the script's shortcomings leaving one with the aftertaste of an all-dressed-up-with-no-place-to-go non-starter.
So PROPSECT could almost be written off as another style-over-content space adventure then? Not quite. Thanks to the performances and to-die-for chemistry of the two lead leads - Sophie Thatcher and the super charismatic Pedro Pascal - writer/directors Christopher Caldwell & Zeek Earl's debut feature star-surfs to safety via muscular character engagement.
Cee and Ezra deserve a better story than this, but despite my reservations, PROSPECT does have a lingering effect and I'd love to see these two astro-cowboys again. Maybe next time?
The Devil's Doorway (2018)
Close The Doorway On The Way Out, Please.
This week's found footage horror is set in 1960's Ireland where we find a couple of priests dispatched by the Vatican to investigate a 'miracle' at a 'fallen' women's Laundry run by the sisterhood.
Zero build-up quickly gives way to Excorcist/Blair Witch cliches galore, as we once more tread the weary path of shouting, screaming, levitation and tripod-free DP work that we've seen countless times before (and done far better) in this long exhausted sub-genre.
I caught Writer/director Aisleen Clarke's debut effort at Nottingham's Mayhem 2018 Film Festival. Clarke followed the screening with a very informative and generous Q&A session which I found far more interesting and engaging than most of what she'd just served up on screen.
The use of 16mm and authentic location choice were big pluses in her movie's favour, as were the performances - not least from Lalor Roddy as the wisely sceptical Father Thomas. Its in the quieter moments where his monologues to camera accompanied only by the night time wind outside that TDD really hits home. Otherwise its business as usual as the seen-it-all-before possession tropes pile up faster than the linen in the wash room.
If Clarke had forsaken the FF for a more formal approach with a slow build-up and a tight reign on the creepy-kids-that-go-BOO-in-the-night traits, then she might have come up with a winner, instead of this strictly third place, non-event spook-show. A missed opportunity.
Ghostland (2018)
Laugier's Lovecraft
Arrow release for Martyrs director Pascal Laugier's latest. An H.P. Lovecraft fixated aspiring horror writer and her elder sibling are driven by Mum to Grandma's house of dolls in the countryside for an unexpected home invasion.
As with all of Laugier's work (see also House Of Voices and The Tall Man), there's plenty of twists and turns and far more to it than first meets the eye. The less you know before going in, the better.
So what can I tell you? Well, if you couldn't stomach the aforementioned Martyrs, then give this particular Incident a wide berth. Ghostland doesn't quite hit the stomach churning 'heights' of his controversial 2008 movie, but it still proves he hasn't lost his touch when it comes to expertly unleashing brutal bruising violence. There's nothing sexy about fist induced swollen eye sockets & shattered cheek bones, and Laugier rams this conceit home harder than any of his villains.
But this is a l-o-n-g way from being just another tawdry psycho intruders break-in potboiler. Genre clichés and tropes are liberally deployed for sure (as is some outstandingly creepy art direction and set design), but this is deceptive gravy for what is really a psychological exploration of the power of imagination overcoming traumatic scarring and complete mental breakdown.
Laugier has always stated he wrote the screenplay for Martyrs under a weighty cloud of depression, and with that in mind, its not too difficult to see his latest for what it is: an autobiographical take on the cathartic nature of creating his most talked about work. Martyrs may always be the child that gets the most attention, but if he never makes another movie, this one will surely be recognised as the baby to which he has the most personal attachment.
In a year that has brought us the powerhouse terror of Ari Astor's sublime Hereditary, Laugier's ugly newborn will have to settle for second place silver medal, albeit a substantially strong one. Approach with caution, but this Ghostland is well worth a visit.
A Quiet Place (2018)
Generic Monster Schlock
In the year 2020 the last remnants of the human race (in this case, an attractive nuclear family who say grace before supper) fight for their lives against blind, violent, indestructible creatures that sniff out their victims via sound. In short, keep your gob shut or you'll wind up monster munch.
It's a decent concept with a promising prologue that occasionally delivers some deafeningly silent moments of tension. But a strong concept does not a good movie make - especially if it doesn't have a robust story with compelling characters to drive it along - and inside the first 20 minutes AQP proves its pedigree as high-concept minus the courage of its convictions.
Co-writer, director and leading man John Krasinski (playing the kind of post apocalyptic Dad who, when not figuring out how to thwart generic looking monsters from nowhere in particular, somehow manages to find the time to maintain his hair and beard in the style of a G*p model) blows the central conceit by way of placing a sappy, cliched music score in all the places crying out for solitary creepy sound design. A spectacular own goal if ever there was one!
What else did I hate? - let me see...oh yeah: the syrupy sentimental family drama, the soul-crushing jump-scares, the jaw-dropping plot holes you could fly a Death Star through, toe-curling Shakespeare quotes hanging unironically on living room walls, a criminally wasted Emily Blunt as pregnant Mom (exactly what you plan for when surrounded by cannibalistic monsters sensitive to noise: a screaming baby!) and a script of pitifully meagre substance and content that's wholly derivative of M Night Charlatan's woeful 2002 misfire, 'Signs'.
AQP will, more likely than not, be loved by those whose broadsheet told them it's a 'rare' horror worth shelling out for. Anyone else who wants to see this kind of thing done correctly should watch 'Metalheads' from the last season of Black Mirror instead, and not waste their money on a movie that'll be forgotten a couple of hours after watching it. Hugely disappointing.
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
A warning from the future
Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Hampton Fancher (in collaboration with Michael Green) get things off to a great start by dusting down an omitted scene originally intended for the 80's classic. Ryan Gosling's Blade Runner, Officer K (Dick?), discovers a long buried secret whilst on a 'retirement' mission outside the walls of future LA. This sets the wheels in motion for a gripping, highly intriguing 2 hours 63 minutes of hallucinogenic dystopian wet dreams, as Gosling hunts for the hunter - Rick Deckard, who has been missing for 30 years...
So, how far have we come between 2019 and 2049? Well, the mash-up of all things vintage and cyber-punk have been aggressively separated out, finding the former unceremoniously tossed over the city wall to wilt and die in the misty post apocalyptic wilderness. The latter's underclass are forced into the Soylent Green over-crowding of Gosling's dead-end high-rise habit, leaving the overlords to bask in their sleek minimalist creature comforts behind closed doors.
The rich/poor divide is breathtakingly realised courtesy of perfectly nuanced art direction (think Gattaca meets Brazil) and Roger Deakins' achingly beautiful DP work. The lighting, design and colour schemes deployed in the perfectly timed build-up to Officer K's face-to-face with you-know-who, has to rate amongst one of the best directed sequences I've ever seen. It's almost like watching the greatest moment Kubrick never made.
Benjamin Wallfisch & Hans Zimmer's hammering Vangelis on steroids soundtrack feels less like music and more the organic hyperventilating of the gloomy Metropolis it supports. In fact – and I do mean this as a compliment - it's sometimes difficult to tell where (outstanding) sound design ends and music score begins (and vice versa).
OK, that's the gravy. But what really make this outing so enduring are Villeneuve & the writers' commitment to telling a story with characters and themes that are well worth your time. The ideas and threads presented in Ridley Scott's masterpiece and PKD's original source material are built upon quite substantially, juggling elemental symbolism (snow, rain & seawater equating life, death & rebirth) with the big existential questions of what it means to be human and the tragic disconnect that intervenes.
Whether it be by design, social-standing, physical-handicap or grim circumstance, every single character here - Gosling's perfectly muted, curiously Roy Batty attired, drone law-enforcer, Ana De Armis' sweet & tragic hologram Joi, Robin Wright's gutsy police chief Joshi, Harrison Ford's meaty, bladey, big & besty Deckard etc – is a slave. Like the original, no one here is in control - not even boo-hiss villains Wallace and his tearful hit-woman, Luv (played superbly by Jared Leto & Sylvia Hoeks respectively). Like everyone else, they too are manipulated by the puppet master society that has been allowed to grow around them, a dark warning from the future if ever there was one.
Any negatives? Whilst I honestly can't think of a single scene that shouldn't be there, some moments could do with a trim as Leto's scenes do tend to ramble on a bit. The action too, whilst still sparing, adheres more to the crowd-pleasing variety this time round, with the finale going a tad too good-guy vs bad guy/damsel-in- distress for comfort. That said the fantastically skilled Villeneuve's work behind the camera insures it always remains as credible as anything else he's ever done involving punch-ups and explosions.
The pace, like the original, is sedate and deliberate, the mood, a mix of oppressive brooding and melancholic bewilderment. Several passages enticingly emit the same kind of foreboding and dread normally found in the best horror movies, and the outcome retains the same downbeat ambiguity as before. The final moment, is perfect.
Was this sequel necessary? I thought it would be nay, but I'm happy to say it's a yay! This Blade Runner may share ticks and traits lifted from its predecessor - and it's too soon to say if it will go on to achieve the same reputation as Scott's signature movie – but thanks to the artistry and craftsmanship of Villeneuve and everyone else involved, the goods have turned up freshly minted with a personality all its own, delivering a tale that resonates loudly with the here and now. It deserves your attention. 9/10.
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Star (Wars) of David
I was left more than a tad underwhelmed by the Alien prequel that was 2012's Prometheus. It started well, had a spectacular finish and sucked like a smelly Alien egg in the middle. Expectations for this one were almost as non-existent as Theresa May's integrity but, against my better judgement, I went to see it anyway in the desperate hope it wouldn't suck (at least not too much). I'm delighted to report that, for the most part, it doesn't.
A sleek and highly intriguing opening sequence quickly paves way to a more-of-the-same, spaceship-crew-awake-from-hypersleep-to-answer- distress-signal-on-hospitable-planet-and-unwisely-check-it-out shtick. And then it gets really good!
I won't spoil it too much for you, but what Ridley Scott delivers this time around is a visually arresting, very exciting and thoroughly engaging mash-up of Alien & Prometheus surrounded by slasher movie tropes with gleeful riffs on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and a jaw-dropping moment lifted straight from the prologue of John Boorman's Zardoz shaping its centrepiece. Hell, he even cheekily integrates key beats from his own Blade Runner which, hopefully on this evidence, is a good omen for things to come from Dennis Villeneuve's imminent sequel.
But, just like its predecessor, AC's real ace trump is Michael Fassbender, returning not once, but twice as the 'idiosyncratic' David, and his doppelganger upgrade 'brother', Walter. He excels in both roles, but it's the former who gets right under your skin. Via Fassbender's android Hannibal Lector spin, we get the perfect vessel to deliver Scott & screenwriters John Logan & D.W. Harper's impressively bleak musings on the future of mankind. It's also interesting that this is the second set of prequels from one of Fox's biggest tent poles (see Star Wars episodes 1-3) to feature an anti-hero at its core. Kudos says I.
Sure, there's plenty wrong with it too: there are no annoying characters around like there was on tap in Prometheus, but most of the cast are mere Facehugger/Xenomorph grist for the mill. Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup & Danny McBride give strong, solid performances and do enough to register interest, but next to Fassbender's powerhouse turn, its weak tea.
Also, Scott relies too much on repeating dialogue, action and music cues from his 79 original (and even Cameron's Aliens) than try and create something fresh. He executes everything with maximum efficiency and the set pieces come off more enthralling & attention grabbing than they've any right to be. But its crystal clear Scott's heart is firmly with David & the big existential questions.
The creatures are a hit & miss bunch too: the Pan's Labyrinth like Neomorphs are suitably ghastly and effective, but the more traditional monsters come over like brand obligation bit-players in their own movie. They're far from a box office red herring, but they're not much more than an after-thought either.
Griping aside, Scott has largely redeemed himself with a pacy hybrid of bloody exploitation slice & dice action and hardcore life-the- universe-and-everything science-fiction philosophising that resonates loudly with the gloomy here and now. This is a Summer blockbuster with brains and a vision that, even at its most predictable and downbeat, never forgets to entertain. You may be able to spot the pay-off to AC coming a mile away, but it gets the one it needs and the one you want to see. And Sir Ridley doesn't let you down. Roll on Episode Three!
A Cure for Wellness (2016)
Don't forget your toothbrush
Business exec Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) receives the wake-up call he deserves when the boss dispatches him to retrieve a work colleague from a sinister 'Wellness Center' in the Swiss Alps. One car 'accident' later and our semi anti-hero finds himself up to the groin in plaster, dangerously crossing paths with dodgy water, dodgy Dr Jason Isaacs and an innocent young lady who may not be as youthful as she appears. What is the clinic's dark secret, and what's with those pesky jellied eels?
I usually couldn't care less for the output of director Gore Verbinski (The Ring, The Mexican, Johnny Depp and the Pirates etc), but here he really does do full justice to a screenplay (written by Justin Haythe) that comes off like a timely attack on the Trumpton ethnic cleansing programme via Mario Bava's 'Baron Blood'.
In fact, it's all pretty Italio horror styling crazy, seeing Bava and Dario Argento get ripped & riffed left right and centre, with an almost unwatchable Lucio Fulci inspired outing in the dentist chair thrown in for good measure. 'Ouch' is not the word I would choose to use. Where's Steve Martin when you need him?
Anything for the naughty step? Well, I think a slap on the wrist may be due re the excessive running time. I certainly wasn't bored, but a good thirty of its two hours, twenty six minutes duration could easily have been shorn from the girth and not be missed. You gotta lose those pounds if you want a higher score baby.
Gripe aside, 'A Cure For Wellness' is a largely successful mix of old fashioned Gothic horror & social commentary that gains virtue by not spelling it all out and not taking itself too seriously. Just don't say I didn't warn you about the dental 'hygiene'. 7.4/10
Blair Witch (2016)
The Bad News Blair
I had high hopes for this one. The ad campaign and pedigree of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett look set to dash the dismal aftertaste left by the lamentable 2000 BWP (Blair Witch Project) sequel that was BOS (Book Of Shadows) and finally give us the kick-ass, scare-you-sh*tless follow-up we'd all been craving.
Wingard & Barrett's previous outings such as A Horrible Way To Die, VHS, You're Next and the truly awesome The Guest, pointed to the promise of a distinctive genre piece crafted by two sterling talents that truly understand the medium. What could possibly go wrong?
Despite a few cosmetic high-tech ticks re contemporary camera equipment, the deployment of the original's 'Found Footage' template proves to be the REAL bad omen here as the younger sibling of BWP's Heather sets off with his chums into the forest of Burkittsville to find his long lost sister.
Doubling up on characters, Wingard & Barrett lead their shreddies down a very familiar path to a very familiar destination upping the jump- scares and loud-bangs-in-the-night ante all the way up to 11 along the way. A smattering of new elements are intriguingly brought to the table only to be frustratingly swept away when it becomes blindingly apparent that neither writer nor director have much of a Scooby-Doo what to do with them.
The introduction of a Twilight Zone style riff starts going somewhere and looks set to top the movie off with a mind-bending final reveal. But no. Nothing doing. BW settles for the same old same old seeing us off with a coda flatter than the flattest flat at a flattest flat in the world convention.
BW also breaks a rule set by the original even the ill-fated BOS didn't dare go near let alone touch. It may appease the unimaginative spell-it-all-out-for-me-please naysayers of the 1999 classic but, despite its effectiveness, I'm still on the fence as to whether it should have been included or not. We've possibly been given a little too much information that I fear may have cheapened BWP's stellar ambiguity for good.
I don't doubt Wingard & Barrett's affection for the original, or their sincerity & commitment to this belated sequel, but they've set themselves up for a hiding to nowhere by trying to please too many people with too many disparate threads, thus leaving us with a wildly unfocused witch-hunt that annoyingly slams the hand-printed door in your face the moment it starts to do anything interesting.
Despite its undeniable watchability, cracking pace and thrilling, heart-racing third act, BW comes off as nothing more than a hollow, artificial retread of the mean & lean original's greatest hits. BWP's hand-knitted low-key dynamics sang through lungs filled with organic, naturalistic fresh-air. BW is nothing more than a shrill, shouty, concession sprinkled remake that ultimately derails itself via a slew of ill- advised more-is-more, Hollywood-polish aesthetics.
Not a terrible film by any stretch – a few standout moments will get right under your skin - but I do feel Wingard & Barrett lost their nerve early on and opted to play safe instead of giving us what could have been a real humdinger of a sequel. If they'd cut two of the characters, dumped the found footage tract and ran-like-hell with that 'mind-bender' thang, then you'd most likely be reading a very different review to the one you're indulging now. The potential for uncovering hidden gold nuggets via a re-watch may yet prove a case for reassessment. But for now, I'm placing BW in the filing cabinet marked: Missed Opportunity. 6/10
The Other Side of the Underneath (1972)
Enough already!
Being the only film of 1972 solely written & directed by a woman who would tragically commit suicide 10 years later at the age of 55 would, surely, cancel out any impact a gratuitously experimental and excruciating experience like this one might have to offer. But Jane Arden's linear-free schizo-mental health examination remains brain numbing hard work for anyone with the courage & patience to sit through it.
Beginning with images & ambiance similar to that found in the previous year's Lets Scare Jessica To Death (itself an exploration of a woman losing her marbles), TOSOTU Starts promisingly but quickly buckles under the weight of a too-much-too-soon dosage prescribed by the heavy-handed Dr Arden.
A young lady pulled from a lake in an undisclosed part of the Welsh countryside winds up in what can only be described as an all female funny farm for avant-garde theatre performance artists. There is no plot or characters so to speak of, only a bloody-minded desire on behalf of the filmmaker to set her creative co-ordinates to eleven on the launch pad and blast off into the solar system for the best part of two hours before crash-landing somewhere in the region of Zeta Reticuli. One can only assume by that point the coffers must have run dry for film stock.
There is certainly no question of the director's earnest sincerity broaching the weighty subject matter. But the ruthless disregard for linear dynamics disallows any point of entry other than to smirk or guffaw at the serious-as-a-heart-attack images of women sharing beds with sheep whilst taunted by Mr Punch's ugly sister or, birthday suited nymphs flanking cellos in the Green Green Grass of Home (at least composer Sally Minford's oppressive string arrangements hit the vulnerable dark spot).
I find it hard to believe that even back then this was considered fresh and challenging, especially considering the likes of Ken Russell had been there, seen it and vommed on the t-shirt with this sort of visual excess a million times before already. Meanwhile, over at the BBC, the Monty Python gang were running full throttle dropping raspberry stink- bombs on targets like Arden's school of pretension with devastating precision. Their merciless lampooning of the great King Ken's work in the 'Gardening Club' sketch should give you a good idea of what you're letting yourself in for.
Whilst I do have a big appetite for seeking out the more cutting edge offerings to be found hidden away in the dead-letter-office of secret cinema, this is one I feel has not stood the test of time and would've preferred to have left under lock and key.
The Invitation (2015)
California Screaming!
Where the hell did this one come from?? –The best, as they often say, is saved 'til last and that certainly proved to be the case when I caught Sunday night closer The Invitation at the 2015 Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham UK six months ago. It was one of those rare occasions when a movie proves to be so creepily flesh crawlingly disturbing, that your levels of stress rise to the degree where you want to climb into the screen and scream "Make it stop! Make it stop!" It certainly did for me!
Opening with a turbulent car journey, the story introduces us to invitees Will (Logan Marshall Green) and his partner Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi), arriving at his former home in the Hollywood hills. He is gathered with a group of old chums for an evening of fine cuisine and claret on tap hosted by his ex-wife, Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her slimy new beau, David (Michiel Huisman). Anxiety prevails and the atmosphere is still thick with fallout from the 'event' that drove Will and Eden apart.
The hosts' have a couple of freaky new friends in attendance too, both of whom add ill-fitting girth to a conversation of new-age enlightenment born from Eden and David's explanation for their two year absence. Tremors of discomfort occur, not least from Will, who strongly begins to suspect his ex-Mrs and her creepy new fancy bit might be up to no good, harbouring sinister intentions for their guests. But as there is evidence to suggest Will may not have his mental faculties in order, his questionable grip on reality may be inducing paranoid delusions of the worst kind...
Directing from a faultlessly constructed screenplay by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, helmer Karyn Kusama's very modern day Californian horror yarn plays like a riff on Brian Yuzna's Society gate crashing The Big Chill (albeit with a better soundtrack), locking the audience into a swirling, dreamy toxic whirlpool of wobbly social etiquette versus let's-get-the-hell-out-of-here stigma that will keep you guessing which way it will fall from the first to last.
The foundations of the story are built solidly on tragic events of the past and how the different paths people take to cope with personal trauma can lead to not necessarily opting for the best route home. There's also room for subtly humorous social commentary too, bravely poking fun at the money laundering spiritually guided pursuits of rich & gullible desperados residing in CA's tackiest resort. We see a landscape still terrorised by the odious spectres of Manson Family home invasions and Applewhite charlatan mantras casting long dark shadows across the backyard swimming pools and sun-bed patios. All of this is backdrop gravy however, and Kusama is sure never to let it drown out the supper's baton passing queasy mystery-drama into full blown thriller/horror trajectory.
Cast iron control is wielded on the twelve strong cast too: the actors may get varying degrees of screen time, but every single character will, at some point, have your full undivided attention. Standouts John Carroll Lynch and Lindsay Burdge as Eden & David's brand new besties, Pruitt and Sadie respectively, will have you writhing in your chair with profound uneasiness, and Corinealdi as 'trophy wife' Kira, blows expectation out of the water when, with immaculate timing, Kusama finally lets her bolt from the stable.
But it's Logan Green as Will who really gets under your skin. After vapid fare such as Devil and the disappointing Prometheus, he momentarily looked cursed with a 'We couldn't get Tom Hardy' millstone round his neck, doomed to a career clearing up in third rate fodder passed over by his thespian 'twin'. Not a chance. Coiffured in a 70's style Jesus locks & beard combo, he resembles a young, lean incarnation of The Big Lebowksi's Dude, going the whole distance with a performance worthy of Bridges at his haunted, brilliantly despondent best.
And then there's Kusama. Up until now her slim CV - consisting of the acclaimed but forgotten Girlfight, and the unfairly maligned Aeon Flux and Jennifer's Body - had hardly set the world on fire. But she finally delivers on her initial promise with a muscular, mature and expertly nuanced piece of work that, if there's any justice in this sorry little world, will rightly escalate her profile into the ranks of the A- List.
Her draw of influences is to be highly commended too where a recent interview had the director citing 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers as being at the forefront. The nervy edginess & unearthly autumnal lighting of Phillip Kaufman's remake is perfectly recaptured in texture & tone, not least with Will's explorations of his old residence (courtesy of production designer Almitra Corey's trippy & treacherous interiors) as he spies through door cracks and windows to be frustratingly denied the incriminating evidence he so desperately seeks. This beautifully mirrors Brooke Adams' similar detective antics in IOTBS as she surveys the in clandestine activities of her duplicated pod person fiancée.
And just like Kaufman's undervalued masterpiece, Kusama reveals her Ace trump mere moments before the end credits roll with a final reveal outrageous and terrifying enough to freeze the blood, savvily hitting the satirical, lunatic heights of Network and Fight Club's most Iconic beats on its way. This one's a night to remember.
Thought-provoking and powerful, The Invitation is a modern day master class in the art of suspense building and an instant classic that deserves to be seen in the cinema on a big screen. Seek it out whilst you can.
The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015)
The Bare Witch Project
I approached this particular witch with caution. At first glance it appeared to be sharing DNA similar to that spooned from the same misfiring cauldron as two of my least favourite sub-genre outings of the past 15 years: M Night Shymalan's The Village and Ben Wheatley's A Field In England. The Buzz generated from early reviews & trailers promised the visual aesthetics of the former and theatrical bombastic lingo of the latter and I braced myself for another hyperbolic disappointment.
But I needn't have worried, as writer/director Robert Eggers debut effort delivers full on its promise with a slow burning historical tale of external evil manipulating internalised religious fervour to its ultimate sticky end.
The story involves a puritan family of seven ousted from the safety of their colony into a life of corn-crunching hardship in the fertile land of New England's past. But deep in the forest lurks an unspeakably malevolent force that wastes no time instigating a plan of destruction for its unsuspecting neighbours, and it isn't too long before finger pointing accusations of witchcraft begin and the ship of dread sets sail toward its unknowable, terrifying destination...
With more than a passing nod to lurid 70's classic Blood On Satan's Claw, Eggers' wicked 17th Century yarn is alarmingly brought to life by his informed ear for the period dialect and the remarkable DP work of his cameraman Janin Blaschke, whose lighting skills drain just enough colour from the landscape to make you believe we're right slap-back bang in the middle of pre-creature comforts 1630.
There's no shirking from the harsh day-to- day realities & tensions of these new/olde' puritans existence, but Eggers' screenplay never loses focus on their humanity as a real living, loving family unit either. As the dogmatic hubris of ingrained faith begins to tear them apart from within, the dynamics of the story stubbornly refuses to make snide, self-righteous judgements at their expense, so we always care about their survival even when it looks like things are heading to the point of no return.
Any whiff of archaic restraints imploding on the usage of Eggers' authentic dialogue is expertly staved off by a first-rate cast who deliver it with unforced conviction. Ralph Inesen and Kate Dickie as parents William and Katherine (respectively) are very fine indeed, but it's their brethren of offspring that steal the show with Harvey Scrimshaw's Caleb and star player Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin making the biggest splash via two of the most original and, not to mention, rudest sexual awakenings ever committed to a horror film.
And yes, The Witch is very much a horror film. Brooding atmosphere and disquieting menace take precedence over the urge to indulge the usual tired genre tropes, and the more conventionally minded patron seeking a roller-coaster broomstick ride might be put off by Eggers' steady, deliberate pacing. But when it's ready to get its hands dirty, out come the teeth and claws to reward your patience, not least by landing a jump scare I guarantee you will not see coming, but boy, will you feel it! This one isn't called The Witch for nothing.
Eggers' draws everything to a close via an orgasmic flash of perfectly timed delirium that, intentional or otherwise, hits a key visual beat from Logan's Run. The reference points don't stop there either as the eerier aspects of the iconic soundtracks for 2001 and The Shining are gleefully aped by composer Mark Korven's score. His music enhances the outlandish finale to such a spine tingling degree, you almost feel as though you've snuck a peek behind the magic curtain to witness one of the world's best kept secrets.
Voices of dissent have called out this ending as a step too far. But for me it's further proof of the movies balls and insurance against a branding from the dreaded 'Psychological Thriller' iron too.
The Witch is lean, mean and when it chooses to be, damn right nasty. By stepping back in time to the darkness of our past, Eggers' has sneaked the genre creeping and cackling into the 21st century with an entry to make you think twice about picnicking in the woods anytime soon. And to that, I raise a glass of bloody goat's milk. Cheers Phillip!
Nina Forever (2015)
No thanks Nina
Nina Forever is the blackly comic debut feature from the writer/director team of Ben & Chris Blaine which begins very promisingly with supermarket drone Holly (Abigail Hardingham) wooing her work colleague Rob, (Cian Barry), into a romantic relationship. Rob is game but still grieving with suicidal tendencies from the death of his previous lover, Nina, who was killed in a motoring accident. This opening segment is well set up with offbeat humour, convincing performances and a disquieting atmosphere thanks to Oliver Russell's sullen cinematography.
Once Rob and Holly hop into the sack however, the brothers Blaine hit premature ejaculation and out pops the bloody apparition that is Nina, spawned from the hereafter for a sabotage mission. Her bizarre and shocking introduction from the inside beyond of Rob's mattress is as impressive as it is gruesome, and quite understandably deflates the newly acquainted couple's appetite for love making. But almost as quickly as Nina's arrival comes the realisation that this is as good as it gets and the story has reached its final destination in stalled county.
The scenario is served up again and again and again as, rather than screaming her lungs out and running for her life, Holly perseveres and messes in (pun intended) with replacing the gore stained bed sheets every time naughty Nina appears from the afterlife to spanner the would-be blossoming romance with the supposedly acerbic diatribes spewed forth from the bowels of her gob.
Add in Rob's continuing and, it has to be said, occasionally hilarious affiliation with his undead girlfriend's parents, and you've pretty much got everything Nina Forever has to offer. There is little more here than a much laboured conceit about not being able to move on with one's life and being tied to the past blah blah blah, with little variation or story progression to hold the interest.
And then there is the problem of Nina herself: in place of a sympathetic and menacing entity from beyond the grave, we have an irritant bore with the voice of a child and the charismatic black hole demeanour of a refugee from Made-In-Chelsea. Whatever it was about this tiresome It-Girl wannabe Rob found so enchanting and beautiful one can only guess at, as any charm and personality plus points she may have once possessed must have been wheeled off to the knackers yard for crushing along with the vehicle she perished in.
Once again, the writing can take a lot of the blame, but this is shared by the miscasting of Fiona O'Shaughnessy in the title role. She looks physically too long in the tooth for young Rob, yet (ironically) lacks the mature thespian chops required to flesh out the complexities this, admittedly difficult role demands, resulting in a double whammy fail.
Some compensation arrives late in the shape of Rob's moving confrontation in a restaurant with Nina's Mum and Dad and the torch passing fate afforded Holly in the closing scenes. Both are well delivered and move things forward slightly. But it's too little too late.
The brothers Blaine have over reached themselves with a half baked story that, despite its allusions to surrealism and the macabre, is far too well behaved & normal for the tropes contained within. Either an off-the-wall, avant-garde, art-house telling or a straight, hell-for-leather, horror roller-coaster would have been preferable treatment to the underwhelming elegance this non-starter has to offer. Better luck next time boys.
Slaughterhouse (1987)
The Pigs are alright
The main story concerning two all-mod-cons (for 1987 anyway) small town businessmen and a gruff sheriff trying to underhandedly usurp an old school sausage factory owner, Lester Bacon (Don Barrett), and his psychotically wayward son, Buddy (Joe Barton), is pure EC horror comic pulp resulting inevitably as it does in gruesome murder.
Wrapped around this is a fun quartet of teens in a Jeep who while away their time making rubber mask music videos in the slaughterhouse when they're not drowning their French fries in ketchup or cutting a rug to cheesy synth bands at the local Bacon disco dance.
Both these strands are married up quite successfully with likable and reprehensible characters alike meeting grisly fates in the piggy execution chamber via Buddy's big cleaver.
But Buddy's kind of a problem as he's played more for laughs than menace and comes over way too sweet and cuddly for a Leatherface wannabe. Clearly this was the intention of writer/director Rick Roessler from the opening sequence, but it seriously devalues any threats of suspense and tension that might be brewing and leaves an unsatisfying taste in the mouth. Buddy's Pop is cartoonish in tone too but Don Barrett makes a fair old go of it in the eye rolling/teeth gnashing department, so some kudos is due there.
The last third however, does make up for these shortcomings somewhat with an atmospheric climax in the meat plant chamber of horrors where most of the cast are quite harshly dispatched in brutal fashion before the freeze frame cliff-hanger brings us to an unexpected full stop.
Keeping the murderous pig farmers in the shadows would have added a much needed air of mystery and surprise and may have pushed it toward the realm of 'minor classic' and, possibly, a higher rating. But it's still a pretty decent, fun slasher that's well worth a look.
The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)
The Witch Who Came From The Sea Of The Banned
TWWCFTS is a truly freaky 70's psycho-sexual feminist drama (written & directed by men interestingly), featuring incest, castration, pithy dialogue, mermaid tattoos and a fantastic central performance from Millie Perkins as the mentally damaged Molly, the vengeful 'Witch' of the title who wrecks violent retribution upon dominant, brutish men from the entertainments industry. The empty beaches & promenades of the coastal town setting add depth, substance and ambiance in the background to unsettling effect.
If made today starring Jennifer Lawrence and helmed by David Fincher, it would most likely win 10 Golden Globes and 25 Oscars. But back then (the dark 80's) the powers-that-be (and still are) saw fit to condemn to the bin of the banned. Shameful & disgraceful. Now go watch!
Devil's Playground (2010)
Yawn of the Dead
I sat through this bum-fluff at the recent GoreZone Festival in London's West End and almost lost the will to live before the opening credits had rolled. The prologue featuring bargain-basement 'action-man' Craig Fairbrass woodenly spouting even more wooden dialogue at the camera as a prep for the sub '28 Days Later' 'Rollercoaster' to come, made my heart sink faster than 'The Detonator' ride at Thorpe Park, and quickly proved its pedigree as a very bad omen for things to come.
Despite the first half hour containing a few nods to the guilty pleasures of Tobe Hooper's 'Lifeforce', there is little to no fun to be derived from this joyless and dispiritingly derivative Brit-Horror that scrapes the bottom of the 'Zombies-what-can-run' barrel into the dirt.
Accomplished camera-work and Sean Pertwee's hilarious cameo stave off some of the boredom, but a hopeless script and Danny Dyer's pathetic attempt at an emphatic hero put debut director Mark McQueen's puny entry into this exhausted genre deservedly into the dustbin of the underachieving undead.
The Last Exorcism (2010)
Devilishly Bad Denouement
Below par addition to the horror-mockumentary sub-genre, chronicling the tale of the Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), an Evangelical minister with a sideline in performing exorcisms. When his faith goes south, he instigates a documentary expose on the fraudulent and harmful nature of his work and sets off with a two-headed film-crew to the remote property of farmer Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum), who believes his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell) is implicated in a spate of cattle mutilations by way of demonic possession. Marcus promptly 'frees' the troubled girl from the Hell spawned grip of Abalan (for it is he) and, with the Farmer's blessings and payment, is swiftly on his way to retirement, unaware his troubles (and ours) are about to begin...
For the first hour or so, director Daniel Stamm does an efficient, if none too imaginative job of sustaining moderate intrigue and interest in a so-so story and is well served by an able cast and the moody, naturalistic lighting of Zoltan Hont's crisp camera-work.
Unfortunately, his grasp on what makes a good pseudo-documentary ('Blair Witch Project', 'Paranormal Activity') and what makes a bad ('Cloverfield', 'Diary of the Dead') is left considerably wanting as it gradually becomes apparent that, despite the odd scare and Nell's moments of Satanic body-popping contortions, the rear-end of this particular wannabe is of the feathery kind and is planted firmly in 'pretender-country'.
The moc-doc format is seriously undermined with the continuous use of cutaways in what we're supposed to believe is the spontaneous work of a film-unit operating with a single camera. Add to this the mystifying 'scary' incidental music on the soundtrack, and Stamm fully exposes himself as a helmsman minus the courage of his convictions. A derivative 'Blair Witch' style 'Vox-Pop' segment early on doesn't help either and is further evidence that inspiration and originality are in very short supply.
All these creative misdemeanours might have been forgivable had Huck Botko's and Andrew Gurland's script arrived at a suitably shocking, and satisfying conclusion. But that's wishful thinking I'm afraid as the last third declines at warp factor speed into a laughably nonsensical (and quite frankly, embarrassing) mash-up of 'Rosemary's Baby' 'Race With the Devil' and 'The Wicker Man', drowning any evidence of credibility and subtlety in a full-on shower of steaming Fire & Brimstone cowpats, making it a strong contender for Worst Ending of 2010. In that respect alone, 'The Last Exorcism' is 'outstanding'.
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)
See this 'sick filth' now!
Baring more than a passing resemblance to Anthony Balch's 1973 Brit Schlocker 'Horror Hospital', this weird and grotesquely funny outing from the Netherlands starts deceptively in familiar scary-movie terrain with the introduction of Lindsay and Jenny (Ashley C.Williams and Ashlynn Yennie), two bimbo American tourists stranded on a road trip in the German woodlands following the breakdown of their vehicle during a rain storm.
Finding what they believe to be solace in the isolated lodgings of a retired Siamese-twin specialist surgeon - the suspiciously monikered Dr Heiter (Deiter Laser) – things take a turn for the worse when they wind up drugged and bound in the loopy host's operating theatre. A framed photograph of an earlier experiment at the Doctor's bedside - the dead and buried '3-Hound' - is a big clue as to what is in store for our hapless heroines.
After wrong-footing us with a wave of ropey acting, hokey dialogue and genre clichés, writer/director Tom Six's freak show starts to do exactly what its title threatens and, via a dread-inducing diagram demo, it's not too long before our damsels in distress find themselves down on all fours, gastrically conjoined face-to-bum-crack x 2, with a third captive, Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), leading the way.
Surprisingly, THC is a far more palatable affair than this grisly synopsis might suggest, with the slick visuals, black humour and admirable restraint on the ketchup bottle gamely shaping it into a car-crash spectacle you cannot tear your eyes away from. The resistance to turn the graphics all the way up to 11 makes Katsuro's inevitable 'call of nature' moment far more – ahem - digestible too, allowing its 'finer' details to exist only within the viewers' mind.
At the centre of this glorious pile-up is Laser's all-consuming, all conquering performance as the uber-mad surgeon. His bug-eyd skeletal features and uncontrollable tantrums are an ugly, compulsive joy to behold, offsetting sharply as they do against the sterile artifacts and antiseptic interiors of his sanctum sanctorum. Heiter's fire and ice mood-swings and refusal to interact with his stitched-up prisoners as human beings, heightens our sympathies and grief for the whimpering girls and the raging Katsuro too.
It's no coincidence that a man from the east figures in the Doctor's ghastly equation as Six himself has commented in recent interviews that the characters – German, American and Japanese – represent the main players of World War II, and Heiter's experiment mirrors that of the more heinous and sinister crimes committed by Nazi scientists behind closed doors.
One enlightened, and very insightful IMDb reviewer pointed out that Katsuro's involvement is also symbolic of Hollywood's depressingly in-exhaustive practice of remaking Japanese horror films for the US teen-market. As a literal illustration of the West being force fed the regurgitations of the East, it takes some beating.
Another metaphor THC brings home to roost, is the horror of becoming part of something you have no control over; the terror and helplessness of wanting to escape from your body, and the realisation that you have been cemented into a faceless chain of servitude from which there is no escape. Even a breakdown in the system (suicide/sudden death) , or intervention from external forces (incompetent, shaggy-haired policemen) will fail to save your bacon and leave you stuck between a rock and a very hard place indeed, as is the case with the horror-upon-horror ending.
Certain detractors (including a few critics that really should know better) have taken THC at face value and written it off as "the sickest film ever made", adding the usual "Degrading to all those that choose to watch it!" film flam along with a few (completely unfounded) accusations of misogyny. B*ll*cks say I! - Six's movie is certainly outrageous and disturbing, but it's also socially aware, darkly humorous and well made enough to be thoroughly deserving of its forthcoming sequel – 'The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence' - which is currently being shot in London and due for a 2011 release. I.Cant.Wait.
Im Lauf der Zeit (1976)
Get on board the Winter & Lander Express!
Considering the length and weight of his oeuvre, my exposure to the cinema of Wim Wenders is a limited one to say the least. This inexperience stems not from a lack of viewing opportunities, but an apprehension instilled in me after a succession of run-ins with some of his lesser achievements, such as the patience testing 'Until The End Of The World' and 'Faraway, So Close'.
It was with a thick air of trepidation then, that I slipped the German auteur's 1976 opus 'Kings of the Road' into the DVD tray and positioned myself nervously on the couch in preparation for a potential 176 minute assault of self-indulgent monotony. I watched the first hour beneath a cloud of ambivalence as the monochrome images and sparse dialogue crawled by at tortoise speed with any blip of a detectable plot yet to appear on the radar.
The longer it went on however, the more snugly it began to slip under my skin, and the saga of Bruno Winter (Rudiger Vogler) - a truck-driving mechanic travelling across Germany to fix broken down projectors in dusty old picture houses - and Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler) - a depressed hitchhiker with a failed marriage behind him - began to gracefully reel me in from the waters of uncertainty and onto the shores for a warm embrace. At journey's end, my mood was a gleeful mix of satisfaction and gratification: the best part of three hours in these charming men's company had proved very rewarding indeed.
Bruno and Robert's paths cross via the latter's soggy, blackly comic suicide attempt, leading them down the long & winding road of decaying movie theatres, lonely hearts, unforgettable black & white images and a stunning soundtrack. And without really trying too hard, KOTR ends up as a far more worthy lament to the good old days of film-making than anything to be found in the pre-digested pap of 'Cinema Paradiso'.
This is beautifully illustrated both in the prologue (where Bruno bends his ear to an elder statesman bemoaning the passing of cinema's golden age) and a sequence in which our heroes manfully attempt to restore a matinée viewing gone awry whilst silhouetted behind the movie screen of a theatre full of impatient school children. The two men spontaneously burst into a Chaplinesque slapstick routine to the delight of their captive audience and end their performance in a laughing, gasping heap on the floor. They're rudely awakened by a hangman's style noose swinging ominously between them. For better or worse, things will change. A very poignant moment considering today's climate of declining bums-on-seats in the cinema.
Another thing that jumped out at me, were the separate occasions in which Bruno and Robert cast their eyes over the front-page headlines of the daily newspapers; "Terror attack in Jerusalem" and "1 million unemployed" are the type-faces that flash momentarily on the screen, giving both men a firm tap on the shoulder as a reminder of the big-bad-world they've left behind. Blank facial expressions give nothing away as to what either man is thinking and Wenders cuts to the next scene before there's any time to ponder the effects these news stories might have on the decisions concerning their chosen lifestyle. Whatever the case, it resonates loudly with the state of our own current affairs demonstrating at once, that nothing really changes, and what a fascinating, timeless work of art KOTR truly is.
All of these things might sound portentous and heavy handed, but Wenders never forces the issues, takes sides, or labours the point, instead opting for a relaxed narrative where everything unravels in its own time in a hands off, matter-of-fact fashion, leaving us with an elegiac, me-dative affair blessed from top to bottom with great, understated writing and performances.
Fans and critics alike seem to agree that the spare dialogue interaction between the protagonists signifies the difficulty of communication and self-expression that can lead to the breakup of a relationship, resulting in physical violence. This reading of the subtext is certainly not without merit, but as far as the central characters are concerned, I'd have to say I think it's a much lighter movie than that.
Bruno & Robert's nods, smiles and casual shrugs are all part of a silent language and mutual understanding that highlights their free-spiriting nature and genuine feel and affection for each other. There is no need for them to spout endless superlatives re the might of the road, or posture existentially on the magnitude of the landscapes, when they know (more likely than not) that they're both thinking the same thing. Oh sure, they might bicker now and again, endure sadness and have the occasional strop, but so does everyone else on the planet. Everyone else likes to laugh from time to time too, so when the buck finally does stop (after an insipid, mirth-inducing 'punch-up') they go their separate ways with a smile and cheer of goodwill for each other. What could be sweeter than that?
I'm not the first (and will surely not be the last) to say that one could go on longer than the film itself hammering out endless analysis on its incidental delights, sensitivity, craftsmanship etc , so I'll sign off by saying that Wenders' masterful epic will certainly not be for everyone, but was most definitely for me. It's quite possible I'll still be on my guard when it comes to checking out his other titles (although I'm super-keen to see the first two parts of this trilogy – 'Alice in the Cities' & 'The Wrong Move'), but when the mood takes me again, I'll be more than happy to hitch another ride on board The Winter & Lander Express. When it comes to KOTR, Wim Wenders is the REAL 'King of the World'!
Splice (2009)
From Baby to Scary Splice
The icy locations of the Canadian landscape enhance the chilly atmosphere no end in this intelligent and sardonically witty spin on Mary Shelley's famous monster yarn. 'Cube' director Vincenzo Natali's latest creep-show is a refreshing throwback to the smart, body-shock prosthetics of 1980's David Cronenberg , and in particular, his remake of 'The Fly'.
Named after two actors in James Whale's 1935 classic 'Bride of Frankenstein', cool-geeks Clive & Elsa (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) are bedfellow 'mad' scientists who secretly splice together human and animal DNA to create a new species. The resulting creature - Dren (Delphine Chaneac) - evolves at an alarming rate into a chrome-domed woman with wings, gills and a very nasty sting at the end of her tail.
After being moved from her laboratory birthplace to the derelict farmhouse of Elsa's childhood, Dren ups the ambiguity stakes with increasingly unpredictable and dangerous behaviour, signalling that things might not end too well.
Rather impressively, 'Splice' covers a lot of ground in its 103 minutes, successfully placing issues of ethical boundaries, motherhood, 'teenage-angst' and bureaucratic hampering under the microscope, whilst still finding plenty of room for eye-opening set-pieces, such as a botched and bloody demonstration involving two phallic abominations named 'Fred & Ginger', and a truly alarming sexual liaison in a dusty barn between the creator and their creation. Very naughty.
The shift from sci-fi thriller to full-on horror movie is a relatively successful one, although it must be said that the climax could have been a lot tighter and eventful, suffering as it does from some slack pacing and muted dynamics. A tad more grue and gore wouldn't have gone amiss.
On the whole though, this is a thoughtful, well acted, genre piece with enough nifty moves and latex-stretching gross-outs to make it well worth your time.
The Lookout (2007)
The Cop Out
Get Shorty' & 'Out of Sight' scribe Scott Frank's directorial debut (which he also penned) starts out promisingly with a former high school ice-hockey star, Chris Pratt (Joseph Gorden Levitt), trying to adjust to life after being left mentally retarded by a car crash he caused four years earlier. He's fit only for a menial job as night cleaner in a local bank and fills the rest of his time daydreaming about running a sandwich bar with blind flatmate Lewis (the ever reliable Jeff Daniels).
Levitt copes very well conveying the tics & traits of someone who's suffered a serious head trauma, instilling a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment as he repeatedly struggles with etiquette & articulation during social interaction. Unfortunately, it isn't too long before the wheels start to wobble and we take a sharp, wrong turn into predictable street.
Alarm bells first start to ring when he crosses paths with school friend Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode), who's initial generosity and chumminess are really an insidious smokescreen to lure Pratt into assisting him in a bank robbery. Not just any bank robbery mind: Spargo and his evil henchmen need him to rob (and you might be ahead of me here) THE BANK AT WHICH HE IS EMPLOYED!
From here on in, everything you think will happen, happens exactly when you thought it would and exactly as you anticipated. Every box is ticked and every bean is counted as it races frustratingly towards the finishing line of happy-ever-after heaven, leaving no cliché unturned on the way.
I really thought 'The Lookout' might go somewhere unexpected and make a few moves I didn't see coming, as during the first forty minutes all the right noises were being made for a character-driven drama that looked difficult to second guess. But it quickly loses altitude and switches to autopilot for a safe, formulaic landing instead.
It must be said that Frank does display some talent in the director's chair and juggles the visuals and performances of his cast very nicely indicating, that in time, he might be a force to be reckoned with. Its ironic then that, after knocking up such an impressive CV as one of the best screenwriter's around, he scuppers his first go behind the camera by placing all his bets on such a second-rate script. Disappointing.
The Incredible Melting Man (1977)
The Incredulous Melting Ice Cream Man!
I first saw this cruddy little cheapie back in the late 70's when it played on a double bill with 'The Savage Bees' at my local flea-pit.
Being an impressionable teenager, I was 'blown away' by all the blood, guts and goo on show, and left the cinema believing i'd just witnessed a sci-fi horror masterpiece.
Thirty years later, I purchased the DVD and sat down to watch it with my partner. Thirty minutes later, we realised this particular 'Melting Man' should have been left dead and buried in the 1977 trashcan he winds up in along with my rose-tinted memory.
For what it's worth, an astronaut on a space mission flies his craft too close to the sun (or something) and returns to earth to embark on a rampaging trail of mutilation and murder whilst layer after layer of skin melts off his bones. And that's it.
Production values are rock bottom, the direction corpselike, the editing looks like the work of a visually impaired person using their teeth and the acting is uniformly awful which, when all is said and done, at least gives it some consistency.
Rick Baker's Melting Man make-up fx seemed awesome at the time, but now the title character just resembles someone that looks like they fell into a vat of Ben & Jerry's chocolate ice-cream.
And even though it's still the best thing in the movie, the scene with a severed head bursting open at the bottom of a waterfall, is nowhere near as graphic as I remember. But hey, that's memories for ya.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Punch-Drunk-Blood!
Two-thirds of the way through 'There Will Be Blood', it suddenly dawned on me that writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson must be a film student from "The longer the movie, the more seriously i'll be taken!" school of thinking. 'Important' film critics seem to lap up lengthy, historical epics as if they're objects that contain the meaning of life within, and judging by their hysterically over-positive reaction, they must have thought all of their Christmas' had come at once when this self-important ogre first came tumbling over the horizon.
Despite pretensions alluring to an allegory of the Iraqi war, there isn't any story so to speak of other than a series of Mexican standoffs between a piece of pork (Day Lewis' thoroughly unpleasant oil-baron-to-be, Daniel Plainview) and a rash of bacon (Dano's equally unpleasant, charlatan preacher, Eli Sunday) who indulge in a self-serving handbags at dawn spat over some black liquid spillage in New Mexico circa 1898.
These hammy confrontations are very entertaining and the two actors cheerfully chew the scenery for all their worth - but by god! - without them it would be interminable, as the sliver thin plot (adapted from a book no one's ever heard of, let alone read) is dragged out over TWO-AND-THREE-QUARTER-HOURS!!!
In between Lewis & Dano's colourful interludes are vast, vacuous chasms containing some beige mountains, a crushingly obtrusive score by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood and a disgracefully wasted Cirian Hinds, who has almost literally nothing to say or do for the whole movie. He's not alone however, as this elephantine husk has plenty more squandered opportunities waiting up it's flabby sleeve.
A number of scenes whet your appetite for some great drama, but ultimately deflate you by fizzling out into nothing. Too often Anderson places the despicable Plainview into circumstances where his self-obsession threatens emotional fireworks & nitty-gritty theatrics, and too often they're just left dangling in thin-air and end up head butting a dramatic cul-de-sac brick wall instead.
The segment involving the sudden appearance of Plainview's (alleged) younger brother, Henry (Kevin J O'connor), could have been an exception to this rule as it contains a beginning, middle and (very sticky) end. But Anderson executes it with such an arrogant disregard for timing and pace, that it ends up getting crushed pancake-flat beneath a cliff-face of tedium.
Even the final scene takes the wind out of the sails of expectation on account of it just being plain daft. Time Out magazine commented that " the climax contains the lunacy of 'Dr Strangelove' and 'A Clockwork Orange'" which it does and, taken on it's own terms, it is (in a Monty Python kinda-way) actually quite funny. Yet, it's absurdly at odds with everything preceding it, leaving us by contrast with a silly, puny looking pay-off.
Stylistically speaking, TWBB is at least free of the embarrassing Scorsese aping traits found in 'Boogie Nights' & 'Magnolia', and Roger Elswitt's sobering lens work is very fine indeed. On the other hand though, those two movies did at least contain a sense of life and (whisper it) fun, in their bones. So even though they unravelled into a big pile of nothing at the halfway mark, they did (if only for a short time) make a game attempt at proper audience engagement. TWBB just splutters & spurts on it's back for a third of the duration and spends the rest of it's time sound asleep. More likely than not, so will you.
Lurking somewhere within this Death Star sized suet-pudding, is a lean, decent little movie trying to fight it's way out - a taut chamber piece that could have set the world on fire. But it wasn't to be. PTA obviously believed there should be excessive width to 'enhance' the quality and ends up gorging his baby into obesity, boring us sh*tless as a result. Much much less, could have been so much more.
Cry Wolf (2005)
Cry Wolf Droppings!
From the visionary director of Manual Labor and Catching Kringle comes the ultimate in bloodless terror!
If anaemic shocks fused with telegraphed twists and sub Scream shenanigans is your idea of horror movie heaven, then Cry Wolf will drive you into a frenzy!
Set in a boarding school for bratty rich-kids, the storyline deals with the fabrication of a Serial-Killer-On-Campus scare-story by a group of dopey students. After passing it off to the rest of the school as the never-ending-truth via e-mail, they come a cropper when a real mad knife-man comes-a-knocking. Doh!
Following some weak-kneed thrills and wishy-washy attempts at horror, we arrive at a super-unshocking, super-silly denouement with some hypocritical moralising thrown in for good measure.
In all fairness, the material does have a whiff of potential and in more capable, creative hands it could have been a good piece of trashy fun. But with butterfingers Jeff Wadlow behind the wheel, it never stood a chance and he ploughs this particular vehicle headfirst into a sewage-tank.
Spearheading the cast of teen-androids is the stunning non-entity that is Julian Morris, an actor so lacking in distinction, charisma and screen presence, that he makes Orlando Bloom look like a modern-day reincarnation of Spencer Tracey. His balsa-wood like delivery and rigor-mortis-from-the-neck-up expressionism, hasn't made me laugh so much since Madonna made an ass of herself (yet again) in Swept Away.
This young 'thesp' must have friends in very high places to keep getting the rate of work evident on his CV. Why producers and directors are still casting him in leading-man roles is a mystery bigger to me than that of UFO's, Jack the Ripper and the Loch-Ness Monster.
Morris' ineptitude in front of the camera is matched wholesale by Wadlow's behind it. With an insistent use of bleached into oblivion film stock, his visuals are washed out to sea taking any blood & guts (real or metaphorical) with it and damning every inch of celluloid with an aesthetic so bland and vapid, that it makes the colour palette of your average Hollyoaks episode look like it was blueprinted from the Wachowski brothers' SpeedRacer.
The Uzi-fire editing (no doubt deployed by the front office after viewing the finished product) cuts everything up so aggressively, and into such sloppy small pieces, that nothing on show gets more than a split nano-second of screen time to breathe before it wilts and dies in a hotbed of arrested non-development.
A laughably miscast Jon Bon Jovi in the role of a school teacher, and an accent-wandering walk-on part by Gary Cole as Morris' father (you can do better than this sir), bang the final nine-inch-nails into the coffin of a stiff that is yet to see a sequel. Phew.