May 17th, 2008
Posted by
Ian W |
Horror, Movie Reviews |
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This sleazy little film was a lot more enjoyable than I was expecting. Director Pete Walker generates a fair amount of tension early on, and populates the film with some entertainingly bonkers characters, plus plenty of naked female flesh.
When the appropriately named Mark E. Desade picks up a young French model, Ann-Marie (played, with a surprisingly decent French accent, by Penny Irving) he soon displays a perchance for the perverse but it’s only when takes her home to meet his mum and dad that things really get interesting. Dad’s a demented old judge and mum’s a sadistic ex-prison warden and they’ve set up there own correctional facility for wayward young ladies, where even the simplest crime results in the ultimate penalty. The prison is staffed by a pair of matrons, one a butch older woman with lesbian tendencies, the other getting her pleasure from torturing the inmates.
It’s more thoughtful than you might think though, David McGillivray’s script portraying the would-be defenders of morality as the real perverts. Most of the torture isn’t explicitly shown and while early on some of the nudity is pure titillation, there’s little to get you excited once the story moves to the prison (unless of course you’re as twisted as the people who run it). It also displays a ruthless efficiency with its characters, leaving you wondering if anyone will survive to see the credits.
April 19th, 2008
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Ian W |
Horror, Movie Reviews |
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I’ve a lot of time for the Pang Brothers, their films are visually stylish but not at the expense of character and they’ve managed to avoid getting pigeonholed as horror directors. The Eye is probably their most well known film, and also the most successful, spawning two sequels, but I found it a little disappointing and not particularly original.
A cornea transplant patient starts seeing dead people and the mysterious shadow figures that come to take them away. Sound familiar? The Eye borrows a lot from The Sixth Sense and doesn’t do a very good job of hiding it.
The pace of the film is quite slow, not uncommon for Asian horror films, and adds to the feeling of mounting tension and there are some very creepy set pieces. Angelica Lee is excellent as Wong Kar Mun the woman who regains her sight after being blind since she was an infant but the love story angle of the film, that sees her doctor falling for her, doesn’t work and feels superfluous.
The film seems to lose its way at the end, with the reason behind the visions more tragic than terrifying, something the Pang’s must have realised as they seem to rush through this part of the film in order to get to the Hollywood style explosive climax, which put me in mind of The Mothman Prophecies, a film that was released a few months before The Eye. I can’t help wondering if this ending was a late addition, something the brothers came up with after seeing Mothman but regardless, it feels at odds the with quiet chills that are generated throughout the rest of the film.
April 17th, 2008
Posted by
Ian W |
Action, Comic Book, Horror, Movie Reviews, Science Fiction |
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Anyone expecting the serious minded superheroics of X-Men, or the angst-ridden thrills of Spider-Man would perhaps have been a bit disappointed by Fantastic Four, but for me it does a decent job of capturing the fun tone of the original comic. The X-Men are outcasts from humanity, Spider-Man is a masked vigilante who does what he does out of guilt over the death of his Uncle Ben, the FF on the other hand are public figures, they don’t hide their identities behind masks, they’re celebrities and the film portrays them as such, or rather there evolution to celebrity status following the accident that gives them their powers.
The film’s heart may be in the right place, but its casting is a hit and miss affair. First the misses - Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic and Jessica Alba as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman. Gruffudd lacks the presence for Reed Richards, the part calls for someone who can command the screen, whereas when Gruffudd’s with the other three he’s the last one you look at.
I like Jessica Alba, she’s undeniably beautiful and a capable enough actress given a part that plays to her strengths, said strengths not including playing a technobabbleing scientist. The film tries to get around this by that old standby when depicting intelligent characters – have her wear specs. Sadly this ruse doesn’t work, and Alba only gets to make an impression in the scene where she suddenly becomes visible in her undies. That she and Gruffudd have little onscreen chemistry doesn’t help matters.
April 5th, 2008
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Ian W |
Horror, Movie Reviews |
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This is the small-group-of-people-in-a-confined-space-trying-to-keep-the-monsters-out style horror movie that has an obvious appeal to those with a limited budget. We’ve seen it so often, in everything from Night of the Living Dead to Dog Soldiers, yet, if it’s backed up by a clever script and a director who knows what he’s doing, it can still be extremely effective.
The writing team of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton know their horror movies and take great delight in turning the genre conventions upside down. To say too much would be to spoil the surprises, but it’s fair to say that very early in the film you’ll realise it’s not going to be easy to predict who will still be standing at the end of the film.
Director John Gulager manages to create plenty of tension and some cool action set pieces as well as showing a commendable talent for early Peter Jackson style gross out humour. He may have lacked for money but blood definitely isn’t in short supply.
The cast is made up of mostly unknowns with a few familiar faces here and there. Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Jason Mewes and the director’s dad, Clu Gulager, are the familiar faces. Mewes isn’t around for long and Getty seems to be playing Charlie Sheen but Rollins is great fun playing against type as a gun hating coach who’s in the bar when the shit hits the fan. As for Clu Gulager, for a guy in his seventies he’s looking pretty good and it’s nice to see the old pro getting stuck in to the action.
March 29th, 2008
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Ian W |
Action, Horror, Movie Reviews |
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In a break from routine this week’s Friday Night Fright was seen on the big screen. The Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino Grindhouse project is on tour at selected cinemas around the UK in its original form, complete with fake trailers, and I caught it last night at the Vue in Leicester.
I’d previously seen Rodriguez’s Planet Terror segment, along with the fake trailer for Machete, at the FrightFest All-nighter back in November but it anything I enjoyed it more second time around. It’s an insanely gory and utterly demented homage to trashy zombie flicks that totally embraces the Grindhouse concept. Hilariously bad dialogue, over the top performances, a crazy and completely illogical plot and more gore than you’ll see in the rest of this year’s movies combined add up to a thrill ride that doesn’t pause for breath until THE END appears on screen and we hear the last notes of the greatest score John Carpenter never wrote.
High points? Josh Brolin’s mad doctor is a superb scenery (and thermometer) chewing performance. It’s also nice to see Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey in something other than the straight-to-DVD trash they’re normally wasted in these days. The films only weak performance comes from Naveen Andrews, maybe it’s because I’m so used to seeing him as Sayid in Lost, but he seems out of place here and doesn’t really get into the real grindhouse spirit of things.
March 22nd, 2008
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Ian W |
Horror, Movie Reviews |
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Set, for the most part, in just one cell in a French prison, Maléfique has an intensely claustrophobic feel to it. The lead character is Carrère, a white collar criminal doing time for fraud. Sharing the room with him are some very eccentric characters – Marcus, a transvestite muscleman, Paquerette, a retarded young man who grew up living with pigs before eating his infant sister and Lassalle an intellectual driven mad by too much knowledge who murdered his wife at breakfast one morning.
When these odd and decidedly unpleasant characters stumble on a book hidden in one of the walls, written by a serial killer at the start of the twentieth century, things start to get a little weird. For as well as being a serial killer, Danvers, the books author, was also adept in black magic. When they realise that the spells in the book really work they see it as a way to escape their prison, but will it lead them to freedom or to eternal damnation? To call this Hellraiser meets Cube in a French prison would be oversimplifying things but there are certainly elements of those films present. It’s to the writers’ credit that this never feels like a rehash of old ideas.
I’ve never come across any of the cast before but they are uniformly excellent. With such an enclosed environment the interaction of the characters is very much to the fore, and it’s down to the playing of these four actors that the film is so successful. While director Eric Valette cranks up the tension admirably and there are some extremely effective gory set pieces it’s the characters that will stay in your memory.
February 9th, 2008
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Ian W |
Horror, Movie Reviews |
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Prior to The Devil’s Men in 1976 Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence had appeared together in three classic productions - the 1954 BBC TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, the Burke and Hare tale The Flesh and the Fiends (1960) and From Beyond the Grave, one of the best of the Amicus anthology films, in 1973. Given that, I had high hopes for this US/Greek co-production. Silly me.
Pleasance hams it up as an Irish priest convinced the Devil is up to no good in a little Greek village, while Cushing gets too little screen time to do anything with the part of Baron Corofax, the Devil’s right hand man. The actors portraying the young tourists captured by the Minotaur worshipping cult were obviously picked for looks and a willingness to get their kit off rather than any great thespian ability. Unfortunately it fairs no better at titillation that at terrifying the audience.
From a historical perspective the film is probably most noteworthy for having a score by Brian Eno. While not his best work it’s a cut above the rest of the film, although, as you might expect from such an avant-garde composer, it sounds dated now.
Even for a diehard Cushing fan like me this was a chore to sit through, so unless you‘re a Cushing, Pleasence or Eno completist I’d recommend steering clear.
February 1st, 2008
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Ian W |
Horror, Movie Reviews |
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The pseudo-reality style film shows no sign of disappearing; Cloverfield gives the concept a Godzilla spin, while last year Diary of the Dead and Zombie Diaries brought a new meaning to that zombie movie staple, the head shot. Welcome to the Jungle doesn’t bring anything new to table; in fact the opposite is true, as the film harks back pre-Blair Witch to Cannibal Holocaust.
All these films (well I’ve not seen Cloverfield yet but I’d guess it holds true) have the same initial problem - why would anyone continue filming when faced with a life and death situation? Most attempt to surmount this dilemma in the same way - The Blair Witch Project, Zombie Diaries, The Last Broadcast, Cannibal Holocaust and Diary of the Dead all feature filmmakers as their central characters. We’re expected to accept they’d keep going, past the point where any sane person would have headed for the hills, because it’s their job, and, to varying degrees, this works. Works well enough for us to suspend belief and get carried along for the ride anyway.
It’s a hurdle which Welcome to the Jungle fails to get over. Eschewing the tried and tested filmmaker approach the film features four friends who decide to go looking for fame, fortune and Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea, taking along a couple of cameras to document the quest. Now this may sound like much the same idea, but these aren’t professional filmmakers, they’re actually a bunch of shallow, get-rich-quick, slackers. Infighting dogs their progress, two of the group can barely get out of bed in the morning, and yet we’re supposed to accept they would keep filming almost up to the point of their own death? It doesn’t wash.
January 25th, 2008
Posted by
Ian W |
Drama, Horror, Movie Reviews |
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Two thirds of the way through this atmospheric Korean horror I was struck by a feeling that I’d seen something similar and not too long ago at that. It took a few minutes for the old grey matter to make the connection, the fact that the two films, at first glance, wouldn’t seem to have much in common no doubt slowing it down some, but it finally produced the answer - Spider. “What could David Cronenberg’s drama about a schizophrenic man have in common with A Tale of Two Sisters?” you may be thinking…or possibly “Ian’s finally cracked up, better call the men in white coats”. Before you make a booking for me in a padded room let me explain…
Both films chuck you in at the deep end and expect you to swim, by which I mean they don’t go the usual route of explaining who everyone is, how they got where they are and, well, basically setting the scene for what’s to come. It’s up to the viewer to figure things out; this of course requires the use of something often neglected by modern moviemakers - a brain. All too often these days we are encouraged to “leave your brain at home” when paying a visit to the cinema, as this will impair our enjoyment of the movie, so it’s nice to watch a film every now and then that doesn’t require a lobotomy to get the most out of it.
January 18th, 2008
Posted by
Ian W |
Horror, Movie Reviews |
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This isn’t a horror film, it’s a ‘70s softcore porn flick. In the tits vs. scares contest the tits win by a landslide. The horror elements here are purely coincidental; the witch’s coven at the centre of the story is just a means to get people romping about with no clothes on.
Of the rompers Ann and Vicki Michelle are by far the most pleasing on the eye. The unwary viewer should be warned though that as the camera pans around the orgy scenes you’ll be exposed to some rather less aesthetically pleasing nakedness. The prerequisite for being a Satan worshiping extra in Virgin Witch it seems was a willingness to get your kit off, looking good while starkers was purely optional.
If you’ve got an interest in the softcore smut boom of the ‘70s you might get something out of this. For everyone else it’ll be far too tame to titillate and (apart from seeing a few naked old wrinklies) bereft of anything horrific.
