Tuesday 31 October 2017

Trick 'r Treat (2011)



Anthology films are common enough in the horror genre that Horror Movie A Day has totted up an impressive 48 reviews of them during its lifetime.  Many of these tend to just string a series of short films together, one after the other, such as with Tales from the Darkside.  This film, on the other hand, takes a more complex approach with four different but related stories each evolving over the course of the movie.  It does a pretty good job of this integration, and - probably even more importantly - the individual stories are also pretty fun.

So as you might deduce from the title, Trick 'r Treat is a Halloween-themed film, which made it a natural choice for my review on October 31, really.  All four of its stories revolve around Halloween festivities in the same small town, with the characters from each subsection interacting with each other in more or less significant ways.

Without going into too many spoilers, the four basic subsections of the film involve a serial killer, a group of young women on the prowl, a bus full of murdered children, and the charming little fellow in the image above.  His name is Sam.  Sam takes Halloween seriously.  Sam does not like it if you don't treat the holiday with respect.  And you trust me, you don't want to upset Sam.

Deftly balancing creepiness and (dark) comedy, Trick 'r Treat is a fun little horror film with a surprisingly recognisable cast.  If you like the spooky and the ooky, give it a watch.

Saturday 28 October 2017

The Girl With All The Gifts (2016)



Every morning, the soldiers come to Melanie's cell-like room.  One of them covers her with a rifle while the other straps her into a wheelchair, binding her feet, hands and head so that she can't move any of them.  Then they wheel her to her lessons.  On good days, Ms Justineau will be there to teach the class.  She's the only grown-up who doesn't treat the children like rabid animals, and Melanie idolises her.

Of course, there are very good reasons most of the adults treat the kids the way they do, and before too much of the film elapses, Melanie will get a first hand demonstration of them.

So I doubt I am spoiling anything much by mentioning that this is a zombie film.  Even if you hadn't guessed something of the fact from my first paragraph, the quote in the DVD cover image above drops that spoiler on you.

You shouldn't believe everything in that quote, though, because The Girl With All the Gifts is actually a much better film than 28 Days Later.  The nature of the zombie menace is more interesting, and we have a much more interesting group of characters through which to experience it.  All the main players have their good and bad points, and when they act - for good or for ill - they do so for sound and solid reasons.  There's no need for handwaves like "oh well Chris Ecclestone's character is just a nutter" here.

If you're at all into zombie movies, put this on your list.



Thursday 26 October 2017

The Day (2011)



A man scavenges through an abandoned suburb, looking for food.  As he does so, unseen assailants abduct his wife and child.

Some time later, the same man walks along an isolated road with four others.  The colour in the film has now been desaturated to the point of almost-but-not-quite black and white.  The five travellers are nervous about "Them" being in the area, but with a storm approaching and one of their number already ill, they decide to take shelter in an isolated farm house.

Of course, a building can be a prison as easily as a protection, and if "They" come, then the quintet will find themselves under siege.

So far, so Night of the Living Dead, and I know of at least one person who turned the film off right about here on the assumption it was just another Romero rip-off.

But I'm pleased to say that unlike some of the other films I've reviewed this month, The Day actually has a few surprises to spring on the audience.  It also has conspicuously better fight choreography than is the norm for lower budget offerings, with most of the action feeling very convincing and visceral.  There are a few times where the CGI gore is somewhat unconvincing, but when characters swing weapons in this, it genuinely feels like they are trying to land a blow on an enemy.

I'm not going to spoil the wrinkles that The Day has to offer, because I think the film profits from having you discover them as you watch.  But if you've ever enjoyed a zombie film, I think this movie is worth adding to your list of things to see.


Tuesday 24 October 2017

Manhunt (2008)



It's interesting watching this film so soon after Them, because it really does bring home the technical skill of the French/Romanian film.

Like Them, this film (named Rovdyr in the original Norwegian) features a group of everyday people unexpectedly coming under persistent and unexplained assault by an anonymous group of aggressors.

The everyday people in this case are a group of soon-to-be college students, plus a couple of incidental folks they encounter, and the scene of the attack is up in the isolated backwoods of the Norwegian countryside.  Our protagonists are there for a hiking trip, though mostly they seem to be squabbling with each other, even after they start getting targeted by pyscho-killers.

Manhunt is an adequate enough slasher film of the "the entertainment is mostly in the imaginative violence" kind that was so prominent back in the 80s.  The gore effects are good, the acting - as far as I can tell, given it's in Norwegian - seems fine, and the script moves along at a decent pace.

But if you're not a full-on slasher aficionado (and possibly even if you are), you're likely to find yourself asking "is this it?".  Manhunt is so busy ploughing through its violent plot points that it very rarely stops to take a moment to actually be tense.  Despite all the gory antics, the film lacks any real sense of menace.

If you want something scary, you need to look elsewhere.  And if you just want to see a bunch of teens getting murdered in the woods ... well you'd be better off watching one of the better Friday the 13th films; say number 4 or number 7.

Saturday 21 October 2017

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)



I guess on the plus side, when you call your zombie apocalypse movie Zombie Apocalypse you are doing your prospective audience the service of providing advance notice of how creatively bankrupt your film is going to be.

So what we have here is your standard "flesh-eating undead destroy civilisation" type premise.  Six months after the collapse, three young people emerge from the isolated cabin where they've been hiding and go in search of other survivors.  What they find instead is zombies.  One of them is killed, and the other two look set to join him, when four strangers turn up and slaughter the undead in an orgy of badly choreographed melee and gunplay action.  Get used to seeing actors awkwardly swing swords and hammers at zombies that aren't actually on screen with them: it's a really cheap if thoroughly unconvincing way to stage a fight scene.

The six survivors join forces and set off toward Catalina, as the newcomers have heard that there is a safe zone on the island.  Along the way, they will naturally run into a bunch more undead.  Distractingly, the same recognisable extras will be used in a couple of scenes that are supposed to take place many miles apart.  It's that kind of movie.

It's also the kind of movie where they position one character as the audience surrogate / point of view character, set up what looks like the start of an arc for her, and then kind of shrug and forget about her in the last forty minutes when they introduce several new characters and suddenly promote some of the other survivors to more prominent roles.

Anyway, zombie "action" ensues for a while, and the film finally delivers some memorable if extremely random cheese in its last ten minutes, and then it ends.  That final, amusingly stupid scene can't redeem the ninety minutes that came before it, and they certainly aren't enough to make me give the film any kind of recommendation, but they do make me a little less bitter about the time I spent watching this when I could have been re-watching Mega-Python vs Gatoroid instead.

Thursday 19 October 2017

Them (2006)



As you can probably tell from the image above, this is not the wonderful 1954 film about giant ants.  Instead it is Ils, a French-Romanian film about a young couple terrorised in their isolated home by a mostly-unseen group of attackers.

Because the film's premise requires that there be only two characters for much of its run time, we begin with a largely unrelated sequence where a mother and daughter are forced off the road late at night, and then killed.  This five minutes or so relates to the main plot only in that one of the main characters sees the dead women's car the next day, and the perpetrators of the attack are presumably the same group.  The sequence does however establish the main basic shot of the film, which is to have the camera linger on the face of a terrified person as they glance wildly around, nervously reacting to every slightly-too-loud bit of background noise.

That probably sounds dismissive, and on some level it is.  Them/Ils is fundamentally a very slight film, content-wise.  In that regard, it is something of a triumph of style and technique over substance, as it does genuinely build and maintain tension through much of its relatively short run time.  On the other hand, the actual specifics of the plot are more than a little shaky, and its sympathetic characters are drawn in only the sketchiest of manner.  In the latter case, I'm reminded of James Herbert's The Rats, where he would repeatedly introduce a character, give you a page of backstory on them, then have them savagely killed and eaten by mutant rodents.

Of course, sometimes less is more.  The lack of information we have about the attackers is part of what makes them scary, and frankly the more the film reveals about them the less effective they become as a source of menace.  I suspect the movie would be even more effective if we never learned anything about them at all.

At the end of the day, if you just want a scary movie and you are willing to switch your higher cognitive functions off to get that animal brain chill thrill, then Them delivers.

Tuesday 17 October 2017

Nosferatu: the Vampyre (1979)



Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to sell a house to the reclusive Count Dracula, despite the manifold warnings of the locals that the Count and his castle are bad, bad news.  When the unnerving, rat-toothed Count becomes besotted with an image of Harker's wife (who has been inexplicably re-named Lucy, instead of Mina), old Jonathon starts to regret his pigheadedness ... for death now draws close to his home and family.

If you search online for reviews of this remake of the 1922 classic Nosferatu, you'll find glowing accounts from multiple sources, including the late Roger Ebert.

I have no idea why.

Yes, the film is visually quite striking at times.  But artfully shot landscapes and re-mixes of the clever imagery of the original film do not make a good movie.  Not by themselves, anyway.

Perhaps the film works better in German.  It was filmed in both that language and in English, and given the heritage of the actors and writers it's entirely possible that the acting and the script both suffered in translation.  Certainly I hope that it did, because in English they're both at a community theatre levels.  When you're making a sombre horror film and the dialogue feels like a retread of Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch, something has gone wrong.

Ironically, this is a remake of a silent film that I suspect would itself work better as a silent movie.  Mute all the dialogue and add a few text interstitials, and the film would at least be a treat for the eyes without being an assault on the ears.

Or you could just watch F W Murnau's original film, instead.  That's what I'd do.

Saturday 14 October 2017

The Ruins (2008)



If you're a horror movie fan, you can skip this review: just go get yourself a copy of The Ruins and have a good time.

For the rest of you, I'll try to convince you it's worth your time to see.

Four American tourists befriend a young German man while on holiday in Mexico.  He tells them that the next morning he is travelling to a remote Mayan ruin to collect his brother, who previously went there with a lady archaeologist.  With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the foursome agree to accompany him to see the ruin.

Given that this is a horror movie, you can be sure that the trip doesn't end up being an especially jolly one, but I'll refrain from going into any more details about the plot, because I think that the film does a very good job of slowly unfurling the true threat, and to just state the details baldly would not do it justice.

I will, however, take some time to praise the film-makers.  They've done very good work here.  This is by no means a "big budget" film (it cost about $8 million) but it's technically very proficient and you never feel like you're watching a cheap movie.  In particular the casting team has done a great job.  All the core group of actors deliver solid performances, and it is no surprise to see that they've generally gone on to bigger (though not necessarily better) things.

About the only complaint I might make of this film is that once it hits the end game, it feels like it rushes through things just a little.  But when the worst thing you can say about a movie is "gee, I wish they'd given the last couple of scenes a few minutes more to breathe, so they were as effective as the earlier parts" ... well, it speaks pretty well of the film as a whole, I think.

Thursday 12 October 2017

A Killing Strain (2010)



A group of strangers shelter in an isolated farm house as the zombie apocalypse begins.  Can they work together to survive or will the rivalries and disagreements between them prove even more dangerous than the horde of flesh-eating undead outside?

If you've ever seen Night of the Living Dead you're probably thinking "gee, that sounds familiar".  And it should, because in the expansive realm of low budget zombie flicks, A Killing Strain's primary claim for distinction is the extent to which it borrows from the film that defined the genre.  Not that this movie is like Romero's masterpiece in all ways, of course.  It has a confirmed cause for the zombie outbreak, for instance, which the older film avoided.

Oh, and A Killing Strain is also different from Night of the Living Dead in that it's terrible.  The acting's mostly bad, for one thing, though to be fair to the cast it's hard to imagine anyone making some of the scenes in this script work.  For instance, there's an awkward conversation about fried coke that goes on for several minutes.   It's a scene that would land with a thud even if much of the performance wasn't stilted and uncomfortable.

Just in case bad acting and scripting wasn't enough, though, you can be sure this film also delivers bad action choreography and effects work.  It's nothing if not consistent in being of poor quality.

The world is full of low budget zombie films, presumably because it's comparatively easy to make them.  There's a very good chance I'll see at least a couple more in the course of this month, in fact.  I can only hope that if I do, they offer something at least a little more interesting than this film does.

Tuesday 10 October 2017

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)



The conclusion to 2012's Resident Evil: Retribution had the heroes teaming up with their former arch-nemesis Albert Wesker for a final stand against the mutant zombie horde that has overrun the planet.  I'm not sure what writer/director Paul Anderson originally planned to do with that scenario, but I suspect that the delays in making this film - it was originally intended for 2014 release, and instead only just snuck into the 2016 season - probably changed them significantly.

We start here with another account of the "T virus", which caused a zombie outbreak and the collapse of civilisation; and with the news that the apparent "last stand" was a trap.  The only survivor - other than the villainous Wesker - is Alice (Milla Jovovich, returning to punch and shoot zombies for a sixth and presumably final time).

After being chased by monsters for a while, Alice stumbles into another big dump of exposition that justifies all the rest of the being-chased-by-monsters she'll do in the rest of the film.  Humanity's last remnants will be destroyed in 24 hours, and only Alice can save them.  How, you ask?  Why, by penetrating to the heart of the evil Umbrella Corporation and releasing an anti-virus that destroys the T-virus, and anything infected by it.

Which includes Alice herself.  Tough break.

If you've ever seen a Resident Evil film before, there's absolutely nothing to surprise you here.  It's the sixth instalment in the franchise and it's very much in the footsteps of those that have come before it.  Alice teams up with a bunch of other folks, and they tangle with monsters until almost none of them are left, and then she faces off with scenery-chewing bad guys.

So yes, it's pure formula.  But - for me at least - it's a fun formula.  If you like the idea of monster-action, you could well have a good time.

(The first movie is still by far the best in the series, though)

Saturday 7 October 2017

American Mary (2012)



Mary Mason is a gifted medical student, but one whose considerable financial difficulties are putting her future at risk.  When she applies for work at a massage parlour that promises "no sex required", the interview unexpectedly spirals into an opportunity to do a little off the books medical treatment, and from there into the world of black market body modification.

Mary's not looking to make a career of such illicit work, just using it to pay the bills while she finishes her training for a legitimate career, but her plans change after she is sexually assaulted by the surgeons who are training her.  The underworld contacts she's made help her "disappear" the primary culprit, who becomes her unwilling 'guinea pig' for practicing new procedures (can't say I feel any sympathy for him, really), and she launches a new career catering to those who can't get the surgery they want through legal medical channels.

Of course, a surgeon can't disappear without someone taking notice, and Mary's breaking all kinds of laws with her new occupation, so this isn't exactly a safe or stable career she's chosen.  Can she stay ahead of anyone who might wish her ill, or will she end up, so to speak, on the cutting room floor?

I've seen other reviews describe American Mary as nausea-inducing, but I honestly didn't find it that confronting.  Still, there are some surgical scenes, and several minor characters with real life body modifications such as tongue splitting, which I guess may make some folks uncomfortable.

More problematic for me was the plot, which was rather fractured and disjointed, with various sequences that kind of came and went independently of each other, and a romance subplot that just kind of existed, without much establishment or resolution to it.  I feel like the script needed a good bit more work before it would really have been ready to shoot.

Thursday 5 October 2017

The Shallows (2016)



When her mother dies of cancer, med student Nancy Adams takes a break from her studies to travel the world.  One of Nancy's key objectives is to locate and surf at an isolated beach that her mother visited in the early stages of being pregnant with Nancy.

At first, the beach seems to be everything Nancy hoped it to be, but when she follows a pod of dolphins out into deeper water, things go awry.  There's an injured whale here, and - perhaps attracted by the injured animal - there's also a great white shark lurking beneath the waves.

Luck allows Nancy to survive the shark's first attack, but she's now trapped hundreds of metres from the safety of the shore, and the great white clearly intends to finish the job.  The shark has all the physical advantages in this situation, of course, so Nancy will have to rely on her wits to survive ...

The first half hour of The Shallows is excellent, with some lovely underwater photography and a growing sense of tension and menace.  Things remain quite strong through the middle as well, once the shark makes it attack.  Sure, it seems very unlikely that a great white would bother spending hours stalking a single woman when there's an injured whale right there, but if you're willing to overlook that - and the film does ultimately offer a figleaf justification for the beast's obsession with eating our heroine - then it's got lots of decent set pieces.

In the last 30 minutes alas, the scenario does start to collapse under the growing weight of its own implausibility.  There were a couple of moments where I laughed out loud at developments: something that very much breaks the tension and I am sure was not intended.

If movies-that-make-you-jittery are your thing, then this is certainly worth seeing for the first hour, at the very least.  For the rest, well, just don't think about it too much.  Though it did occur to me afterward that if you treat this film as a sequel to Deep Blue Sea, with this killer shark being an escapee from that movie, then the whole thing makes a lot more sense.  For certain definitions of sense, anyway!

Tuesday 3 October 2017

Swamp Devil (2008)



A girl is murdered in some woods, and then seventeen years later, a teenage woman is also killed.  Not longer after this, Melanie Blaime receives a call telling her that her father - whom she coincidentally hasn't seen in about seventeen years - is dying, and asking her to return to her old hometown to see him.

Daddy Blaime isn't actually dying, though: instead he's the prime suspect for the more recent murder, even though the evidence against him seems to amount to "he says there's a monster in the swamp so he must be crazy".  Of course, being the kind of movie this is, it's no spoiler to say that Pops is right on the money about the monster thing.

Making genuinely scary movies is actually a pretty tough thing to do well, which is why a lot of horror films don't bother to try.  Check out the later entries in just about any slasher franchise, for instance, and the overall tone is likely to be more pitched at shocks and thrills than building any real atmosphere or tension - to the point where it's debatable if they are horror films at all.

Swamp Devil is similarly bereft of any real scares, not least because the monster encounters are staged more as action sequences than anything else, but I think its claim to being a horror film is pretty sound, nonetheless, as it hits a lot of tried and true 'vengeful spirit' story beats.  I also give it points for not dragging out the mystery too long, allowing it to get down to monster antics around the halfway point of the film.

The restrictions imposed by its made-for-TV budget mean that Swamp Devil is probably only worthwhile for hard core horror film aficionados.  That's something of a shame, though, as there's the kernal of a decent film in here, and I could certainly see myself raiding the basic plotline for use in a Halloween roleplaying game.

Sunday 1 October 2017

2017 October Schedule

During October, I'll be posting reviews on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, for a total of 13 reviews over the course of the month.  They'll all be horror-themed reviews, so if nominally scary movies aren't your thing, then feel free to take a month's break from this blog :)

The normal Tuesday and Friday schedule will resume in November, with the first review for that month appearing on the 3rd.