Monster Party (2018)

 

Casper, Iris and Dodge are three friends who perform highly coordinated burglaries. After pulling off some literal daylight robbery, they discuss another possible burglary at a ritzy mansion near the coast. Worried about the sophisticated security system at the house, they decide against it.

But then Casper discovers that his father, has been kidnapped by local loan shark, who gives Casper an ultimatum: repay his father's debts, or pay for dad's funeral.

So despite the risks, the mansion job is back on, using the cover of a dinner party to get all three members of the team onto the premises as 'catering staff'.

Unfortunately for Casper, Iris and Dodge, while they're right to be worried about the security system, there are dangers to this job that they never could have anticipated.  This dinner party, you see, is the annual gathering of a very exclusive club.  So exclusive that you might even say it's murder to get into ...

Also known as Killer Party, which is perhaps a little too blatant a nod to the plotline, Monster Party is a blackly comedic horror-thriller that, if it doesn't quite fire on all cylinders, does at least offer some entertainment along the ride.

It's helped immensely by a talented cast who know their stuff and who generally seem to be having fun with the exaggerated characters and over the top gory action-horror hijinks.  Despite the movie's relatively small budget and limited shooting time (it was filmed in less than three weeks), the on-screen talent deliver solid performances.

The decision to keep the run-time lean - the film squeezes in just under 90 minutes, including credits - also works to its advantage.  The concept of 'crooks discover their intended victims are much, much worse people than they are' makes for a good mid-movie gear change, but it's not an especially complex or nuanced scenario.  The decision to keep the pace rapid and not over-play their hand by sticking around too long was a smart one.

Not every choice made by the film-makers is quite as smart, however.  There is some unnecessarily quirky and outré direction, photography and editing.  If the titular 'party' had been something like a rave, with loud music and lots of attendees milling around, then I think that this might have worked better.  It would at least have felt like it aligned to the atmosphere of the scene.  Lathered on top of what (initially, at least) is a genteel dinner party, it just feels a bit gimmicky for the sake of gimmickry.

Then there is the film's violence.  As you might imagine from the premise, there is quite a lot of this.  The tone of such scenes is generally quite slapstick and implausible.  I'm fine with this as a stylistic choice; they're making a black comedy, after all; but there's a balancing act a film needs to maintain when taking this approach.  The violence can be stylised and slapstick, but it still needs to feel convincing and plausible within the fiction itself.  Unfortunately, I think that Monster Party doesn't quite manage to thread the needle of this challenge.  In fact I think it stumbles at the worst possible time: the film's finale.  For my tastes, the last ten minutes or so ring hollow and unconvincing.

Despite some missteps, though, I overall had a pretty good time with this movie, and certainly don't regret seeing it.  If the concept sounds like your sort of thing, it's probably worth your time to check it out.

I Kill Giants (2017)

 

Barbara Thorson is a fiercely independent teenager who spends most of her free time alone in the woods around her home.

This is not mere idly wandering, however: Barbara knows that her hometown is threatened by giants, violent supernatural beasts that are the true causes of many 'natural disasters' such as floods and earthquakes.  She has developed a number of traps and other defences to protect the town and its inhabitants from these dangers.

Barbara has no intention of sharing this with anyone else, however.  She knows they would not understand or accept it.  But then English exchange student Sophia joins her school, and resolutely refuses to accept Barbara's efforts to rebuff her friendship.

But letting people in is dangerous.  That's why Barbara was so reluctant to do it.  While accepting Sophia's friendship put the town in greater risk from the giants?  And what about the terrifying presence that lurks on the upstairs floor of Barbara's own home?

The elevator pitch for this film might be something like "Come for the giant-fighting action, stay for the thoughtful examination of grief and how we process it".  Because if you come just for the giant-fighting, you may be disappointed.  There is some of that, but - without spoiling too much - I think it is safe to say that the greatest dangers within Barbara's life are not necessarily the supernatural beasts she has dedicated so much time to thwarting.

I Kill Giants profits from a smart and thoughtful script that does a good job of keeping the question of 'how much of what Barbara believes is true?' open throughout the film.  I also loved the lushness of Barbara's mythological/zoological study of the giants. It's great, evocative, moody-setting stuff.  Excellent dark fantasy.

The film also profits from fine casting.  Madison Wolfe is very good in the main role, portraying Barbara with both fierceness and vulnerability.  It is easy to identify with her feelings of isolation and frustration as she wages a one-person fight to protect the town, despite being treated as something of a social outcast.  And Wolfe is ably supported by the best of the cast, who are also very good.

I wasn't quite sure what kind of movie I was going to see when I sat down to watch this; and I won't spoil the exact genre of film it is.  The most important thing, though, is that it's a good one.

Killjoys, Season 5 (2019)

 

"The Lady" of the Hullen has managed to re-enter our world, and has used her ability to control human memories to seize control of every planet in the Quad.  Dutch, D'Avin, Jonny and almost all the rest of the Killjoys crew are now among her victims, believing themselves to be very different people and living other lives.

Fortunately, I did say almost all.  D'avin's son Jaq - the half-Hullen, half-human hybrid The Lady so desperately desires to control - is still free and on the run, as his his step-mother Delle Seyah.  And closer to home, Zeph has broken free of the Lady's conditioning and is trying to understand why her memories are so conflicted and confused.

But these are small glimmers of hope, and even if Zeph, Jaq and Delle Seyah can stay free and win more allies, The Lady doesn't keep all her (literal or metaphorical) eggs in one basket.  Thwarting just one of her plans won't be enough to save the Quad.

Overall, this final season of Killjoys continues the show's "odd-numbered seasons are the good ones" pattern.  Zeph in particular is awesome; the addition of Kelly McCormack's character as a series regular in season 3 was definitely a smart decision by the writing team.  She does a great job here as both "crazy" Zeph, struggling to cope with a world that makes no sense to her, and as something much closer to her normal self once the team remembers the truth.

Even the seemingly inevitable "the main characters go to space prison" and equally inevitable "the prison has a plot-critical fight club" sections of the season - seriously, these must be among the most over-used narrative elements out there - are executed much better than such things usually are. Credit for this I think goes to the writing team for making the prison's Warden a much more nuanced and interesting character than they usually are in such arcs.  Credit also to Rachael Ancheril for her performance in the role.  She has good chemistry with the main trio, which really helps their scenes together work well.

This is not to say that the season is flawless, though.  As a 'final boss' threat that has been built up for the entire run of the series, The Lady is honestly a  little bit underwhelming as a threat.  She makes a number of what at best could be described as 'sub-optimal' decisions.  There does seem to be an theme that being in a human host is affecting her, to explain this; her inexperience with the emotions of her human host are affecting her in ways she does not understand and struggles to control; but I still feel like she comes across a little underwhelming, overall.

I will give Alanna Bale a thumbs up for her performance in the role, though. She does a good job of conveying both The Lady's arrogance, and the emotional turmoil she is desperately (if not very effectively) trying to control.

Overall, this was a decent conclusion to the show.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022)

 

Ten years after the destruction of the Jedi and the establishment of the Galactic Empire, Obi-Wan Kenobi is in hiding on the desert planet of Tatooine, where he watches over the young Luke Skywalker.

Kenobi's mission requires him to keep his head down and avoid drawing any Imperial attention.  The Empire's Jedi-hunting Inquisitors are ruthless and effective, and respond to even the faintest hint of Jedi activity.

Despite many temptations to take a stand against injustice, Kenobi refuses to abandon his charge.  Nothing is important enough to abandon Luke.  Or so he thinks.

But then word comes that the young Princess Leia Organa has been kidnapped, and - as you almost certainly already know, unless you've lived under a rock for the last four decades - Leia is every bit as important as Luke.  It seems that Kenobi will have to buckle on his light sabre for one more mission, after all.

Obi-Wan Kenobi never quite managed to make me forget that the fates of many of these characters have been thoroughly defined over the past four decades, but it is honestly about as good and exciting an adventure as it can be, given the canonical narrative straight-jacket within which it must work.  While the futures of major Star Wars characters like Obi-Wan, Leia and Darth Vader are already established, the show wisely looks to introduce new characters about whose lives and fates real tension can be established.  It also does a surprisingly deft job of allowing Kenobi to have a planet-hopping adventure that could reasonably have gone unmentioned before now.  Smart scripting work, overall, even if it can't entirely take eliminate the weaknesses from being a 'flashback' story.

The show also profits from strong central performance.  Ewan McGregor is predictably excellent as Obi-Wan, very much channelling that Alec Guinness vibe for the role; but he is well-matched by the precocious Vivien Lyra Blair as young Leia.  She's an excellent choice, believably a younger, spirited-but-still-naïve version of the character as played by Carrie Fisher.

On the villainous side, Moses Ingram does good work in the role of the Jedi-hunting 'Third Sister', slowly revealing a more complex character than her brash aggression initially suggests.  Regrettably, Ingram suffered a lot of racial abuse and death threats online over the role, which were completely unjustified and hateful, and regrettably show how many people still want Star Wars (and for that matter, other media) to go back to just being all white dudes.

Another thing I enjoyed was the show's choice to depict Owen and Beru as much more than just the querulous aunt and uncle of A New Hope. It's a nice acknowledgement that, with all that was ultimately revealed in the films, they had to be very brave to take him in.  Of course, when the original film came out, little of that context was there!  It's good to see the writers recognising that it makes sense to change their characterisation, given the way the franchise has developed since then.

On the subject of the franchise's development, I do hope to see less trading on nostalgia in the future, with Star Wars. For one thing, there's really only so much space between the lines to fill in this earlier material.  For another, a franchise that is constantly feeding on its own history like this is not growing or evolving, and will ultimately become stale.

Until then, though, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a solid show, and well worth your time if you are a Star Wars fan.  Just don't be a Star Wars fan who is also a racist dirtbag, please.

Killjoys, Season 4 (2018)

Dutch, D'Avin, Jonny and the rest of the Killjoys crew have discovered that the real enemy behind the alien menace of the Hullen is "The Lady", a mysterious and malevolent entity that exists in the psychic(?) stasis realm of "The Green", and who seeks a way to (re-)enter our world through the minds and memories of humanity.  If she ever succeeds, it would mean Bad Things.

This fourth batch of Killjoys episodes reminds me a lot of season 2.  Like that season, a major theme here is that your enemies might not be who you think they are, and that the obvious "bad guys" might have good reasons for their apparent malevolence.

That's a potentially interesting arc to explore, but as with season 2, I don't think it really works.  These ten episodes have to justify a pretty huge shift in not one but two enemies into allies, and for my tastes it has pretty limited success in doing so.  These characters have shown active pleasure in their own 'wickedness' before now, and their journey to the side of the angels is pretty much justified solely by the old rubric 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'.

Also like season 2, I think this series suffers from trying to do too much, too fast.  The show covers a lot of ground here, in addition to the shifting alliances there is a new arachnid menace, a cross-species pregnancy which leads to a baby that rapidly develops into a 'vital to the plot' teenager, and all sorts of other shenanigans.  For my tastes, even as individuals elements and episodes can be quite enjoyable, it doesn't really gel as a whole.

Killjoys, Season 3 (2017)

 

Dutch, D'Avin and Johnny have discovered an alien conspiracy to infiltrate and assimilate the human civilisation of "The Quad".  The Hullen, as these aliens call themselves, essentially possess human hosts and control them.  This physically transforms the host, making them able to recover from almost any injury.

How do you fight an enemy that could be anyone and is almost unkillable?  With difficulty!  But Dutch and her team are determined to try.

Complicating the situation even further is that Aneela, a senior Hullen commander, is the spitting image of Dutch.  How can this be possible and what does it mean not just for Dutch personally, but for the fate of the whole Quad?

I wasn't a huge fan of season 2 of Killjoys, as it seemed to be trying to do far too much, too fast, but for my money this third season gets back on track quite nicely.  The Hullen are decently creepy antagonists and are smart enough at using their advantages that they feel dangerous, but they also have a few flaws that may be weaknesses for the good guys to exploit.  It's all quite well judged.

This season also introduces a new main cast member who is quite a good foil for the existing trio, and creates some new dynamics.  This is a good idea for freshening things up.

Not everything is sunshine and roses, of course.  There is still a tendency to rush things when it comes to the main plot.  Or at least, to advance the main plot in a manner that makes it seem rushed.  There's actually enough time in the season to do everything, but the pacing is uneven: in some episodes the main plot doesn't move much, and then in others it makes large jumps and introduces significant new setting elements.  A little more prior planning and foreshadowing would definitely be of help.

Still, overall this season is a fun bit of SF action.

Kate (2021)

 

Kate is an assassin; an expert sniper who eliminates targets specified for her by her handler and surrogate father figure, Varrick. You see Kate was orphaned as a child, and Varrick raised her. It was a bit of an unusual childhood though, involving extensive training in weapons and combat. Hence her career.

Kate's about done with the business, though.  Her most recent job involved assassinating man right in front of his teenage daughter.  To please Varrick, she agrees to do one final mission; then she intends to retire.

It seems though that someone has plans to retire Kate in a rather more permanent way than she intended.  Kate learns she has been poisoned when a wave of dizziness causes her to miss the target of her final job.  The poison is lethal, and she has only 24 hours to live.  Just enough time to find the person responsible - most likely her target, she figures - and settle accounts.

Like Anna and Ava, Kate is a movie about a lethally skilled woman navigating a web of intrigue and violence while trying to work out who her friends and enemies really are.  I'm a bit tired of so many of these films seeming to think that a mononym is enough of a title when you have a female lead.  It doesn't have with guys anywhere near as often.  John Wick at least got a surname, you know?  I know there are exceptions like Peppermint, Atomic Blonde and Gunpowder Milkshake - but the pattern is still there and I'd like to see it stop.

Lazy titling aside, Kate is probably the best of the crop of 'lethal lady' movies that I've recently seen.  The action sequences are well-constructed, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is very good in the title role, and the script is solid.  Not especially innovative or surprising, but solid.

Check this out if you'd like a more grounded female-led action movie than some of the others names above.

Killer Mermaid (2014)

 

Americans Kelly and Lucy take a break from their busy lives States-side to take a holiday in the Balkans.  They're planning to use the trip to see the beautiful coastline and to catch-up with their college friend (and Kelly's former flame) Alex.

The first wrinkle in this idyllic plan is that Alex is now engaged.  This is something he hasn't told the ladies.  The second wrinkle is that the spark between Alex and Kelly clearly hasn't guttered out.  The third wrinkle ... well, it's in the title of the film.  One impromptu visit to an abandoned jail on a Mediterranean island, and the holiday-makers are fighting for their lives against a lethal aquatic menace and her equally homicidal land-based minion.

Killer Mermaid kicked off with sufficient self-awareness that I was briefly hopeful.  If you give your film a title this unsubtle then it's not a bad plan to kick it off with gratuitous nudity and a boat hook murder.

Unfortunately, after a brisk and bombastic start the film founders on shoals of tedious relationship melodrama.  Even after it finally navigates those, it can't find a way back on course.  There's no momentum to the plot and the technical limitations of the action sequences mean that even when we finally get some life and death scuffles they're not at all compelling.

Ultimately, this film fails to keep its head above water.

Killjoys, Season 2 (2016)

Dutch, D'avin and Johnny are Killjoys: bounty hunters sworn to take no political allegiance in exchange for considerable latitude in the actions they take when pursuing their warrants.  Unfortunately, as season one of this series was already broadly hinting, "not taking sides" is not as easy as it sounds.  And not just because at the end of the day, being neutral is functionally very similar to siding with whichever happens to be most powerful.

As often happens in media, of course, the side that happens to be most powerful in Killjoys also happens to be pretty darn awful.  Far more awful, in fact, than even their "penning up their labour force and implicitly threatening to starve them" public actions make them appear to be.

I found the first season of this show to be moderately engaging but very emotionally heavy-handed science fiction action.  Tragic backstories of emotionally abusive father figures; evil figures of power who really needed to buy glue-on moustaches so they could twirl them as they contemplated their evil plans.  A noble doctor fighting to help the downtrodden while hiding dark secrets of her own.  It was all slathered on with a trowel.

This second season trades in the trowel for a dump truck, as it veers the narrative in unexpected but also not terrible interesting directions.  On top of that the writers seem rather too enamoured of their villains, to the point where the good guy protagonists feel side-lined in what is supposed to be their show.

It does feel like the show reaches a potential new starting point at the end of this season, so maybe Killjoys will find its way again in season three, but for my tastes, these ten episodes go rather off-track.

Knives Out (2019)

At first, the death of successful author Harlan Thrombey seems to be a clear-cut case of suicide.  But when someone anonymously hires famous detective Benoit Blanc to investigate, all sorts of secrets and lies and grievances start spilling out, and the case is well and truly wide open once more.

Featuring a star-studded cast (some of them playing significantly and engagingly against type) and with a witty, zippy script that blends humour and drama, Knives Out is a seriously good whodunnit movie that manages to deliver a denouement that makes sense and feels satisfying, without being entirely obvious.  Until quite late in the film, there at least a couple of competing plausible explanations for what has occurred.

And honestly, I don't feel like I need to say a lot more.  This is well written, well directed, wonderfully acted stuff.  It's a shade over two hours long but the time flew by while I was watching it.  Recommended.

Killjoys, Season 1 (2015)

"Dutch" Yardeen is a Killjoy - a space-faring bounty hunter in a solar system known as the Quad (for its four inhabited planetoids).  Together with her partner Johnny, she takes on warrants to apprehend people or property under the authority of an organisation known as the Reclamation Apprehension Coalition (RAC).  In exchange for the autonomy they enjoy, the RAC's Killjoys swear to remain neutral in conflicts and owe no allegiance to any other organisation or government.

Of course, remaining neutral is not always compatible with doing the moral or ethical thing, and that's a balancing act that Dutch and Johnny are going to find more and more difficult to maintain, especially as their own pasts and secrets - as well as the secrets of the RAC itself - are about to catch up with them.

As you can probably tell from the synopsis above, Killjoys is an action-themed light drama science fiction.  In its component parts, it is nothing new or exceptional.  The individual episodes have plotlines that will probably be familiar to anyone who has watched any significant amount of other light drama SF shows.  The characters are equally familiar: we've got not one but two bad-asses with a tortured past, for instance.  But a show does not always have to be breaking new ground to be entertaining.  Executed well, the familiar can feel fresh and engaging.  On that front, Killjoys mostly delivers.  The cast are decent, the effects tolerable for the TV format, and there are enough amusing moments sprinkled into the dialogue and events to offset the basic grimness of rather dystopic setting that is the Quad.

If you are in the market for a new SF action-drama, the Killjoys might well do the job.

Rabies (2010)

A young woman is trapped in a sealed pit, deep in the woods.  Her brother Ofer, unable to get her out, promises to find help.

A park ranger and his wife are conducting rounds of a nature reserve in a forest.

Four teenagers driving to a tennis tournament take a wrong turn and accidentally run over a man who staggers out of the woods in front of their car.

These three groups, as well as two others I haven't yet mentioned, will spend the rest of the film intersecting and interacting in various, rarely-productive, ways.

So .. this film.  Thirty minutes in, I was really enjoying it.  Decent interactions between the characters and a nice surprise in that the teenagers respond relatively sensibly to hitting the young man (who is Ofer, in case you hadn't realised).  Two of them stay with the car and call the cops - who wonder of wonders in a horror film, actually show up! - while the other two try to help Ofer find his sister.  I was excited.

And then the rapiness kicked in.  Oh boy.  Both the teens who stayed with the car are attractive young women, and one of the two cops is all about sexually assaulting them via a "search".  It's clearly not the first time, and it's also apparent that his partner - who we're disturbingly asked to find sympathetic - is aware of this and has covered for him in the past.  From then on in, I was frankly not in a positive mood toward the movie.  I could possibly have overlooked it if the second cop had been positioned as just as bad, given he is obviously complicit in the behaviour, but as noted, he's positioned as sympathetic.  Screw that.

Rabies (or Kalavet, in the original Hebrew) has a good cast (albeit working in a language I don't speak), and several good moments, but for my tastes they aren't enough to compensate for the awfulness of the gender politics.

No Sympathy for the Devil (1997)

In the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, they fall in love and marry, but then Eurydice dies.  Orpheus goes into the Underworld to win her back, but screws up and gets torn limb from limb, instead.  Cheerful stuff!

I mention this because No Sympathy for the Devil is a Greek film ostensibly based on this tale.  Of course, "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes on quest to win her back" is hardly unique to Orpheus and Eurydice.  The elements that make the legend unusual are the trip to the literal underworld, the "light and shadow" plot points that this introduces, and the tragic end.  The film reinterprets

In this adaptation, our never-actually-named male lead meets Eurydice first on a train station platform, and then again when she tries to shoplift at the store where he works.  For some reason, he is drawn to her, finding her "filled with light in a world of darkness".  Exactly why she might be like that is (at best) cryptically explained by some interactions she has other characters, a notable proportion of which appear to involve her getting naked.  I'm sure this was "vital to the Art", or something.

Anyway, our leads have a pill-popping sex session, lose consciousness, and are whisked off for treatment.  Eurydice goes missing, and the male lead heads off to a strange new town, filled with weird and often hostile people, to find her.

This film reminded me a lot of the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and in particular his first film, The Immortal One.  Like that film, it is about a man looking for a missing woman.  Like that film, it is deliberately shot in black and white.  Like that film, it's full of people talking very earnestly but very obliquely about things, and generally acting in strange and unexplained ways.  It's all very consciously Artistic, in other words, and to my mind would frankly have benefited from being a lot more straightforward.

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)

Someone - or something - is roaming the woods, ambushing young women and draining them of their youth.  The local surgeon calls in an old army friend, one Captain Kronos.  Kronos, who arrives with a hunchbacked professor (as well as some girl he randomly picked up in the woods) in tow, is now working as a vampire hunter, and quickly ascertains that such a creature is responsible here.

This isn't your normal blood-drinking, stake through the heart, can't eat Italian food vampire though.  As the professor helpfully explains, there are hundreds of different types of vampire, each with their own powers and weaknesses.  This one drains youth, rather than blood, and can be expected to be young and gorgeous itself.

The girl with Kronos is young and gorgeous, and in a smarter film perhaps she would have turned out to be the monster.  But no-one, including the script writer, ever seems to consider this possibility.  A shame.  Instead we get a villain so obvious that I was actively disappointed that they weren't a red herring.

"Actively disappointing" might be a good way to sum up this whole film, actually.  Leading man Horst Janson lacks the charisma to make the taciturn Kronos compelling, but I'm not sure many actors would have been up to that challenge.  The script certainly does him no favours in that regard, and it misfires in a number of other ways too, frequently squandering precious chunks of its slender 90 minute run-time on characters and scenes that add little to proceedings.

This was apparently planned to be the start of a new franchise for Hammer Films, but the studio's money troubles sunk that plan.  Based on the one effort they completed, I'm far from convinced we lost anything in not getting a Captain Kronos 2.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Season 1 (1974)

Chicage in the mid-1970s.  Carl Kolchak is an experienced reporter with the Independent News Service.  He works a lot of crime-related stories, which often puts him into conflict with the Police Department, due (a) to his "creative" ways of getting information and (b) his equally creative - one might say "crazy", given that they usually involve supernatural creatures - theories about who the culprits might be.  Vampires and werewolves and witches, oh my!

Of course, this is a TV show - one that Chris Carter cited as a big influence on The X-Files - so Kolchak is invariably right about who or what is responsible, and almost as invariably manages to find and defeat them.  Though somehow, of course, he always does so without finding any concrete proof of what he saw.  Kolchak's inability to take a decent photograph, for instance, is one of the show's several not-as-funny-as-the-writers-think running gags.

Alas, misfiring humour is far from the only problem with this show.  The writing in general is formulaic and thin, the recurring supporting cast is too divorced from the supernatural shenanigans to ever really connect, and the production values are ... not good.  The last episode in particular has some very ill-advised costume work, though frankly, it may be my favourite of the season since it's one of the few times the show manages to inch toward the "so bad it is good" line, rather than just being dull.

Kolchak might indeed have been a big influence on Chris Carter, because I can't help remembering the confused, "we haven't actually got a plan or a point" mess that The X-Files descended into, and seeing a connection.

Knight and Day (2010)

June Havens is just trying to fly home with some classic car parts when she bumps into charming stranger Roy Miller.  Literally.  Twice.  The two immediately share an attraction, and perhaps they might have exchanged phone numbers or something by the end of the flight, if it weren't for the fact that Roy is a fugitive secret agent.  June finds herself plunged into a world of crashing planes, high speed car chases, and international conspiracy.  Which would be quite enough to complicate the relationship, even if June could be sure that Roy was actually the good guy in all this ...

Knight and Day is a very light, very silly action comedy with two personable leads.  Much as I don't care for Tom Cruise, he does this kind of stuff very well, and Diaz is solid even if the script spends rather too much time having June squeal while Roy does all the action stuff.  Yeah, I know the image above shows her waving a gun around, and shes does eventually do so, but there's a lot of squealing before we get that far, trust me.

Although the theatrical release of the film does have some rather awkward transitions (there's an extended edition that may address the worst of these), overall Knight and Day is a passably entertaining bit of cinematic fluff.  It's not likely to stay with you for very long after it's over, though, so definitely save it for a time when you want the lightest of escapism.

Singularity (2017)

Humans invent an AI to solve the world's problems.  As is typical for SF media, the AI determines that humans are the problem, and initiates a global cleansing to solve it.

97 years later, humanity is almost wiped out.  There are only a few scattered enclaves and wandering bands left, but among those hope continues through the legend of Aurora: a city somewhere in the north, that the machine army cannot find.

The story from here revolves around Calia, a hard-bitten female survivor who will become disappointingly less and less effective as the film progresses, and a robotic infiltrator named Andrew, whose task - unknown to him - is to find Aurora.  I'm not spoiling anything by revealing Andrew's true nature, because the film tells us what he is in his very first scene.

If you're guessing that the unknowing robot bad guy is going to fall in love with the human woman and turn against his machine masters, then you're probably as familiar with SF genre tropes as I am.

So there are a trio of big problems with this film.  The first is that it doesn't trust the on-screen events to organically tell the story, instead overdosing us with narration and exposition-heavy dialogue.  The second is that, while it does have an explanation for how it is that the machines can't find Aurora, that explanation is extremely implausible in the context of the film's established setting.  Finally, there's the fact that the ending of the film is clearly more about setting up a potential sequel (or maybe a TV series - it feels a bit like a double-length pilot episode) than it is about actually having a satisfying conclusion to this film.

A recommendation to film-makers: focus on creating a good movie first, not on establishing a possible franchise.  If your film is good, people will ask you for the franchise.

Singularity fails to be at all singular in any way, really.  If you must watch a humans vs machine infiltrators film, and for some reason you're burned out on The Terminator, then can I suggest Cyborg Conquest / Chrome Angels?  It's also not very good, but at least it's fun.

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.

The Killer Robots! Crash and Burn (2016)

Apparently "The Killer Robots!" are a Florida-based "theatrical rock band", who take the stage dressed as ... well, as Killer Robots ... and who produce a variety of multimedia materials that encapsulate their passion for both music and science fiction.  I didn't know any of this when I impulse-bought this film from Google Play, but I did know it by the time I got around to actually watching the film.

The film begins with a group of robots press-ganged into fighting in gladiatorial battles.  They prove much tougher than the arena owners expect, however, and destroy three monstrous opponents before attempting to escape.

Said attempt ultimately ends in their own destruction, and if this had just been a short film that ended there, I'd probably have given it a qualified recommendation for its manic energy and memorable (if uneven) visual design and special effects.

However, that's only "chapter one", and the film continues for a good many chapters more.  The robots are rebuilt in part two, and tasked with a mission: they must travel to a distant world with a cure for the terrible virus that has swept the population.  That's a computer virus, of course, since said population is also robots.  Unfortunately, the virus also causes everyone infected by it to become homicidal, and there's also a bad guy chasing them for not terribly well-explained reasons, so the task is not an easy one.

This film is pretty much all about the cheap-but-often-interesting visual design and the goofy humour, with the plot being very much a secondary concern.  That steadily becomes more and more of a weakness the longer the movie continues.

So overall, I'd have to say skip the film, and maybe just watch the trailer, which packs in pretty much all of the movie's selling points in a handy two-and-a-half minute bundle.

Kessler (1981)

Fourteen episodes were filmed for season 3 of Secret Army, but the final episode was never aired in the UK, and is not included the DVD box set of that series.  There were apparently concerns about the degree of anti-communist rhetoric in the script, and a feeling that the thirteenth episode made a better conclusion to the series in any case.

The 'missing' episode was set 25 years after the war, and featured a group of Nazi hunters attempting to expose a German businessman as being SS officer Kessler, who was the principal villain of the show.

And thus we get to this series, which takes up the same idea, but stretches the search out into a six-part serial.  Kessler has adopted the role of an industrialist in West Germany, and uses his business to help finance the Kamaradenwerk: a secret organisation of Nazis who work to keep war criminals (i.e. themselves) from retribution and who at least nominally also seek to establish a Fourth Reich.

Kessler has a grown daughter, whom he has raised to be an ardent national socialist like himself.  She and the other young adherents of the cause have little confidence in the "senile old men" of the Kamaradenwerk and want Kessler to divert the funds to them, instead.

But Kessler has a bigger problem, in that accusations about his past are about to be plastered all over Belgian TV, as part of a documentary series that draws the attention of an honest, anti-Nazi German official named Richard Bauer, and a feisty young Israeli woman named Mical Rak.  These two will become quite the thorn in his side.

Overall, the premise of this show; the chase of Kessler and the rising tensions among the Nazis; is a sound one.  Alas, the execution leaves much to be desired.  The pacing is often languid, and even by the standards of TV Nazis - rarely a terribly effective group - the bad guys here are colossally incompetent.  They make three separate attempts to kill Mical in the first two episodes of the show, with the following results:

1. they kill the wrong woman
2. Mical kills the guy they sent
3. they beat Mical and dump her in a river without actually checking she's dead.  She's not.

They avoid looking quite so incompetent for the next few episodes, mostly by not trying to kill her any more, but when they finally make their 4th and 5th attempts, they contrive to make the first three efforts look good.

Poorly-paced and far-fetched.  A considerable disappointment after Secret Army.