Review: Bunnyman

Called The Bunnyman Massacre on DVD that I was dumb enough to buy, this was a blind buy that didn’t turn out as well a lot of the recent films I’ve seen. This film started out by annoying me and it never improved after that. It is poorly written and directed by the same man who it turns out is also the Bunnyman Carl Lindbergh.

Six dumb asses are in a car driving somewhere that’s never stated from somewhere else that’s never mentioned. They overtake an ugly ancient truck and the driver honks at them and overtakes them. He lets them pass him again then he starts smacking into their rear bumper. They don’t know what to do since clearly jamming on the accelerator and leaving the truck eating their dust is never even considered as an option. Instead they pull over and so does he, right behind them. Every time he revs his engine they crap themselves and do nothing. For hours.

Eventually the truck pisses off down the road and they wonder what to do before heading off in the same direction the truck went in. Down the road the truck is stopped halfway across the road forcing them to swerve to avoid it and go off the road and stopping. They sit in the car and bicker and do even more nothing at all and the truck drives off down the road

Bunnyman stops and gets out of the truck to take a girl out of the back of the truck do a stupid rip-off of one of the death scenes from The Hitcher, right down to actually not showing you death but cutting straight to the corpse afterwards. Then he drives back to the dumb asses. One dumb ass has got out of the car and looked at the engine. He finds some tools among the trash in the trunk and gets under the front of the car to try to fix it.  Bunnyman arrives and smacks the truck into back the car twice and leaves again. The dumb asses in the car freak out then slowly realise one dumb ass was under the car. They get and discover that he’s dead and we see a little bit of gore on the ground so we have to take their word for it.

The dumb asses go for walk up the road until they get to a road that is lined with white crosses (upside down apparently) and still keep going when they find bags of human bones hanging from trees. They come to shack which has some ugly local leering at the women. They impatiently asks for his help or a phone and he rudely tells them no. They try asking nicely and offering money but he still refuses to help. Eventually after wasting even more of our time he chases them away with a shotgun. Next they are wandering through lost through the woods and they start bickering and one woman treks off in huff. This a waste of more time since in the next scene she back with them again.

That night some woman we’ve never met is putting a body into the back of her truck. She then goes and speaks with her brother in the front of the truck who has injured his hand and then she sees the dumb asses coming towards them along the road. She tells them that she has to get her brother to hospital and will be back in 20 minutes. They try to convince to take at least one of them but she refuses and starts getting angry. Then she tells them to go wait in a shack she knows and gives them directions and promises she’ll be back in 20 minutes.

Next morning they all wake up at the side of the road. They agree to start heading for the shack where the lady that they made angry told them to go to wait for her. Then one of the women hears the sound of a mobile phone so she goes to look for it and one of the guys follows her. She finds Bunnyman sitting with dead bodies around him playing with some fake brain. The dumb ass guy following her startles her as a joke and Bunnyman spots them. He kills the woman by spraying blood all over her with a chainsaw – horrific injury once more only implied not but not shown. The guy runs like hell calling to his friends as he flees right past them, telling them to get running too.

The dumb asses get to the cabin and it turns out to Bunnyman’s place and now we’ve got a rip-off of every backwoods torture slasher film going but we don’t see the deaths on-screen they are just implied with blood. There’s a terrible rape scene with Bunnyman’s pet hunchback dry humping one of the women but it’s as unconvincing as the death scenes.

The actors were not terrible but they were very poorly written in a poorly written film. The plot is driven by one stupid choice after another by the characters and I only finished this film to see how bad it could get. It might have been an attempt at comedy but it just wasn’t funny. It is not entertainingly bad, just annoyingly bad. I recommend avoiding this one or making people you hate watch it

Rating 1/10

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Review: District 9

I just re-watched this on a whim and got reminded what an incredible film it is. It makes extensive of use of CGI creatures but in unlike many big-budget efforts these creatures are convincing living presences on the screen. Using the very familiar pseudo documentary style it effectively created a convincing reality where these creatures exist and it the end left really gasping for a sequel.

A large alien vessel has come to a stop over the city of Johannesburg and after waiting for quite a while for something to happen next the authorities investigate and find it is full of starving aliens. Under scrutiny from the rest of the world and mindful of their history of apartheid the South African authorities agree to let them stay in Johannesburg. The aliens are arthropod-like creatures nicknamed prawns that are generally violent, unpleasant and it doesn’t take long for conflicts to arise with the locals so the authorities drive the creatures into a slum area called District 9. Now 20 years later they want them moved out of the city altogether and they have called in a private security company to assist the government agency the MNU to deliver eviction notices to the aliens as part of a bit of legal ass-covering by the government.

A documentary crew follow the leader of the relocation squad Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) as he leads the squad into District 9. Wikus is a perfect little bureaucrat delivering the eviction notices while backed-up by the mercenaries and raiding the prawn’s shacks for illegal activity while giving a running social commentary to the film crew. The most disturbing is when he finds a nursery full of alien eggs and proceeds to have it incinerated while he chuckles at the popping sounds the eggs make. Meanwhile the alien Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope) and his son and a friend are searching the tips around the slums for alien technology. They need this to power their drop-ship to return to the mothership so they can return home to arrange a rescue for their people. It has taken them 20 years to collect enough and that’s when Wikus and his squad arrive at their friends shack. Christopher hides the cylinder and tells his friend to be polite to the humans to avoid suspicion. This goes very badly and Wikus and the film crew search the shack with Wikus looking for anything illegal. They find the rear room with a lab where Christopher was extracting the fluid and Wikus almost stumble across the cylinder. He examines it “probably illegal” and he unscrews the top and gets face full of the black fluid.

They find weapons in another part of the shack so Wikus goes out to interrogate the alien but about the fluid and the weapons and the alien panics and attacks them injuring Wikus’s arm. The mercenaries kill the alien while Christopher looks on sadly. Wikus feels violently sick and after getting his arm patched up by a field medic he goes home. He just want to go to bed but unfortunately his wife has arranged a surprise party for him to celebrate his promotion to squad leader. The party come to an abrupt end when Wikus throws up over the cake and passes out on the floor. His wife takes him to hospital and the doctor cuts off the field dressing on his arm to examine it but the arm is now an alien arm. The doctor immediately alerts the MNU who swoop in and transfer him to the MNU headquarters

Wikus is now treated like a medical curiosity and they examine his arm and how much pain it causes him when they cut into it. Then they discover he can fire the alien weapons which humans can’t do and they make him fire many weapons, using a cattle prod to make him fire against his will. The worst is when instead of using a pig carcass as a target they put an alien. Back on the operating table the doctors are discussing how to take Wikus apart as Wikus wasn’t hearing all this. His father-in-law Piet Smits (Louis Minnaar) is the chief executive of MNU and he is coldly going along with their plans. Just as they are about start dissecting Wikus he breaks free and manages to escape from the MNU building.

Wikus is now on the run with the MNU after him. He can’t even buy food because the MNU are claiming he had illegal sex with an alien and is now highly contagious and dangerous. The only place he can go to hide is District 9 where he ends up having to rely on Christopher and his son to hide him from the MNU and their mercenaries. At last Wikus has met someone who knows what has happened and may even be able to help him to be a normal human again. Unfortunately Christopher really needs the tube of liquid so this means Wikus has to break back in to the MNU building and get it.

Wikus goes to the brutal Nigerian gangsters who have set up base in District 9, taking advantage of the aliens. He wants to buy weapons but their leader wants to eat his arm in the superstitious belief that Wikus’s alien weapon wielding abilities will be passed on to him. They hold him down and are about to cut it off when Wikus manages to grab an alien weapon and blast away a lot of the gang and escape with the weapons. Christopher and Wikus break into the MNU lab where Christopher is shocked by the sight of the corpses of his fellow aliens cut up an experimented on. Wikus retrieves the cylinder and they escape in a stolen MNU truck, chased all the way by the MNU in trucks and helicopters.

There is an amazing showdown at the where Wikus get into walking alien weapon and take on the MNU mercenaries to allow Christopher and his son to get into the drop-ship and return to the mother ship safely. They start up the mothership and leave with Christopher having promised Wikus that he will be back in three years.

This film is everything great science fiction is about while still having the crowd pleasing action. It covers deep ideas about the morality of how we treat others in our society by having the aliens as the others and using their treatment to look at the issues more objectively. I liked the documentary and other footage being used to provide the setting for the story especially the vox pops. The films looks really amazing and I felt totally immersed in the District 9 community more effectively than 3D has ever done. In fact my only complaint about District 9 is that there is no sequel.

Rating 9.7/10

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Review: Vanishing on 7th Street

This was another blind bargain purchase of a film I knew nothing about. The blurb on the DVD case sounded intriguing enough and I had certainly heard of the most of the cast. It is a well-acted horror thriller made on a low-budget with a very small cast. With simple effects and lighting the film-makers have created a fairly tense creepy film. I did feel it was a more like good Twilight Zone episode that had been padded out to feature film length.

One night the Dark comes to Detroit and takes everybody except for a small handful which it now hunts. When it takes people it leaves behind clothing and jewellery etc. in a sad pile where they stood. When it first strikes Paul (John Leguizamo) is working as a projectionist when the power goes out. Instead of a busy cinema all that’s left are piles of clothes. Outside in the mall he finds a single security guard alive but he doesn’t last long as the darkness takes him silently. Luke (Hayden Christensen) is a TV news anchor and he wakes in his apartment to discover there’s no power and that there’s no people. Three nights later Luke is making his way through the streets draped in batttery powered torches and checking all the cars for any whose engine still works. He finds a truck but the battery is flat. He spots a little girl with a torch but she runs off when he calls after her. He comes across a brightly light bar with music playing and checks it out. He finds the place is being powered by a generator but it is running low on fuel. The place seems empty but is in fact in inhabited by a frightened 12-year-old boy called James (Jacob Latimore) who pulls a shotgun on Luke. Luke calms him down and lowers his own gun. James tells him that his mother left him to go to the church down the street and told him to wait there in the bar for her.

Another survivor Rosemary (Thandie Newton) comes into the bar hysterical and wanting to know where her baby is. When she tells them her story it’s clear that she’s aware that the dark took her baby at the hospital where she works as a doctor. She also found a patient on the operating table with empty surgical clothes gathered around him but he didn’t last long and the dark soon took him. They hear someone screaming for help outside and  Luke wants them to ignore it but Rosemary wants to go help, which guilts Luke into going. They find Paul inside a brightly lit bus shelter that operates on solar power so has kept going for now and they take him back to the bar with shadows closing in on them all the time. All he knows is that he found himself dumped on the street and someone hit him on the head. They have absolutely no idea what is happening or if it will stop happening or even if tomorrow the sun will rise.

I thought this was a nice creepy film and it was really carried by strong performances from all the main cast and the use of simple but effective lighting. I liked the premise of the story but I’m not sure it was enough for a whole film and the pace did seem a bit saggy in the middle. It was still an interesting watch.

Rating 7/10

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Review: Fright Night (2011)

This remake of Fright Night could be said be to cynical attempt by bunch of Hollywood suits to cash-in on the vampire bandwagon with a film based on a very popular vampire comedy from the 80s. I was going to go and see this at the cinema but decided to wait until it was released on DVD. While this film does have the same characters as the original they are all very different people. It has many of the same scenes but there are many more scenes unique to this film and knowing how the original story went doesn’t really tell you much about this one except in the broadest terms.

Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) is a dick-head who ditched his lifelong nerdy friends to hang out with other dick-heads and impress a beautiful girl Amy (Imogen Poots) with how cool and not-nerdy he is. His former friend (Evil) Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) desperately needs to talk to him about their friend Adam going missing. We saw Adam going missing when he got captured while hiding from an unseen vampire that had killed his family the start of the film. Charley is such an insecure dick-head now that even after begging Ed has to threaten him with compromising photos to get his help in investigating Adam’s disappearance. They got to Adam’s house  and Ed tries to convince Charley that his new next door neighbour Jerry Dandridge (Colin Farrell) is a vampire and is responsible for a string of disappearances in their suburb but that just leads to an argument and Charlie is not convinced.

On his way home from Adam’s house Ed gets chased by one of Charley’s bully dick-head buddies. He evades the bully but falls right into lap of Jerry. When Charley gets home Jerry asks him if can borrow some beer and lingers creepily at the door while Charlie gets him beer from the fridge with Charlie clearly making point of not inviting Jerry in. Jerry talks about Amy and Charley’s mother in way that is ambiguous enough to sound innocent if repeated but with a definite air of threat. Next day at school Charley notices Ed is missing and starts getting worried. He starts watching Jerry and when Doris, a woman he knows, goes into Jerry’s house and he hears screams Charley calls the police but Jerry manages to charm his way out of being investigated. When the police leave Charley sees Jerry leaving in his car so he breaks into Jerry’s house and finds Doris but when they manage to sneak out into the daylight Doris bursts into flame.

Charley tries to get help from Peter Vincent (David Tennant) a Las Vegas magician who also claims to be an expert on vampires in his publicity. Charley cons his way into an interview with Peter by posing as a reporter but when he tells Peter that he really needs his help with a vampire Peter gets him thrown out thinking he’s crazy. Charlie goes home and starts carving stakes and hanging crosses and garlic around the doors and windows. When the door bell rings he rushes to stop his mother Jane (Toni Collette) answering the door but it turns out it’s Amy. Jerry appears at the door soon after but Charlie convinces his mother to not invite Jerry in. They are puzzled to see Jerry go into their back garden with a spade and digging down the gas pipe supplying the house. He ignites the gas and blows up their house. Charlie, Amy and Jane get in a car and try to get away but Jerry is soon on their tail.

It is inevitable this film gets compared to the original and it’s not going to be a favourable comparison. Charley initially less likable, Amy is more blandly standard pretty, Jerry is more thuggish, Peter Vincent is Dr Who. But  in this film those characters fit together in a different way to create a different story. I liked that Charley’s mum did not get conveniently scripted out the story. I’m not keen on the CGI gore and Peter Vincent’s convenient expertise really was a bit much. It is entertaining and has plenty of thrills but is light on the chills.

Rating 7/10

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Review: Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark

There’s seem to have been an all out hate-fest on this film and I not going to try rebalance it with my own views on the film .Sure it’s not a classic and maybe it isn’t as good as the original made for TV film that I have never seen or heard about or even heard anyone talking about. I have to just give an honest assessment of how I found the film I watched with no regard to other people’s views on it and I found it was a creepy film that was well acted but perhaps let down some hoary old clichés making an appearance in the writing.

In a short prologue we learn that an artist called Blackwood had his young son stolen from him by a race of ugly tiny creatures who can’t stand bright light and live behind a grate in his cellar. He kills one of servants to give them the teeth that they are after but they told him they only want children’s’ teeth and they take him instead.

Eight-year-old Sally (Bailee Madison) is flown across the country to stay with her father Alex (Guy Pearce) and his partner Kim (Katie Holmes) in their big old house that they have bought to restore and sell on. Alex is an ambitious architect who wants to use the restoration as a demonstration of his skills to potential clients. While he loves his daughter he’s not very happy that his ex-wife has dumped Sally on him during a time that is important in his career. Kim is uncomfortable helping Alex look after Sally since she has no experience with children and worries about getting it wrong. Sally knows all this so she’s feeling a bit unloved.

Sally goes exploring the garden of the house and she hears voices whispering her name, the voices of the nasty little creeps from the prologue. Sally follows voices that leads her to a window to basement that neither Alex of Kim new existed but we saw this place in the prologue. It’s the place where the servant was killed and there’s the grate with the little creatures sealed up behind it. Sally is fascinated by the voices and when no-one is looking she sneaks down into the basement with a wrench and unscrews the bolts holding the grate in place. Harris the gardener goes back down later to put the grate in place because he knows what’s behind it, but the little creatures attack him and he ends up badly injured in hospital.

The creatures are after Sally and they appear in her room, whispering nasty little half-truths about how her parents don’t want her but they do. At first she thinks the creatures are friendly but its not long before their hostile nature shows. When they rip up Kim’s clothes her father he blames Sally but Kim doubts she did it. The creatures attack her in her bath and still her father blames her but Kim knows she is showing signs of genuine fear. Alex insists on calling in a psychiatrist who prescribes pills to make her less annoying to Alex. This leaves Sally feeling so alone and desperate that she calls her mother and pleads with her to let her come back home but her mother brushes her off. Naturally she is terrified because she thinks she is on her own against creatures that want to steal her away to some unknown but no doubt horrible fate.

This film had a lot real nice scary atmospheric scenes and Bailee Madison was very convincing as Sally. There  were a few clunky bit of exposition but I’m not too put off by that and it didn’t drag me out of the film. The CGI creatures were definitely scarier when they were in dark than when we get to see them but they were okay.

Rating 7/10

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Review: The Lazarus Project

Into the cheap DVD pile again and this one caught my eye. This film is a psychological thriller and though it doesn’t have a bright glossy look, loads of action or a huge budget it is a fairly decent low-key film with reasonable acting and an interesting storyline

Ben Garvey (Paul Walker) is a former thief just off of parole and making plans for his future with his wife Lisa (Piper Perabo) and daughter Katie. His brother Ricky comes to see him fresh out of jail and wants his help for another robbery. Ban refuses at first but when he loses his job he agrees out of desperation. The robbery goes tragically wrong and three men end up dead, including Ricky. This is Texas which means justice equals state-sanctioned vengeance and despite the fact that Ben didn’t kill anyone he gets a death sentence. With indecent haste Ben ends ups strapped to a bizarre cross-shaped thing being put to death with chemicals.

Next thing he’s hitching a ride from Father Ezra (Bob Gunton) to a psychiatric institute in Oregon where he is to start his new job as a grounds-keeper. He has vague memories of being brought here after his execution and told that he has been given a second chance but he must give up on his old life with Lisa and Katie. A mysterious man called Avery (Lambert Wilson) warns him the only death awaits him if he leaves this town. Ben does try to leave on a bus back to Texas but Avery gets on the bus and convinces him he’s in danger. He manages to convince Ben to get off the bus and when Ben sees  the news the following day of a bus crash he thinks Avery was telling the truth.

Any more plot outline would have spoilers because this film has a few twists and turns after this. Like most psychological thrillers this film takes its time to develop the characters so it is fortunate the cast pull it off convincingly enough, especially Paul Walker. The story has a lot of red herrings and I was really expecting the plot to go some stupid way but it didn’t. Though I can’t say too much without revealing  too much the ending was a little too pat and cliché. Still it did have few things on the subject of identity and responsibility for one’s actions. Julie Ingram a psychiatrist at the institute says to Ben at one point “There’s a struggle. How do you live if you’re ruled by your past? But, how do you let go of a past that made you?”

Rating 6.7/10

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100th Review: Interview With a Vampire

I finally got to 100 film reviews so I’ve gone in back in time for this  film back to the heady days of the 90s when this adaptation on Anne’s Rice’s novel got the Hollywood blockbuster treatment with plenty of money spent on it and a big name cast.

The story doesn’t really have plot since it is the biography of a fictional character Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) who is telling his story to writer Daniel Malloy in the present day. He was wealthy plantation owner in 18th century Louisiana when he became a vampire. Grieving over the death of his wife in childbirth Louis was wandering around New Orleans aimlessly hoping that someone would do him a favour and kill him. Just as he’s about to get what he wants he gets ‘saved’ by Lestat de Lioncourt (Tom Cruise) who kills the whore and her pimp who were just about to kill and rob Louis. Lestat offers him the choice he was never given between death and eternal youthful life, feeding on the blood of the living. It is no surprise what choice he makes since he’s telling this story in the present. There is problem here because I don’t see how the film got from wanting to die to choosing to live forever. The book was full of the the fear Louis had about what happens after you die but the film didn’t really show it that much which is strange since it seemed to be behind almost every choice he makes in the book.

Lestat moves into the plantation house and teaches Louis what he has learned about living as a vampire but he is no better able to answers the questions Louis has about life death good and evil, heaven or hell than Louis is. At least Lestat has come to terms with what he is while Louis is having trouble with the idea of killing people. Louis is full of guilt about the deaths they cause and when he discovers that they can live without killing people he tries it but it is difficult and painful. Louis tries to survive on the blood of animals but it does little to satisfy hunger and his slaves are getting increasingly nervous about the unexplained deaths. Louis tells them they are right their master is the devil and they are all free to run away, then he burns the plantation house to the ground in a fit of madness and self-pity.

Lestat rescues Louis from the flames and takes him to New Orléans where Louis wanders the streets depressed and when he gets warned away from a plague-infested slum drags his weary whiny ass straight to it. He hears a child sobbing and finds her next to the corpse of her mother. Louis offers the child some comfort and then he feeds on her. Just then Lestat turns up laughing at Louis attempt to pretend he’s some sot of merciful angel of death. Louis flounces off and Lestat tracks him down in the sewers by following the trail of dead rats. he tells him he has a surprise for him. Back at his house he has the child Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), near death after Louis fed on her but not yet dead. Despite Louis objections Lestat opens his wrist and drips blood into Claudia’s rnouth. Claudia grabs his arm and feeds hungrily on his blood. she dies and then comes to life animated by a supernatural glamour.

Lestat is open about creating Claudia to chain Louis to him by their mutual responsibility to care for her. She is very quick to learn how to use her innocent appearance to ensnare humans and is every bit as ruthless as Lestat when on the hunt. Time passes quickly and after 30 years of still being a cute little girl with golden curls Claudia realises she will never be growing older. She freaks out and takes out all her rage and frustration out on Lestat. She tricks Lestat into feeding on a dead boy she poisoned with laudanum and the corpse blood poisons Lestat then she slashes his throat and watches him fall down apparently dead. Louis just stands there watching her kill Lestat. They dump his body in a swamp and Louis arranges passage for both of them to France. However Lestat is not dead and he attacks them on the day they are due to leave but Louis sets him on fire and they escape onto the ship for France

Once in Europe they travel around looking any sign of other vampires but all they find are stories. It is only when they get back to Paris that other vampires find them. Armand (Antonio Banderas) and Santiago (Stephen Rea) are based in an old church that has be transformed into a Grand Guignol type theatre where the performers are vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires.

Armand and Louis are drawn to each other. Louis hopes that Armand has answers to the big questions he insists on bothering himself with, while Armand knows that vampires need a contemporary companions to give them a link to times they live in. Claudia senses that Armand is drawing Louis away from her. She chooses herself a companion, a woman who lost her own daughter and emotionally bullies Louis into turning her.

The vampires at the theatre suddenly invade their rooms led by Santiago and drag them off to be punished for their crimes. These vampires have stagnated into a cruel parody of human society and even have their own set of laws. Claudia’s very existence as a child vampire is an offence to them so she and her new mother are sentenced to death while Louis is sentenced to be locked in a steel box and walled up. Claudia and her mother get locked a small cell whose ceiling is open to the sky and when the sun rises they die wrapped in each others arms. The following night Armand breaks Louis out of his captivity. Louis returns to the theatre later to take a revenge on them all by setting them on fire while they lie in their coffins.

Louis doesn’t stay with Armand but instead has taken to wandering the world on a fruitless search for answers  to his big questions. He recently returned to New Orléans and discovered that Lestat is still there, reduced to a pathetic creature scared of the changes around him and surviving on the blood of small animals. Louis finished his story and Malloy complains about the ending. He wants to become Louis’s companion, his link to the present and in reply Louis just disappears having failed to conivice Maloy that his life is a curse.

Malloy is driving home from the meeting and he is very excited about the material he has recorded. Just then Lestat drops into the back seat of his convertible and he’s more than willing to offer Malloy what Louis refused him.

I did enjoy  this film when it came out but  I suppose it a strange choice to tell a story from the point of view of the party downer but that is what this film does. Louis is miserable when he gets turned and stays miserable, meanwhile all other vampires around him are having great time. Cruise is really great as Lestat throwing himself the  larger than life role. Kirsten Dunst is amazing as Claudia considering her age when this film was made. Pitt mumbles morosely through a part that really isn’t too much of a stretch. If you are after horror this is not the film for you, bu if you’re looking for a sympathetic look at vampires that isn’t Twiglet you’ll probably like this.

Rating 7.5/10

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Review: The Woman In Black

I like the fact that Hammer is back in business and that they are producing some decent quality horror films with a strong British flavour. I grew up on the horrors from Hammer and they terrified me as kid and were fairly reliable entertainment in the pre-VHS days when the only horror I saw regularly was on TV. So I took myself of to local cinema to see their latest film which was receiving positive reviews. I did enjoy the film but I did not like sitting in a noisy crowded cinema and I think I’ll try to keep to the quieter weekday matinee screenings from now on.

The film is set in Edwardian times and Arthur Kipp (Daniel Radcliffe) is a young lawyer with a five-year-old son. His wife died in childbirth and he is still grieving for her. His employers feel he needs to prove he is still capable of working for them and he gets assigned the task of sorting out the estate of a client who recently died. Her name was Mrs Drablow and she lived alone in a remote house on the northeast coast of England. Arthur has to travel up to Eel Marsh House and sort through any papers and official documents he can find. He leaves his son in the care of his nanny and sets off for long tiring train journey to the village of Crythin Gifford.

On the last stage of the journey Arthur meets Sam Dailly (Ciarán Hinds), a wealthy landowner with an estate near Crythin Gifford. Sam is pretty scathing about the superstitions of the locals and he sees himself as a rational man. He starts giving his low opinion of spiritualists when Arthur reveals that he believes he can sense the spirit of his dead wife. Sam gives Arthur a lift in his car from the station into the village and invites him to dinner at his house the following day.

There is little welcome to be found at the inn where Arthur had been expecting a room to be booked for him by his employers but the innkeeper denies receiving a booking and claims they are fully booked. If it was not for the terrible weather outside the innkeeper’s wife would not have convinced him to let Arthur stay in the attic. The following day Arthur gets the clear impression no-one want him around. He goes to Jerome the local lawyer’s office where Jerome promptly hands him a package of papers, assures him there no need to go to the house and tells him he has a horse and cart waiting to take him to the station to get his train back to London, nice seeing you, goodbye. This isn’t just normal inhospitality but more like they are terrified by his presence.

Knowing his employers would not be happy if he just went back to London he bribes the man with the cart to take him to Eel Marsh House. This a large house on an island linked to the mainland by a causeway across a muddy estuary that is submerged at high tide. The cart driver won’t be able return until low tide leaving Arthur alone on the island for several hours. Arthur looks around the dilapidated house and gathers papers together but he gets distracted by noises and he has look around the house. When he looks out the window he sees a woman dressed in black standing outside looking up at him. Arthur rushes outside and there’s no-one there. The causeway is covered in a thick fog, concealing it almost completely. He hears the sound of a horse and trap coming along the causeway then the sound it going off the causeway into the marsh and he hears the screams of the occupant as they are dragged down into the mud. He rushes out to help whoever it is but he finds nothing as he runs through the fog. Suddenly he meets the man with the cart who took him out to island.

The film follows Arthur as he tries as he tries uncover the curse of the Woman in Black. There are plenty of very well done jump scares and the films has a suitably gloomy depressed atmosphere like the film is in mourning.  If forced to choose I would say that the TV adaptation is overall a scarier version but this is a solid well-made ghost story with a good supporting cast. Daniel Radcliffe is okay as Arthur Kipps and looked convincingly scared during the scenes at the house even it was harder to swallow the widower with child part. If you like old-fashioned ghost stories with little gore then you will probably enjoy this film.

Rating 7/10

 

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Review: From Dusk Till Dawn

I just got this on Blu-Ray giving me chance to revisit this fantastic film from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. This film blew me away when I first saw it because it really brilliantly takes a crime thriller and turns it into a vampire film. Quentin Tarantino has written some fantastic dialogue for this film.

The Gecko brothers are bad men who are on the run from the law after holding up a bank and killing cops, rangers and civilians and taking a bank teller hostage. They are in a liquor store holding two girls hostage while the clerk pretends to another ranger that they are not there. Seth (George Clooney) wants everything to go quietly and smoothly but thanks to Richie (Quentin Tarantino) the ranger and clerk and end up dead, Richie gets shot in the hand and the liquor store is blasted to bits. Seth brings up the meaning of the phrase ‘low profile’ but it’s clearly wasted on Richie.

They go to a run-down motel where they try to figure out a way to get across the border to Mexico. Seth arranges a safe place across the border with a guy called Carlos but he still hasn’t figured out a way to get there. He leaves Richie alone with the hostage while he goes to buy food which turns out to be a very big mistake because when he returns the hostage is dead and her body mutilated. Seth loses his patience with Ritchie and pins him to the wall but then realises his brother is too demented to be reached and just hugs him.

Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) is on the road in his RV accompanied by his daughter Kate (Juliette Lewis) and adopted son Scott (Ernest Liu). Jacob is a former Minister who has just quit his position as after falling out of love with God. They have been on the road a while and Jacob really wants to sleep in real bed so they stop at the same sleazy motel as the Gecko brothers. Seth sees their RV and it gives him a plan. The brothers trick their way into Jacob’s room and force him at gunpoint to agree to take them across the border in their RV. The journey to the border is very tense Jacob can’t trust Seth, Seth can’t trust Jacob and he certainly can’t trust Richie. When they come the border a border guard (Cheech Marin) inspects the van but the family convince the guard they are alone in the van.

Once over the border there is massive release of tension because Seth thinks they are now all free and clear. He tells Jacob to drive to their rendezvous, a sleazy rowdy biker bar near the border called the Titty Twister. The place has a huge neon sign outside with the name and a cartoon demonstration of exactly what the name means. Outside the bar is doorman Chet Pussy (Cheech Marin) encouraging punters to enter with the range of pussy the bar features. When Seth goes to pass Chet to get to the door Chet stops him and return Seth beats him to the ground and leads the way into the bar. Richie takes a sneaky chance to kick Chet violently as he passes.

When they enter the Titty Twister what they see is like a hellraiser’s idea of paradise with booze, rock music and semi-naked dancing girls on the tables and in alcoves in the wall and random meaningless fights amongst the patrons. Seth goes to the bar and tries to intimidate the barman Razor Charlie (Danny Trejo) into serving them but it really doesn’t work. Fortunately Jacob manages to calm down the tension and they get their drinks, grab a table and settle down to drink and wait for dawn.

Everyone starts to settle down and relax, particularly Scott and Richie. Razor Charlie then introduces the main act of the night on the stage and he gets away with telling them straight she is a demonic high priestess of Satan. On comes Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek) with a yellow boa constrictor draped over her body. She doesn’t so much dance as stride around like hungry cat and stare at the meat in front of her. She walks across the tables to the one where the Geckos and Fullers are sitting. She lifts Richie’s beer and pours it down her leg to her foot in Richie’s mouth. When the music ends she basks in the applause of the spellbound crowd.

Chet meanwhile has entered the bar and spoken to Razor Charlie and the bar’s bouncer and they come over to the table to call out the Geckos as the ones that beat up Chet outside. Richie and Seth are ready for trouble with their guns drawn and they shoot the three men ‘dead’. That’s when Santanico and her girls all vamp out and attack the customers and she herself goes for Richie, biting a chunk out of his neck. There is widespread slaughter, especially with three ‘dead’ men come back to life and rejoin the battle. The house band have also vamped out are playing human bodies as instruments. Very soon there is only Seth, the Fullers and two other customers left alive, a Vietnam veteran called Frost (Fred Williamson) and Sex Machine (Tom Savini) who packs a spring-loaded revolver in his codpiece.

They kill off the vampires in the bar (except the band who disappear in a flash of smoke) but get worried about the sound of flapping wings outside. First they realise that they have deal with the corpses before they come back to life. Kate and Sex machine go around staking the bodies with table legs. Sex machine gets bit by one before he kills it but he hides his bite from the others. Richie come back to life and Frost is about to take him out but Seth stops him. Then Richie vamps out and Seth stakes him while the others hold him.

They have a few moments of calm so Seth takes charge of trying to figure out what’s going and what they can do about it. Jacob points out that everything they know about vampires comes from old horror films. Seth talks about weapons and says if he still had his faith that Jacob himself would be their most valuable weapon so if Jacob can get over his anger with God they’d be a lot better off.

Frost starts telling them about his experiences in Vietnam but while he talks we see Sex Machine is struggling to hide his transformation from the others. He eventually vamps out and attacks, biting a chunk out of Jacobs’s arm. After some struggle he bites Frost who picks him up and throws him out a window. This is not a mistake as Frost has immediately vamped out and just let hundreds of vampires in bat form into the bar. Seth Kate and Scott escape to a store room while Jacob ends up trapped behind the bar counter.

Tarantino and Rodriguez Image via Wikipedia

Jacob finds his faith and creates a makeshift cross out of a baseball bat through the loading mechanism of a shotgun and clears a path with both the cross and the gun through the mass of vampires to the storeroom. The storeroom is full of stuff taken from the trucks of the bar’s previous victims. They go through the boxes and get themselves armed and ready for a showdown. Scott has water guns and condoms full of water blessed by Jacob. Kate has found an auto-loading crossbow. Seth has made himself a stake fixed on a jackhammer. Before they leave the storeroom Jacob makes the others promise to kill him as soon as he vamps out and while has no problem believing Seth he pushes for a sincere promise from Kate and Scott.

They attack the vampires and just about manage to stay alive, killing many of them. Then the inevitable happens and Jacob vamps out. Scott hesitates for a moment and Jacobs bites him before Scott takes out half of Jacob’s head with a condom and Kate finishes him with a crossbow bolt. Scott gets seized by a mob of vampires who begin feeding on him and he begs Kate to kill him. She shoots him and it kills both him and vampires feeding on him.

Now it’s down to just Kate and Seth who are getting low on ammo. Then the sun rises and Seth sees the vampires trying to avoid the shafts of light. Carlos (Cheech Marin) arrives outside the door and calls out for Seth who tells him to blast the door open. As the sun comes in many vampires are roasted immediately and many more get killed by reflections of the sun off a large disco ball on the ceiling.

The first thing Seth does is punch Carlos but Carlos explains that he had only ever passed the place and had never been in it. Seth gives Kate some money and apologises for what happened to her family and tells her to go home. He leaves with Carlos while Kate drives off in the RV. The camera then pulls back to a wide shot of the back the Titty Twister which is actually the top of an Aztec temple and there is a large pit full of hundreds of bikes and trucks of all the victims of the place.

Seeing this film again has actually increased my liking for it. I’ve seen other attempts to merge the crime thriller genre with the horror genre but none have done it as well as this film. The action is violent and when it really begins in the second half it is almost relentless. The performances were great all round even from Quentin Tarantino who I really believed as a violent insane sex offender with a short fuse.

Rating 9/10

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Review : Bathory

I had heard of Countess Bathory but most of what I had heard is based on old stories that may not be true and the classic Hammer film Countess Dracula which is fiction. She’s apparently listed by the Guinness Book of Boring Pub Conversations as the biggest female serial killer in history but the figure of 650 victims is from an unverified claim. This film is an attempt to tell the story of her life more sympathetically. Her life story is being written by a fictional old monk Pastor Ponicky (Antony Byrne) and as he writes he narrates her story. One of the notable things he says at the beginning is that history is written by the victors hinting that this story cares nothing about what has been said about Erszebet Bathory (Anna Friel) in the history books. Since I know nothing about the history of Hungary I am in no position to judge the historical accuracy of this version but it certainly is entertaining.

The film has divided her life story into three chapters titled after the most important person in her life. The first part is titled Ferenc after her husband and it covers the early part of her life and her arranged marriage to Hungarian nobleman Ferenc Nadasdy (Vincent Regan). They have two daughters but when Ferenc rapes her while pregnant with their son she loses the baby. Ferenc doesn’t spend a lot of time with his wife after that but he does send her a Milanese painter that was a prisoner of the Ottomans that he defeated. This painter turns out to be Merisi Caravaggio (Hans Matheson) and Bathory wants him to paint her and her daughters. The two grew increasingly close and they explore their mutual fascination with human anatomy with the highly taboo dissection of corpses in Bathory’s hospital. Despite Merisi being gay the two of them fall for each other. She starts having strange dreams where she is with Merisi in his paintings. This not the only sign of her increasing mental instability and she confesses to Merisi that she is scared because she hears the sound of the sea in her head. Bathory starts acting more and more paranoid she accuses Merisi of cheating with his models. When Ferenc returns from war she has him send Merisi away

Ferenc is concerned about Bathory’s health so he hires a pagan herbalist to help her. Divulia is the title of the middle section named after the herbalist Divulia who promises that not only can she help treat Bathory’s condition but that she will bear a son and heir. The narrator Pastor Ponicky actually takes part in this part of the film investigating the suspicious reports of strange deaths from Bathory’s castle for the Catholic Church. He’s accompanied by a young neophyte called Cyril(Jirí Mádl). These two spies observe many suspicious things but conclude that Bathory is not doing them or at least not to the extent that the rumours claim. Not sure it’s a good idea to try and make the case in defence of Bathory through the agency of two fictional comedy relief spies who have roller skates, clockwork skis and some bizarre imaging apparatus.

Bathory has a few enemies in particular Juraj Thurzo (Karel Roden) a nobleman who fought alongside her husband and whose land adjoins her own. When Ferenc dies of his injuries during one battle Thurzo sets about undermining Bathory. His wife dopes up the potion Divulia makes for Bathory and instead of easing her symptoms it sends her into a full psychotic breakdown and she kills one of her servants. She blames Divulia who gets out of the castle. Divulia then gets captured by by Thurzo who has her tortured and takes out her tongue

Thurzo convinces King Mathias (Franco Nero) that action has to be taken against Bathory. This starts the third chapter of her life titled Thurzo. Thurzo is Palatine of the region and begins an investigation, collecting evidence from locals. He raids her castle arresting four of her servants. They are questioned under torture then quickly put to death while Bathory is put under house arrest. King Mathias is furious with Thurzo for killing the only witnesses since the evidence of the locals cannot be used to try a noblewoman. But Thurzo does not want her tried for then she would be executed and her lands seized by the crown and he has done a deal with her sons-in-law and her son to retain her property and title.

This a strange rambling film that takes it time to develop the character of Countess Bathory and Anna Friel is brilliant in the role but apart from the ever reliable Karel Roden as Thurzo the other characters are amateur dramatics. It did give a context to her life story during a chaotic time in history of Europe. The film never goes as far as suggesting that Bathory is completely innocent but it does still have her as a victim of a conspiracy. Overall the film was okay but I did find my attention wandering a bit.

Rating 6.5

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