Notable Occurrences Related to Audiovisual Recordings of Fantastical Narratives

Remakes or re-imagining have featured in a couple of films that got my attention this week. The first was the release of a teaser trailer for Total Recall which is due out this Summer. Paul Verhoeven‘s original with Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big hit because it was a big science fiction action blockbuster but it still had at the core the question of identity: are we purely the sum of memories or is there a something more fundamental to an individual’s identity. I know in that the economics of film mean if you have a big star like Arnie to play the lead then your investment is safe but Arnie is a very imposing personalty and so I welcome the decision to cast Colin Farrell in the lead because he is actor who can be more convincingly normal and I hope the remake is a bit closer the Philip K. Dick story that it is based on.

The other remake that made the news was the casting Chloe Moretz to play the lead in of a remake/re-imagining of the Stephen King story Carrie. I’m not very enthusiastic about this one because I don’t see there being any more to the story than what we got in Brain de Palma’s original version. Maybe it will be closer to the book but even if that’s so it would not mean that the film will be any better so I will just wait and see the film when its finished

One film I am excited about is Iron Sky which is coming out in April (see the sidebar for the UK release date). The story has Nazi’s hiding on the dark side of the Moon invading the Earth with flying saucers and from the trailer the whole thing looks a bit like Mars Attacks, a film that I really enjoyed. It has Udo Kier as the Nazi commander and also has a female American President who looks and sounds a lot like Sarah Palin, a future just as terrifying as Nazis invading from the Moon (only joking so chill out conservatives).

Speaking of American Presidents I have seen the trailer for the Summer release of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter  and it looks interesting. I like stories which take a mixture of historical figures and literary characters and blend them into something new and if this film is successful maybe they’ll have try at other novels like Anno Dracula or The Difference Engine.

Other interesting trailers doing the rounds include The Host where everyone has blue eyes because they’ve been invaded by aliens. It is based on a book by Twilight author Stephanie Meyer and is not out until next year so we’re in for long campaign of attrition on this one.

How many clichés can be squeezed into one trailer? A man convicted of a crime he didn’t commit is offered his freedom by the authorities if he goes in to a maximum security prison to rescue the President’s daughter who is trapped inside after the prisoners start a riot. Put the prison in orbit around the Earth and you’ve got Lockout starring Guy Pearce and I have a feeling the trailer will be the most exciting thing about this film.

Other films

• The Revenant – I know nothing about this other than it has been around  for a coupleof years and it is a zombie comedy.
• Metal Shifters – (or Iron Invaders on IMDb) sounds like a rip-off of Maximum Overdrive or Killdozer

 

Review: They Live

This lesser known John Carpenter science fiction film is well-liked among those who know do it. It is famous on YouTube thanks to a scene involving one of the most prolonged fight scenes I can remember in a film, probably included to showcase the wrestling skills of the star of the film Roddy Piper. If that is all you know about the film then you are missing a nice paranoid action thriller

America is in the grip of a recession and unemployed drifter Nada (Roddy Piper) arrives in Los Angeles looking for work on a building site. At the end of the day’s work he has nowhere to stay. One of the other workers on the site Frank (Keith David) takes him back to shanty town where he stays and Nada can get food and shelter from a charity group working out of the local church.

As Nada settles in he sees some old guys watching a TV set showing aspirational programmes in a tent and adverts for extravagant luxuries while they are sitting with nothing. A pirate broadcast interrupts with a strange message from some radical political group. Nada notices a blind street preacher standing nearby mouthing the exact words from the speech being given on the broadcast and starts to think that something strange is going on. He keeps an eye on the church and the following day he sneaks inside. The sound of a choir singing turns out to be a tape playing. He sees that there is a meeting including the guy from the pirate broadcast and the people working in the church they are talking about their need to recruit more people to spread their message.That night the police raid the church and then they bulldoze the shanty town brutally beating anyone resisting. Nada finds the police beating the crap out of the street preacher and the pirate radio guy round the back of the church.

In the aftermath of the raid everyone is looking for any of their belongings that they can salvage. Nada goes into the church and opens a secret panel he had found on his last visit and grabs a box hidden in there. Out in an alley in private he has a look inside is puzzled to find it is full of sunglasses. He takes a pair and hides the box in a bin. Once out in the street he put the glasses on and sees the world in a new way. Everything is bleak monochrome with brutal modernist architecture and advertising hoardings contain giant propaganda slogans like Obey, Reproduce, and Don’t Question Authority. Without the glasses everything seems normal again. Nada goes to a news stand and sees the magazines are the same slogans over and over again

A businessman comes to the news stand to buy a paper. Nada puts the glasses on a sees a nightmare instead a face, with big silver eyes and transparent skin. He looks around and sees most people look the same with glasses on but a number of people have the same nightmare faces Nada goes into a supermarket and confronts one of the aliens saying “You know, you look like your head fell in the cheese dip back in 1957.” They aliens realise he can see them and the woman talks to communicator disguised as an expensive watch to report him

Nada goes out outside and puts what he’s seeing together with what he’s overheard from the group back at the church. Two cops arrive, both aliens. One of them tries to offer him a deal but he’s having none of it and manages to get one of their guns and shoots both of them dead. He gets the other guns from the police, including a shotgun in their car, and shoots a floating robot camera visible only with the glasses on.

More police are on the way so ducks into building to get away from them and discovers he’s walked into a bank with armed guards and several aliens. He quickly recovers his composure, cocks the shotgun and says “I have come to here to chew bubblegum and kick ass … and I’m all out of bubble gum,” then starts gunning down as many aliens as he can. He sees one alien touch his watch then disappear right in front of him. The cops arrive and Nada has to shoot his way out.

Nada gets to a car park with the authorities not far behind. He’s see a woman Holly (Meg Foster) getting to her car and takes her hostage, forcing her to drive him to her house, a large expensive place overlooking the valley Holly works at the local TV station as assistant programme director. She acts cold towards Nada passively co-operating but nothing more. Nada tries to explain and apologise but Holly makes it clear he’s in charge because he has a gun and nothing more. Nada tries to get her to put on the glasses but she tells him it’s no use since she’ll just say she sees what he wants her to see. Nada is tired from wearing the glasses, he is feeling high and his head hurts. He needs to rest but can’t trust Holly. Holly finally agrees to help Nada but instead pushes through her window.

Nada is on the run so he heads to the building site and tries to get Frank to help him but thinks Nada’s gone crazy, since to everyone else it looks like he just went psycho with a gun. Frank gets him some food and tells him to go away. Nada goes to alley where he left the box of sunglasses and retrieves them just before a garbage truck takes them away. He meets up with Frank again tells him to try on the glasses. Frank thinks Nada really is crazy and refuses but Nada does not take not for an answer. The two men fight and fight and really pound the crap out of each other. Frank manages to beat Nada down several times but Nada gets up each time and just starts again ”Put on the glasses”. It’s very long scene and is clearly just a pure indulgence for wrestling fans. It ends with Nada putting the glasses on the barely conscious Frank but finally he can see it too, the real world under the aliens.

Nada and Frank get in touch with the church group and learn that they are having a meeting at a community hall to discuss what they know and plan what they are going to do about it. Some want to carry on with giving out glasses and contact lenses. Others want to try to go for the source of the signal the aliens are using to hide their presence and influence from the human population. They know it is being transmitted with the TV broadcast signal. That’s when Holly chips in with information that the signal leaves the studio clean.

Nada goes to talk to Holly about how she got there but just at that moment armed police raid the building shooting at people indiscriminately. Frank and Nada struggle with one alien cop and manage to get his watch from him. They kill the cop an activate some switch that open a trap door to an underground network of tunnels. Once safely in the tunnels no-one questions their presence they are free to explore the place, including a teleporter that lets the aliens travel the millions of light years to their home world.

One of the old men from the shanty town is there and thinking Nada and Franks have joined up with the aliens like he has he gives them a guided tour of the place. Showing off he takes them into the TV studio. He’s pretty shocked when they start shooting equipment and aliens. They discover that the signal is being broadcast from the roof and as they make their way up there they meet Holly who comes with them.

Nada heads up to the roof first and finds te alien signal device. He thinks that Holly and Frank are just behind him but that traitor Holly has already shot Frank dead and now tries to kill Nada before he can destroy the device but Nada manages destroy it before he dies. The whole world wakes up in shock to discover the hideous alien creatures living amongst us.

I know this film can be a bit cheesy sometimes but it has a great story and it does not try to what Carpenter is saying abou the world at the time that this was made, that the rich are parasites who feed on poverty and are so divorced from the way the poor live they are like aliens living in different world. It fit the politics of 80s perfectly and as the world has swung back into another recession it still resonates. I really liked contrast of the bleak world seen through the glasses with the apparently normal world. If you haven’t seen it I really recommend that you do

Rating 8/10

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• THEY LIVE – John Carpenter (irkthepurists.wordpress.com)

 

Review: Surrogates

In a future world that has been created to criticise the present almost everyone lives their lives though remote control robots that go out into the word and work and live meet and interact while their human operators stay safe in their homes operating the machines. Even wars are fought by operators remotely with machines fighting machines in endless battles. Murder is now a very rare crime but we get to see two committed outside a night club when someone on a motorbike shoots two machines with a bright beam of crackling electricity that fries their eyes and their circuits. Bruce Willis is Greer a FBI agent investigating the destruction of the machines with his partner agent Peters (Radha Mitchell) and at first the cops have no reason to suspect murder until they trace the operators who were both killed by whatever destroyed their Surrogates. It is a nice touch that the operator of hot female machine was a fat slob in his underwear

The big powerful (and automatically evil) company who make the machines are very worried about the publicity of the investigation and are not very forthcoming with helpful information merely denying that it is possible for what did happen to have happened at all. Willis does manage to get information from a scientist working for the evil corporation that they had machines returned to them from the military that were fried out in the same way

They find out that the identity of the second victim is Jarid Canter who was operating an unregistered machine owned by his father Dr Lionel Canter (James Cromwell) the inventor of the Surrogate technology that he created to help paraplegics. Canter has split from the evil corporation when they started marketing his machines for everybody and changing the world as a result. Now many people never interact with the real world at all and this includes Greer’s wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike) who never appears in person even to her husband after their son died in a car accident several years earlier. In response to this situation there are anti-surrogate groups who follow people like the Prophet (Ving Rhames) who advocates rebellion against the unreal life of those who use Surrogates and have several Surrogate-free Dread reservations.

The FBI manages to get information out of the last memories of the Surrogates to identify the man who has the ray gun and thanks to constant remote surveillance they find out where he is. The FBI swoop on the man Miles Strickland (Jack Noseworthy) but he uses the ray gun to take out all the agents chasing him including the pilot of the helicopter that Greer is flying in and it crashes into the Dread reservation. Strickland has run there to get away from the FBI. Greer had avoided getting his Surrogate fried by going off-line just in time but he re-activates it and gives chase to Strickland across the reservation. This really pisses off the locals who gang up to destroy his Surrogate. Greer now has to deal with the world in person instead of through a Surrogate and at first he finds this disorienting. The political furore caused by his Surrogate being caught in the reservation means that the FBI are not wanting to take the case any further but Greer will not let it drop, especially as the death toll now includes several FBI agents.

While watching this film I enjoyed the action and the story and thought it was an interesting idea but by the end there were things that concerned me. The overall message of the film seemed oddly technophobic for a product of such a technology-dependent medium whose main form is escapist stories. The ugly scenes of the reservation mob chasing down and destroying Greer’s Surrogate did very little to endear me to their philosophy and we never get to see any good side to living a real life without a Surrogate. In the end the film did not deliver much more than a very standard action film. Bruce Willis is pretty good as Greer and he is what makes the film watchable.

Rating 6.5/10

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Notable Occurrences Related To Audiovisual Recordings of Fantastical Narratives

American actor Johnny Depp. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So much news flashes past daily on the Twitter stream but many film sites were talking about the release of images and then a trailer for Tim Burton’s film version of the 60s TV series Dark Shadows with the almost inevitable Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins.  I only came across the original Dark Shadows when it was shown on the UK version of the Sci Fi channel. It was creaky and overacted with bizarre over-complicated stories featuring vampires, witches, ghosts, Lovecraftian creatures, time travel and alternative realities. From the trailer it seems that this will be a Burton/Depp project and the strangeness will be replaced with kookiness, the creakiness replaced with Burtonesque sets and Elfman music while the rest of the cast will be shoehorned into supporting a very Depp-centred story with a strong comedic feel. This will be hitting the cinemas for better of worse in the summer and since the series was barely known in the UK I wonder how they will market it

The Hunger Games (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Even bigger news this week is the release The Hunger Games with what looks like a massive opening weekend and favourable reviews. Before its release this was being tarred by attempts to associate this film with the Twilight audience but that attitude seems to evaporated in the face of the positive reactions to the film itself which despite its 12A (PG) rating has not compromised on its dark theme of children being forced to fight to the death for entertainment. The film I’m looking forward in the next couple of weeks is The Cabin in the Woods which has a sort of Cube mixed with Evil Dead feel to it from the trailer. It has me intrigued and I might go see it

On DVD and Bluray this week The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. I am familiar with Tintin from reading the books as a kid, but I was always a bigger fan of Asterix the Gaul. I will probably get the film when payday comes just to see what Spielberg did with it. Another significant release is the special edition of Ken Russel‘s The Devils starring Oliver Reed. This is still not the uncut version of the film but it’s probably the best we’ll get for now.

Next week’s DVD releases have a couple of films that caught my eye. The Awakening is a ghost story set just after the First World War in a boarding school with a sceptical investigator Rebecca Hall looking into hauntings for headmaster Dominic West. Also out next week is the prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing confusingly also called The Thing.  It had mixed reviews at the cinema but I will give it a fair chance.

 

Review: The People Under The Stairs

This film is a pretty entertaining horror film from the 90s that is a bit different. It is dIrected by Wes Craven and while not among his best films I always had fun watching it.

The hero of this film is 13-year-old Fool (Brandon Quintin Adams) and it’s his birthday.To celebrate his sister Ruby (Kelly Jo Minter) reads his future in her Tarot cards and warns him that he faces a trial. Fool lives in the ghetto with his mother and she is very sick with untreated cancer. One of Ruby’s friends Leroy (Ving Rhames) talks to Fool about how much crap his family are in, including telling him that they are going to be evicted for not paying their rent on time and that his mother’s cancer is treatable but because they don’t have any money she is dying.

This set-up is just to soften Fool up to so that Leroy can convince him to help him out robbing their landlords. Leroy and his pal Spenser (Jeremy Roberts) have worked that the landlords for lots of houses in the ghetto are the same people who also run the pawn shops. They know where they live and they have heard rumours that the owners keep a collection of valuable rare gold coins in their house and this is what Spenser and Leroy want to steal. They want to find out how secure the house is and that’s where Fool comes in. They get him to dress as a Boy Scout trying to sell cookies and to case out the place. While Fool is trying the doors and having a look around the woman Mommy Robeson (Wendy Robie) comes out wanting to know what he’s after. She doesn’t fall for Fool’s Boy Scout routine and Fool fails to trick his way into the house by asking to use her toilet. The Robeson’s daughter Alice (A.J. Langer) was watching Fool from an upstairs window.

Spenser decides to try himself by dressing as a gas company engineer and he manages to get inside the house. Leroy and Fool wait in the van for a signal from Spenser but as the time goes on then Mommy gets in her car and drives off. Leroy gets worried that Spenser may be trying to get the gold for himself. Leroy breaks into the house with a crowbar taking the reluctant Fool with him. Getting into the house seems fairly easy until they discover the place is guarded by a large Rottweiler but they manage to trap it in the utility room. Leroy wants to go upstairs and look for the gold but Fool doesn’t so he stays downstairs in case Mommy comes back.

Fool hears a noise and goes down to the cellar and finds Spenser lying dead on the floor. He also sees strange figures moving about behind a crude partition. They grab Spensrs body and poullit towards the [partition but Fool grabs him back and sees that they hve been chwing off the flesh on Spenser’s hand. Fool freaks runs up the stairs and finds Leroy lying with his  headstuck in a heating vent. Fool thinks the worst but Leroy is alive and was looking in there because he heard noises in the walls.

Mommy comes back and she has Daddy (Everett McGill) with her. They spot Spenser’s van and know something is up and when they find the dog in the utility room they know someone is in the house but they are stuck outside the metal security door. Daddy beats at the base of the door and manages to bend the metal (It looked like solid steel but I guess it was just aluminium or something) and let the dog in. The dog attacks them and chases them around the house. Fool runs for the front door but when he touches the handle he is knocked out by a powerful electric shock. When he recovers the dog has a firm grip on Leroy’s arm. Fool has a really stupid idea and grabs Leroy’s other hand and pulls him towards the door. He grabs the handle and the three of them get shocked but Leroy and Fool quickly recover and get away upstairs while the dog lies whimpering and twitching.

Daddy and Mommy get into the house and Mommy goes to take of her dog while Daddy gets mad and gets armed with his shotgun. He comes after them and spots Leroy. Leroy tells Fool to get away but Daddy thinks Leroy was talking to him and gloats as he shoots him dead. Fool hides in a cupboard but freaks out when a skinny figure with scary hair tries to grab him and he runs out and hides in the corridor. The police arrived outside and want to know about the van outside. Mommy tells them it’s not theirs and spots the Boy Scout uniform in the back. She realises that Fool was with the thieves and tells daddy to find him. Fool spots a rag doll tied to string. Some tugs the string and pulls the doll into a heating vent. Daddy is getting closer to finding Fool so he decides to follow the doll through the gaps between the walls until he comes out of the vent in different run-down part of the house and meets Alice

Alice tells Fool about Mommy and Daddy and how they keep looking for the perfect child but all the bad boys did or said something wrong and had to have their tongues cut out and get locked away in the cellar. One boy Roach  (Sean Whalen) has escaped the cellar and is living in the walls where Daddy can’t get him but no-one has got out of the house. This is the boy who tried to save Fool earlier but Fool ran away. Plenty of others have got in but none of them left and Alice shows Fool the dolls she has made to remember the victims that the Robesons fed to The people under the stairs. Daddy has put on a gimp suit (Seriously!) and is chasing round the house looking for Fool and Roach and firing his gun at the noises in the walls but Roach leads Fool to safety. When Fool goes back to get Alice to get her out of the house Daddy catches them. When Roach tries to get away Daddy shoots him.

Daddy chains Fool in the cellar and then cuts up Leroy’s body, tossing bits of meat at the boys behind the partition  and eating some of the meat himself. Daddy leaves Fool there but he gets rescued by the critically injured Roach who hides him in the furnace and gives him several gold coins and a written note asking him to take care of Alice. Fool agrees and Roach dies after showing him the way up to through the house to the attic up the chimney. Fool gets to Alice and they escape into the walls but Daddy sends the dog after them. Fool struggles with the dog while Daddy stabs at the wall with a bayonet. Fool manages to get the dog against the wall and Daddy stabs the wall killing it. Daddy thinks he killed the boy but when Mommy insists on seeing the body they realise it’s the dog he’s killed. Fool and Alice get up to the attic where they find the only window not secured because it’s a sheer drop two floors down. Fool remembers that there’s a pond right under it so it should be okay to jump but. Alice is terrified and won’t go. Just then Daddy arrives and Fool makes the jump alone, promising Alice he’ll be back for her. He lands in the pond and gets clean away.

Fool tells Ruby and his grandfather about what happened. Grandfather tells them that the Robesons are descendants of morticians who procreated by incest until ending in the present pair of psychotic freaks who are brother and sister, not husband and wife. They don’t have any children, the kidnapped all their children as babies. Grandfather assures Fool that the gold coins are enough to pay their rent and for Fool’s mother to get her operation. Fool is determined to go back and rescue Alice so he comes up with a plan with his family.

Back in the crazy house Mommy throws Alice on the blood covered floor and makes her clean it up. Then because she got blood on her dress Mommy forces Alice into a bath full of scalding hot water. Outside Fool goes to a payphone and calls the police to report the Robesons for child abuse. This results in loads of police as well as child protection people all over the house but the Robesons have everything hidden away and Mommy serves coffee and cakes to police while they chat about the how nasty the neighbourhood is.

The police leave and right away Mommy and Daddy realise anybody could have got into the house while the police were there. They are right because Fool is hiding inside the house. They catch him but he escapes into the chimney and climbs up to the attic where Alice is tied to a metal loop fixed into the chimney. Fool tells Alice that the Robesons are not her parents and this persuades her that she needs to leave. Alice warns him that Daddy drained the pond and blocked up the ducts and rigged them with explosives. Fool frees Alice but Daddy comes up so Alice pretends to still be tied up.

Fool tries to ambush Daddy but gets caught. He manages to get away when Ruby and the rest of the ghetto appear at the door and distract Mommy. Fool then goes down to the cellar and opens the partition to free the boys under the stairs. They show him a vault full of money and gold that the Robesons have squirreled away. It is also full of explosives, which is handy.

Alice gets caught by Mommy but she stabs Mommy with a kitchen knife and the boys burst through the stairs and kill her. Daddy goes down to get Fool in the vault but Fool has wired up the explosives. He gives a Daddy a chance but he’s just a mad dog and Fool detonates the explosive and the Vault and goes kablooey and Daddy gets blasted through a wall and into the sewer dead. The money gets grabbed by everyone and the boys from the under the stairs escape into the night.

This urban fairy tale is a very entertaining films and the action is almost constant. The Robesons are a really over-the-top pair of villains but while Daddy is a psychoidiot in a gimp suit Mommy is just a downright evil bitch. I remember that the actors played a very similar married couple in Twin Peaks but not quite so crazy. There is very little graphic gore despite the film being about cannibals under the stairs. I always have fun watching this film

Rating 7.5/10

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Review: The Violent Kind

I had never heard of the film so I went into it blind, which is probably the best way to see this film so I’ll try hard to avoid any spoilers.This film features some modern bikers up against something that’s difficult to explain even after watching it. The film is a strange of blend of influences like Blackboard Jungle and 70s exploitation films with just a little hint of something demonic

Cody (Cory Knauf), Q (Bret Roberts and Elroy (Nick Tagas) are members of a biker-gang ,drug-dealing violent and just not very pleasant. They go to Cody’s mother’s old house where she is celebrating her 50th birthday in typically rowdy biker-gang fashion with lots of booze, gambling, strippers and fights. Cory is not very happy to see his ex-girlfriend Michelle (Tiffany Shepis) at the party with her new boyfriend Dave (Terry Wayne). Cody’s mother has to leave the party early with his uncle who has an oxygen mask. The party keeps going but Cody drifts outside where he gets talking to Michelle’s little sister Megan (Christina McDowell) who always liked him and wrote him letters anonymously while he was in prison.

As the night goes on all the bikers leave until Cody and his two friends are left along with Q’s girlfriend Shade (Taylor Cole) and Megan who has discovered that Michelle has already driven off with Dave and she has no transport into town about 30 miles away. Then Michelle comes back to the house covered in blood and injured and they find Dave lying dead in the car just down the road. They take Michelle into a bedroom and Megan tries to clean her up. Q tries to get his car working to get her to a hospital but even though the engine is fine it’s just not working.

The film looks like its going to be them up against some supernatural evil hiding the woods but things take a sharp for the turn for the strange when Michelle goes crazy and nearly rips Elroy’s face off and a violent gang of rockabillys terrorise them to relieve their boredom. This gang are led by Vernon (Joe Egender) who never shuts up then there’s Jazz (Joseph McKelheer) in his teddy boy outfit who likes his flick-knife and dancing, Murderball (Samuel Child) who never speaks and prefers his fists and listening to insanity on his headphones and two women call Trixie (Mackenzie Firgens) and Pussywagon (Ilea Matthews).

As I said above this film is a very strange blend and it may take another viewing to see if I can figure out if I liked it. It has a gritty  depressing realist portrayal of the bikers and the over-the-top violent campy madness of the rockabilly gang and that really is not all. It is difficult to hint at the final reveal without spoiling it but I think it will lead to very mixed reactions. I thought it was quite a bold film and even if its not entirely successful it certainly is interesting.

Rating 6.5/10

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Review: The Dead

This zombie film is mainly shot in Burkina Faso and Ghana in Africa and uses the now commonplace slow  silent shambling reanimated corpse type zombies made famous by George A. Romero but I feel this film, directed by brothers Howard J. Ford and Jonathan Ford, owes just as much of a debt to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesheaters (Zombi 2).

A group of westerners are on the last plane out of the country when an injured passenger turns zombie and the chaos that folows causes the plane to crash off the coast. There’s only one survivor, an army engineer called Lt. Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) and when he manages to get to the beach he immediately face zombies attacking him. Fortunately the crate he floated to shore on is full of guns and ammo and he is able to shoot enough of them to get away. Everywhere is full of zombies creeping around slowly.

Murphy gets to a farmhouse where he finds a truck with no fuel and with one wheel off. He starts making sure the engine will work but misses a zombie getting very close. He is saved by a soldier Sgt. Daniel Dembele (Prince David Oseia) shooting the zombie before it gets to Murphy. Dembele had been back to his home village after going AWOL from manning roadblocks. He had found everyone dead, including his wife, except for an old woman who tells him that his son got away with the army. Dembele says he will take Murphy to an airfield and then he can take the truck north himself to the army base where his son was taken.

The film follows the men’s journey across the country with the constant threat of zombies everywhere and their fuel, ammunition and water gradually running out. The use of old-fashioned make-up and effects is pretty convincing and it effectively recreates the slow passionless ever-present threat from this type of zombie that I remember from Zombie Flesheaters and Romero’s original films. This is a solid decent zombie film. Rating 7/10 Related Articles

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Review: Mutants

Zombie films have appeared like a plague in recent years and in different locations. This time we’re in France so this film is in French with subtitles. There have also been different types of zombies and this film has are plague-type, called mutants as they are living people who have become infected and metamorphosed into flesh-eating bestial creatures, so they are fast and strong but they can be killed like the infected people in 28 Days Later.

Sonia (Hélène de Fougerolles) is a paramedic and her partner Marco (Francis Renaud) are in an ambulance with to soldiers after an attack by mutants. One of the soldiers has been bitten and when there is a sign that he is infected the other soldier order them stop and she shoots her colleague dead. Then she orders Marco to clean all the blood out to prevent them getting infected  then they have to drive to NOAH base, the government agency responsible for controlling the outbreak. They are getting low on fuel so they stop at a petrol station but its pumps are dry. Marco gets attacked by a mutant the soldier manages to shoot in the head but Marco end up covered in its blood. The soldier gets bitten too by another mutant and after she kills it she gets Sonia to kill her to avoid becoming a mutant I forget how but Marco gets injured.

Sonia drives the ambulance to a large empty building. Marco is not feeling very well and is worried about harming Sonia when if he turns but Sonia tries to contact NOAH on the radio to rescue them. Sonia has already been bitten and has not turned into meaning she is immune and her blood may have the cure to the disease. As time passes Marco starts showing symptoms and his behaviour gets more and more erratic.

When an armed group of survivors come into the building their leader tells her that they heard her call on he radio but the helicopter never stops They want her ambulance to get away from the area. They were in a nearby storage bunker which has a more powerful radio and fuel supplies. From there the story heads off down the road of mistrust and betrayal leaving them prey to mutants

This film was okay and it was a decent change of pace right up until the point that the other survivors arrived and then the film seems to switch to more normal survivor horror territory. The two leads Helen de Fougerolles and Francis Renaud were good but I wasn’t too convinced by the performances of the actors playing the survivors. I thought the make-up effects were nicely done especially Marco’s metamorphosis and there was a fair amount of nasty gore scenes. Recommended to anyone wanting something a bit different from a zombie film.

Rating 6.5/10

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Review: The Raven

Popped off to the cinema to see this film based very loosely on the life and work of Edgar Allen Poe, the influential American writer credited as the father of modern detective stories as well as for his grisly tales of madness and murder.

This film is story set during the last few days in the life of Edgar Allen Poe. Poe (John Cusack) is a penniless drunk (with a pet raccoon for some reason), depending on money he gets from The Baltimore Times for writing acerbic reviews of other writers’ work to keep him in the booze. Emily (Alice Eve) the woman he loves is difficult to reach because her father Colonel Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson) has a very understandable dislike of Poe so they have sneak around behind his back.

The police are investigating two brutal murders of a mother and her 12-year-old daughter in a locked room. Detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) notices the parallels between these murders and the Poe story Murders in the Rue Morgue so he sends a squad of policemen out to bring Poe in for questioning. Although Fields doesn’t believe Poe is responsible for the murders he is definitely connected to them.

There’s a second murder this time based on the story The Pit and The Pendulum and this is a pretty gory killing as you can imagine if you are aware of the story (if you are not I’ll just say the pendulum has an enormous blade on the end of it). The victim this time is a writer at The Baltimore Times who wrote highly negative reviews of Poe’s stories. A crimson mask found on body is a message from the killer to Poe and the police about where he will strike next. The killer is playing a game with them and when the life of his beloved Emily is threatened Poe is forced to play the killer’s game.

This was an entertaining mystery thriller and I did like the inclusion of Poe’s stories in this film. The setting felt authentic enough and there was no anachronistic steam punk stuff going on like so many other alternative history stories. The cast are reasonable enough, especially Brendan Gleeson, but they don’t really get too much development. I don’t have any doubt that Cusack’s performance bore very little resemblance to the real Edgar Allen Poe but it was fun and over the top and similar to Robert Downey Juniors’s take on Sherlock Holmes. Anyone expecting dark melancholia and madness will probably not like this film but for people only passingly familiar with Poe it is a mystery thriller romp with a pulpy comic book feel.

Rating 7/10

Related articles

• IMDb
• Rotten Tomatoes
• The Raven, review (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Raven – review (guardian.co.uk)

 

Review: Shadow

This was another bargain buy from the pile DVDs I’ve bought but not watched yet so other than what it said the cover I knew nothing  about it. The cover art was a little bit worrying but I need not have worried because it’s very misleading. I did notice that the picture of Hitler with the swastika are not on the IMDb picture and wonder why they’re on the UK DVD.

David (Jake Muxworthy) is an American ex-soldier who served in Iraq and is taking a mountain biking holiday in a remote forest in Europe before going home. He stops at a café for a beer but while he is sitting quietly writing a letter home two oafish hunters Fred (Ottaviano Blitch) and Buck (Chris Coppola) come in and really stink up the atmosphere, harassing Angeline (Karina Testa) a young woman sitting at the next table. David intervenes and the café owner orders the hunters to leave.

Later David is in the woods trying to set up his tent but it is very windy and the tent blows away. Fortunately Angeline finds him and lets him sleep in her tent for the night. The next day they cycle through the forest together stopping occasionally to admire the scenery. They see a group of deer and stop to watch them. Then Angeline sees Fred and Buck and Fred has the stag in his sights. Angeline calls out and alerts the deer who run off to safety.

David and Angeline make off on their bikes with Fred and Buck chasing after them in their car and shooting at them. Angeline comes off her bike and David stops to help her but he gets shot in the arm by Fred. He picks up a large rock and throws it into the windscreen of the hunters’ car causing Buck to drive off the road and the their car ends up turned over. David and Angeline ride off deeper into the forest and then stop so that Angeline can  clean and dress his bullet wound.

They don’t get to relax long before Fred and Buck catch up with them but they manages to escape them. Angeline disappears and something else is in the woods hunting the three men, a sadistic madman called Mortis (Nuot Arquint)

This film is well-shot and they did a quite good job with chase scenes through the forest.  I was not too sure about the scenes in Mortis’s lair which did seem a little derivative and reminded of the film Creep and, now I  think about it Mortis looked a lot like the creep. I thought at one it was going down the hostel route but after a couple nasty scenes the film swings back into action. There is a twist to ending which I didn’t see coming but it was set-up with clues earlier that I’ll look out for if I watch it again. Fred and Buck were not very well-played and there was a bit of a wandering accent from them that seemed to go from American to British and back again. This film was nothing special and certainly wasn’t too horrible

Rating 6.5/10

Related articles

• IMDb
• http://www.horror-movies.ca/2011/04/shadow-2009-movie-review/
• http://www.dreadcentral.com/reviews/shadow-2009
• Shadow (2010) Movie Review (fringefiction.net)