Review: Excision

DVD Review

This is a film that I heard about but I had no idea what the film was about since I tried hard to avoid spoilers. This film was in the horror section and while it has that transgressive element common to horror it is also a family drama but with quite a lot more blood and gore than is typical in that genre and that is right from the opening scene. The majority of the gore is in fantasy sequences in the head of the main character.

This film follows the story of Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord), a high school senior who is far beyond merely socially awkward and is definitely has an undiagnosed mental condition. Suffering is not the correct term since it her family that do most of the suffering from her condition. She has the delusion that she is on track to becoming a surgeon and her dreams are filled with bloody necrophilic fantasies of her being worshipped as a beautiful glamorous surgeon.

Pauline’s family find it difficult to cope with her strange behaviour. Her mother Phyllis (Traci Lords) feels the burden of trying to create a normal family environment is totally on her shoulders since her husband Bob (Roger Bart) has delegated all his responsibility to her. Phyllis has little patience with Pauline’s behaviour and in a desperate attempt to civilise her she signs her up for some ritual called cotillion which Pauline desperately wants to avoid. Pauline’s younger sister Grace (Ariel Winter) has cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition that damages the lungs and often leads to a shortened life expectancy. The fact that she is beautiful, sweet and loving makes the tragedy of her condition all the worse.

Pauline has absolutely no friends at school and her classmates treat her like a freak but she really seems to have little interest in them anyway. The teachers find her exasperating with her unpredictable disruptive behaviour. Her question in sex education class about the possibility of catching an STD from sex with a corpse is treated as a juvenile joke by the science teacher Mr Claybaugh (Matthew Gray Gubler) but after seeing her fantasies it’s clearly something she really wanted to know.

I don’t know if it was because of the sex education or not but Pauline decides to lose her virginity, something she confides in with Grace who really didn’t want to know and to a god she doesn’t believe in but she pre-emptively asks for forgiveness anyway. After overhearing two classmates Natalie (Molly McCook) and Abigail (Natalie Dreyfuss) joking about size of Natalie’s boyfriend’s penis Pauline approaches the boyfriend Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) and tells him she wants to lose her virginity to him. Adam is embarrassed because he is with his friends and feigns disinterest but he phones her later and Pauline arranges a time to meet. They go to a motel and Pauline takes charge. Pauline had madesure to time her sex to coincide with her period partly to make sure she doesn’t become pregnant but she then asks Adam to go down on her with very predictable results. When it’s over Pauline has no interest in Adam and he is physically repulsed by her.

The drama reaches a terrible but almost inevitable conclusion. Her disruptive behaviour and delusions are too much for the counselling efforts of the local minister Reverend William (John Waters) whose sessions have been reduced to him suffering a torrent of abuse from Pauline. When Pauline physically assaults Natalie as payback for a prank she gets expelled and Phyllis realises she needs professional help. At the same time Grace’s condition gets worse and her doctor puts her on the lung transplant list. There is no doubt Pauline loves Grace and her delusions lead her to implement a terrible plan. This is a disturbing film but it keeps most of the fantastic gore in the world of a highly stylized fantasy in Pauline’s head but Pauline tries bringing her fantasy into the real world and the results are not pretty.

I am not sure what I think of this film. The cast did a great job and I was certainly drawn into the story. There is a scene where Pauline overhears Phyllis breaking down and telling Bob that she can’t love her daughter and this just destroys Pauline. I was a bit distracted by some of the well-known faces such as Ray Wise as the headmaster and Malcolm MacDowell as the maths teacher, both playing exasperated authority figures. Some of the fantasy scenes seemed to deliberately trying for shock and while it will succeed with some people I found it a bit silly. Despite my misgivings I think it is worth a watch

Rating 7.0/10

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Review: Some Guy Who Kills People

DVD Review

I picked us this film based purely on the cover since I’d never heard of it and I happy to say that this turns out to be one of those quiet little gems with a great story and really great performances from the cast, especially Kevin Corrigan and Barry Bostwick. It is a difficult film to describe the plot because it is a crime mystery story and is best enjoyed as the story unfolds. I am also going to mention the soundtrack that hooked me in before the film started with the great song I’m Coming Home by Murder by Death over the menu

Ken Boyd (Kevin Corrigan) has just been released from a psychiatric hospital and his only close friend Irv (Leo Fitzpatrick) has gotten him a job working in an ice cream parlour. He’s still troubled by memories of his abuse by a team of bullies at high school that led him to attempt suicide and get admitted to the hospital. Now these asshole high school students are asshole adults and someone is killing them off brutally. The local Sheriff Walt Fuller (Barry Bostwick) is on the case but with only Deputy Ernie Dobkins (Eric Price) he has a hard time putting the case together.

Ken lives with his mother Ruth (Karen Black) who is angry that Ken refuses to open up to anyone and is still keeping his feelings locked up inside. He has a sketch book that he has filled with drawings full of violence and anger and won’t let his mother or anyone else look at it.

His boss Al Fooger (Lou Beatty Jr.) takes advantage of Ken’s poor job prospects to make him do all kinds of shitty jobs like wearing an ice cream costume to work at birthday parties or hand out fliers. At a birthday party for one of the bullies he meets Stephanie (Lucy Davis) an English woman working as a travel agent.

When he’s handing out fliers an idiot knocks them out of his hand but a friendly young girl helps him pick them up. This girl is Amy (Ariel Gade) who later that same day discovers that Ken is her father. After making her mother feel guilty about lying about her father all her life Amy turns up at the parlour and drops her bombshell on Ken. When Ken goes home he discovers Amy is there and Ruth is angry for never being told Amy exists and is very worried that Ken isn’t capable of being a father to Amy. Amy does drag Ken into wanting to be a father, especially when he sees that like him she is getting bulled by jocks at school and he starts giving her some coaching. Amy helps Ken out by pushing him into a relationship with Stephanie and coaching him on dating a woman.

The only problem for Ken is he goes on mysterious nocturnal trips that seem to coincide with the deaths of his high school bullies. Sheriff Walt is in a relationship with Ruth and spends most nights in their house so he feels close to Ken but as his investigation into the murders goes on the evidence starts pointing to Ken being the killer.

This is film really is a very pleasant surprise and though it does have a series of brutal murders at the centre of it the film really spends more time showing the growing relationships between the characters. There is humour in the film but it is from the characters’ dialogue and so feels natural. Barry Bostwick is really great as Sheriff Walt whose laid back manner hides a sharp mind. Ariel Grade is also fantastic as the intelligent strong-willed Amy. It isn’t the most original film but I really did enjoy it and recommend it to anyone who enjoys quirky crime mysteries.

Rating 7.5/10

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Review: Fairytale

DVD Review

This Italian film is a psychological supernatural mystery that I picked up cheap in the the local supermarket. It is on of those films that are entertaining enough to watch but it really doesn’t have anything that stands out enough to make it memorable

Sophia (Harriet MacMasters-Green) is moving into her new apartment in Italy with her young daughter Helena (Sabrina Jolie Perez) to get on with her life after Sophia’s husband Robert (Jarreth J. Merz) left her to find himself (a younger woman). Sophia is a historian who teaches at a local college and she is teaching her students about how the city they are in was created by the Fascist leader Mussolini when he drained the coastal marshes, eradicated the malaria carrying mosquitoes and created farm land.

Not long after they move in Helena starts losing one of her milk teeth. While driving Helena to her school Sophia tells her the story of the tooth fairy. Sophia is also getting distracted by interference on her car’s GPS and crashes into a truck when she strays into the wrong lane. The car gets smashed and turned around before skidding off the bridge into the water.

Sophia comes round in hospital and her first concern is Helena and she’s told she’s in the next room. Once she’s been checked out by Doctor Fabiano (Giuliano Montaldo) Sophia goes to see Helena who is looking a bit shaken up but seems relatively unhurt. Sophia apologises for crashing the car but Helena seems mainly concerned about losing her loose tooth in the accident. She demands that her mother find it right away.

Later when they go back to their apartment Sophia discovers Helena has another loose tooth and it is loose enough that Sophia can pull it out and she tells Helena that they can put it under her pillow and the tooth fairy will give her money for it. At night Sophia sneaks into Helena’s room to find the tooth but Helena wakes up and tells her the tooth fairy has already taken away the tooth.

Next morning Sophie asks about find any money and Helena says she did but she knows her mother left it because the tooth fairy had already been and given her money for her tooth. She shows the coins she claims she got and they are all strange old coins. This is the start of Helena acting like there really something in the old wardrobe in her room that wants teeth and gets angry with anyone who gets in her way. Sophia thinks that it might be a result of a head injury in the accident but after repeated tests Dr Fabiano assures her there is no sign of any physical problem. Helena has been drawing many pictures of the scary tooth fairy and Dr Fabiano shows them to a psychiatrist colleague. The psychiatrist is the one who alerts Sophia to the disturbing history of the building she is staying in.

It turns out there was a terrible crime committed in the building and it involved the wardrobe in Helena’s room. There’s also a creepy old neighbour Mr Ferri (Paolo Paoloni) who seems to know exactly what’s going on and warns Sophia to move out before it’s too late. Since it’s a horror film of course Sophia ignores the crazy man until it’s too late and she also sees the figure that is scaring her daughter. Sophia has to solve the mystery of the supernatural threat to her daughter while her ex-husband thinks he has grounds for applying for custody of Helena because the mental instability suggested by Sophia believing that a ghost is after their daughter. It builds to the fairly typical resolution of the mystery but this film has a little extra trick up its sleeve with a neat little dark twist in the ending that I liked.

It is interesting to watch an Italian horror film that has been dubbed into English not long after watching Berberian Sound Studio but this lot less gory than the exploitation film that was being made in that film. Instead it relies more on a fairly standard ghost story format with a creepy atmosphere and a small amount of CGI. It isn’t particularly scary but I was drawn in to the story while watching it even if I probably won’t remember it very much

Rating 6.0/10

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Review: Inbred

DVD Review

This low-budget British bad taste gory exploitation horror has a nice streak of dark humour and is fully aware of how ridiculous and over-the-top it is. It is strongly influenced by a love of the gory backwoods American horror films like The Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre but mixed with the influence of the British comedy series League of Gentleman.

Four young offenders are taken to Mortlake, a remote village in North Yorkshire by two social workers Kate (Jo Hartley) and Jeff (James Doherty). Kate is fairly laid back and treats the teenagers like normal people but Jeff is one of those pushy idiots who create more problems than they solve with unworkable ideas of what is best for people. The young offenders are Dwight (Chris Waller) a knob-head who thinks he’s hard and is always acting up, Zeb (Terry Haywood) a weasely boy who is easily led into trouble, Tim (James Burrows) an arsonist who is the angry rebel type and finally Sam (Nadine Rose Mulkerrin) a withdrawn young woman. None of them are particularly pleasant people but then I suspect the film is not siding with them.

Jeff drives them though the town past the pub which is called The Dirty Hole and leads to several crude jokes. They arrive at a run-down farmhouse where they are supposed to be staying. Jeff confiscates all their mobile phones which is an idiotic thing to do but necessary to the story. They clean up the farmhouse then as a reward Kate and Jeff take them to the pub which is strange since none of them are 18 years old.

In the Dirty Hole the locals go quiet as they enter. These locals are all messed with crude variations on the inbred village idiot make-up with wild hair and teeth all sorts of messed-up. I would not be surprised if there a few familiar faces hiding in that make-up. The pub landlord Jim (Seamus O’Neill) clears a table for them and he looks normal compared the rest of the locals. Jeff goes to bar to see if they can order any food but Jim says all he has is homemade pork scratchings, a revolting English pub snack at the best of times but when the flavours come in hairy or smelly it’s a lot worse. Kate tries ordering cokes for everyone but all they get is homemade lemonade

Sam goes outside for a smoke and she attracts the attention of Gris (Neil Leiper), an over-excited local pervert with mange who tries to interest Sam in his carrot. Sam humours him but is feeling intimidated so she goes back into the pub. Gris follows her in but Jim throws him out and apologises to the group promising that Gris is harmless.

The next day they hike up to a salvage yard full of train carriages. As part of the community service sentence they have salvage anything valuable from the carriages so they split into two groups. Jeff takes Dwight and Zeb while Sam and Tim go with Kate. Dwight isn’t interested in salvage so he just sets about wrecking the train and Zeb copies him. Tim claims to know about trains and so he and Sam go into one to find copper while Kate waits outside.

Kate ends up wandering off thinking she hears noises. Tim and Sam spot a fire and go to investigate. They find a goat burning to death on a fire with another goat tied up beside it. Tim frees the other goat but it runs into the road where a truck runs it over, splattering it all over the road. Tim and Sam run back the salvage yard but the guys in the truck come after them. Kate sees them getting caught by Gris and his two pals and he’s getting suggestive with fruit and vegetables again.

Kate comes to the rescue with a spade that she smacks over Gris’s head then she holds him to the ground with the spade at his throat and makes his friends let Tim and Sam go. She only lets Gris up when Jeff arrives to find out what’s going on. Gris claims he was only mucking about and claims back the tools they were using to wreck the carriages. He leaves with his pals but after Dwight shouts insults at him he starts running back. Jeff chases him off with an iron bar.

Jeff ends up falling over on to a sharp piece of scrap metal that cuts into his thigh and must have severed the artery. Kate binds his leg with a belt and they get him into a wheelbarrow while Gris and his pals just laugh at them. They head into the village to try to get help but instead find themselves the main entertainment in a grisly show put on for the locals.

This film is just so over-the-top and relishes the bad taste gorefest of its plot. In some ways it reminds me of the exploitation of William Herschell Lewis’s 2000 Maniacs and that goes for the sick humour of the cannibalistic locals. Fans of British soap Emmerdale may be shocked to see Dominic Brunt (Paddy) playing the chainsaw wielding Podge who dances around with his chainsaw like Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The special effects look quite icky and re mixture of physical effects with computer enhancements and they are pretty well done. This film is certainly not for the squeamish it is recommended to fans of gory backwoods horror

Rating 6.0/10

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Review: Berberian Sound Studio

Bluray Review

This film seems to have received quite a bit of critical praise so I was definitely interested in seeing it. Now that I’ve seen it I am left confused by the film. It initially seemed to have a conventional narrative but becomes more ambiguous as the film goes on, playing around with the line between reality and fiction. On the level of performance and technical skill the film is solid especially Toby Jones but the story left me with that “Huh?” feeling. Maybe the film is just too smart for me.

Toby Jones is Gilderoy, a quiet nervous man, who has been hired as a sound engineer by Italian film director Santini (Antonio Mancino) to do the post production sound editing on his latest film When he arrives at the studio the secretary Elena (Tonia Sotiropoulou) has no interest in him but she calls into studio and the producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco) comes out to meet him. Right away Gilderoy tries to find out about claiming back the price of his plane ticket and Francesco promises that it will get taken care of. This is not quite how it goes and Gilderoy gets the runaround from Francesco when it actually comes to paying up.

In the studio two Foley artists Massimo and Massimo are creating sound effects using watermelons. Gilderoy is dismayed to discover that the film he has been brought in to work on is a violent gory horror film about witches being tortured and killed and the watermelons are being used to create the sound of flesh being chopped up. We never actually get to see the film itself but the sound effects created by Massimo and Massimo and by Gilderoy do a very effective job of painting a picture of what is happening on the screen. I really enjoyed this aspect of film, just seeing the way the sound is put together in a film and it highlights they way that many of the scares and emotions in a film are communicated through the sound.

Gilderoy gets on with his job and tries to stay out of the office politics but he find himself getting involved with one of the actors Silvia (Fatma Mohamed) who has a very bad opinion of Francesco and an even worse opinion of Santini. Silvia tells Gilderoy to stand up for himself or he’ll never see any money. Francesco is all business and wants people to get on with their work but Santini is completely full of himself and takes offence when Gilderoy calls his film a horror film. He claims he’s confronting people with historical truth that must be uncovered and this truth includes a lot of scenes of attractive women being graphically tortured. Santini is very fond of attractive women even if some of them are not that interested in him and really don’t like his hands on coaching methods.

The film blurs the lines between the fictional reality and the fictional fiction in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has watched David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Gilderoy’s life starts unravelling into the fiction he’s working on. This starts off pretty subtly as the film continues it’s like Gilderoy get totally absorbed into the film’s fiction.

This film has definitely left me feeling a bit befuddled but then that is often my first reaction to watching David Lynch’s films and I am not sure if the film has interpretations that would help it make sense. Is Gilderoy always a character in Santini’s film? Is the film real or is Gilderoy mad and dreaming everything? The straightforward interpretation that what we see on screen is actually what happened is not available by the end of the film but it also doesn’t make it clear what has being going on either.

Rating 6.0/10

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Review: Dredd

Bluray Review

The first attempt at based on 2000AD comic’s Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone was a predictable science fiction feature that missed the mark by quite a lot so I was interested when heard they were giving it another go and the film got some pretty good word of mouth. I didn’t manage to catch it at the cinema so I had to wait for the Bluray. This film is dark, brutal and packed with tension and it has strong performance from Karl Urban as Dredd, played with a calm ruthlessness that is totally different from the shallow shouty Sylvester Stallone attempt.

After a short voiceover set-up and a flyover of Mega City One we get an introduction to Dredd (Karl Urban) in action taking down three fleeing crooks. He gets called back to headquarters and one of his superiors introduces him to rookie Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) who just failed her basic training. Despite that the senior judge wants to give her a chance of a field test because she’s a mutant with psychic powers that might be useful in fighting the powerful criminal gangs and she asks Dredd to take her out and assess her.

The big bad that Dredd faces is the smart and very dangerous Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) the leader of a gang based in one of the enormous slum housing blocks called Peach Tree. She controls the supply of a brand new drug called Slo Mo that lets users experience time as if has been slowed by a factor of 100 and leads to some really beautifully filmed scenes of carnage. It is her punishment execution of three Peach Tree residents that brings her activities to the attention of Dredd.

Dredd and Anderson arrive at Peach Tree and start their investigation into the deaths. The local paramedic TJ at the medical centre updates Dredd on the situation in the block and we learn the story of Ma-Ma’s rise in power and how her gang run the whole block. TJ tell them the location of an apartment they are using to sell drug on the 39th floor so Dredd and Anderson raid the place. This raid is shot is the glistening slo-mo style and once it’s over anyone who pulled a gun on Dredd and Anderson is dead and the cuff the rest for arrest. While Anderson is cuffing one man called Kay she reads his mind and knows that he is the one who killed the men. If Dredd has any doubts about his guilt he cannot execute him on the spot so because Anderson will only commit to 99% certainty they have to take him in for interrogation.

This decision really does not sit well with Ma-Ma who would prefer that Kay not be taken in for questioning so she has the entire block sealed up and announces a bounty on the heads of the two judges. Cut off from any outside help Dredd and Anderson have to make their way through the block while Ma-Ma throws everything she’s got into stopping them leaving alive with Kay.

An over-the-top character like Judge Dredd really needs a desperate world for him to represent justice and the great thing about this film is it really does create the world in which a character like him is justified. The future is just like the present only bigger and suckier and the value of human life is well represented by the fact that dead bodies are cleaned up by protein recycling robots.

Karl Urban is great as Dredd and still manages plenty of expression with most of his face concealed beneath the helmet. His voice is always steady and even officious as he passes judgement and sentence. Olivia Thirlby really does good job as the rookie judge coming to terms with job of a judge. Lena Headey plays Ma-Ma almost as a criminal version of Dredd, cold emotionless and brutal. I highly recommend this film to fans of violent action films and especially to fans of Judge Dredd and if I’d seen this film in the cinema last year I would have had it in my top ten.

Rating 9/10

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• Seeing Dredd Should Be The Law For Action Fans – Andy Burns on Dredd (biffbampop.com)
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Review: Grabbers

DVD Review

I have been hearing about this film for ages and had been following it progress on Facebook and Twitter as the received a broadly positive reception at various film festivals. It finally arrived for a short limited cinema run then it was out on DVD/Bluray the following week, a very common pattern for independently funded films nowadays.

It opens on a scene shot from space of an object crashing into the Atlantic just south of Ireland. It is spotted by fishermen in a boat nearby and the skipper radios in that he’s seen what looks like an emergency flare and he is going to investigate. The boat is attacked by something that we don’t get to see yet and the three men are killed. It is a pretty intense start to film that is essentially a comedy.

The main characters in this film are two Garda (Irish police) the alcoholic cynical Ciaran O’Shea (Richard Coyle) and eager young Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley). Ciaran works on the island of Erin off the south coast of Ireland and Lisa is coming to Erin to work for two weeks while Garda Sergeant Kenefick goes on his holidays. Ciaran protests that he doesn’t need any help in a tone that’s just like a teenager complaining about having a babysitter.

At the dock Paddy Barrett (Lalor Roddy) is checking his lobster pots and in one of them he sees a strange creature with tentacles that squirts a foul-smelling fluid on the face another fisherman. Next day Dr Jim Gleeson  (Pascal Scott) walks his dog down to beach and discovers about a dozen dead pilot whales lying on the sand. Ciaran and Lisa go to investigate and meet Dr Adam Smith (Russell Tovey) a marine ecologist who takes a liking to Lisa. He hasn’t really got any idea what could have killed the whales.

Ciaran and Lisa go to a quarry and get the owner Declan Cooney to go to the beach and remove the dead whales. After they have cleared the beach Cooney and his men pack-up to leave and Cooney sends one them to fetch shovel he’s left on the beach the man spots a load of strange eggs. He picks one up and gets attacked by something. Cooney is waiting on the man to return so he can leave and he goes to see what happened to him.

In a house near the beach the couple are settling in for the night and they hear a banging at the door. When the guy opens the door Cooney is there moving about strangely and they thinks he’s drunk but then he drops dead. The guy goes to investigate and he gets speared in the chest and lifted away into the air. His wife comes out to see what happened and what she sees makes her run screaming into the house where she gets dragged out through the chimney.

Ciaran is drinking in Maher’s, the only bar on the island and he gets teased by Una Maher (Bronagh Gallagher) the landlady about his interest in Lisa that he tries to deny but then he realises he’s probably not tried very hard to be nice to her. Paddy comes in and no-one believes him about the thing he caught in his lobster pot that he has put in his bathtub. They think he’s just raving with the amount that he’s already drunk which makes him and bit belligerent. That night when he goes home the thing is no longer in the tub but is on the ceiling the corner of the room and we finally get to see it, all glistening green-blue tentacles. It stabs him with its long spear like tongue but it quickly withdraws. It jumps at his face and wraps its tentacles around his head but after a bit of struggle Paddy gets it off

Next day Ciaran and Lisa try to find Cooney but all they find is his car with his keys still in the ignition. They decide to check out the nearby house, the one that was attacked the night before. The lights are on but there’s no sign of anyone. They spot something on the roof and Lisa goes to investigate because of course Ciaran has already been drinking. There seems to be along piece of torn clothing and Lisa tugs on it dislodging something from the chimney. She screams when she realises it’s a head and it rolls off the roof and smacks Ciaran in the face.

They take the head to the doctor to see if he can figure what killed him but Dr Gleeson points out it’s just a head so he has nothing to go on since he doesn’t have big city laboratory facilities. They go to see Paddy whose house has a big hole from when the bath went through the wall. Paddy tells them about the creature and takes them to Smith’s laboratory where he has been examining it. Smith has never seen anything like it and says it is a new species. Paddy calls the thing a grabber much to Smith’s annoyance since he wants it given some sort of descriptive Latin name but Paddy knows he’s got naming rights. Smith tells them the grabber is female and shows them the large egg he has dissected. Smith says if they have a female that implies that there is a male around too which is a little presumptuous for an unknown species even if he doesn’t know it’s not from Earth. Paddy takes Ciaran and Lisa to the beach where he caught the grabber and they have a close run in with the large male grabber.

They figure out that Paddy survived the attack because the grabber didn’t like something in his blood and Ciaran realises it must be the alcohol. When Ciaran tries to call the mainland for help he’s told that all rescue boats have been called in because of a large storm approaching so they are on their own. Together with the help Dr Gleeson and pub landlord Brian Maher (David Pearse) they come up with a plan to get everyone on Erin Isle into the pub for a huge booze up.

I really liked the characters in this film and a lot of the humour in the film comes from their dialogue and interactions. The humour balances out the creature horror parts where the tentacled monsters are attacking and killing people. The creature effects are pretty impressive and one of the best things about it was the way they have the large male grabber move by rolling on its tentacles at fairly impressive speeds. I had a lot fun watching this film and have no hesitation giving it my recommendation

Rating 7.5/10

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Review: Detention

DVD Review

My first review of 2013 is this fairly run-of-the-mill story of high schools students being terrorised by a vengeful ghost I actually mistook this for a different film also called detention but this film came out two years earlier. It has a low-budget which means cheap CGI and most of the time it manages to work well without using them but when they do appear they aren’t very good. This film features the late David Carradine in what must have been one of his last film roles. At first I thought the character clichés would get annoying but they do try giving a couple of them a bit of depth

The set-up is that in the 70s a bunch of high school students are involved in a prank that goes tragically wrong and a boy gets burned to death.

Forward to the present and we see the two main characters nice hot jock Paul (Preston Jones) and nice hot girl Lisa (Maitland McConnell) getting given detention for arriving late by Principal Hoskins (David Carradine) while he is talking to a new history teacher Miss Cipher (Alexa Jago). Hoskins also hands one to a passing Goth girl Sara (Zelda Williams) who accepts it like it is a daily ritual.

The unused incinerator where the boy was killed is still in the boiler room in the basement but Hoskins is finally getting the go-ahead to get rid of it and so he has two workmen getting it dismantled. The spirits make the metal incinerator door slam shut on the hand of one of the workmen severing some of his fingers and halts work while the other workman takes him to hospital.

At the end of the school day the whole school is getting whisked off  on buses to watch some sort of big match so the school will be empty except for the pupils in detention, their teacher Coach L (Thomas Calabro) and Miss Cipher who turned down the creepy offer of a seat next to Hoskins at the match.

The usual bunch gathers in the detention room. Paul and Lisa meet up with Paul’s friend Jack (Billy Aaron Brown) who is an immature pest. They also meet up with Mimi (Rachel Sterling) who has bitchy slutty spoilt rich girl persona and Sam (Michael Mitchell), a weird boy who stalks Mimi and she tolerates his attention and even lets him claim to be her boyfriend. Sam deliberately got detention after Mimi got detention so he could look after her. As they walk to the detention room they don’t notice the black CGI ghost smoke flying around the corridors and it flies around Sam before entering his body and knocking him to the floor like he’d been punched. He gets up asking if anyone saw it but like I said no-one did.

In the detention room Sara is already there as well as the final student and to complete the list of shallow stereotypes we have T-Loc (Jonathan ‘Lil J’ McDaniel) a black student with an aggressive persona. He enjoys making remarks about Mimi who is capable of giving as good as she gets but it winds up Sam. Coach comes in and takes control, first by taking away all phones, I-Pods and knives and locking them away in a desk drawer. He then makes them get on with whatever pointless busy work they have been assigned. Now the creepy stuff starts with Sara seeing a face at the window in the door. Coach is doubtful until he sees shadows of someone passing the door. He goes to investigate and runs in to Miss Cipher who was just about to come in. They hear noises in the school so Coach goes with Miss Cipher to investigate and he locks the detention room door behind him which is a very stupid and irresponsible thing to do. Remember he also locked away all their phones too which is was also very stupid but seems to be required for the plot. Miss Cipher had come to tell the Coach that the police had called to tell them that because of a storm that is raging outside the river is too high and bridge too dangerous so they are trapped there for the night. They make their way to Hoskin’s office but the CGI ghost smoke appears and they get separated.

Back in the detention room after the usual pointless bickering they start wondering if something happened to the Coach. They are locked in the room but T-Loc brings out a lock pick. Before he can use it to open the door Sam grabs it out of his hand and tries to open the door but because he’s a klutz he just break the lock pick.

They start seeing ghosts who are replaying the events of the day the boy was killed. Sara starts to freak out and wants to leave. No-one even talks about leaving by the fire exit but I think Sara tried the window once and then they just left it. Paul knows another way out of the room – a door hidden by furniture and boxes and labelled Fire Exit but it isn’t a fire exit, which is lucky because I’m sure blocking off a fire exit is a criminal offence. Everyone goes out through the door which leads down to the service tunnels and eventually to the boiler room. Sam pushes his way through first so he can check if it’s safe for Mimi and he goes rushing on blindly. Mimi and T-Loc keep together which naturally leads to heavy petting when they find somewhere quiet. Paul, Lisa and Jack go off another way. Sara refuses to leave because she’s got claustrophobia so she stays in the detention room and now everyone is split up into isolated groups, all the better to be picked off the spirits haunting the school

The film was bearable but it’s just not very interesting or memorable. The characters are pretty thinly drawn though T-Loc, Jack and Mimi do get a bit of fleshing out. The same cannot be said about Paul and Lisa who remain pretty and bland. I already mentioned the cheap CGI but another problem I had was that the background noise was pretty loud all the time and it was often difficult to make out what the characters were saying.

Rating 5/10

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2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 17,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

 

Best and Worst Films of 2012

2012 Top Ten

This has been a very mixed year for films and while I enjoyed many of the films released this year it has been a stronger year for science fiction and fantasy films than for horror films. These lists are only based on films I have seen and I know that some of the ones I haven’t seen yet would have had a good chance of getting on my list if I’d seen them including Dredd, Looper and The Hobbit, so this is not a comprehensive list. I chose these films for how much I enjoyed watching them.

Honourable mention to Absentia
A woman whose about to have her missing husband declared legally dead finds that he may not have gone far. This low budget independent horror managed to create an effective sense of gloom in dread without a big CGI budget. It creates a chilling atmosphere with the effective use of sounds and shadows and the story is pretty original

10. Juan of the Dead
Independent films seem to have a hard time getting cinema distribution but this appeared fairly quickly on DVD.This film is genuinely funny with a streak of sharp social commentary as we see Juan and his friends making the best of a zombie plague in Cuba and even finding ways to turn a profit

9. The Dead
This film also only got a limited cinema release but it is a great back to basics zombie survival horror. I like my zombies to be the slow silent shambling kind and that is what this film delivers. It had a simple story and strong characters and it is a must see for zombie fans.

8. Prometheus
When a couple of researchers discover a starmap hidden in the art of different ancient cultures a wealthy businessman sends a ship to the star system to investigate hoping to discover something about the origins of mankind  but what they find is not answers but more questions. Ridley Scott’s return to the universe he created in Alien isn’t as gritty and intimate as that film but it still a good solid science fiction film, even if there was a lot of gratuitous sequel baiting

7. The Innkeepers
I know that this film was doing the film festivals in 2011 but we didn’t see it in UK until 2012 and it got the familiar “blink and you’ll miss it” release in the cinemas. It is a nice tight supernatural thriller with great performances from the Sara Paxton and Pat Healy as two amateur ghost hunters investigating the haunting of the inn where they work.

6. The Woman in Black
It is great to see the Hammer studio back in the horror film production business and this is their biggest recent success. That may have been due to lead being played by Daniel Radcliffe in his first film role since the end of the Harry Potter series. This is a vengeful ghost story that really ramps up the atmosphere of gloom before scaring the crap out you. Hammer were always at their best in period costumes

5. Iron Sky
Nazis hiding on the dark side of the moon launch an invasion of the United States. This ambitious crowd funded film hardly ever shows its limited budget and it’s a film I have watched over and over. Like all the best comedy it is played totally straight. Julie Dietz is great as the sympathetic Nazi teacher who seems to have no idea what the Nazi are really like. Stephanie Paul is a creepily Palin-like US president and Otto Gotz really throws himself into the role as the big magnificent Nazi bastard.

4. Sinister
A true crime writer moves his family into a murder house but as he investigates the crimes he discovers something  ancient is behind the murders and several more he finds out about. This is definitely the creepiest, scariest film I’ve seen this year and it makes great use of old film footage.

3. The Dark Knight Rises
The conclusion  of Christopher Nolan‘s batman trilogy manages to complete his story of Batman and it really puts Bruce Wayne through a much tougher set of obstacles to overcome the threat posed by Bane who wants to complete Ras al Ghul’s mission of destroying Gotham City for the League of Shadows.

2. The Cabin in the Woods
When co-writer Joss Whedon was quoted as calling this film a loving hate-letter to the horror genre you could probably guess this film was going to be divisive. Even the cliché of the five young friends travelling to the titular cabin the woods is all part a huge in-joke and the whole film is a metaphor of the horror industry. It has great characters, a smart, original story and an ending sure to make horror fans just squee with delight.

1. The Avengers
I’ve a been long time fan of Marvel and so this film was made for me and designed in almost every way to appeal to what I wanted to see in a comic book film. It was great to the see the different characters butting heads and the big action set pieces really brought the comicbook battles to the big screen. It was great to see that the character al got their chance to shine through and the portrayal of the Hulk was incredible. Now Marvel’s stage one has been so successful they are in position to expand their movie universe with further titles and characters.

Special mention to some of the films that I didn’t see until they were released on DVD/Bluray  in 2012 and would have gotten into 2011’s top ten list if I had seen them

Chronicle
This found footage film gives a pretty nice portrayal of what could happen to a group of normal boys who gain super-powers.  The special effects are pretty well done but it the performances of the young actors who give this film its strength

Hugo
This family adventure film from Martin Scorsese would have been a real treat to watch at the cinema in 3D and I loved the way it paid respect to the pioneers of cinema without it even seeming to be about cinema at all.

The Adventures of Tintin
More family adventures this time from Steven Speilberg with a motion-capture animation of the classic Belgian comic book character Tintin that manages to stay pretty faithful to adventure of the nosy young reporter.

We Need to talk About Kevin
This harrowing drama about mother of a boy of commits an atrocity and now she has to live alone in the aftermath. Tilda Swinton is just fantastic in this part as a woman examining her memories of the boy she never loved. This is not a feel-good film but it is definitely a must-see.

Worst Films of 2012

Because I’m more likely to take a chance on a film on DVD than pay to see a stinker at the cinema these films were all on DVD or in one case Bluray. Since low-budget films can be good enough to appear in my top ten list having a low budget can hardly be used as an excuse for these dull annoying films.

10. Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies
Asylum cash in that can only really be enjoyed in the “so bad its good” sense but I don’t that films that start off intending to be cheesy knock-offs should get that pass since it tends to justify laziness and stupid fort he sake of stupid. It is one of the better Asylum efforts, as if that is saying anything.

9.  Wreckage
I barely even remember this film which is a pretty good hint that this film belongs on this list. A group of young people find themselves being victimised by a serial killer in a salvage yard. The film is not very original and is very inconsistent in tone.

8. Stonehenge Apocalypse
The Syfy channel has gotten a reputation for producing dumb films and this a perfect example.  Not only are ancient astronauts real but Stonehenge and the pyramids were created as a terraforming mechanism and a mad scientist has activated so its up to another mad scientist to find the lost pyramid of Maine and shut it down to save the world. 

7. Kentucky Fried Zombies
This pointless film has a serial killer killer in a diner caught up in a zombie outbreak. This film just failed to connect to with me and I didn’t really laugh at any of its attempts at dark humour

6. Tape 407
A passenger plane crashes in side a gorvernment secure zone and survivors find themseklves facing some something lethjl in the darkness. I don’t hate found footage films but like any technique it can be well done or badly done and this one is mostl just running in the dark and screaming while the shaky-cam bounces all over the place

5. Sand Sharks
An island holiday resort is plagued by sharks that swim the sand and the Sheriff finds his attempts to alert people thwarted by the interests of the mayor and his son who wants to hold a hippy music festival and make money. This film is another low-budget Syfy production and it is dumb and very badly written relying on making the characters do stupid things to further the stupid plot. It also has very unconvincing cheap CGI effects that are almost signature of awful SyFy films.

4. The Dead Matter
This films was just muddled mess. A group of young people come into possession of a magical amulet being hunted by a vampire and and couple of vampires hunters. The amulet can control the dead and soon they are hanging out with a zombie. This film is dull and the story is just silly.

3. Stormhouse
Military mad science has managed to capture a ghost and they use it to torture terrorist subjects. The characters are just plot driven puppets and not like real people.What gets to me the most about the story is the enormity of the achievement of seems to by-pass the peabrains running the military complex or their political masters. They have least proven the existence of spirits but seem neither amazed or excited by this.

2. The Wicker Tree
I had quite high expectations of this film since it is directed by Robin Hardy the same director as the fantastic Wicker man but I should note that he’s not the scriptwriter of that film. The same broad theme of the clash of evangelical Christianity with paganism is much more crudely done with some very amateurish acting and lots of singing. It fails to build up to any powerful climax and it is a pale shadow of the original film and even makes the Nicholas Cage remake look good.

1. Bunnyman
A bunch of idiots driving get terrorised by killer in a bunny costume and then find themselves being hunted down by his crazy family. Stupid characters do stupid things and they get killed by a cliché family of psychopaths. It has long periods of just being annoying broken up with occasional scenes of baffling idiocy. It really tries to be bad and has succeeded.