Devil Story

Devil Story (1985)

Directed by Bernard Launois

A little known French horror film that the only extant English version of is a badly scanned copy on youtube with subtitles in Greek. Why am I watching this?

Well for starters because Braineater drew my attention to it but mostly because, well, look at that poster.

Zombies in SS uniforms, ghost ships, a Mummy (!) a man on fire…what on earth is this thing about?

Having seen it, I am still asking myself that question.

So Devil Story starts with some kind of mutant in an SS uniform (unexplained element number 1) running around the French countryside killing people and very quickly a few things about Devil Story become obvious.

1. This film was shot for no money whatsoever. The biggest clue to this being the blood ‘effects’ achieved by squeezing a hand pump full of red water onto an actor.
2. Boring things like motivations, narrative, dialogue and sense will not be troubling the audience today.
3. The cinematographer doesn’t actually know how to use a camera. One of the great things about bad movies is the way they, by making mistakes, reveal all the talent in good movies you’d never notice. Devil Story features such joys as a guy picking the camera up, stand and all, and walking backwards away from the subject of the shot complete with shaking and the noise of the camera operator grunting. Plus one of the most bafflingly terrible cinematography decisions ever, but I’ll get to that later.
4. At some point somebody who did know what they were doing adjusted the exposure of the cameras. This allowed the cameras to film at night pretty effectively for such a low budget film. However, they neglected to adjust the exposure again for the scenes shot during the day. As such every scene shot during the day is painfully washed out to the point of being nearly invisible. It’s a white screen with coloured blurs moving on it.
5. This film was scored by somebody who bought a Casio 2 days ago and now thinks they’re Goblin.

Like, 2 minutes into this stinker you know you have stumbled upon bad movie gold.

So our mutant murders some campers for oooh, a good 15 minutes at least. We have no idea who these people are, their names, why the mutant is killing them, etc. It’s just murder, cut to blood, murder, cut to blood in an endless repetition. Then the mutant pounces upon a couple with a flat tire. Then we cut to an entirely different couple with car troubles whom our mutant does not trouble. Instead, as the man (no name is given as far as I could tell) tries to fix the car our heroine (Veronique Renaud)* wanders off into a quarry to be menaced by a cat (unexplained element number 2).

Just, an ordinary cat, whose evilness is generated by shooting it from a low angle, playing scary music and having our heroine stare at it with a frightened expression.

Then it jumps on her, or rather, is thrown on her from off screen by a grip. Poor kitty.

So after ooh, approximately 4 days of looking at the adorable  evil cat our couple drives to a nearby inn run by exposition woman and some old French guy who keeps an enormous hunting knife in his sock and loads and unloads a shotgun for fun.  And by nearby inn I mean the Palais Bénédictine in Normandy a structure so gothic and intimidating it is accompanied by Tocata in Fugue in D Minor when we first see it. Don’t know the music? Here, let me jog your memory.

Yup, it’s that music. Aka the most stereotypically ‘scary’ noise imaginable.

Anyway, exposition couple start to regale boring couple with the story of the local legend.

Some time in the past lived a family of wreckers. Wreckers are people who would light fires to lure ships onto rocks to shipwreck them, then loot whatever washed ashore. One night the family lured the wrong ship ashore though as they’ve targeted a clipper coming from Cairo carrying all sorts of Egyptian artefacts.

The ship does wreck, but then the cliffs themselves come alive, eating the family and the ship. The only one spared was the youngest sister who grew up to become a powerful witch and now lives alone with her son nearby, and that son is the mutant we saw earlier. Oh and a daughter whom nobody has ever seen.

Having been told this tale, boring couple decides to go to sleep. The husband promptly disappears from the film entirely but the wife is awoken by the sound of an evil horse (unexplained element number 3). How do we know its evil? It’s black and runs up and down in front of the inn repeatedly. And boy, do I mean repeatedly. Shots of that horse running or rearing comprise, what must be 50% of this film’s running time?

Having been startled by this horse our heroine decides, for some reason, to drive away from the creepy inn whilst wearing her nightie. I’m not sure what her thought process was here since the horse seems fairly incapable or getting past the gates, through the doors, up the stairs and to her bedroom. I guess bitches be crazy? (unexplained element 4?)

Of course, this being a horror film, her car won’t start so she takes the eminently sensible option of running off into the woods!

French survivalist dude also decides he’s had just about enough of this evil horse and goes out to kill it. The horse runs away into a field where the Frenchman chases him and begins shooting at him. This effect achieved by watching the man spin round firing wildly intercut with shots of the horse rearing. This footage of the guy spinning and shooting makes up the other 50% of this film’s running time.  Yes I know that adds up to 100% and yet I’m describing other scenes. It doesn’t make sense does it!

Welcome to my nightmare!

So whilst the epic battle of man versus horse continues the scene shifts to the mutant and the witch burying the young girl. Said young girl is also played by Veronique Renaud so when she shows up in their graveyard the old woman and the mutant are somewhat surprised and, I think, assume that she’s the daughter come back to life and that they need to bury her again. The mutant gets distracted from his burying duties by the evil horse then suddenly the evil horse is at a cliff and, in a scene I think is stolen from another film entirely, the cliff splits apart and the ghostly clipper from Cairo emerges from the cliff in the form of a toy boat. (unexplained…ah fuck it.)

We scarcely have a chance to process this development when we cut to a massive sarcophagus standing on the beach. The lid swings open to reveal, yes a mummy. Ancient Egypt, when will you leave us alone!!

It also reveals that the sarcophagus isn’t, it’s just a lid, without a back. So it was less the mummy emerging from his sarcophagus than it was the mummy standing behind a door waiting for the camera to look at him so he can make a dramatic entrance.

Back to the mutant, the girl and the devil horse. The mutant is prevented from burying the girl by the horse and so begins a fight between SS Nazi Mutant and Demonic Horse (not quite up to the standards of zombie vs shark but what is). This fight goes about as well for the mutant as can be expected and after a headache inducing fight scene the girl suddenly has a chance to escape.

Then the mummy shows up.

Fortunately he seems more interested in raising the daughter from her grave than the living Veronique. So she hides behind a gravestone whilst the mummy commands the dead to live. However, when she sees her lookalike she lets out a startled cry that alerts the mummy to her presence.

Now, I don’t know why the mummy  decides to try and kill her at this point, let’s just chalk it up to the inscrutable evil of Ancient Egypt. But he does and our heroine (*snort , snicker*) fights him off by clawing his face off. This reveals a rotten face that vomits a clear white liquid for oooh 4 hours? What’s that, this film’s only 72 minutes long? Well I can’t explain it folks but suffice to say this badly realised gore effect lasts way, way, waaaay too long.

The girl runs away, the mutant gets up and chases her and the mummy decides to wander away with his new zombie girlfriend into a sequel with infinitely more promise than this pile of rubbish.

Then comes what may be the worst shot I’ve ever seen.

We’re back to daytime by this point so everything has been turned back into a white featureless void with shapes that might conceivably be trees. The camera is pointed at these trees and it begins to pan left,

And keeps panning

And keeps panning

And keeps panning as the road comes into view

Suddenly mummy!

Then it keeps panning

And keeps panning

And keeps panning

And keeps panning

And cut.

…what!

What!!!?

If for nothing else watch Devil Story for this shot. In fact, helpfully, the whole thing is available on youtube so you have no excuse.  This shot is the most baffling choice in a film consisting entirely of baffling choices. I can kind of see why the first part of the shot works. Panning across the landscape to suddenly reveal something is a time honoured trick and a good way to pair the shock of the jump scare with the tension created by anticipation. Basically if you pan across a featureless landscape in a horror film the audience knows something bad is going to happen but they don’t know when, and that is a great way to scare them.

But there is absolutely no goddamn reason in the entire world why you would keep panning after the reveal. It achieves precisely fuck all effectiveness. It’s so inherently wrong that it’s straight up comedy gold.

So, morning now and our heroine still has to get away. She makes it back to her car pursued by the mutant and this time it starts. He does the standard splay himself on the windscreen and roar menacingly thing and she, in what is to give this film some credit quite a well shot sequence, smashes him into a lamp post. The mutant begins coughing blood over her windscreen and she does something I have never seen a final girl do before, she turns the windscreen wipers on!

Then she reverses away leaving the pretty badly mauled mutant lying collapsed on the ground.

Now, most final girls at this point would just drive away but Veronique Renaud has had one terrible fucking night and is having none of that shit. She gets a canister of petrol from her car and douses the mutant in it whilst he lies bloody and bleeding, then, retreats to a safe distance and lights him on fire!

It’s a strategy with pros and cons. Pro, that mutant is definitely dead now. Con, as she drives away (completely ignoring her disappearing husband) her car runs out of petrol. Oh irony, thy name is Devil Story.  This wouldn’t be so bad except as Veronique scans the horizon she sees, lurching towards her the mummy again.

Cut to.

Veronique waking up the next morning after her nightmare and driving off with her husband as the mutant looks on.

Oh hell no.

An it was all a dream ending? Yup, they went there. The most hackneyed, cliché and downright terrible way you could possibly think of to end a horror film  and Devil Story does it. They even have the goddamn cheek to add a ‘but was it?’ coda. If nothing else you have to admire the sheer ballsiness of the filmmakers here. Actually scratch that if, you should admire nothing else.

Not the real poster but the best summary of this film imaginable.

This summary makes Devil Story sound 1000x more coherent than the experience of watching it is. Basically most of this film is shots of a horse rearing and a Frenchman spinning in circles with a shotgun intercut with insanity. Nobody has any names, characters do things for no adequately explained reason and characters move from location to location without any sense of transition. And yet, it gives itself an out with the stupid “it was all a dream” ending. Of course it’s incoherent and weird. Of course people do things for no reason. Of course a Frenchman can have an infinite supply of shotgun shells it’s all a dream!

That doesn’t make it good though. You can do dreamlike horror but it is, if anything, harder to do than horror where the subject matter is explicitly real in the text. The makers of Devil Story are not up to the task nor are they up to the task of, really anything to do with making a film.  Rarely have I seen anything quite so incompetent and if it weren’t for one fairly major problem I’d be recommending this as a forgotten bad movie classic.

That problem? It’s kind of boring. Despite the insanity too much of the running time is repetitious and tedious. It’s short enough and weird enough that I would recommend it but only for the dedicated bad movie buff.

*Imdb doesn’t have the character’s name and damned if I picked it up whilst watching this turd. That’s a sign of a quality movie right there folks.

Big Hero 6 Review

Big Hero 6 (2015)

Direct by Don Hall and Chris Williams

So after a couple of articles all about Big Hero 6, the comic, and my thoughts on the possible ways Disney could adapt it I finally got a chance to watch the finished product.

And it’s pretty fantastic.

But what did I think about it as an adaptation?

Well, despite that being the topic of all my previous posts on Big Hero 6 when I got to see the finished film it quickly became apparent that this is one of the loosest adaptations of any property ever. I kind of suspected as much once we started to get some character and plot details, and also from the total lack of any acknowledgement that this is a Marvel property but the main things the film and comic share are some names, some powers (loosely), a few design elements (even looser) and a sort of Japanese feel.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. None of the original characters are particular winners (well, maybe Sunfire but he’s originally an X-Men supporting character/anti-hero) and nobody’s powers had an amazing unique concept (although I do like Fred and his Kaiju monster aura). There isn’t a great definitive Big Hero 6 story that everyone loves so, yeah, as long as you keep the high concept of super-heroes but vaguely Japanese, change whatever you want.

So how is the film itself as its own beast?

(Spoilers, sort of, most of this is set-up)

Well, the film tells the story of Hiro (Ryan Potter who is Japanese/American, which is fantastic), young orphaned genius and his older brother Tadashii (Daniel Henney and FYI Tadashii is not a name. Is it so hard to ask a Japanese person if the word you’re using for a character name is a real first name of total gibberish? Well, not gibberish since it does mean right or correct but it isn’t a first name) who is similarly a genius. Hiro spends his days hustling illegal street bot fights for cash, Tadashii spends his days at University in a specialised programme for geniuses where they get to work on whatever interests them. Tadashii is dismayed at his brother’s lack of ambition and brings him to his school to see his latest project, Baymax (Scott Adsit), an inflatable medical robot that will live in people’s homes and help them with psychiatric and physical medical assistance. There Hiro also meets Tadashii’s friends who are all idiosyncratic geniuses with their own interests and personality quirks. And Fred (T. J. Miller), who is the school’s mascot.

Hiro is inspired and desperately wants to join the school but to do so he needs to demonstrate something impressive. So he starts working on some micro-bots, think a cross between nano-bots and lego. They’re finger sized magnetic robots that can be mentally controlled to re-shape and build larger structures. He shows them off at an expo and everyone is suitably impressed leading to Hiro getting his school placement. He doesn’t get to enjoy it though because a fire starts at the expo, destroying his work and killing Tadashii.

Hiro, understandably, falls into a depression after this as his brother and best friend is dead and the only thing that snaps him out of his funk is the accidental discovery of a mysterious masked figure using his micro-bots to commit crimes. Well, that and Baymax who is programmed to try and treat his depression. With the help of a modified Baymax and Tadashii’s friends Hiro sets out to catch the thief.

The main strengths of Big hero 6 are the writing and the characters. This is a Disney film that, despite all the fantastic elements, feels very real and honest emotionally. Hiro’s personal arc is both engaging and really feels like something a teenaged boy would go through, and it’s paced marvellously too. And at the heart of that arc is the relationship between Hiro and Baymax.

I said in the build up that there’s a lot of potential in “ a boy and his….” Narratives. From Old Yeller to Iron Giant to How to Train your Dragon there is something about the relationship between teenaged boys and non-human friends that is really effecting and Hiro and Baymax are another highlight in this tradition. Baymax in particular is wonderful. Equal parts hilarious, caring, warm and adorable with a smidgen of badass. He’s the big brother everyone wishes they could have. He’s also just a great comic creation and Scott Adsit’s measured delivery of every line delivers some really great deadpan humour (if you’ve seen this film, you did a fist bump and went fa la la la la la la la, do not deny it).

The animation is, of course, spectacular. The flying and chase scenes have a sense of thrill and danger to them that puts most live action films to shame and the big action sequences with the team showing off their powers and fighting the villain are everything I want in super hero movies. Bright, colourful characters using their powers in creative ways and teaming up to look cool and kick ass. Much like Incredibles before it Big Hero 6 is so confident and creative in showing off super powers that it just highlights how limited and boring the action scenes in the Marvel movies, Man of Steel or the X-Men franchise have been. There’ so much invention in the fights and they’re choreographed so clearly and fluidly that my main complaint with the action is that there isn’t nearly enough of it.

The animation really soars in the details though. San Fransokyo is a masterful creation, it feels really lived in and is full of details that make it both aesthetically interesting and are really fun for a nerdy otaku like me to spot. Fred’s room in particular is one for the super nerds. He has a statue of sleepwalker in there! He has a statue of Black Talon. Black Talon, the guy who dresses like a chicken and fought the avengers once in the 70’s. Black Talon made it into a film before Wonder Woman!

San Fransokyo was one of the elements I was most worried about mostly because in the trailer it came off as more Chinese than Japanese. However, the creators have explained that the concept is that in this reality Chinatown has expanded to encompass the whole of San Francisco, so this is an American city with very obvious Chinese and Japanese elements. That makes a lot more sense and really comes across in the design. Stuff like Hiro’s robot anime posters, the cat named mochi or Honey Lemon pronouncing “photo-photo” with a really good Japanese accent make it feel Asian in a subtle and all-encompassing way that’s more effective and markedly less offensive than the original comics. Plus it just feels cool. It’s all the really iconic and awesome parts of modern Japanese culture nicked and combined in one sleek package.

My main complaint is that the other 4 team members get very little screen time or development. This is a story of 4 characters, Hiro, Tadashii (who dies), Baymax and the antagonist (whose identity is a secret). And that’s fine, there isn’t anything wrong with telling a focused narrative with a few side characters. Indeed, the narrative is stronger for its tight focus and excellent pacing.  But the film is called Big Hero 6 not Hiro and Baymax and we have 4 other guys who get very little to do. And that wouldn’t be so bad except that I really like these other characters and want to see more of them. Wasabi no Ginger becomes Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr), nerdy black guy (I bring it up because I’m super happy he isn’t a horrible Asian stereotype like the comics character) with OCD and laser knives. Go Go (Jamie Chung) keeps her rebellious snarky personality but trades in bouncing like an egg for skating on frictionless magnetic bike wheels. Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez) is the complete opposite of the sexually dominating flirty comics character and is a shy, slightly clumsy but very sweet and caring typical girly girl with a purse that’s also a chemical factory. Then there’s Fred, who is pure unbridled fanboy excitement in a rubber monster suit that lets him jump high and breathe fire.

Fred could so easily have been annoying but I love him. He reminds me of me.

I like these characters, a lot. They’re fun, they have clear well defined personalities and they have wonderful chemistry together. And they have cool and varied powers. My favourite moments in the film (aside from just, everything Baymax does) are their training montage and the fights where they get to show off their skills. I just wish we had more time with them in costume fighting guys. I understand that in the original concept there was more of this but it got cut to tighten the focus. Hopefully we can get a sequel or a TV series to flesh these guys out more.

So in summary Big Hero 6 is a classic family film narrative enlivened by an imaginative setting. great characters and some clever jokes. It’s not ground breaking in any way but it’s hard to find fault in it really.

It isn’t better than The Lego Movie though.

Poltergeist 1982

Poltergeist 1982

Directed by Tobe Hooper

Poltergeist is an enjoyable watch filled with likeable, well drawn characters acting sensibly in pursuit of clear motivations. The story is well paced, compelling and full of interesting twists and turns that make it an unpredictable watch. It’s shot well, acted well and written well. It has a sort of baseline of quality in every aspect of production. Which is probably to be expected of a Stephen Speilberg film, even when he is bad he is mostly good.

It’s undeniably a good film, but is it a good horror film?

Basically, is it scary?

Nope.

But then I don’t think it is trying to be.

Don’t get me wrong, Poltergeist is clearly set in the horror genre and it deals explicitly with the supernatural . It even has some genuinely horrific imagery and some creepy moments, all of which have become iconic such as the guy tearing off his face, the static filling the TV screen, the tree crashing through the window. But outside of these moments it just doesn’t feel much like a horror film.

For example, there is very little tension at any point in the film. Outside of the climax and the first tree attack nobody is ever in any danger in Poltergeist nor is any looming or approaching danger implied. We get all kinds of supernatural shenanigans happening but they aren’t presented as frightening or dangerous just inexplicable. They’re just there.

Stylistically it doesn’t feel like a horror film either. The stuff with the static TV screen filling the frame is creepy, the way the guy tearing off his face is framed is fantastically macabre but outside of that it is all filmed in a very flat style. Contrast this film with The Orphanage (which has almost the exact same plot). In The Orphanage, similarly, there were few explicit threats to our protagonist but there was a pervading sense of tension created purely through the way the camera moved, constantly reinforcing that there was an unknowable presence watching the protagonist. In the costuming, in the set design, in the sound design The Orphanage was ramping up the tension and the sense of unease even when what was happening onscreen wasn’t particularly dangerous of scary.

Poltergeist is almost the exact opposite. The subject matter should be terrifying but the style isn’t there to make it so.

Speilberg though has always had a very unobtrusive style. He rarely moves the camera except to follow the action of a scene and when he does move it he frames the shot to try and disguise this. His aim is to hide the camera, to remove his style from the film as much as possible and let the story do the talking.

This is, of course, a perfectly valid way of shooting a film and it’s great for Drama but genre requires a different approach. And it’s not like Stephen Spielberg doesn’t know this either.  In Duel, in Jaws and to a lesser extent in Jurassic Park Spielberg has demonstrated his ability to scare the audience.

And I say Speilberg by the way, despite the fact that he is credited as the producer and horror auteur Tobe Hooper is the official director on this film. That’s because this could not feel more like an 80’s Spielberg film if it had E.T. in it. If you gave this film to somebody without telling them the creators and they were any kind of film fan they would recognise Speilberg’s fingerprints all over it. Various reports have discussed how much creative control Speilberg had on the project but by all accounts Hooper hated working with him and felt limited by the restrictions his boss imposed. There are some moments in the film that feel like a Tobe Hooper movie i.e. anything scary in this but they feel like they’ve escaped from a different film entirely.

Another issue with the lack of scares is how explicit the supernatural threat is. As I said in my review of The Orphanage, horror lives in the gap between the possible and the impossible, the normal and the paranormal. The world has to feel real with just one or two things off, otherwise you aren’t dealing with a horror, you’re dealing with fantasy. By making the supernatural elements so obvious and so obviously impossible as early as he does in the film Spielberg puts up a big flashing sign saying, “this isn’t real” that lets the audience relax and watch the film rather than being caught up in the tension.

Is it a good horror film? Absolutely not. No, this is a drama. In terms of tone it most closely resembles Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Ostensibly a Sci-Fi film Close Encounters is really a drama about the effect of obsession on a family. How one man’s need to do something  can drive his wife and kids away from him and how he can recognise that he’s ruining his life but still feel the need to pursue his dreams.

Poltergeist is a drama about parents, about the fear of losing a child and how the loss of a child can impact the individual parents, their relationship with each other and their relationship with the outside world. It’s about how an evil force that was present in the home all along can steal a parent from a loving father that only wanted to give his kid’s the best.

Huh….I guess we don’t have to wonder how Spielberg felt about his ex-wife do we? Between Poltergeist and Close Encounters I think we have the full story of his divorce from his side.

Unlike Close Encounters though, Poltergeist just doesn’t delve deep into enough its themes to make up for the bait and switch. For an audience expecting a good horror story it is tame and not scary. For an audience interested in working through the themes symbolically it just isn’t meaty enough.

So yeah, baseline competent with some iconic moments but overall a disposable piece of fluff that you can happily skip.

Night of the Dead 2014

Night of the Dead 2014

A Leeds institution; Night of the Dead is a horror movie marathon that runs through the night, ending in the middle of the next morning and featuring a mix of horror films, shorts, games and banter. It is one of the highlights of my year and like previous years I’m going to talk a little about the movies that were screened there.

Before that though, a brief word about the event itself. This year had a lot of changes for Night of the Dead, some good, some not so good. The event started almost 2 hours earlier than normal (and still overran! The event organisers summed it up neatly right at the start. “We won’t be on time because we thought ABC’s of Death 2 was 90 minutes long and when we got the film it was 2 hours and 5 minutes so that’s thrown the schedule right out.”) and was held on a Friday, both of which I felt were good ideas.

Less good was that it was held later in the festival causing it to clash with Thought Bubble, Leeds’ massive comic book convention which I also normally attend. Also in the loss column was the lack of Gip, one of the two regular presenters and a charismatic shouty Irish man beloved by all. He also attends Thought Bubble and chose it over NOTD this year. He was replaced, for some of the night, by Dom Brunt better known by most as Paddy from Emmerdale. A Leeds resident and massive horror film fan (he’s even directed and starred in a former Day of the Dead entry, Before Dawn) Dom was a fine choice but lacks the easy charm of Gip. Also he had to leave at 3 in the morning. In fairness to the man he was going on holiday the next day and had already delayed joining his wife on holiday for 3 days because he got the dates for the event wrong but still, less banter and fun than previous years.

This was the first year sponsored by Shameless Cinema, a small press distributor specialising in rare exploitation and B-movie films. They supplied a ton of prizes for the presenters to give away. So many in fact that by the end of the night they just resorted to giving everybody who was left a prize. I walked away with about £50 worth of DVD’s so I probably made a £25 profit on the event.

The biggest change though was in the style and content of the films chosen. Leeds International Film Festival asks audiences to rate the films shown and the offerings at Night of the Dead routinely end up in the bottom 10. In fairness this is because the offerings at NOTD are usually fucking terrible but then that is something I love about it. As a massive fan of shit schlock NOTD provides me with a chance to see some really obscure shit schlock. In previous years the hosts have pleaded with us to be nicer to the films but asking for sympathy from the NOTD crowd is guaranteed to backfire. However, I think they’ve started to worry about their bad reputation since attendance has been down and so this year they’ve decided to butter us up. There is usually one horror comedy and it is usually the best film of the night so this year they decided, fuck it, all horror comedies. And so 4 out of the 5 films we saw were horror comedies.

As a fan of horror comedies I did enjoy the films more this year but I kind of miss the shitiness of previous years. NOTD is a really unique experience, equal parts great and awful, like all good bad things it is hard to do intentionally and I would hate for NOTD to lose their special qualities by chasing the audience.

 

ABCs of Death 2

I haven’t seen the first ABC’s of Death yet but since this isn’t a film in the conventional sense that doesn’t matter. Boz from The Little Pod of Horrors has seen both and assures me that the sequel is better than the original by a country mile.

For those who don’t know the high concept here is that this is a series of 26 shorts, one for each letter of the alphabet, each directed by a different director and with each director given full creative freedom to do whatever they want except that they must include their letter and they must feature a death.

As you can imagine this is an extremely difficult film to talk about. Almost all the shorts rely on some kind of twist and they’re all less than 5 minutes long so talking about the plot even briefly tends to spoil the short. Even worse, the titles come at the end of the short and they’re usually some kind of last twist or final gag revealing a new layer on the short you just watched so you can’t even use the titles most of the time.

Nonetheless I will do my best.

Despite being nominally a horror film almost none of the shorts try for tension or scares. There is lots of gore and traditional horror subject matter but most of the films are blackly comic. Of the shorts that did try for horror I would say K is the most successful with a genuinely creepy moment in the middle that I haven’t seen before. S also works as a tense piece with a really nice twist.

Of the more humorous shorts though it becomes really hard to pick a favourite, almost all of them are funny and in different ways to each other. A, B, E, O, P, T and Y all made me laugh. Special mention though has to go to G, M and W. G is just, amazingly bonkers. The kind of thing where you watch it, have no idea what you saw but are glad you saw it. It represents possibly the most surreal 5 minutes of cinema I have ever seen. W is a parody of He-Man that doesn’t go where you are expecting it to but is full of great little observations. M, M is just gleeful. M was this year’s wildcard so it was open to any film maker to try and come up with a short and I can confirm that they made the right choice.

 

On the bad side, a couple of shorts are just kind of there, not overtly creative, not funny and not scary. N, V and Q in particular. F is probably the worst short in the film, it thinks it is profound and clever despite being mostly dull and uninteresting. Finally special mention has to go to L a short in which I have only the vaguest of ideas as to what actually happened.

Housebound

The best film I saw this year. A clever little horror comedy from New Zealand,  Housebound tells the tale of Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly). Kylie is a young tearaway with drug and alcohol problems. We’re introduced to her trying and failing to crack open an ATM with dynamite and a sledgehammer. After being arrested she is sentenced to house arrest at her Mum’s house, something neither she nor her Mum are entirely happy about.

Kylie is a horrible little shit. Rude, lazy and openly hostile to everyone and everything she has pretty much no redeeming qualities but her Mum still loves her and wants to help her turn her life around. Kylie, however, seems more interested in figuring out some of the mysteries in her Mum’s old house, especially once she finds out it used to be an insane asylum and becomes convinced that it is haunted.

Talking much more about the plot would do Housebound a disservice because one of the strengths of this film is that it continually surprises you. At several points the film totally upends both the kind of film it is and the story you thought it was telling. And not only are the twists unexpected and surprising but they all make perfect sense and play fair with the audience. Also some of the turns the plot takes are really funny, particularly when one character suddenly reveals that they know a hell of a lot more about ghosts then they’re letting on.  You need to see Housebound, it is just that good.

Every other aspect of the film just works. The acting is uniformly superb, the jokes are funny and the scares are effective. And that in particular is rare. Most horror comedies are really just black comedies, or comedies with gore. It is rare that a film tries for scares and gags and rarer still that it succeeds but Housebound unequivocally does. This is even more surprising when you consider that its director Gerard Johnstone’s first film. Based on this he has a successful career ahead of him. He has an unobtrusive style but as a storyteller he gets every single thing that needs to work, working.

And its even more of a success when you consider that Housebound has an unlikeable protagonist. Unlikeable protagonists are somewhat in fashion and whilst they can be done well they are really hard to pull off. But Kylie is in enough danger and has enough charisma to work as a protagonist even as she acts like a shit to everyone she knows.

Housebound is simply a must see, the best horror comedy I’ve seen since Evil Dead 2 and probably the best horror film I’ve seen all year.

Dead Short Competition

In another change to previous years, rather than the shorts being spread out throughout the night this time they were all shown as a chunk. The reasoning behind this decision was that that for the first time we were invited to vote on our favourite short.

Normally the shorts are easily the best part of NOTD but this year they felt a little lacklustre. It might be because we watched ABC’s of Death earlier but nothing in the shorts measured up to the insane fun of G or M from that movie nor was there anything a tenth as good as Fist of Jesus.

And yes I have brought that short up just to have an excuse to link to it again. I love it that much.

That said none of these shorts were bad either and most had something to recommend them.

Waterborne gives us what I think is a cinema first, zombie kangaroos, and not much else.

How To Make A Nightmare was the only truly terrible short. It was pretentious, dull, over long and confused.

Slut, a 1970’s period retelling of little red riding hood, was well shot and acted and evoked the period beautifully. It ends wonderfully too.

Invasion from Moustache on Vimeo.

Invasion told a very slight story and was mostly just an excuse to show off the rotoscoped animation of Hugo Ramirez and Olivier Patté. It does look very cool though.

EXTREME PINOCCHIO Trailer (English ST.) from Alcibal Productions on Vimeo.

Extreme Pinnocchio basically transports the entire Pinnochio myth to an inner city in France complete with midgets, transvestites, paedophiles, drugs and a garbage truck/whale. It has a wonderfully lived in grimy feel, some good gags and some memorable visuals but it is faaaaaar too long at 23 minutes and drags in places.

M is for Mobile was a failed entry in the ABC’s of death open slot. I suspect it was rejected for being too short but it is very funny with a great twist.

Bon Appetit doesn’t have any new ideas but it does have style.

Sequence of Death was “mind blowing” – that’s a pun.

Liquid is a Takashi Miike style Japanese psycho-sexual body horror that basically exists because the word liquid, when said in a Japanese accent, sounds a lot like re-kid. It has a nice central idea but isn’t scary or particularly stylish and its amazing how quickly a short can wear out its welcome.

This was the sole film for which we had the director present this year who came all the way from Tokyo to see his movie premiere at 3 in the morning. Fair play to him for dedication but it’s a shame for him to come so far and not win. I did get a chance to talk to him and learned that interestingly one of the actresses in his film is a famous porn star, but not the one who is naked for almost the entire running time.

The three really good shorts were Mouse X, Cannibals and Carpet fitters and Safari Heat.

Mouse X was one of the only shorts to try for overt scares rather than black comedy. It is inexplicable. A man wakes up in a chair with a bible, he sees a mouse on the floor, sees  a hole that lets him escape to another room and quickly realises he is in some kind of time recursion interacting with himself at different points in time. The film is amazing at creating a sense of almost existential dread by refusing to answer any of the many questions it poses. It’s also stylish and has a great soundtrack which very subtly and effectively ramps up the tension to a spine chilling climax.

In contrast Cannibals and Carpet Fitters isn’t especially clever but it is charming. The tale of a battle between some cannibals and two ordinary carpet fitters in the west country of England has a sly deadpan sense of humour and stacks of likeability. It won the contest and I’m not surprised. In fact I kind of want it to be turned into a TV series where every week two ordinary blokes in the West Country battle supernatural horror.

What should have won though is Safari Heat, which defies explanation. Telling you anything about it will spoil the experience except to say it is a parody of Miami Heat, done in Claymation and set in Cape Town. However it quickly transforms into easily one of the most bizarre and amazing things I have ever seen. Sadly, I couldn’t find any version of it online to show it to you.

 

Wolf Cop

It was a testament to how good the offerings were this year that Wolf Cop wasn’t the best movie. In year’s past it would have easily been the best thing they screened but this year both Housebound, ABC’s of Death and, in a weird way Street Trash, delivered better results. Still, Wolf Cop wasn’t a bad film so much as a painfully average one.

With a title like Wolf Cop guess what this is about? Yes, it is about a werewolf cop. Specifically it is about a werewolf deputy who has to clean up his small rural town from the twin threats of organised crime and satanic shape shifters. Oh and he’s like Popeye but with booze instead of spinach.

That sounds fun doesn’t it? It sounds like Teen Wolf but with gore and dirty jokes. It sounds like it’ll be over the top silly, campy fun in the style of Troma, Sam Raimi or even Family Guy.

And to be fair to the movie there is a stretch lasting about 20 minutes in the middle where it delivers exactly on that promise. Our titular lupine cop (Lou Garou, because this movie thinks it is far cleverer than it is) starts tooling around town in a modified wolf mobile, ripping the faces off crooks, stealing liquor and making puns (“who are you?” “The fuzz!”) and it is glorious.

Unfortunately it takes a long time to get to that point and the build up to the payoff is just, not very interesting. I understand you need to have highs and lows, you can’t just do balls to the wall gore and gags from start to finish (although counterpoint, Evil Dead 2) but that doesn’t excuse the build up being boring. Wolf Cop lacks likeable or funny characters so all the character establishing stuff in the beginning is just a chore to sit through. Then it delivers what it promised us, and then far too quickly that part is over and we get a predictable and tension free climax or various people running around the woods.

I will give it credit for this though. I cannot remember seeing a penis metamorphosis in a live action film before, so kudos to wolf cop for that.

Street Trash

Street Trash defies a conventional critical approach because it is singularly unconcerned with mundane things like plot, characters or motivations, not when it can be shocking you instead. This isn’t a film, it’s an assault. Street Trash hates you, the viewer, and does everything in its power to provoke you to either getting up and walking out or giving in and laughing at it. If it were a sound it would be a child saying every swear word it knows until you either slapped it or couldn’t help it and giggled.

You certainly can’t call it a good film but a bad film? Bad by what standards? It isn’t telling a story, it isn’t trying to scare you, it isn’t trying to move you or connect on an emotional level. Street Trash has one ambition, to make you go, “what the fuck am I watching?” And it achieves this. It really successfully achieves this.

Describing the plot is a little bit like describing a particularly grimy fever dream you once had. Street Trash doesn’t really tell a story from beginning to end so much as it presents a series of vignettes of what life was like in New York in the 1980’s if you were scum. Among the various vignettes we have: 2 brothers living on the streets to escape their abusive ‘nam vet dad and their arguments with each other, a black guy stealing from a supermarket, another ’nam vet who has flashbacks and rules a junkyard like a kingdom, the gang rape of a mob boss’ girlfriend, a sweet junkyard employee who seems to care for one of the 2 brothers and is sexually harassed by her boss and a cop with anger management issues trying to sort out all the mess. Some of these plots will intertwine and resolve but mostly what happens in this film is pointless meandering that (the filmmaker) thinks is either gross or funny or both.

The main plot in terms of memorability, if not running time, has to do with viper. Viper is a drink that causes anyone who drinks it to melt.

Yup, melt.

A liquor store owner finds it behind a loose board in his basement and deduces it must have been there since prohibition. Well, bums will drink it at a dollar a bottle and he’ll have made a profit so why not? He has no idea it will make people melt of course, and neither does anyone else until Mike Lackey, who is sort of our protagonist, has a lucky escape from drinking a bottle himself. He then uses it to get revenge on anyone who did anything bad to him for the preceding 80 minutes.

Viper is set up early in the film and for the first 15 minutes reoccurs periodically to remind us it exists and to get some of the “plots” (biggest fucking scare quotes you can imagine around plots there people) moving. Then it disappears from the film entirely until Street Trash decides it needs an ending and sets about melting all the bad guys. Nearly every plot thread is unresolved , no ultimate point was made and no sense of closure is given.

Street Trash is a fucking terrible film and yet, I can’t say I’m sorry I watched it. And not because it’s so bad its good either, it’s too slow and in all of its technical respects, weirdly, too good to qualify as a bad movie. You get the sense that if James M Muro wanted to tell a decent story, he could. He just has absolutely no interest in doing so.

No, the reason I liked Street Trash is because I got to see some things I have genuinely never seen before. I haven’t seen a bum melt into a toilet and I’ve got to say here, the melting effects were really well done. No realistic but certainly evocative. I’ve never seen a gang rape played for laughs. I’ve never seen a game of penis keepaway.

My favourite part of the whole film was a minor character who worked for the Mob Boss. He was some punk kid that clearly hated the menial job he was doing and hated the Mob Boss, so he let’s bums gang rape the Mob Boss’ girlfriend. There’s an amazing scene where the Mob Boss and the Kid are sitting in the police station arguing. The Boss is threatening to kill the kid and the kid is insulting the boss. The angry cop sees this and pulls the kid to one side asking why he is insulting a man who can have him killed. The kid says it’ll be okay because the cop can put him witness protection and as the cop slowly shakes his head the dawning look of realisation the kid’s face as he puts together just quite how badly he fucked up is priceless.

I think, ultimately, I have to recommend Street Trash. You won’t like it, buy you won’t forget it either.

Oh and as an aside, we got to see this movie on film! A rare treat and the scratches and grime on the print really added to the atmosphere of early 1980’s urban decay. If you are going to watch this then watching a print version at 6 in the morning in a theatre full of horrible people is definitely the way to do it.

Septic Man

So let’s get the obvious joke out of the way. What a load of shit!

Here’s how Septic Man was sold to us. This was the mystery film at this year’s screening and it was described thus. A guy falls into a massive septic tank and starts to slowly mutate. Sounds like Toxic Avenger right, only with pooh? You think that that’s the first act and then this shit monster is going to go out and get revenge against the people who put him in the septic tank?

Here is what actually happens in Septic Man.

There is a city, it has a disease, a plumber is asked by a shady cabal to fix the sewer system (by himself for some bizarre reason!) whilst the city is evacuated. He does so but then gets trapped in a septic tank with some dead bodies. As he is stuck there he slowly starts to mutate. Lou Ferigno and his insane brother live at the water treatment site and won’t rescue him. Then Septic Man’s wife shows up and mercy kills him.

After Act 1 when he eventually gets stuck NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS!

NOTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can do films where the protagonist is trapped in one location. 127 Hours, Buried, Phone Booth hell Saw is basically this. It’s an idea that’s more appealing in the abstract (writers love high concept writing challenges like this because writers find restrictions to actually be freeing) than it is normally well executed. Phone Booth sounds like a great idea for a drama but getting 90 minutes out of it is tricky.

That said you can do it. The trick is to find something to fill up the time with. Flashbacks to how the hero got here, cutaways to the outside world as they try and track down our hero, watching our hero as he tries every clever and desperate method to escape his situation. You can even have a person there for them to talk to and write dialogue that reveals their character. If you’re particularly lazy you can throw in some dream sequences to fake out the audience.

But you have to do something.

Septic Man vaguely flirts with the idea of doing all of these things  but it quickly decides it can’t actually manage to pull them off, gives up and defaults back to what it likes to do best; shadowy shots of an ugly man, in an ugly room, sitting.

Fully 50% of this film’s running time consists of looking at a dude being sad.

If that sounds like something you’d enjoy then Septic Man should be right up your alley but I despised this film. It ranks amongst the worst films I have ever seen. Not because it is technically bad but because there is nothing there. It’s a blank space where a film should be. It’s the cinematic equivalent of staring at a toilet wall. It’s like a bowel movement that lasts 83 minutes where you don’t have anything to read, boring and excruciating.

I literally have nothing nice to say about this utter turd of a film.

So that was NOTD 2014. 2 good films, 1 meh film, 1 film that was certainly memorable and 1 of the worst cinematic experiences of my entire life. That’s a marked improvement on last year which, as I said earlier, is kind of a mixed bag. I strongly recommend Housebound though, you will not regret it.

Night of the Lepus

Night of the Lepus (1972) Directed by William F. Claxton

Bad movies are bad for all sorts of reasons but mostly they are bad for technical reasons. Bad acting, bad direction, cheap sets, lousy dialogue, laughable effects, plot holes, etc. Rarely is a film bad because of a bad concept. Oh bad ideas are common, but they’re usually part of a concept that would have broadly worked. Plan 9 from Outer Space is predicated on a secret alien invasion using our own dead against us, that’s kind of neat. It’s just every single thing that follows on from that premise that Ed wood and company get wrong.

No, the collaborative nature of film and the high cost of production means that most truly bad concepts die before they manage to jump through the many hoops needed to get a film financed, produced and distributed.

Which is what makes Night of the Lepus such a rare treat. This is a film, ladies and gentleman, predicated upon the high concept of giant mutant killer bunny rabbits.

Giant, mutant, killer bunny rabbits.

Let that sink in for a bit.

Multiple people heard that idea and thought, yup, that’ll work. There are 57 people credited with working on this film and at least 4 of those (the director, producer and two screenwriters, yes two of them!) are personally responsible for the thought process.

“Giant, mutant, killer, bunny rabbits. Why not?”

The mind, it boggles.

Now some of you bad movie aficionados are probably squirming uncomfortably now thinking, hang on Adam, this must be a piss take right? This is like 8 Legged Freaks or Slugs or something else patently ridiculous where it really is a satire or at least a parody of monster movies?

I don’t blame you for thinking that. In my experience when you come across a truly bad idea usually the creators know it and have done it on purpose. Also bolstering this argument is the fact that the novel it is based on is a satire with an anti-war message.

But if this is a joke then it is a work of deadpan genius to rival Andy Kauffman. Every single thing in this movie is played 100% down the line straight. Even better it is portrayed with a seriousness and gravitas unique to 70’s “message” films. This isn’t just a film about giant mutant killer bunny rabbits that takes itself seriously, this is a film about giant mutant killer bunny rabbits that thinks it is important!

Our film starts with Rory Calhoun (yes, that guy who is always walking and talking) murdering a horse.

Okay, in fairness it actually starts with Rory Calhoun riding a horse, the horse tripping on a rabbit hole and Calhoun euthanizing him with a rifle. I suspect this is intended to make us hate the rabbits because they caused the death of a horse but it doesn’t. It makes me think Rory Calhoun is some kind of emotionless human robot who kills horses without being even slightly broken up about having to do it.

And actually in further fairness I skipped the prologue which features news footage of people exterminating rabbits, mostly in Australia. The footage of hundreds of rabbits running panicked against rabbit proof fences being chased by men with sticks and guns is accompanied by frightening music and a voice over intoning how devastating ecologically rabbits have been in parts of the world.

Now intellectually I know this to be true and I have no moral opposition to the culling of rabbits to protect farmland. Hell I eat rabbits. But watching adorable little bunnies running for their fucking lives while giant, half-glimpsed human forms lunge at them with sticks menacingly does not make me scared of the rabbits.

Which is a problem the film never solves. They try, they try really hard. Over the course of this movie we get every horror trick in the book. We shoot rabbits from low angles, in the dark, with menacing strings. They even shoot close ups of the rabbits impressive front teeth that they’ve smeared with tomato ketchup. And all I can think is.

D’awwww, look at his widdle nose twitch.

So, human robot Rory Calhoun (sporting the full denim tuxedo) is upset that his farm is full of rabbits, as well he should be. He decides to exterminate them but not for human robot Rory Calhoun the ways of his father, just drop loads of cyanide down all over the place. No, human robot Rory Calhoun is going to try and do this in a more sensitive ecologically friendly manner. He calls in De Forrest Kelly (alright folks, everyone get your dammit I’m a doctor not a [blank] jokes ready) who hooks him up with Stuart Whitman, another old western star playing a scientist.

When we meet Whitman he continues this film’s trend of all of its heroes being bastards to animals by shaking a box full of bats. Why is he shaking a box full of bats? Well apparently he has isolated the noise bats make when distressed and he hopes to be able to use it to corral them away from crops and livestock using sound. Now the canny among you might be thinking; “A ha! This is clearly exposition for the thingy that will stop the giant mutant killer bunnys in the film’s climax.”

Nope, no this scene serves no purpose except to set up that Whitman is a man who will casually just shake a box of bats for the express purpose of pissing them off.

Our heroes ladies and gentlemen.

So Whitman sets about trying to come up with a solution to the rabbit problem. His idea is to breed a rabbit that is singularly uninterested in sex then introduce them to the native rabbit population where they will breed with the natives and pass on the gene for not wanting to breed.

You don’t have to be an expert in biology to spot the somewhat massive flaw in Whitman’s plan there.

However Whitman’s plan swiftly becomes irrelevant. Having not much luck with his asexual rabbits he decides to inject one of the rabbits with a mysterious vial of liquid. How mysterious is it? Well apparently even Whitman has no idea what it will do.

So the mechanics of how our mutant bunny escapes into the wild are thus (somewhat paraphrased)

Little girl who is not adorable: Daddy don’t inject that bunny with the mysterious liquid. He’s my favourite.

Bat torturer: Uh huh. (ignores his annoying daughter)

Little girl who is not adorable: *pouts*

Little girl who is not adorable: Mommy, can I have a rabbit?

Janet Leigh (yes, Janet Leigh who regrets being in this turd and boy can you tell from her performance. In the fine tradition of Famke Jannsen Leigh only agreed to star in this because it was near her house.

Anyway)

Janet Leigh: Bat torturer, can our annoying little girl have a rabbit?

Bat Torturer: Sure, just don’t take the one I injected with a mysterious liquid.

Little girl who is not adorable: Okay.

Little girl who is not adorable: *proceeds to take the injected rabbit, then take a random rabbit from elsewhere and put it in the cage marked, mysterious liquid rabbit*

THE VERY NEXT SCENE

Little girl who is not adorable: Whoops! (drops rabbit)

So then boring shit happens so we can build tension (giggle snort) until the giant mutant killer bunny reveal. Boring shit is interspersed with our first rabbit attack which is amazing in its lack of subtlety.

Here is my recreation. (again, somewhat paraphrased)

Truck driver: (stops truck, gets out) Boy I need to stop this truck right here in the middle of the desert. Yesiree bob, its time to stretch my legs. Whoooo. That feels nice. Well, I guess I better check that my cargo of carrots and cabbages is still all there (opens door of truck) Yup, all the carrots and cabbages are still in place. That’s right, boy I’d be in trouble if anything ever happened to my carrots and cabaaaaaaaaagh.

(man is eaten by rabbits)

End scene.

So more boring shit happens and the next brilliant scene is where Bat torturer for some reason is attending the autopsy of the truck driver. (Or it might be a prospector, frankly I couldn’t give a shit). Said medical examiner is, refreshingly, black. Thus making him the only black person in the movie as well as the only person aged between 10 and 50. He is also the only actor who clearly realises this is a terrible idea and has decided to ham it up and have some fun. A particular highlight is his delivery of the line that he can’t rule out the possibility of a vampire attack!

More boring shit and then Bat torturer, human robot Rory Calhoun and Deforrest Kelly (dammit Jim, he’s a doctor not a rodent exterminator) set out to end the rabbit menace. Their plan is to find the cave they’ve been living in, collapse the cave entrance with dynamite and then go get some beers.

The plan is jeapordised a bit when Bat torturer decides he wants to have a look at the monsters before they go extinct and nearly gets himself eaten for his trouble. This gives us our first good luck at the rabbits and along with the special effects achieved by just shooting real rabbits that have been smothered in tomato sauce from a low angle we also learn that this film will feature men in bunny suits!

Sometimes the bad movie gods see fit to reward me.

So other than Bat torturer being kind of an idiot (although, yeah I’d be curious too) the plan goes off without a hitch.

The problem with the plan is that it didn’t really account for the fact that rabbits can burrow

Dun dun dunnnnn!

And at this point, about an hour into the film just turn it off. You have seen everything this movie has to offer both from an ironic “oh my god how dumb is this” aspect and from the perspective of the story itself. For the next half hour all we are treated to is endless slow motion footage of bunnies running around miniature sets interspersed with boring human robots reciting bland dialogue at each other. There is zero tension, zero movement in the plot, zero character development just rabbits, rabbits and more rabbits.

This footage is hilarious at first, the combination of old skool cheapo special effects with the just terrible idea to make cute rabbits scary is absurd. But the joke dies a swift death and yet the rabbits cavorting just keeps…on…happening.

Mercifully the film finally ends when the heroes concoct a plan to chase all the rabbits towards an electrified train track and shock them all to death. This happens in glorious close up for a loooong time during which every viewer is made supremely uncomfortable about how unhappy those bunnies appear and start wondering if a “no animals were harmed disclaimer” is going to appear.

It does not, which is the only scary thing about this abomination.

The Orphanage (2007)

The Orphanage (2007) J. A. Bayona

(Spoilers)

As an adult Laura (Belen Rueda) returns to the orphanage where she grew up. She brings along her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) who is a doctor and their adopted son Simon (Roger Princep) who has HIV, although he doesn’t know that yet. Early in the film though he discovers both secrets about himself and a little boy that was already lonely and withdrawn becomes even more detached from reality and content to hang out with his imaginary friends.

Laura and Carlos meanwhile want to turn the Orphanage into a boarding school for disabled children but that plan seems unlikely when, at the grand opening party for the school, Simon disappears. The rest of the film is concerned with finding Simon, finding out what happened to him and the other children at the orphanage and what is going to happen to Laura and Carlos now.

The Orphanage is chock to the brim with creaky old horror clichés you’ve seen a million times. Creepy children, masked silent killers, mysterious old ladies, psychics and huge old empty houses. But these are all clichés for a reason. They scare us. And The Orphanage deploys these tired old tricks with a wit and sophistication that resurrects them and makes most of them work again.

It also brings some new cards to the table, mostly in that Bayona understands a key thing about good horror, it isn’t what’s there, or even what isn’t there that is scary, but what might be there. The Orphanage is very good at playing the suggestion game, hinting that something may be there without explicitly revealing it and letting the audience’s imagination fill in the rest.

In particular this film loves doors. The Orphanage, both the film and the titular building, is chock full of doors, opening slowly or closing suddenly, doors behind which could be anything but you’ll never know until you open them. The Orphanage is also filled with shots framed in such a way as to leave large parts of the screen visible but not clear. Characters are forced into the sides of the frame so the focus is on a door, a cave, some curtains or any object that could be concealing something unsettling. The effect is off putting as the audience assumes the focus of the shot to be the important part of the shot and so we’re constantly expecting something to happen.

Yet almost always, nothing does.

 

Almost always.

 

Bayona’s other good trick is turning the camera into a malevolent spirit. In a few key scenes Bayona moves the camera like a person moves their head, bobbing up and down slightly and turning to look at different objects in the room. Whereas normally the camera cuts or zooms to look at important objects in a setting here the camera gets up and walks towards it. The effect is to create the impression that the camera is watching Laura; that it is some kind of force with personality and consciousness. In particular the scene of Laura playing some Spanish version of “What’s the time Mr Wolf” with ghosts is terrifying not because of the ghosts but purely because of how the camera takes in the scene.

So The Orphanage does some old tricks well and in a genre as full of crap as horror can be that is enough for me to recommend giving this flick a watch.

But The Orphanage also got me thinking, how important to the effectiveness of the horror is the possibility that what we’re watching might be real?

That might sound like a stupid question. This film has ghosts in it, ghosts aren’t real and neither are monsters, vampires or serial killers that invade your dreams. Surely reality is unimportant for a horror film?

But The Orphanage is very cleverly constructed so that whilst it unequivocally has ghosts in it as far as what the audience sees, there may not be any ghosts within the reality of the film’s world. Laura is the only character who ever sees a ghost, she doesn’t see one until she suffers the traumatic loss of her son* and every time she sees a ghost their appearance is of someone whose facial features she was recently given in a more innocent context. Everything ghostly in this film could quite easily be in Laura’s head. This is a woman who just lost her son so the idea that she’s having some kind of breakdown and seeing hallucinations is not only likely but it makes considerably more sense than the supernatural explanation.

Crucially nothing in the plot of The Orphanage requires ghosts. Everything, even Simon’s disappearance, has a perfectly natural explanation.

And this got me thinking that many of my favourite Horror films, and certainly the ones that scare me the most effectively, also offer the possibility that nothing supernatural occurred. At least for the first half of the film anyway.

The Exorcist plays its hand pretty clearly towards the end but for most of the film the idea that Reagan’s suffering is purely mental illness is entirely logical and no less horrifying because of it. The Descent, one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen, has no supernatural elements for more than half its running time but the tension is built around a very real fear of being lost, being stuck and having nobody who can rescue you. The American version of The Ring is put together like a detective story with the main character following logical clues until at the end logic ceases to have any meaning in their world. The Haunting (the original), Nightmare on Elm Street (and especially a new nightmare), Don’t Look Now, Suspiria; some of the most unsettling and frightening films play with the barriers between reality and madness.

This blurring of reality and madness evokes the uncanny. The uncanny is a Fruedian concept inextricably tied up in any critical reading of fantasy and horror. At its simplest it can be said that it is an instance where something can be both familiar yet alien at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. The usual example given is that of a doll, the image of a human and yet at the same time not a human and so possessed of an uncanny quality. If you’ve heard the term the uncanny valley, referring to how CGI representations of humans seem unsettling whereas more stylised animated characters do not, then it is basically the same idea.

Analysis of the uncanny tends to focus on uncanny objects; dolls, doppelgangers, doubles and other things not beginning with d. However, I wonder if it might also apply to the fictional reality of the text.

If a text posits itself to be real or at least a reflection of the real world but somehow a reflection that is wrong then it becomes a double of reality as we experience it but possessed of an uncanny quality. And that is very unsettling.

Creating this sense of our world but with something wrong is harder than it sounds. You can’t simply say this is our world, but with ghosts, that’s what makes it ‘wrong’ because our world doesn’t have ghosts in it. The experience might be different for someone who believes in the supernatural but as a staunch sceptic and rationalist myself the moment a text goes, btw this is all ghosts, it marks itself out as another world, a fictional one. It emphasises the point that what it is depicting could never happen to me and that creates a barrier between me and the experience of the protagonist, a sort of fictional safety net protecting me from the horror.

No, the wrongness has to be implied more subtly and the film has to present it as an option that could still happen in our reality. The events of The Orphanage could happen in the real world, we could lose a child, we could be driven mad by the experience, etc. But they also have the shape of something much weirder. In fact that shape seems to work better than the rational explanations. Keeping the possibility of rationality alive means the fictional safety net never gets deployed, it means that the fictional world possess a sense of the uncanny and it means that everything I am watching probably won’t, but does have the potential to, happen to me.

Sometimes I lay awake at night and imagine my bedroom door opening and something horrible being revealed standing in the doorway. It’s not something I lose much sleep over, it’s a fear I can rationalise away. I lock my doors, I’ve gone to sleep every night for 28 years and a murderer hasn’t been in my doorway, the odds are I’m safe.

 

But, still, there could be something there.

It is this fear that The Orphanage most acutely invokes for me.

 

*People who have seen the film at this point will be pointing out that no, she totally sees a ghost before Simon dies. Tomas, the film’s main spectre, shows up at the party and pushes Laura into the bath before Simon disappears. Except, it might not be Tomas. Tomas is distinguished by his sackcloth facemask but at the end of the film when she finally finds Simon he is also wearing Tomas’ facemask. The little boy who pushed her into the bath could easily be Simon wearing Tomas’ mask.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Guardians of the Galaxy 2014

Directed by James Gunn

Since the general consensus amongst critics seems to be that Guardians of the Galaxy is absolutely amazing (as I write this it has a 92% on rotten tomatoes) I thought I’d take the unusual approach of listing all the flaws I thought it had.

It has weak villains

This is becoming a major problem for Marvel Studios films. Although I have yet to come across a Marvel Studios film I don’t like, the lack of interesting villains is starting to become a noticeable theme. You’ve got Loki (who is amazing), various greasy arms/corporate guys in the Iron Man films and lots of big bad evil with a capital E ranting guys who want to destroy things (Malekith, Red Skull). Ronan the Accuser falls into the latter group and spends the majority of his screen time delivering overwrought dialogue that feels very super villainy but which doesn’t advance his motivation, pose an interesting ethical dilemma or even convey much personality. You can replace everything actor Lee Pace says with “I am evil” and get much the same effect.

It’s even worse in the case of Ronan since the comic’s version is a very good villain. Ronan is driven by very strong ideals of justice and obedience to the law, I’s just that the law he follows is inherently corrupt so he ends up on the side opposed to our heroes more often than not. He’s basically Javier in space with a hammer. Yet like all good villains he is the hero of his own story and like every Marvel villain ever who was written well enough he’s fallen on the side of angels a few times too.

Movie Ronan though, big evil dude with a hammer. The most character he gets is when Thanos says he’s pouty and my fiancé and I both laughed out loud because yeah, dude is really pouty.

Thanos seems awesome at this stage btw but is barely in the film. Yondu was okay but more of a side character than an antagonist and Nebula was just kind of there. The film gave her enough back story for a potentially interesting relationship with Thanos and Gamora but not enough screen time to explore it. I suspect we’ll see more of Nebula when we finally get to the Infinity Gauntlet.

Its action is underwhelming

In an action film you expect the action set pieces to be inventive, exciting and memorable. In Guardians they are largely not. They’re functional. Action happens in all the places you expect it to in the story and no action scene feels bad but equally none of them stand out for me as much as the Nightcrawler scene in X-Men 2, the battle for New York in Avengers (and the amazing shot that joins all the characters) or the Winter Soldier’s attack on the bridge. Guardians absolutely works as a comedy and the moments that stand out in the film are the gags and character beats but as an action film the action should be special too.*

Gamora is kind of dull

Gamora’s character arc happens off-screen. She goes from being a universally renowned assassin working for some of the most dangerous villains in the galaxy to a good guy trying to save it between her first appearance and her second. That’s a big swing for a character and the actual character progression she has on screen during the film, going from having a stick up her ass to having it slightly less far up her ass, is not quite as compelling.

Worse still, because of the way the character dynamics are set up in this film Gamora ends up being the member of the team that is most noble, most concerned with helping others and saving the day. She fulfils a very necessary narrative function because without her the other fuck ups that form the Guardians would not be properly motivated to engage in the plot. It’s just a shame that they gave that function to Gamora who, in the comics, is one of the colder, less emotional, less noble and more badass characters. It leaves Gamora kind of bland since everything about her comic’s version is gone and the movie doesn’t invent very much to replace it with.

Having said that, this might only be a problem for people familiar with comic Gamora. I know plenty of people who loved her character and thought she made a refreshing change from female characters in other super hero films so maybe she only comes across as white bread compared to her more robust comic counterpart.**

It was thematically weak

This sort of comes back to the villain thing. The way super hero stories deal with theme most of the time is quite ingenious, you literalise it. You turn the thing you’re talking about into a person or object that your hero can interact with. Want to say that racism is bad? Make a super-villain called racist-man, give him racist themed super powers and have the X-Men punch him. Unsubtle and not very nuanced but awesome, and that’s one of the reasons I love super-hero stories.

When you have villains who are just evil for the sake of evil though you can’t do that. That doesn’t mean you can’t have thematic weight but you’ve sort of missed the point of super hero stories as far as I’m concerned. If you’re using Ronan your story normally is about the role of authority, that was not a factor in GOTG.

What theme’s Guardians does have are shallow and clichéd. The idea of making a surrogate family out of your friends is fine but it has been done to death and better in other sci-fi fare (most notably Firefly and Farscape which GOTG is heavily influenced by). The character’s do have arcs but the arcs don’t form a cohesive theme, Quill’s arc about learning to take responsibility has nothing to do with Gamora’s arc about being less stiff or Drax;s arc about coming to terms wit the loss of his family.

The plot was bobbins

This is a flaw in basically every super-hero film except Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The plot can be a big part of the appeal of a story. Who wants what, why and how? What will happen next and where? Will our heroes live or die and what will the consequences of their actions be? You watch something like The Bourne films and the appeal is all in the plot. Same with a lot of TV, cliff-hangers, plot twists and developments in the story are exciting for the audience.

In most comic book movies though, the plot is merely a framework to get from one action set piece to another. Nobody gives two shits what Loki is doing in Avengers of why, they come for the character interaction and the fight scenes, they come for the awesome. Ditto GOTG, the story is very basic and largely devoid of much tension or enigma. However it provides a framework for great comedic and action set pieces.

That scene with Gamora and Star-Lord in space is bullshit

It is and you know it.

So wait, you ask. You didn’t like the plot, the themes or some of the characters. Does that mean you didn’t like Guardians of the Galaxy?

Guys.

I absolutely adored it. It is awesome!

I can’t recall which critic said it but their review of Avengers was basically that it defied conventional critical analysis because the plot, themes and other things critics normally talk about were irrelevant to the success of the film. Avengers was about being awesome, and it delivered the awesome. Ditto GOTG except GOTG is more focused on being funny.

Another thing Avengers and GOTG have in common? Great writing, great acting and great direction. Those three things will cover a multitude of sins. Your movie can be an empty hollow nothing with a mess of a plot that’s got holes you can fly a space ship through but if you deliver interesting characters with charisma that I like hanging out with, have them throwing out dialogue which had me crying with laughter and it put them in a setting which is inventive and imaginative then you win. Worked for GOTG, worked for Star Wars, worked for Indiana Jones, worked for Clerks, worked for James Bond for 40 years and it’ll work again.

Just as final note, Rocket and Groot are he stand out character undoubtedly but they’re also my favourite characters from the comics. What impressed me more was Drax, a fairly dull guy in the comics but hilarious on screen. Drax has been both a smart character and a dumb one in the comics over the years but the idea to make him of normal intelligence but completely literal is both hilarious and adds many layers to his character. Bautista’s performance was a revelation too, he has great comic timing and I’m hoping for big things from him in the future.

*The only action set-pieces people bring up are Yondu’s arrow and Groot smashing a row of villains both of which are really visual gags.

**on the topic of Gamora I just want to mention briefly that this film barely squeaks by the Bechdel Test since most of her interactions with Nebula revolve around the topic of Thanos or Ronan. They do have some dialogue about each other directly though so it passes. Next time I’d like to see Phyla-Vell, Moondragon or Mantis on the team to beef out the female character count a bit. Or even Star-Hawk in the both a man and woman incarnation of the character.

Summer Wars (2009)

Summer Wars

Summer Wars is very nearly a flawless movie.

And I use that term very specifically. A flawless movie means that I can’t find a single thing wrong with it. It doesn’t necessarily mean the movie is great merely that you can’t find fault in its execution. I’ve seen a very few flawless films in my time but even of the ones I have seen they aren’t my favourite kind of film. I’m much more interested in films that are trying to do something new or interesting even if their reach exceeds their grasp. Ambitious failures are more exciting than lazy successes.

Summer Wars is flawless and its got just enough creativity, engaging themes and new things to say to compensate for a straight forward plot and ideas that are not particularly original.

Summer Wars tells the story of Kenji Koiso (Ryûnosuke Kamiki) a high school student who has just missed out on the chance to represent Japan at the math olympics. He’s preparing for a dull Summer in a job as an administrator for OZ.

What’s OZ? Well it’s a social media platform that has kind of replaced traditional browsers. In OZ you can do anything you can on the internet, banking, work, shopping, social interaction and of course play games. But rather than just reading text on a screen you have a custom avatar that inhabits a virtual world and interacts with its surroundings visually and in multiple dimensions. Want to go shopping? Well you can take your avatar to a shop and have it wander around the same as you would on the high street.

Kenji’s boring Summer plans get interrupted when he gets offered a Summer job working for Natsuki Shinohara (Nanami Sakuraba) a girl who has just graduated high school this year and also a girl that Kenji has a massive crush on. She wants him to accompany her to her Grandmother’s home to attend her 90^th birthday party. What Natsuki doesn’t tell our hero until he arrives is that he’s pretending to be her over achieving fiance from a perfect family. Turns out Granny Shinohara hasn’t been feeling well recently and Natsuki said she wasn’t allowed to die until she met her boyfriend, a boyfriend that didn’t exist.

Kenji of course thinks this is both unfair and impossible and has a stressful day answering questions and being sized up by the extended Shinohara family including black sheep uncle Wabisuke Jin’nôchi.

He gets distracted from his problems though when a mysterious message arrives composed of numbers. Thinking it’s a maths problem he spends all night deciphering it and then sends the finished code back to the mysterious sender. And this turns out to be the secret backdoor password into OZ. And Kenji has just given the password to a malicious A.I. named Love Machine that immediately starts causing chaos and havoc in OZ. Worse, since OZ effectively is the internet the chaos has major ramifications for the real world, fire engines are dispatched to fake emergencies, traffic seizes up into miles long gridlocks, medical monitoring equipment stops working. Whoops.

Now the race is on for Kenji to fix what he did and he discovers along the way just how much the Shinohara’s are inextricably linked to the fate of Oz, himself and the world.

At face value Summer Wars is a Cyberpunk story, and not a particularly original one. The notion of an alternate virtual world that reflects how the internet works goes all the way back to William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984 and variations on the idea have appeared in Snow Crash, The Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic, Tron, ReBoot and even Digimon.  In fact Summer Wars is in part a re-make of the second short from the first Digimon movie known in Japan as Bokura no wô gêmu! Or “Our War Game.” Director Mamoru Hosoda was also responsible for that short and the plot, basic concept and a lot of the animation is freely recycled from his earler effort.

What many of those other examples share though is that they’re set in the future and so feature other sci-fi or fantasy elements. Tron and Digimon feature people actually travelling to the digital world. Neuromancer and snow Crash features cyborgs and other SF technology that reinforce their theme of how people and technolgoy interact.

In contrast Summer Wars is firmly set in real world Japan pretty much exactly how it works, looks and feels in 2010. And this is because Summer Wars is only half a cyberpunk story. The other half is concerned with the family and relationship drama of the Shinohara’s. The dynamics, tensions and alliances of the Shinohara’s are beautifully observed and feel so real to me. Kenji’s stress and panic when he’s the one outsider in a group of 20 or so people, all with names he struggles to remember, completely echoes the way I felt when I first stayed with my fiance’s relatives in Tokyo. Even if you don’t have any experience of Japanese culture though you’ll recognise and empathise with the way each family member teases the others, slots into a defined role, makes sub-groups within the larger family, etc.

Summer Wars really is about the contrast between communication amongst families and communication online. It’s about how the human dynamics of 2 thousand years adapt to the technology of the modern world. And it’s a story that could not be told more perfectly than in Japan. I’ve remarked numerous times that one of the things that stands out to me about Japan is about how the very high tech and the very ancient live together. Outside of Japan countries adapted to the changes of technology gradually, each new invention necessitating changes in how human beings lived and thought. But Japan remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years until the Meiji Revolution when, boom, all the benefits of the industrial revolution came completely overnight.

It meant that Japan had to adapt fast to change and the way they managed it largely was to isolate and section off their lives, this bit is traditional, this bit is new. Like the paper walls that section off a Japanese home they could create invisible notional walls that left both the old and the new in the same place, but separate.

The Shinohara’s are a particularly good example of this. A samurai family with a large traditional house that made their money from silk. They have unusually strong ties to Japan’s past and are proud of their heritage. But they all have cell phones, the kid’s all have game boys, one son is a professional baseball player, another is a computer programmer and one more sells computers. They’re as much a part of the modern world as anybody.

Summer Wars is not alone in being about the tension between technology and tradition in Japan, Mononoke Hime and Hi-No-Tori cover similar ground in greater depth and complexity. What Summer Wars does get right though is that it doesn’t pick a side. Very often in films about the importance of family or the environment tech gets demonised and the audience is encouraged to root for nature. Not so in Summer Wars. Tech can cause problems but it also, ultimately, saves the day. The strong family bonds of the Shinohara’s help them organise and get through the crisis but it’s a failure in family dynamics that inadvertently causes the threat in the first place. And one character dies explicitly because tech that was keeping them alive no longer works. Tech is not the bad guy, nor even is the reliance on tech.

What is the bad guy though, in every instance, is a lack of communication.  Kenji not knowing the situation he’ll be in stresses him out, which leads him to solve the maths problem and not knowing who sent that problem leads to the problem in OZ. Wabisuke not knowing that he is loved and forgiven leads to the creation of the Love Machine. Equally every problem is solved through communication. There is an amazing sequence of Granny Shinohara phoning people up during the first OZ crisis and pulling seemingly the whole of Japan through the problem with stern words of admonition and others of encouragement. Kenji is able to get the gear he needs to fight Love Machine due to the family connections of the Shinohara’s each of who can contribute a particular skill or talent showing that we’re stronger together than fighting alone.

If there is one criticism of Summer Wars it is that technology doesn’t work that way. The depiction of OZ is one thing but the damage that Love Machine is able to do because he hacks OZ is simply impossible. And the idea that punching a giant monster, which is rendered in code in a graphics engine, with a rabbit avatar which is equally rendered in code in a graphics engine would somehow re-write or alter code is frankly silly, a useful visual allegory but silly. I think the film gets a buy on this though. Every film gets to do one impossible thing and for me with Summer Wars I’ll let it slide that the internet doesn’t work that way. Partly because although the internet doesn’t work that way the way the film depicts how people use the internet, what our relationship with communications technology is and what it does to us is 100% spot on. I know for some people though this is an insurmountable obstacle, and all I can say is I wish you could get past it to experience just how good Summer Wars is.

Every other element is, as I say, flawless. The acting and script are just perfect. The movie has a very naturalistic feel despite the big SF concepts which again supports the contrast between the real world and OZ. Even better the script is brimming with humour and nice character moments. This film has a huge cast of characters, many of whom get maybe one line of dialogue and most of whom have names I couldn’t tell you. Yet they don’t feel interchangeable, everyone feels like a real person and distinct from the others. With only a few lines of dialogue, the acting and the animation everyone is able to bring each character to life.

The animation too is spectacular, right up there with Ghibli. Supplied by Madhouse, who also did the stunning The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Millennium Actress, the scenes in the real world look nearly photo realistic with amazing attention to the background details. The characters are just stylized the right amount, nobody looks like an obvious cartoon like Disney or Ghibli but they still move and emote with energy whereas many realistic animated films feel stiff and lifeless.

That realism is crucial for selling the contrast between the real world and OZ. In OZ though the animators are free to indulge in their wildest fantasies and OZ is full of striking, inventive and memorable visuals to rival other eye candy anime like Evangelion or Spirited Away. I particularly like how there are no  black lines in OZ, everyone is instead outlined in another primary colour such as red. It gives the effect of making OZ seem more ethereal and the real world more real by comparison.

Pacing, direction, music, atmosphere; everything else is just perfect for what the film needs them to do.

Summer Wars is an absolute must see.

 

 

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters (2013)

Directed by Tommy Wirkola

The opening credits sequences of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is pretty cool. It’s done in a style reminiscent of early printing, sort of like wood block art and it depicts the titular siblings beating up witches as they grow up and their fame grows with them.

It lasts for ages though. After a minute we quickly get that these two are indeed bad ass witch killers. Yet the scene just keeps going and going. The first time I watched this film I wondered why it was in there. Having seen the finished movie though, I know exactly why. It’s because without that scene you might wonder if Hansel and Gretel have actually managed to kill any witches at all.

Seriously, they get their asses handed to them repeatedly. The film has about 4 major action sequences involving the siblings fighting witches and in all but the last one the witches smack them around like they’re kittens in a bag. Fortunately, for plot related reasons, the two are immune to magic which means the Witches can’t blast them with spells but you know what isn’t immune to magic? Tree branches. And you know what isn’t immune to tree branches? Skulls. If you ever wanted to see people magically smash Hawkeye and a bond girl in the face with floating wood then you will not be disappointed by Hansel and Gretel.

My favourite example of just how massively incompetent they are is that Hansel (aka Jeremy Renner aka Hawkeye and yet at no point does he fire a bow and arrow which is a huge waste of a gag movie!) not once, but twice employs a strategy of “grab onto broom stick and get dragged along by evil witch.”  The first time he does this he gets dragged along the forest floor and his head smashed into a rock (which unaccountably does not kill him). The second time he does this he ends up falling off the broom from about, oooh 200 feet up, and landing in a tree. This also does not kill him. So presumably Hansel is also immune to gravity and rocks.

Anyway, incompetence aside, what is this movie about? Well the film starts with the story of Hansel and Gretel you know rendered fairly faithfully to the Grimm version, assuming their version was art directed by Tim Burton and included the word “bitch.”

Having roasted an old lady the two kids decide they have quite the taste for murder and grow up becoming famous Witch Hunters the world over.

Cut to a town whose name I don’t care about in Germa-hun-slo-po-rus-den. Children are being stolen and the people blame witches!

Fortunately they’ve found one!

Unfortunately she turns out not be a witch.

Fortunately Hansel and Gretel are here to catch the real one.

Unfortunately there is a blood moon coming and witches will be more powerful than ever at that time. And the head witch (Famke Janssen who imdb tells me played ‘Muriel’ which is not the most threatening of villain names) has found a potion that will remove a witch’s main weakness, fire.

Fortunately for our heroes the witches’ potion only works temporarily and requires Gretel’s heart to be made permanent.

Why does it require Gretel’s heart? Well it turns out she’s a white witch. As was Hansel and Gretel’s mother and that is why they’re immune to magic.

BTW movie, a witch tried to eat them once and they’re at this moment stealing and killing children. I think Hansel and Gretel have enough motivation to hate witches without needing to avenge their family.

Also turning out to be a white witch is the woman at the start of the film that Hansel rescued from the crowd. The woman he explicitly said was not a witch. Again, not the world’s best witch hunters here folks.

Oh and the other white witch is not immune to magic because…hey look a troll!

So that’s your movie folks. Muriel *snort* wants to kill Gretel and kidnaps her, Hansel and white witch lady rescue her, witches get slaughtered, the end! Oh plus a troll and a fanboy are somehow involved.

 

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is of course dumb schlock, but it’s not terrible schlock.  Lets’ get the obvious problems out of the way first. The plot is bobbins, there is no attempt at theme or saying anything, the editing is iffy and the acting ranges between scenery chewing and phoned in.  Jeremy Renner’s costume is actually not far off his Hawkeye outfit and I’m sort of wondering if he shot all his scenes while they were setting up shots of Avengers. Also I’m 90% certain that Famke Janssen is only in this because they filmed it near where she lives and so she didn’t have to travel to do any work.

So yeah, its crap; but it does have a few things going for it. It looks pretty great actually. Considering the budget the effects are well done and the costumes and make-up are also pretty creative. Edward the Troll looks better than similar monsters in much higher budgeted films. The witches in particular are a delight. The movie posits that a witch’s appearance reflects their inner darkness and so these witches are all mutated in varied and interesting ways. One witch has a massive goitre, another has no legs, there is a pair of witches conjoined at the back who are awesome! We even have a black witch which makes this film more diverse than pretty much any film set in historical Europe, even if she is a baddie with no lines.

On a similar note is the gore. Now I’m not a gorehound by any stretch of the imagination but the gore in Hansel and Gretel is surprisingly effective. It doesn’t wallow on entrails like an old 70’s gorefest nor is it amazingly creative in the violence like many anime are. What it does is just follow the consequences of an action for about a second or two more than Hollywood conventionally does. So for example when Edward the Troll crushes a guy’s head, normally you’d get a cut and a sound effect but here, nope, we see head crushing. Like I say, not normally a gore guy but the film is cartoony enough that the gore sort of adds to the fun. Evil Dead is the closest comparison I can think of although that comparison gives this film far too much credit.

Where Hansel and Gretel has the most fun though is in the setting. The film is wildly anachronistic mixing up elements from as early as the 13^th century to as late as the 19^th and mixing styles and fashions from all over Europe. It sets its stall out early though with milk bottles that have got missing children posters strapped to them in string. Basically we’re doing, everyone and everything is completely modern but set is the past.

I kind of love that. It’s a big part of the appeal of the Discworld books for me and Hansel and Gretel has fun with it. I draw the line at the weapons though. I love steampunk, I love clockpunk and I’m an easy mark for mixing modern high tech weapons and fantasy weapons. I like Warhammer for god’s sake, a game that features Dwarves flying helicopters. Movie, I’m on your side with this. But Gretel has a crossbow that rotates to fire two bolts at 90 degrees to her.

No, no movie that is stupid. Not cool, not fun, just dumb. Really damn dumb.

My only real problem with the film is its gender politics, and not for the expected reason either. Witches are inextricably linked with the oppression of women historically and normally in cinema witch hunters are unequivocally the bad guys, persecuting innocent women for their own gain. I also grew up in the 90’s, the era of New Age and the birth of Wicca as a popular movement. That means I’m even more inclined to automatically view witches as at worst misunderstood good guys who worship flowers.

But in this film witches are basically just monsters, and I’m fine with that. Sometimes I like a vampire movie where the vampire is a tortured and conflicted romantic, other times I want a scary monster. Here they’re scary monsters.

No the gender problem is that Gretel gets horrendously mistreated by this film.

She starts out being all bad ass and competent, shooting witches in the face with crossbows and head butting sexists in the nose! She has personality, she argues but she also jokes and she is a pretty great lead. She certainly comes across as more interesting that Hansel, if only because Gemma Arterton is having the time of her life hamming it up whereas Jeremy Renner looks like he woke up from a hangover and doesn’t realise people are filming him.

Then in the second act she suffers from the fact that both she and Hansel are just, really, really bad at their job guys.

Finally in the third act this happens to her. She gets assaulted by the Sheriff’s men (yeah there is a Sheriff in this film, he is not important) who attempt to rape her. Then she gets captured by Muriel *snort* tied up in bondage and stands there chained to a wall during the climactic battle.

I mean, she does get freed and do some shooting in the final battle but she went from arse kicker in leather trousers to damsel in distress in less than an hour.

And there is no need for the attempted rape whatsoever. I know why it’s there. Its story function is to  set up that Edward has to protect Gretel which is a clue that she’s secretly a witch. And it’s other function is that “we’re doing a revisionist take on fairy tales, yeah, with realism, yeah, and women got raped like all the time in the past so that’s realistic, yeah.”

But there are soooo many other ways you can set up the Edward thing and the attempted rape adds nothing. It’s sleazy, It’s gross, it’s exploitative and it makes the film much worse for being there.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t care either except Hansel and Gretel was doing really well beforehand. It handily passes the Bechdel test and up until the ruining of Gretel all of the female characters had personality, agency and motivations that didn’t revolve around men. That just makes it all the worse when it does the typical Hollywood bullshit at the end.

So that’s Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. Should you watch it? Meh. It isn’t a bad film but I’d have a hard time recommending it to someone because there isn’t anything especially novel in it. Unless you like seeing Hawkeye brained with branches. If you want to see that then no other film ever made will satisfy you more.

 

Richard Halls

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

X-Men: Days of Future Past

2014 Director: Bryan Singer

The first 10 minutes of Days of Future Past were pure fan service, delivering cool moment after cool moment and making this X-Men fan boy squee uncontrollably.

I’ve largely enjoyed Fox’s X-Men movie franchise (with the exception of The Last Stand which is pure garbage) but I very early on had to separate them from the X-Men I know and love from the comics. The X-Men films were largely their own thing, much more like a conventional action movie than a translation of the storytelling style of the comics to screen.  This is fine of course. When you adapt something from one medium to another, changes will occur and that’s a good thing. You also have to remember that X-Men was basically the first film that kicked off the modern age of super-hero films. They were taking a big risk adapting the X-Men and were understandably cautious about many of the things they were trying. Hence the all black costumes, the action scenes which borrow far more from the Matrix than from X-Men comics and the original plot rather than any attempt to adapt an existing comics storyline.

Times have moved on though. Captain America can wear his comic book costume in all its four color glory in The Avengers and no one bats an eye. Super-heroes are common and accepted by audiences now and so you can push the boat on what aspects of the comics you use in your film rather than trying to be conservative.

As such that first few minutes gave me teams of mutants, working together and using their powers in interesting ways! Costumes with colour and that aren’t just black uniforms. Blink! Goddamn Blink in all her pink face tattooed glory. The Blackbird! Sentinels! Iceman using Ice slides! ICE MOTHERFUCKING SLIDES! I was in nerdvana let me tell you.

The scenes with the future X-Men bookend the film but the confidence that you can take the audience further and do more daring things than a conventional action film permeates the rest of the movie. One of my favourite things about super-heroes is the creative ways their powers can be employed and X-Men: DOFP is full of scenes that show this off in startlingly original and visual ways. Blink’s portal powers are stunning and some of the stuff Magneto does is very clever but the real star of the show is Evan Peters’ Quicksilver who gets one of the most unique set pieces in action movie history and absolutely steals every scene he’s in.

There’s more fan-service too including cameos from basically every X-Man to appear in the franchise thus far (the only omissions are Nightcrawler because Alan Cummings wasn’t prepared to undergo the make-up again for a cameo and Angel because everyone wants to forget Last Stand.) and plenty of Easter Eggs.

But the fan-service stuff is mostly confined to the beginning and end of the film. For most of its running time the story it’s telling is at once not at all like the X-Men and actually something right at the core of the franchise.

X-Men: DOFP is of course an adaptation of the seminal “Days of Future Past” story-arc by Chris Claremont and John Byrne. In that tale, Kitty Pryde is sent back in time from an apocalyptic future to stop Mystique from killing Senator Kelly. Kelly was an advocate for a piece of legislation called the Mutant Registration Act and his death increases anti-mutant sentiment which leads to more support for the Sentinel Programme (a programme that builds giant mutant hunting robots) and eventually to the apocalyptic future.

X-Men: DOFP starts from the same premise with a few tweaks. Rather than killing Senator Kelly Mystique is trying to kill Bolivar Trask, the creator of the sentinel programme because Kelly is dead in the movie continuity. Also rather than Kitty Pryde being sent back it’s Wolverine. Whilst I am annoyed that both the character of Kitty Pryde and Ellen Paige’s performance get thrown under a bus in favour of more Wolverine I completely understand the film maker’s decision to use him. He is by far the biggest and most popular character in the franchise whereas most viewers might not even remember who Kitty Pryde is from her brief screen time in X3. Also if we use the mind transfer plot device from the comics then the only candidates for time travel are Wolverine, Magneto and Prof X and obviously the film wants to be about the 1970’s versions of Prof X and Magneto so that only leaves Wolverine. To make up for it Kitty randomly gets new “I can send people back in time powers” that she nicks off Rachel Grey. Because adding Rachel Grey to the movie continuity would have been way more of a headache than was worth it for anyone.

Wolverine doesn’t actually get to do a huge amount in the film though. He gets some nice making fun of the 70’s gags but he’s largely just there to move the plot along after that and have some short character stuff with Ryker. He doesn’t even get into a decent fight scene which seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity (although we do have 5 films of Wolverine fight scenes already). In fact most of the characters in this film exist either to move the plot along or to have a brief cameo and do something cool with their powers. Peter Dinklage’s Bolivar Trask, for example, is supposed to be our villain but he plays basically no part in the climax and has only one direct confrontation with the heroes. He gets juuuuust enough screen time so that he comes across not as a one dimensional villain and Dinklage is one of those charismatic actors that makes their character feel real and lived in even without much screen time.

 

 

In fact, the acting in this film is uniformly excellent. The X-Men films have generally been graced with excellent casting as one of their strengths. One of the reason’s the first three worked as well as they did is that old pros like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen can elevate a poorly written script with very well considered performances.  DOFP is no different and the film is generally at its best when it just lets two performers in a scene act at each other. There isn’t anything in here to hit the heights of ‘Magneto Nazi Hunter’ but stuff like McAvoy and Stewart’s cross time Xavier meet-up is joyous and McAvoy and Fassbender retain their fascinating screen chemistry.

And it’s a good thing they do because for most of the film this is a triple header between James McAvoy’s young Professor X, Michael Fassbender’s Magneto and Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique.

The film set’s these three up as a trinity opposed along different extremes with at various times one character in the centre, generally Mystique. So for example Mystique is the active character for most of the first act opposed to Magneto imprisoned in a cell and Xavier imprisoned in drugs and emotional crisis. Then we get Xavier preaching non-violence in stopping Mystique opposed to Magneto wanting to kill her and Mystique as the target. Or we get Magneto as a proud mutant who wears a costume proclaiming it versus Mystique who is a proud mutant but can hide who she is versus Professor X who is literally taking a drug so that he stops being a mutant.*

The main trinity of course is between Xavier’s dream on one hand, Magneto’s on the other and Mystique in the middle, someone who was part of the X-Men and part of Magneto’s Brotherhood but is now striking out on her own. Xavier tries to win Mystique back to his side, of a dream that mutants and humans will co-exist and that the best way to do this is to set a good example, showing humans they can be heroes and saviours. Magneto argues that humans will never trust mutants and the only way to survive is to instil a terror of mutants in the humans, to set themselves up as rulers so the humans are powerless to attack them. Mystique sits in the middle, wanting a better world for mutants but unsure of the method to achieve it. She is pragmatic and cynical in what she is prepared to do but she has not yet killed to get what she wants, not yet crossed the line into terrorism and it’s the battle for Mystique’s soul that the film really concerns itself it with.

This battle of course is one of the driving forces in the X-Men comics but despite Magneto being in 4 X-Men films to date this is the first one to really concern itself with that central issue. And unlike many X-Men stories where you are inherently on Prof X’s side the film plays fair with it. Magneto’s viewpoint is bolstered by the fact that the future where Human’s hunt Mutant’s to extinction happens, it’s shown to us at the start of the film and despite everything Xavier and Magneto do it still seems to be inevitable. And yet the day is ultimately saved when Mystique chooses Xavier’s path, showing compassion for her enemies and not giving in to violence to achieve her arms. It’s only when they truly give Xavier’s dream a shot that the future becomes a better place.

The 70’s setting gives this theme a rich resonance too with the dreamers of the 60’s the civil rights activists, sexual revolutionaries and of course the X-Men literally destroyed by the Vietnam war leaving a more cynical, less compassionate and more pessimistic America in its wake. First Class did something similar using the backdrop of the sexual revolution of the 60’s and the Cuban missile crisis to give the illusion of depth to its story but First Class basically rhymed with history to seem smart. DOFP in contrast has actual themes which parallel history but could also equally apply to today. The whole Sentinel aspect, for example, could be read as a cry to use compassion in winning the war on terror rather than drone strikes.

It’s this thematic depth that ultimately makes DOFP stand above any of the other X-Men films, and indeed most Super-Hero films. I’d still probably rate X2 as the most entertaining X-Men film and the best composed as an action piece but for what its worth I think DOFP might be the best X-Men film now.

It’s not without weaknesses though. A Super-Hero film necessitates action and DOFP seems to know this but to be singularly uninterested in it. Sure enough an action scene comes along approximately every 10 minutes according to some script writing guide somewhere but most of them are perfunctory and devoid of tension or excitement. Mystique beating up the ambassador for example is neither exciting, nor tense, nor an interesting use of her powers, nor building of character. It is a scene that exists purely because we haven’t seen anybody hit something for a while and it’s exactly the kind of Hollywood laziness that DOFP generally avoids. DOFP has three and a half really good, inventive and well shot action sequences but it really needed one more. Still that’s a minor quibble in an otherwise excellent film.

*As an aside this plot point is something of a stroke of genius. Clearly at some stage two production/story problems emerged. Firstly they were going to have one of their main characters in a wheel chair, which causes a nightmare for the production and lots of headaches that I’m sure they’d rather not have to deal with. Secondly Xavier’s power set is so powerful that he could legitimately end the story in about 5 minutes if he was working at full capacity. The plot device that the “cure” for Xavier’s paralysis dampens his psychic abilities not only deals with both issues at a stroke but it adds the idea of Xavier as a kind of metaphor for the downfall of hippies as the 70’s rolled in. His ideals of peace and love have decayed into drug abuse and mental problems. His self-identity as a mutant/hippie/campaigner has been crushed much like the dreams of hippies everywhere were by Vietnam. It’s an inspired McGuffin.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

X-Men DOFP is the first example I can think of where a film employs a ret-con. For those who don’t know a ret-con is short for retroactive continuity and it basically means that what you saw before in a story didn’t happen the way you thought you saw it. A good example from comics is Swamp Thing. Originally conceived as Alec Holland, a scientist who was reborn as swamp monster after an experiment gone awry Alan Moore ret-conned the origin so that Alec Holland died and the Swamp Monster created by the experiment merely thought it was Alec Holland.

Other films, especially sequels, have played fast and loose with continuity before and chosen to ignore other films in the series. Superman Returns, for example, is a sequel to Superman and Superman 2 but ignores Superman 3 and 4. DOFP however is the only film I can think of that provides a reason in the context of the story for how one of the previous films you watched, namely Last Stand, never happened. Basically it uses time travel as an excuse to undo the huge amount of damage that disaster did to the franchise. This made me happy, really happy. We might never get a film set in the timeline of the first 3 films again but if the future shown for he X-Men in DOFP is all we get I’ll still be satisfied.

The 70’s setting is realised quite well until we get to the Sentinels who in no way shape or form look a thing like 1970’s technology. They look like I-Pods with guns.

The X-Men films have not been shy of plundering the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe for some obscure characters before (First Class had Azazel  in it for fuck’s sake from the one X-Men story we all collectively decided did not happen the moment it ended) but I still cannot believe that Ink is in this film. He gets no dialogue and nobody names him or explains his deal but that is unmistakeably Ink. For those who don’t know Ink his power is that whenever he gets a tattoo he gets a new super-power that relates to the image of the tattoo. Now X-Men fans are prepared to accept as part of the suspension of disbelief that mutant powers can give you such diverse super powers as the ability to teleport through space, the ability to absorb other people’s super powers by touch, the ability to  make copies of your own body out of seemingly nothing and a million and other powers that shit all over physics and give biology a swirly. However Ink was where we all collectively cried, bullshit. No, nobody has that as a mutant power. That is dumb. They made it slightly less dumb when they later ret-conned it so that Ink didn’t have super-powers, his tattoo artist did, and his power was to give other people super-powers and the tattoos just served to define what power they got. That at least explained how Ink’s body somehow new that the biohazard symbol would make people sick but it was still stupid. Ink was quickly put into a coma and nary a single fuck was given about him since. I honestly can’t find you a more despised X-Man, and yet, here he is.