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The Special (2020)
First Rate New Horror
A brilliant indy horror with an outrageous premise developed with a dead straight face, excellent script and dialogue, crisp photography and editing, and thoroughly convincing acting. The special effects are sickeningly well done but this is definitely an actors' horror film, and there aren't many of those about.
It's a perfect example of why every film, not just comedies, has got to have a sense of humour. Done right, it makes the film more gripping, not less.
Den blomstertid nu kommer (2018)
Sweden YESSSS!!!!
This is where fifty years of feminism gets you. Every character is a whiney, self-obsessed quitter except the main character's old, grizzled Dad, whom everyone else reviles for not being a feminist but is still the only character who grasps the seriousness of the situation and is the only one who does anything about it, as opposed to just following their latest whim. Eventually the film even admits that he is the hero. The main character (a high-brow techno concert pianist who nonetheless can't get laid) eventually decides that his own life has been so horrible that he wants to forget it by standing in the poisoned rain.
I loved it. The only gripe was that I expected it to end with Russia annexing Sweden, but amongst the closing credits are news flashes telling us that after Alzheimering 800,000 Swedes with nerve gas, killing the entire government and blowing up Sweden's parliament, all its power sub-stations, at least one church and who knows what else, the unmarked black helicopter men just.... left. And everybody thought Russia did it just to stabilise their own economy, but no-one was sure. Or they just didn't care. Sweden.
Range 15 (2016)
Filthier Than Grimsby
"Made by vets for vets" so the humour is rough as hell, with something to offend everyone, including amputees, SJWs, gun-haters, anyone with sensibilities and gays. I'm gay and I watched it with my boyfriend (not vets by any means but the poster art featured some awesome hunks) and we belly laughed all the way through. Didn't get all the jokes (WTF is a "POG"?) but they hit you so fast and so often that if the last one leaves you shaking your head then the next one will be along in a few seconds and will probably hit the spot. A lot of human energy went into this.
Best enjoyed intoxicated with like-minded (and dirty-minded) friends. Would have given it a ten but they pixelated the male nudity.
Color Out of Space (2019)
One Of The Best Lovecraft Movies
Well written, acted, directed, lit and photographed, with a good mix of trippy CGI and horrific practical effects. The pace is good, the family's idyllic pre-meteorite tranquility sliding into unease, then tension and paranoia until finally slowly morphing into outright horror. There is some excellent horror in this, and Cage is good. They even quote directly from the master.
I nearly called this review "Stanley Annihilates Lovecraft", but I figured that not enough people would get it.
Ad Astra (2019)
Space Travel Made Boring
****SPOILERS****
Depressed astronaut Major Roy McBride is working on a space tower in a space suit when Earth is hit by cosmic rays and he falls off. Parachuting to safety he is informed by SpaceCom that they think that Dr Clifford McBride his dad who went missing twenty years before on a mission to the outer solar system to search the galaxy for life with a special antimatter powered telescope on the Lima spacecraft is still alive near Neptune and has turned the telescope into a death ray and is using it to destroy Earth.
He flies commercial to the Moon to catch the Cepheus SpaceCom spacecraft to Mars but lands miles away from the launch pad and has to drive there through space pirates. On the way to Mars they answer a distress call from a biomedical research space station and the captain of the Cepheus is killed by baboons.
On Mars Roy sends some messages to his dad asking him to stop but then fails his computer-controlled psych evaluation and gets locked up in what looks like a children's creche. The Mars base boss shows him a recording of his dad's last transmission twenty years before saying his crew all got homesick and mutinied so he killed them, then she breaks him out and drives him to the launchpad where the Cepheus is preparing to launch for Neptune without him to nuke Lima. He swims through an underground Martian lake and climbs aboard through an airlock just as it blasts off but the crew panic. There then follows a series of unfortunate events involving a space gun, a knife, sudden acceleration and a cylinder of poison gas that accidentally kills the entire crew one by one in less than a minute, so Roy carries on to Neptune alone.
He finds the Lima with, sure enough, what looks like a death ray blasting off on top, so he parks the Cepheus and flies over in a shuttle, which he then loses. Aboard the Lima he finds the entire crew dead except for his dad Cliff, who explains that twenty years ago not all the crew mutinied and that those that didn't accidentally set the telescope to destroy Earth before they died, and that he has been trying to switch it off ever since. He also explains that while they were all still doing their jobs they discovered loads of lovely planets everywhere, but no life of any kind, and it made them depressed.
Roy grabs the Lima data, sets the self-destruct and tries to spacewalk back to Cepheus with his dad, but Cliff gets depressed and jets off into the void. Alone again, Roy spins up on a radar antenna and surfs a piece of it through Neptune's rings back to Cepheus, where he rides the blast from the Lima explosion all the way back to Earth.
This film was made to make space travel look boring. It has got to be deliberate.
Doom: Annihilation (2019)
There's A Chainsaw
Macho (and that includes the whamen) space marines running around fairly smart but generic space station sets firing endless rounds off at zombies and flame throwing demons. Plot about UAC secret teleport project on Phobos unwittingly opening a gate to hell. Coloured key cards. Wall mounted first aid stations. A BFG 9000. Actually getting to see Hell. Imps and a Hell Knight. No Nazis, spider masterminds, beholders etc, and I would have made the BFG do far worse damage, but you can't have everything. Honestly, it may not be the film that Doom fans want, but it's the film that Doom fans deserve. I know, because I remember the late nineties stuck on my old old old PC having just one more go at getting through the level before bed and then noticing light around the curtains and you realise that you have to be at your desk to start work in an hour.
Unlike The Rock's 2005 version with ancient Martian genes causing mutation, this version does follow cannon, as much as a nineties video game has cannon, so it is actually a Doom movie, not just another space marine v space monster movie that pinched the title, like 2005. I'd have enjoyed that one a lot more if they had just called it something else. E.g. "Marsageddon".
Tiny wee Scots lass Amy Manson (Trainspotting 2) is hilarious as the main man. Stunning and brave.
Time Trap (2017)
Ambitious and Perfect Low Budget SciFi B Movie
Good character development and dialogue, good actors, an unusual premise, very well done. Photography and special effects are excellent. Some very clever details and twists.
Not many films conjure up a sense of existential hopelessness, but this ones does. I got invested in the bleak and seemingly inescapable situation that the characters slowly realise they have unwittingly wandered into, and it would have terrified me.
Voice from the Stone (2017)
First Rate Ghost Story
This is not a horror film, which many ghost stories are these days, hence, I think, some of the poor reviews, but if you like mystery and creepy goings on around a huge country mansion in an Italian forest estate, with a bit of romance, this delivers. I found myself engrossed, and the ending was nicely ambiguous.
The production values are high, with excellent photography set all over numerous beautiful Italian estates. Emilia Clarke is a solid leading actress, convincingly sliding from "Pefect Nurse" through "too emotionally involved" then down into "haunted madwoman", and proves that she can headline a film.
The League of Gentlemen (1999)
Far Too Close To Home
I remember watching this with a Scottish friend when it came out, very late at night. At the end of the first episode he was still laughing, and noticed me sitting apparently unmoved. "Didn't you think that was funny?" he asked. I replied, "That's where I grew up."
Not just the actual filming location, Hadfield, 6 miles from where I lived until 21, but the multicoloured plastic strip door curtains that the rest of England gave up in the 70s, the butcher who acted like we still had rationing and he was doing you a slightly illegal favour, the misanthropic bottom tier civil servants, the ambitious burned-out businessman on the edge, the two scary little girls, the family that looks like a tiny cult, the shop that never seems to sell anything and yet never closes, the accents, oh God, the accents... The North. My North.
It gratifies me that Americans can get the humour. I suppose Yorkshire is the UK's answer to hillbillies.
Nightflyers (2018)
Good Space Horror
I enjoyed it.
Plusses - Awesome sets and special effects. Good acting. High concept. Often scary.
Minuses - poor world building eg: is the Nightflyer a privateer with a secret family history and a small crew on a jaunt (like in the novella) or is it Earth's greatest spaceship on a mission to save humanity?
I can see why they had to expand the terms of the novella to fill out ten episodes, otherwise a cast of seven would have gotten claustrophobic, but sometimes characters act like they are alone in a haunted house, not aboard a spaceship with a crew of hundreds to call on for help. The all-purpose excuse for this irrational behaviour is that everyone is going madder as they approach the Volcron (who, btw, are good for a very eerie CGI trip in the last episode).
They must have known that a second season wasn't going to happen, because they left nowhere for the show to go. Either we get to see Karl's further adventures inside the Volcron, which has already been sold to us as fundamentally inconceivable, or the remaining crew and ship limp back to Earth, a whole season of getting further away from the whole point of the story.
Personally I think the Volcron are evil. Nobody comes back from the dead, the Volcron just use memories and illusions to manipulate humans through their fear of death
Sum1 (2017)
Too Many Loose Ends
Well acted, filmed and designed, this film has all the things it needs except one - a good script. The cheapest stage of any film is the script writing, because it takes place independently of all the others and only requires one person and a $300 laptop. That is the stage when the writer should have decided to work out for himself and then tell the audience the answers to questions like:
Why can't we kill giant crabs with tanks, drones and aerial gunships?
How did they travel through space to get here apparently naked?
Why does no-one have any drone footage of them? Who decided to call them The Nonesuch and why?
If they are real why are some survivors more scared of the army?
If V.A.X. 7 didn't kill himself why is there that blood stain on the wall?
When S.U.M. 1 saw V.A.X. 7 in the shadows he must have actually been there because he was recorded on video, which must mean that he'd broken into a maximum security military bunker without being caught by any of the cameras and then escaped again before the lights came back on, which is daft.
What were the toxic emissions, human or Nonesuch, and why didn't they kill S.U.M. 1?
Why call someone "S.U.M. 1" unless you want them to doubt their own sanity?
It Comes at Night (2017)
A Beautifully Made Empty Box
This qualifies as art-house because it is very well made but has no plot. And by "a plot" I mean a series of causally connected events, not a bag of non-sequiters and loose ends. It irks me, and I suspect I'm not alone, when a film raises my curiosity with intriguing puzzles and then blows a raspberry in my face gloating "you'll never know what killed the dog and it only annoys you because you're a knuckle- dragging Philistine who can't handle artistic ambiguity and has to have everything spelt out for them!".
Okay, I can see how the two families might be a metaphor for Mankind's history of conglomerization and the pitfalls of uniting tribes, and the two guys we met for two minutes might represent bandits preying on civilisation, but I wouldn't have to be thinking about this if these two characters had any history or context as part of a plot.
Did Will actually know the two guys? Why is Will inconsistent in describing his family? What are the rules of the plague? How do you catch it? Who opened the red door? How did the kid get in Grandad's room? Was he actually infected? If he was, how? Where did Will get the pistol? Why did no-one have a radio?
It's not clever or fair to raise interesting questions like these and then just forget all about them. It makes me feel that I was conned into emotionally investing in the film.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
Superior Scary Supernatural Horror
The two male leads have great on screen chemistry and the premise gradually reveals itself with supernatural dread. The film earns it's title by actually showing you the entire autopsy from start to finish, of Jane Doe. I like it when things are that perversely literal.
Some people have called this film Lovecraftian but it is not, it is something much more traditional. If you want Lovecraftian try The Void, just a little bit better in my humble opinion.
The Void (2016)
Lovecraft's Lovechild
Brilliantly well done in every department, this film is a great horror film. Constantly raising the stakes and surprising me it kept me engrossed, and sometimes grossed out. No flimsy CGI that I could see, the effects are all practical and lashings of them.
The whole plot made sense to me right up to the end. But I won't divulge.
Huge fun.
Black Mountain Side (2014)
Atmospheric Indie That Is Short On Ideas
An indie must be low budget which necessarily means small cast, small sets, and few special effects, but it doesn't have to mean a meandering script and a weak ending. The cheapest part of any movie is the script so there is never an excuse for a bad one.
Cinematography and acting are good but there is no satisfying resolution. It feels like half a story, a few creepy random events cobbled together on the run with no convincing conclusion in mind. How could the crew spend months making this and not notice that?
Day of Reckoning (2016)
They Really Tried
The good points:
1 It takes itself seriously, it is not a daft parody of science fiction like Sharknado.
2 Interesting premise - millions of monsters from deep beneath the Earth's crust rise up world wide during some eclipses to eat people.
3 Good dialogue and acting. Generally not bad direction and editing.
4 Several types of monster (avian, bovine, humanoid, small worm things, giant worm things) suggest a subterranean ecosystem somewhere.
5 Okay CGI. Vast hordes are depicted with conviction. Close-up hand to hand battles, less so.
The problems:
1 There is no attempt to understand or explain the creatures, which a sci-fi or horror film ought to try to do. Some people think they are literal demons, which some people would, but why would subterranean creatures react to a total eclipse they cannot possibly detect? Is it because they really are supernatural? I can see why cold would bother them but why salt? Salt is a traditional weapon against magical threats, again suggesting a supernatural nature. They decay rapidly into red mulch when dead but nobody mentions this, making me think this was added at the CGI stage and was not in the script.
2 Just one is seen at night apparently either dead or paralysed, but mysteriously still intact. Nothing is made of this potentially intriguing episode.
3 Several action scenes are missing short vital events necessary to make the scenes flow and make sense. Easily fixable, so why weren't they? Was it edited in a rush?
It still manages to be one of the best SyFy channel movies.
Raging Balls of Steel Justice (2013)
Hilarious 80s Action Homage
It's every 80s action film condensed into 15 minutes of non-stop violent claymation, executed with great care and tremendous technical skill. Beautifully sculpted clay models, stop-motion animated, are enhanced with CGI explosions, the whole thing directed and edited like a really good action film. Some bits look almost real.
English humourist Miles Kington once said that for a parody to work the parodist had to truly love his subject, and Mike Mort must love those old 80s action movies to create this. It made me laugh with every single frame. It's fast, dense, clever and painstakingly well done, and unlike maverick cop-on-the-edge Chuck Steel it plays by ALL the rules.
The Harvest (2013)
Intense, Well Acted Drama
This is not a horror film but a gripping thriller with horrific aspects powered by two actors both of whom do intense better than anyone, Michael Shannon and Samantha Morton. Morton is particularly good, terrifyingly on the edge of becoming completely unhinged most of the time, although seemingly tiny next to Shannon. The two child actors also deliver convincing performances, Natasha Calis and Charlie Tahan (Gotham's young Scarecrow). Their relationship drives the plot and works well.
It starts off slow then gradually builds up its tension and shocks without resorting to improbable melodrama. A very good film.
Capsule (2015)
Fifty Years Too Late
Fylingdales Station (the one with the giant golf balls) is located in Yorkshire and though it is nominally an RAF base it is operated in cooperation with America as part of an intelligence-sharing arrangement between the United States and the United Kingdom. If Hermes was being monitored from there the Yanks would have known all about it.
American or British personnel, including astronauts and test pilots, involved in top secret programmes are heavily investigated and so are their families. Anyone hiding a thick Russian accent under a plummy English rose wouldn't last long.
The Russians and Americans both launched a man into space in 1961. I would LOVE to think that the Brits beat them to it in 1959, but the idea is about as plausible as First Men In The Moon and Cavorite.
Britain's only rocket launch base was Woomera in Australia, and nothing we ever had could reach orbit. Our most powerful rocket was Blue Steel and that was cancelled in 1965 at the behest of the Americans (who didn't want the UK to have an independent ICBM) in return for an IMF loan to bail out Harold Wilson's bankrupt government.
I get the feeling that this was rushed out as a piece of tatty anti- Russian propaganda because of the situation in Syria. Ahhh... smells like the sixties all over again!
Tank 432 (2015)
Jacob's Tank
It is half suggested by the end of the film that this is about a group of soldiers and civilians being used as guinea pigs for an orange powder super soldier drug called Kratos that heals injuries in some people and just kills others but sends everyone mad.
We join the party mid story. They seem to be taking the situation too seriously for it to be an exercise but know too little about anything for it to be an episode from an actual conflict with a history. For all they eventually reveal about their situation and motives they may as well all be acting on instinct with amnesia. They find a car that won't start because the engine has been replaced with something that makes all who behold it vomit, you won't find out what. They find a farm shed with headless bodies in it. They run away from a teleporting guy in a cloak and gas mask who is bullet proof, nobody seems to know why. They randomly wander across an abandoned tank and get locked in it for the rest of the film, then find all their own scrappy personnel files in it, plus a few glass tubes of Kratos. There is a facially mutilated body with dog tags seemingly belonging to a platoon member who has already died miles before. The doctor keeps shooting people up with stuff that the leader is making secret notes on, but he doesn't know why. One guy takes an actual lovingly photographed sloppy bowel dump. A prisoner finds a gun and kills most of the survivors. Guys in full hazmat suits with one guy in a pinstripe suit and a splash mask turn up and flame thrower the tank.
There is a theory that every story has been told, and so now we are reduced to remakes for ever. Or, some people make mood films with bits of stories mashed up and let the audience do the hard work, because actual comprehensible stories are so last decade.
The monster in the publicity photos only appears in a choppy dream sequence.
The Last Days on Mars (2013)
My Favourite Space Zombie Movie
Good script, excellent dialogue and acting, first rate prop design, photography and special effects... granted the basic idea is fifty years old but it has never been done so well. The cast is full of convincing actors who would normally never appear in a space zombie movie and all of them treat the whole thing like a serious character drama with total commitment.
As a sci-fi fan I appreciate it when a script simply refuses to ignore the rules of physics. Apart from the mystery bacteria/fungus/whatever that turns people into vacuum-breathing space zombies this film is painstakingly realistic, and the astronauts may be scared and under pressure but they never turn stupid. I found it more realistic than The Martian and more enjoyable for about a tenth the budget. It's fast, violent and scary and it had me gripped from start to finish.
How they did this for seven million dollars I do not know but if that really is all it cost why can't we have a few like this every year? A perfect B movie, and I mean that as the most sincere compliment.
Darkest Day (2015)
Well Done Brit Indie Action Horror
Not bad for an Indie. It is set in the 28 Days Later version of Brighton and the deserted city is convincingly portrayed on a budget of about £1,000, according to the DVD extras. The army scenes are particularly well done, and I had to watch the making-of-doc in the extras to find out that the helicopter scenes were very, very good model work and CGI done by the director Dan Rickard himself. The acting is a bit ropey but I have seen far worse, especially since none of the cast are actually actors. Most of the action scenes are very well shot and edited and show that this director has talent. The early scenes in the squat reminded me of the Brighton I got to know years ago.
All of the plot lines are left unresolved, such as the giant speakers, and the ending felt like the writer just gave up like the main character did, but the film is still often gripping and worth watching to see what can be possible for a British indie these days.
Somebody should give Rickard a decent script and a budget.
Grimsby (2016)
Either Raises Or Lowers The Bar On Filth
Good Lord this is filthy, and I laughed right through it, sometimes crying tears. I can totally see why some people would hate it, many scenes are hard to watch. The "plot" cracks along and the jokes are pretty much continuous, and filthy. Mark Strong not only makes a convincing James Bond type secret agent but is as equally committed to embracing the film's sense of humour, following Cohen into new filthy territory. Cohen, as usual, has no internal breaks and doesn't seem to be even trying to figure out where he should stop, he just keeps piling on the filth to levels hitherto undreamed of. The elephant bukake scene nearly broke me.
Being drunk will help, but you have to be able to enjoy filthy humour. Did I mention it's filthy?
The Incredible Melting Man (1977)
Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin
You can't really spoil this film, so I won't try. A perfectly linear plot with barely any twists hosed down with gore. Full-on horror with occasional and reasonably well done comic relief. This film has no message whatsoever. Tell a roomful of desperate writers to write a script knowing nothing more than that the title has to be "The Incredible Melting Man" and that the first to finish gets paid, and the winner would look something like this.
It could have been a TV movie production except for the very gory special effects, which are X-Certificate and laid on extremely thickly by the young master Rob Bottin. There are also a couple of boobs. 70s boobs.
If you think that you are the sort of person who might enjoy a film with a title like "The Incredible Melting Man", then you will definitely enjoy this film.
Parasite (1982)
Engaging Grindhouse Sci-Fi Thriller
I don't know how I missed this one when it came out, because I watched a LOT of VHS in the 80s. It's great. Characters fail to pull the trigger and consequently get disarmed on about half a dozen occasions when I would have just shot the muppet (there don't seem to be any police around) but otherwise this is a well-made action/horror/sci-fi thriller set in the outer dusty fringes of a future corporate dystopia with ray guns.
The world-building is simple enough but the elements fit together convincingly to frame a story in which an infected fugitive from a world-threatening corporate conspiracy stumbles into sleazy desert-dweller shenanigans.
No-one in it was ever heard from again apart from a feisty 20 year old Demi Moore in her third ever film.