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Advance Review: Panic Button

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Panic Button (2011)
Directed by: Chris Crow
Starring: Scarlett Alice Johnson, Jack Gordon, Michael Jibson, Elen Rhys
Review by: Nia Edwards-Behi

The horror genre has always been an effective arena for exploring the topical, and Panic Button is a film that does exactly that. Taking the tricky topic of social networking as its inspiration, this impressive low-budget thriller explores the more sinister possibilities of living online. Four strangers win a competition on social networking site All2Gethr that sees them boarding a swanky private jet taking them for a once in a lifetime trip to New York City. As they settle down to the in-flight entertainment – a game hosted by a CGI alligator – the group begins to realise the implications of their online actions, and the dark motivations of the people providing their luxury flight.

Most of Panic Button takes place in one location: the fancy private jet flying our cast of characters to NYC. Director Chris Crow, who made an impressive debut with twisted-slasher Devil’s Bridge, makes the most of the limited space, the claustrophobia mounting as the film ticks by. Luckily, the main cast of four more than withstand the gruelling close-ups and twisting narrative. Scarlett Alice Johnson makes for a strong lead as single mother Jo, while Elen Rhys is suitably wide-eyed as sweet girl Gwen. Jack Gordon’s Max is the most superficially likeable character, but it’s Michael Jibson who steals the show as Dave, the smartly-dressed but grossly laddish, irritating prick of a character that you’d definitely not want to be stuck on a plane with. He’s the kind of character whose demise you hope for, but for a change Dave’s an annoying character who is at least nuanced and intended to be that way. A large number of recent slasher films and survival films tend to be populated by unlikeable, two-dimensional characters. Although Panic Button’s unwitting victims are fairly obvious stereotypes, they’re at least likeable and well-developed. Even brilliantly-annoying Dave has his moments of sympathy. If not for this great sense of character, the film could easily have been a prosaic thriller.

Contributing to this is the tight script, the discussions about the clunky topic of social networking never coming across as anything but natural. It’s easy to treat a topic such as social networking, particularly when considering the more troubling side of the phenomenon, in an awkward way: the way social commentators might talk is entirely different to how every day users of networks like All2Gethr.com would talk about status updates and poking. Panic Button’s strong sense of character is what really keeps it together, as the narrative becomes increasingly twisty and verges on the over-blown – however, it never quite tips over that line into the realm of the unbelievable. The film is tense throughout, and the device of the creepy animated alligator character controlling events is surprisingly effective. It shouldn’t work, but it does, mostly thanks to Joshua Richards’ commanding, booming voice work. The melding of psychological horror with the topicality of the dark side of the internet is fairly seamless, matters such as cyber-bullying and voyeurism never seeming to be shoe-horned in for the sake of it. What’s key to this success is that the online actions of characters – from watching snuff videos to pretending to be someone they’re not – are never presented in a particularly sensationalist manner, and creepiest of all are the moments when you stop and think: ‘hey, I do that…’!

Panic Button is a breath of fresh air, a modern, original twist on a familiar narrative form. Keeping up an impressively tense atmosphere, this is a film that thrills as it makes you think. With upcoming festival screenings at FrightFest in August, and Abertoir in November (where you can also see director Chris Crow’s debut, Devil’s Bridge), Panic Button is home-grown horror worth seeking out.

Review: New Hammer Horror ‘Wake Wood’

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Wake Wood (2011)
Distributor: Dark Sky Films
DVD Release Date: July 5, 201
Directed by: David Keating
Starring: Aidan Gillen, Eva Birthistle, Timothy Spall, Ella Connolly
Review by: Keri O’Shea

Ah, Hammer. I must admit that seeing that Hammer logo appear on the big screen – replete with a brief montage of classic Hammer poster art – was something special. It also brought back feelings of trepidation: in its most recent incarnation, Hammer has (in my opinion) made a series of bad calls. So, what would they have to offer with Wake Wood? Well, here we have a film which, although quite unlike Hammer’s classic horror, still heralds a return of sorts to some familiar themes: isolated communities, the occult and the impermanence of death are all explored here, though by no means in a way which is intended to be instantly recognisable as classic Hammer fare. Wake Wood is very much its own film: it’s understated rather than overblown Gothic, and quietly threatening, not lurid.

One year after the loss of their six year old daughter, Alice, Louise (Eva Birthistle) and husband Patrick (Aiden Gillen) elect to make a clean break, moving to the village of Wake Wood, deep in rural Ireland. They try to get on with their lives, but – particularly for Louise, who cannot have any more children – Alice’s death still casts a very long shadow over the couple. When Louise decides she has to leave the village, the chain of ensuing events introduces Louise and Patrick to the dark, secret life of the Wake Wood community. Yet within that secret life lurks possibility: Louise and Patrick are offered an opportunity to bid a proper goodbye to their dead daughter…

The phenomenon of occult rites in an isolated community, all taking place under the watchful eye of patriarch Arthur (Timothy Spall) suggests obvious similarities to The Wicker Man; there is the same sense of warped functionality within the village, a functionality which can be destructive to outsiders. However, Wake Wood differs from The Wicker Man in many ways: here, the outsiders are willing participants in the village’s rituals – rituals which are altogether more grisly, and presented in much greater detail than in the film’s 1973 forebear.

It is this level of detail, though, which provides the Achilles heel of the film. The intricacies of the rites themselves beg a lot of questions which go unanswered; some additional exposition would have helped to thrash out some of the inconsistencies in the film’s plot, many of which occur due to the unexplained nature of the village’s occult practices. A little explanation would have sufficed to contextualise these rituals and their interesting-looking accoutrements (maybe even just a few lines of dialogue from ringleader Spall would have done) without sacrificing the palpable atmosphere of unease which pervades the film. Again, in places I found myself drawing comparisons with other horror films – Dead and Buried, perhaps, and Pet Sematary to a point – but the atmosphere and tone within Wake Wood is quite novel. I never felt I was simply watching a derivative piece of film. At its heart, Wake Wood is an examination of family trauma, and this theme is pulled apart and examined in an intriguing – deeply ambiguous – way here, one which never delivers moral absolutes or ultimately passes judgement on a fantastical turn of events. 

The Hammer brand carries with it many expectations and also, I maintain, due to its pedigree, certain responsibilities. Happily, Wake Wood manages to combine a requisite sense of continuity with a sense of exploration, as it develops upon some horror staples in a muted, yet still complex way. As much as I adore the Technicolor style of Hammer horror – and I maintain that there is still an audience for period Gothic – I can understand that Hammer does not wish to be limited by past successes, and that it wishes to strike out into modern film. Wake Wood is exactly the type of project, then, that Hammer should be promoting – something which can be promoted on its own terms as an interesting project, rather than defended as a bad idea, or as a reason to get mired in suggesting that ‘all Hammer’s great horrors were remakes’ (which they weren’t). Although there are flaws in the plot of Wake Wood, it’s still a great, gripping horror film, and I now feel enthused and encouraged about future projects like The Woman in Black. More fascinating, enigmatic horror stories such as this would be most welcome…

DVD Review: Slaughter High

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Slaughter High AKA The Jolly Killer (1986)
Distributor: Arrow Video
DVD Release Date: 11 July 2011
Directed by: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra, Peter Litten
Starring: Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore, Carmine Iannaconne, Donna Yeager
Review by: Ben Bussey

Good afternoon class. Can I have your attention please? Don’t give me that look, I’m just as anxious for the day to end as you are, but let’s push through it shall we? Now I’m going to start you off with an easy question. Who here has ever seen Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace? By show of hands. Come on, don’t be shy about it. Okay, quite a few of you. So, those of you who did see it; who among you felt, as I did, that it would have been considerably more effective as a recurring element of a sketch show rather than as a full half-hour comedy programme in its own right? Did any of you feel, as I did, that its recreation of the badly dated production values, limp writing and weak performances found in the genre-based television of the late 70s/early 80s was only fitfully amusing, and that it didn’t take long to grow tiresome?

If you answered yes, chances are that your reaction to Slaughter High may well be similar to mine.

Now, it’s no secret that I like me some slashers. They’re that rare breed of film where innovation of any kind is irrelevant, so long as the requisite quota of absurd gory deaths, cheesy dialogue and gratuitous nudity is met. However,  this might just be me, but I don’t think it hurts if the material is approached with at least a degree of sincerity. The bad writing and bad performances should not be self-consciously so. They needn’t be trying to make Citizen Kane with a machete, but the viewer should at least get a sense that all those involved really want to make a good, solid movie. As you may have surmised by now, I did not get that impression from Slaughter High.

As it was made at the tail end of the first wave of slasher movies, it’s more or less a given that Slaughter High would feel a bit stale. Typically, it’s an adolescent revenge story that can be summed up in a sentence: a nerd who was humiliated and accidentally disfigured in an April Fool’s prank that went too far seeks revenge on those that wronged him by staging a bogus five-year high school reunion. (It may come as little surprise that the film was written and shot as April Fool’s Day – curiously, it even carries that title in the opening credits – until Paramount paid off the producers for the rights to the title before releasing their better known April 1st slasher the same year.) Taken on its own the overfamiliarity of the premise is no great problem, but add it to the other little niggles and it all gets a bit trickier to swallow. The real elephant in the room is the age and nationality of the actors. It’s again pretty much accepted that the bulk of the ‘teenagers’ in these movies are in reality a bit older, but this one really takes the biscuit. Caroline Munro, lovely as she is, was 37 when this film was made, and she looks it. That’s not a slur, by the way. Any straight man of flexible morals would still happily accept an invitation to visit the girl’s showers with her, but as Penthouse Forum fantasy archetypes go you’d buy her more as the sexually frustrated gym teacher than the promiscuous cheerleader.

But here’s the real kicker; though it tries to pass itself off as an all-American slasher, Slaughter High is actually a British production. This fact is abundantly clear almost immediately, as there is not a single convincing American accent to be found. Nor does much of the dialogue ring true-blue USA. Subsequently the whole endeavour feels like some half-arsed British amateur dramatics production of an American play. It doesn’t help that school setting and the surrounding countryside (brief though its appearance may be) also look about as convincingly American as Dick Van Dyke is convincingly cockney. You can dress it up as Mom’s apple pie, but it still smells like spotted dick with custard to me. (Yes, Americans, that’s the actual name of a British pudding.) And perhaps it’s inevitable that a film with three directors would feel a tad disjointed; just because it worked for Airplane!, don’t expect similar results.

Of course, none of this need be a negative. This enhanced absurdity may well boost the entertainment value for some, particularly given the death scenes which, even for the time, are notably lurid; take the mid-coitus electrocution, and the exploding stomach (both of which are briefly shown in the trailer below). Fans of the ridiculous should be happy as Larry, then. But, to bring it back to my Garth Marenghi analogy, to me it just feels a bit too knowing, too clever-clever nudge-nudge wink-wink. While it wears its 80s origins on its sleeve, in many respects Slaughter High feels spiritually closer to the (considerably inferior) 90s second-wave slashers, in all their ‘post-modern/ironic’ self-importance. It’s doesn’t skimp on the gore and nudity like most of those did, though, which I’ll admit does go some way to making amends.

The disc itself is another winner from Arrow, with commentaries, interviews and other such supplemental material in abundance, and the digital transfer of the film looks great. But still, were I to compile a list of the great forgotten entries in the first wave of the slasher genre, I rather doubt there’d be a place for this one. Check it out by all means, but don’t anticipate a lost classic.

UK DVD Review: Siren

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Siren (2010)
Distributor: Matchbox Films
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date (UK): 27th June 2011
Directed by: Andrew Hull
Starring: Eoin Macken, Anna Skellern, Tereza Srbova, Anthony Jabre
Review by: Nia Edwards-Behi

To say that the cover for this DVD is a little misleading might be a bit of an understatement. To say that it’s got absolutely sod-all to do with the film would be more accurate. Obviously aiming for a certain audience, Siren is a film that actually deserves better than pigeon-holing into a ‘cor, this has got sexy ladies in it!’ slot.

Rachel (Anna Skellern), our beautiful, somewhat coy leading lady, and her boyfriend Ken (Eoin Macken) meet up with old friend Marco (Anthony Jabre) for a weekend away on a borrowed boat in the Mediterranean off Tunisia. Their ideas for a paradisiacal break together are thwarted when they take on board a castaway who promptly dies on the deck of their yacht. In the middle of nowhere, they take his body to nearby island to discover a second castaway, the enchanting Silka (Tereza Srbova). Stuck on the island, the four hot-blooded companions find themselves in an increasingly paranoid, tense and deadly situation, as rivalries and insecurities come to the fore.

Siren is certainly an attractive film, both in its good-looking cast and its exotic location. Impressively, what could become something of a sleaze-fest avoids such trappings, and mercifully the cast put in some solid performances. The women come off best, perhaps with more to work with. Skellern ensures Anna just about stays on the right side of annoyingly earnest and sensible, while Srbova brings some impressive subtlety to a role that could easily have simply required her to look pretty (which she certainly does). The sadly late Andrew Hull directs the film with some flair, providing much of the film’s sinister atmosphere even in its ostensibly blissful setting.

I’ve seen the film a couple of times now, and I actually preferred it on the second watch. Some of the moments that made me roll my eyes the first time round – it’s not a film until some girls start kissing! – aren’t nearly so irritating upon rewatch. The reason being, quite simply, that Siren has a decently strong plot. Feeling a little like a horror film from the 1940s – but with a lot of added sex – Siren plays on a fairly universal sense of paranoia regarding relationships and self-worth. It’s refreshing to see a relatively low-budget film that relies on its story rather than elaborate or gory set-pieces. It’s evident that those making Siren weren’t willing to treat its audience like idiots, which makes for a very nice change. The film might not do anything too thrillingly new or original, but at least it does what it does with respect for its audience. One of the film’s highlights is the film’s most violent, some nifty editing and sound design making for a nice, understated moment of monstrosity. It’s a shame that some later scenes employ some very obvious CGI blood, presumably just to up the requisite gore tally. It’s worth mentioning the film’s excellent opening sequence as one that very effectively sets the tone for the rest of the film, the nuances of which become increasingly apparent on the second view.

The one extra feature on this DVD is some deleted scenes – mostly variations on what’s in the end product – which serve to emphasise the mythological aspect of the film, which I imagine was cut simply to make it less talky. A shame, but the film doesn’t really lose out for being less on the nose. As it is, it’s an interesting thriller that’s worth picking up – and not just for the half-naked woman on the cover.

UK DVD Review: The Pack

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The Pack (La Meute) (2010)
Distributor: Icon Home Entertainment
DVD Release Date (UK): 4th July 2011
Directed by: Franck Richard
Starring: Yolande Moreau, Émilie Dequenne, Benjamin Biolay, Philippe Nahon
Review by: Ben Bussey

It began like any other day on a bleak/remote/desolate country road in deepest darkest France. A moody emo girl burned down the road in her dirty old car, blasting metal on the CD player and ruminating on how miserable she is. Along the way she attracts the attention of some randy bikers. And then, for whatever reason, she stops to pick up a hitchhiker. Ah, what am I saying, he’s a pretty long-haired Frenchman, I know why she stopped to pick him up. Soon they stop off at a bleak/remote/desolate roadside bar named La Spack. Those same bikers show up, and confrontation ensues, but this is quickly dissapated by the landlady of the establishment, apparently also named La Spack. But just when things seem to be looking up for our moody emo girl heroine, it suddenly transpires that – shock horror – things are not quite what they seem…

Yep. It begins like any other day on a bleak/remote/desolate country road, and it ends that way too. It should subsequently come as no surprise that incarceration, torture and the consumption of human flesh follow in no short order. I would have opted to keep it a secret that in this particular instance the old hillbilly horror format is tweaked ever so slightly with the inclusion of monsters, but as this is made abundantly clear by the very nice Graham Humphreys cover art there doesn’t seem much point keeping it under wraps. And indeed, now that I’ve told you that there seems very little left to say on the subject of The Pack. It takes an existing formula that has been put to film innumerable times, gives it a few minor twists, but ultimately fails to take the audience on a journey that it hasn’t been on a thousand times before.

It must be tricky these days to be a first time writer/director working in the horror genre in France. Franck Richard has quite the standard to live up to. And while his film may look and sound very nice, and have some strong central performances, his efforts can’t help but look a bit pedestrian by comparison with those of his fellow countrymen Aja, Maury and Bustillo, and Laugier (and I say that as one who didn’t even like Martyrs very much). Not only that, but The Pack has the whole survivalist/hillbilly horror tradition to live up to, and again it just doesn’t stand up well by comparison.

There’s plenty that works. As previously stated, it’s all very pleasing aesthetically, and well-acted. Yolande Moreau makes for a good villianess, thanks to the way she approaches feeding people to the creatures that live in the earth with the same emotionless, workmanlike manner in which she runs her establishment. Also, for those like myself who know Philippe Nahon only for his turn as the nightmarish killer of Aja’s Haute Tension, it’s curiously entertaining to see him take on such a different role as the seemingly incompetent local policeman who might be more than meets the eye; definite shades of Colombo there. As for Émilie Dequenne and Benjamin Biolay; well, they’re young, good looking and French, so they clearly don’t have anything to worry about. Their characters are less endearing, and as such their performances are of somewhat less interest.

I missed The Pack when it played at FrightFest last year, and I can’t say I’m sorry. Subsequently I don’t think it’s one you should begrudge missing on DVD. Much as with such other recent French horrors like Mutants and The Horde, it’s not exactly a bad film; it’s just that I personally just can’t shake a feeling of overfamiliarity. Who knows, you may well feel otherwise. Stranger things have happened.

UK DVD Review: Neighbor

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Neighbor (2010)
Distributor: High Flier Films
DVD Release Date (UK): 27th June 2011
Directed by: Robert A. Masciantonio
Starring: America Olivo, Christian Campbell, Mink Stole
Review by: Keri O’Shea

Editor’s note: Neighbor has been reviewed elsewhere on Brutal as Hell by Marc – you can check out his thoughts here. Beware of moderate spoilers ahead.

Is there a way of reinvigorating the horribly hackneyed ‘torture porn’ subgenre? For a type of horror film which has had a comparatively short, yet abundant lifespan, it is remarkable how quickly even the most extreme movies have settled into cliché: people tied to chairs, people assaulted with household tools, the menace of facial disfiguration…these things are now as obligatory as longhaired ghosts in the cinema of the Far East or the omnipresent masked killers of slasher flicks. So – and speaking as someone who became immune to excruciating gore on screen at some point shortly after seeing Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood around fifteen years ago – does torture still have a future? For me, at this point, it can only be achieved by a steadily-building relationship with characters; this doesn’t mean I have to like them, but I have to be able to empathise with them and I definitely need to feel they exist in the first place. No pathos, no point. It is not enough to presuppose that it is ‘subversive’ to swap the obligatory tool-wielding male for a tool-wielding female; it is certainly not enough to conjure up a montage of bloody sequences, especially when the censorship of the most notable of those scenes lessens the film’s bite so significantly. Yet, this seems to be the premise with Neighbor, a film so keen to try to shock that it dispenses with many of the elements which could have helped to make it a success. The film shows its hand almost immediately, introducing us to our killer, where she is and how she operates. We even see as much of her motivation in the first sequences as we’re ever shown. This is a gal who vaguely seems interested in what death means, and that’s all the audience gets: the rest of the film makes little attempt to generate suspense, simply picking off a few of the residents of a suburban area in a bloody fashion before moving on. I felt too distant from the brutality on screen to really care.

The plot is thus: nameless girl (America Olivo) is shown dancing about in her nightclothes somewhere in banal suburbia before finding some folk tied to chairs (natch!) upstairs. At first she’s shocked but you see, she isn’t actually shocked at all, because she’s the guilty party. After this, she’s on the look-out for her next victims, and after a few disjointed murder set pieces in the local area, she espies Doug (Christian Campbell) and his friends. They seem ideal, so she keeps an eye on Doug’s place until it’s a good time to strike. When she does, she ties him up and mauls him in a variety of ways, extending this treatment to anyone along the way who calls in.

In the midst of this standard torture treatment (and it looks as though the British Board of Film Classifications have rejected the infamous penis torture scene which was one of the movie’s chief calling-cards) Neighbor takes an excursion from its linear format to toy with timeshifts and to intimate that it is all a dream or a trip. There is no resolution to these sequences of repetition and (possible) hallucination: during the commentary, director Robert Angelo Masciantonio and producer Charles St John Smith III suggest that they experimented with this as a way of ‘getting to know the characters’ but insist that it is not overdone. Hmmm. If I was being entirely cynical, I might suspect that what we have here is filler, but in any case, you need a sturdy screenplay to withstand this sort of development. It worked in Funny Games USA, but only because the whole film was a well-constructed assault on the concept of home, not a series of gory tableaux in which the audience have little invested. I felt further removed from proceedings by the suggestion that Doug was dreaming (as well as confused by what sort of mushroom trip would be quite that bad!)

Something which is very interesting about this film is its (self-proclaimed) subversive approach to gender stereotypes: I don’t mean simply in terms of casting a woman as the killer, but also in commissioning an audio commentary by a film studies tutor/doctorate-holder. Now, gender in horror is a hot topic of late, and horror itself is gradually being explored by an academic community which had all but ignored horror and genre cinema as grounds for serious study for many years. However, it is all the same still unusual to have an academic commentary on a film like Neighbor. Much of the commentary explores the film along the lines of a film studies lecture: describing potential desired effects of using certain shots, suggesting symbolism behind colour choices in the film, and so on, but it also focuses particularly on ‘expected genre roles’.

So, is Neighbor really a gender-subversive film? I would say no. It suffers from the schizophrenia which is at the heart of much gender-subversive cinema and critique: utterly dependent on stereotypes on one hand and in many ways as reductivist as the stereotypes it wishes to subvert. Neighbor seeks to deliver an ass-kicking heroine because this is unusual, but cannot quite bring itself to give us a believable one: we get, as the commentary reiterates, a woman with a Playboy model body and ‘come to bed’ eyes – i.e. very usual – who can yet crush a man’s windpipe with one manicured hand or beat up a guy as he flails around looking for a weapon (a weapon? Try punching her – you’re twice her weight, fella).  For all the film’s deliberate unstitching of assumptions about The Girl’s gender though, it’s nothing compared to what we’re told about the guys in the film. Being men, their conversation is, we are told, immediately ‘sexual and violent’; men stigmatise other men who are in relationships; men are interested only in tawdry sex; men can’t be trusted with household tasks; men just discuss bodily functions…this eventually feeds into a sort of jubilance, as the Playgirl-bodied actress proceeds to mistreat them. The film tries to question gender stereotypes yet quickly falls back on basic misandry. Whilst I’m not sold on this idea of horror as a gender arena in the first place – horror serves many functions but fairness is seldom a factor – I would have liked Neighbor a lot more if it didn’t rely so heavily on that it seeks to undo (see also: the film’s UK release cover). It makes – it needs – a stack of assumptions of its own.

It isn’t a disaster: I applaud the filmmakers for using make-up effects as opposed to CGI, and a lot of the gory effects are interesting: I’m not staunchly anti-CGI, it has its place, but the film definitely benefits from having real-time blood and guts. Some of the dialogue has a sense of mischief, too. However, there is little to love about this movie. Like Murder Set Pieces – actually, just like Murder Set Pieces – it seeks to shock, but for those of us who want more context for their ‘scenes of an unsettling nature’ it is just another disjointed torture flick, only this time with more than one axe to grind therein.

UK Blu-Ray Review: Dario Argento’s ‘Tenebrae’

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Tenebrae (1982)
Distributor: Arrow
Blu-Ray/DVD Release Date: 27th June 2011
Directed by: Dario Argento
Starring: Anthony Franciosa, John Saxon, Daria Nicolodi, Veronica Lario
Review by: Nia Edwards-Behi

It’s possible for Dario Argento’s body of work to be considered as being markedly in decline, post-Tenebrae. Despite some solid films – Phenomena, Terror at the Opera, Sleepless – and some not-so-solid that are still watchable – The Stendhal Syndrome, Trauma – the 1982 giallo perhaps marks Argento’s last truly great film.

Tenebrae sees Argento return to the genre that made him famous after a pair of supernatural horror films, and sees him transplant just a smidge of the gothic sensibility gained on Suspiria and Inferno into the hyper-clinical world of a semi-futuristic Rome. American novelist Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) arrives in Italy to promote his latest best-seller, the titular Tenebrae. He is soon contacted by the local police, after the body of beautiful young woman is found brutally murdered, and with pages from the novel stuffed into her mouth. This is the first of a series of murders that closely resemble those featured in Neal’s novel. When Neal begins to receive death threats, he decides to take the investigation into his own hands, and slowly unravels a haunting and twisted mystery.

I’ve never been wholly convinced of Argento’s claim that he intended for Tenebrae to be set in a future version of Rome, but his representation of the city is certainly a bleak and desolate one, making the best use of its rationalist architecture and steering completely clear of all its ancient landmarks. People die in this city, and passers-by barely bat an eyelid. This clinical backdrop is lensed by Suspiria’s cinematographer Lucio Tovoli, but gone are the dark shadows and garish colours of the earlier film; instead concrete and whitewash are starkly and brightly lit.

Tenebrae is a film wholly concerned with doubles, as has previously been written about (see Maitlind McDonagh’s excellent book ‘Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds’). The film itself serves a double purpose, as both tense thriller and subtle parody. The over the top sexism, the gratuitous nudity, the sometimes cartoonish violence all highlight and exaggerate unfair criticisms aimed at Argento’s (and his peers’) films. Within the film, the murders in Neal’s book are replicated by the real life killer, the victims figured as deviant or non-deviant by killer and author respectively. Characters mirror each other too: Anne and Detective Altieri, Anne and Jane, Gianni and Maria, Gianni and Bullmer, Neal and Detective Germani, Neal and Christiano Berti…characters reflect each other, both in their similarities and their differences. Even scenes a viewer expects to see are replaced with their opposite: where one might expect a sex scene, violence takes its place: when Anne and Neal spend the night together, Argento shows us not their coupling, but a flashback to a vicious stabbing of a beautiful woman from the killer’s past. It’s in the body of this woman that this sense of doubling reaches its peak: Eva Robins, the actress who plays the formative woman, was born a man.

There’s a certain sense of doubling or mirroring in the very fabric of the film: if the film seems fake or overly-choreographed, it’s because that’s precisely the purpose. The shoplifter Elsa Manni (Ania Pieroni) perhaps puts it best when she tries to defend her theft by exclaiming ‘it was only a paperback, for Christ’s sake!’ Tenebrae is a giallo both as a film and as a book within the film, and if the giallo is anything, it is violent, it’s sub-literature, it’s trash cinema. The killer in the film takes photos of his victims, and this idea of staged, faked violence is shown at its best in the most bravura and celebrated sequence of the film: the death of journalist Hilde and her lover, featuring a lengthy, apparently pointless and utterly brilliant crane shot around the outside of their apartment building. The murder of the two women importantly ends on the image of a camera’s viewfinder, at once drawing attention to the staged nature of the murders, as well as the position of the killer as an artist who has composed his photos with definite detail. This returns to the idea of the film as a parody: as Argento himself describes it as a sort of ‘joke’ – if critics equate his on-screen violence with actual violence, then here he is, proclaiming the murderer as artist.

Tenebrae’s artistry is beautifully rendered in Arrow’s new HD transfer. Its set pieces, such as the Louma crane shot and the red high-heels flashback look utterly glorious in a clear and stark version of the film. At times, the sound can be a bit problematic, with the soundtrack coming out a lot more loudly than much of the dialogue, but this is really just a small concern. I had feared that the special features on the disc were starting to get repetitive, but my fears were unfounded. The interviews with Claudio Simonetti, Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi are as insightful as ever. It delights me every time to listen to Nicolodi talk about her work, as she is so frank and so affectionate about it. She describes Argento as a prima donna with a devilish giggle, and it’s a truly lovely moment. A great extra feature included on this set is recording from the partially-reformed Goblin’s live show at the Glasgow arches in February of this year. Playing both Tenebrae and Phenomena, there’s some great band banter in between.

Arrow have possibly out-done themselves with this Blu-Ray set. If Tenebrae marks a downturn in Argento’s own filmmaking canon, I very much doubt the same will apply to a truly great label for genre fans.

UK Blu-Ray Review: New York Ripper

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New York Ripper (L’Eventreuer De New York) (1982)
Distributor: Shameless Screen Entertainment
Blu-Ray Release Date (UK): 27 June 2011
Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Jack Hedley, Almanta Keller, Alexandra Delli Colli
Review by: Nia Edwards-Behi

A maniac terrorises New York City, slicing up attractive young women and taunting the police with bizarre phone calls. The killer has two fingers missing from his right hand, and the voice of a duck. Its combination of mean-spirited violence and gratuitous sex has ensured it a special place in sleaze-cinema history. This new edition of one of the nastiest of Lucio Fulci’s films is preceded by an opening scroll, courtesy distributor Shameless Screen Entertainment. It outlines that this is still a cut version of the film, despite their negotiations with the BBFC. They’ve made great attempts to mask the cut best that they can, and, according to Shameless, this is the most complete version of New York Ripper available in the world. The still-offensive scene that the BBFC refuses to budge on – the death of the prostitute Kitty – is fairly apparent, but Shameless has done an admirable job in editing it so that it doesn’t stand out too sorely from the rest of the film.

The most unwatchable part of New York Ripper, for me? All the close ups of Jane’s mouth– when she watches the sex show, when she’s molested at the bar. I don’t know why, but something about the way her mouth twitches repulses me. Of course, pretty much every single scene to feature Jane (Alexandra Delli Colli) is repulsive, her character more or less existing in the film for the sole purpose of various scenes of sexual degradation, masked as character back story, prior to a protracted murder sequence. It’s her character that makes the film most troublesome for me, and it’s certainly the film’s treatment of women that has made it so enduringly infamous. An interesting discussion emerges in the interviews on the disc with writer Dardano Sacchetti and Antonella Fulci as to whether or not the film is misogynistic. Sacchetti recalls pissing off Fulci’s daughter by suggesting her father was a misogynist himself, a claim she evidently disagrees with, as she claims that New York Ripper isn’t a film that hates women. Personally, it’s incredibly difficult to defend the film as not misogynistic, but I’d also struggle to accuse Fulci himself of being a misogynist in light of his earlier work.

It’s easy to focus on the film’s treatment of women, given as that it’s the most remarkable aspect of it. As a police procedural the film is prosaic, no twist or turn emerging that, by 1982, would be unfamiliar to giallo fans. The acting is passable enough, though the dialogue is trite at best (having said that, my favourite line is a corker: ‘I’m a prostitute, not your wife!’ as a response to a request for a cup of coffee). Some bravura sequences see an apartment searched entirely from the point of view of one of the police officers, and throat slicing shot from, er, inside the throat; but stylistically New York Ripper can’t match Fulci’s early gialli, and nor does it have the same narrative charm as his supernatural films.

Of course, as far as sleaze cinema goes, New York Ripper is quite the paragon. The high-definition transfer provided by Shameless is great to look at and the choice of English dub or Italian dub is a great feature, even though the subtitles provided for the Italian dub are a little imperfect, insofar as they’re badly punctuated. The film isn’t without its defenders; the booklet provided by Shameless is adapted from Stephen Thrower’s book on Fulci, in which he declares New York Ripper as one of his ‘best’. Thrower mounts a compelling defence of the film as a nihilistic vision of modern humanity, but it doesn’t quite convince me that the film is superior to Fulci’s other work. As far as I’m concerned, the value of New York Ripper lies strictly in its paracinematic qualities, and as part of Fulci’s broader canon of work.

UK DVD Review: Savage Streets

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Savage Streets (1984)
Distributor: Arrow
DVD Release Date: 20th June 2011
Directed by: Danny Steinmann
Starring: Linda Blair, Sal Landi, Robert Dryer, Linnea Quigley, John Vernon
Review by: Ben Bussey

Now it’s 1984, knock-knocking at your front door. And would you believe it; the kids are out of control. They’re not going out to the library to study, like they tell Mom and Dad; they’re putting on leather jackets, ripped denim and spandex (or some combination thereof) and heading out to the city streets in search of some action. On one particular night The Scars, a gang of drunk-driving, drug-pushing bad boys lead by Jake (Landi), are cruising in their vintage convertible when they happen to cross paths with The Satins, a marginally less obnoxious girl gang lead by Brenda (Blair). The girls are eager to teach the guys a lesson, and high tempers soon result in high jinks that go a bit too far, with the girls stealing and trashing the guys’ prized car. But that’s nothing compared to how far The Scars take their revenge, cornering Brenda’s deaf and mute sister Heather (Quigley), gang-raping and beating her into a coma. Distraught but none the wiser as to who is responsible, Brenda swears bloody retribution. It won’t be long before more blood is spilled; and when Brenda learns the truth, no power in all creation will stand between her and her revenge. Well, no power but that of her hairspray, stiletto heels and black spandex, at least.

I’ve often pondered that the term ‘guilty pleasure’ might be a tad redundant around these parts, given that by and large our staff (and I daresay our readership) specialise in movies that are gruesome, grotesque and generally depraved. That taboo quality – the sense that we should know better than to watch this ‘crap’ – is a big part of what makes such films so enjoyable to watch. To a large extent films of this kind drive Brutal As Hell, and they’re the bread and butter of Arrow Video. Just take a look at their original artwork to the left. No one is under any illusions here that Savage Streets is a serious, socially conscious expose of youth gangs, sexual violence and vigilantism. Nope, this is 80s trash at its most trashy and its most 80s; a neon-lit, stone-washed urban fantasy that’s full to the brim with power dressing, power ballads, big hair, big tits, blouse-ripping girl-on-girl punch-ups, and motor-mouthed dialogue replete with profanities aplenty.

Passed uncut by the BBFC for the first time (having been trimmed by just over 10 minutes for its VHS release back in the 80s), the excessive tendencies of Savage Streets come as little surprise on learning it was co-written and directed by Danny Steinmann, who went on to helm perhaps the sleaziest entry in the Friday the 13th series: Part V, A New Beginning. Steinmann’s voyeuristic proclivities are even more blatant when watching the film with the director’s commentary, wherein he notes with great regularity “that actress had great breasts” and “I really tried to persaude her to take her bra off.” It’s just that kind of film; close in spirit to the cheap and cheerful Jack Hill movies of the 70s, but with a glossier 80s veneer. Or given that it’s set in high school and cast with actors clearly over high school age (as my lady wife remarked of Linda Blair in a classroom scene, “she looks older than her teacher” – Blair was 26 at the time), it’s like a more down and dirty version of Grease with the songs cut out. With its deluge of quotable trash talk (take John Vernon’s principal telling the Scars to “go fuck an iceberg,” or Blair declaring “I wouldn’t fuck him if he had the last dick on earth”), the most cringeworthy bit of impromptu poetry outside of Tom Cruise in Cocktail, and of course the eye-poppingly garish new wave outfits and hairdos, there are high camp pleasures aplenty to be taken from Savage Streets; and refreshingly devoid of the knowing ironic overtones that tend to impede attempts at similar films today, such as Bitch Slap.

 READER ADVISORY – MILD SPOILERS AHEAD.

That said, there is of course a bit of a dichotomy at the heart of proceedings, which is acknowledged in the commentary: for while the film is largely designed to amuse and titillate, the action hinges on a gang rape which (as if there was any alternative in the matter) is really quite harrowing. That it features Linnea Quigley – who went on to become the queen of gratuitous nudity in horror with Return of the Living Dead, Silent Night Deadly Night et al – somehow makes it even more unpleasant for fanboys like myself, as we’re so used to greeting her naked body with a smile. And it’s made all the harsher by the manner in which it is edited, cross-cutting between the rape (which, it should be emphasised, is certainly not played for titillation) and what would otherwise have surely been the male fantasy highlight of the film, a catfight in the showers (pictured – note the two naked girls behind Linda Blair, fighting for no apparent reason).

It’s a curious decision which raises questions about just what message the filmmakers are trying to convey; are the voyeurs in the audience being punished for their voyeurism? Is a point being made about fantasy versus reality; what feminists regard as the violence against women inherent in pornography? Given how the film revels in gratuitous bare female flesh elsewhere, it would seem unlikely, but it gives pause for thought. In a milder way the same is true of Linda Blair’s one nude scene; by contrast with the shirt-ripping catfight action that comprises much of the film’s nudity, hers is a subdued, contemplative moment. I was reminded of Christina Ricci’s nude scene in Prozac Nation; it would seem the intent is to emphasise the character’s emotional state, rather than for the audience to go “oh Christ, I’ve seen that girl in films since she was about 12, and now she’s naked.”

But again, perhaps this jarring clash of serious artistic intent and sleazy excess is part and parcel to that whole ‘guilty pleasure’ thing. As rape revenge films go, this certainly isn’t the nastiest one out there, and if you can stomach the sour parts you may well savour the sweet parts. It’s a hugely entertaining bad girl thriller that should be high on the shopping list for anyone with a lust for exploitation, and given that (as with all Arrow releases) it’s region free I expect fans worldwide will be clamouring to get hold of a copy. And as much as I feel like this goes without saying now, it’s another great package from Arrow. As well as the aforementioned directorial commentary we have two additional commentary tracks with producer John Strong and actors Robert Dryer and Johnny Venacur; interviews with Blair, Quigley, Strong and Dryer; a collector’s booklet written by Kier-la Janisse; and of course’s Arrow’s trademark reversible artwork and free poster. Oh, and also the trailer, which is embedded below; be warned it features extreme close up cleavage, 80s power balladry at its fiercest, and basically gives away the entire movie.

UK Blu-Ray Review: Witchfinder General

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Witchfinder General (AKA The Conqueror Worm) (1968)
Distributor: Odeon Entertainment Ltd
Blu-Ray release date: 13th June (UK)
Directed by: Michael Reeves
Starring: Vincent Price, Ian Ogilvy, Hilary Heath
Review by: Stephanie Scaife

I only just recently got myself an HD TV and Blu-Ray player (I know, I know… I’m way behind) so I’m still at the stage of making “oooh” and “aaah” noises every time I watch something on Blu-Ray. For years I kept telling myself that surely it couldn’t be all that different to DVD, but now with hindsight I realise that I was being a fool. So now I have the pleasure of being able to review this brand new, digitally remastered, special edition of Michael Reeves’ seminal cult classic Witchfinder General, and what a delight it is too.

Witchfinder General is based on the novel of the same name by Ronald Bassett and it is a heavily fictionalized account of the exploits of Matthew Hopkins, a 17th century lawyer and self appointed “witchfinder-general” who used civil unrest as an opportunity to profit from rooting out so-called witches and devil worshippers. The novel was adapted for the screen by its young director Michael Reeves and Tom Baker, a long-time friend who’d worked with Reeves previously on The Sorcerers (1967) and it was produced by Tigon and American International Pictures for the relatively small budget of around £100,000.

Set in 1645 in East Anglia, Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy) is a Roundhead soldier engaged to a young woman named Sara, the niece of local priest John Lowes. Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price, giving an uncharacteristically restrained performance) and his assistant John Stearne (Robert Russell) travel around the region executing witches and charging the local magistrates for their “services”. As outcasts in their small village Sara and Lowes are immediately rounded up by Hopkins and accused of witchcraft. When Marshall discovers what has happened he returns home to find Sara traumatised and Lowes dead. Vowing revenge Marshall takes matters into his own hands and, without spoiling the ending for those few who have not seen the film, things end pretty badly for all those concerned.

I came to this film fairly late in life; of course I was a fan of The Wicker Man, but it has only been in the last year or so that I became aware of the rather fantastic if brief period during the late 60’s and early 70’s when the UK produced a number of occult themed horror films – now sometimes referred to as “folk horror”. Witchfinder General was one of the first films to be made that fit into this short lived sub-genre along with Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out starring Christopher Lee and the fantastic, yet often overlooked classic The Blood on Satan’s Claw. These films were an early sign of a major change taking place within the horror genre; they were less camp than the early Hammer films and more realistic than the Universal monster movies that audiences were accustomed to at the time. Not to mention that the levels of sex and violence often proved too much for the flummoxed and flustered BBFC who frequently demanded heavy cuts.

I’ve found Blu-Ray shopping to be a veritable minefield, with some companies sticking any old thing onto Blu-Ray merely to enable them to charge a few extra bucks when in reality the difference in quality compared to the DVD is negligible. However I’m pleased to report that Witchfinder General looks and sounds fantastic on Blu-Ray, and is a definite must have for any horror fan. This new edition also comes with some special features that are exclusive to Blu-Ray, including an audio commentary from Benjamin Halligan, author of Reeves biography and filmmaker Michael Armstrong, who had been an acquaintance of Reeves at the time of his death; the documentary “Bloody Crimes: Witchcraft”; an amusing clip from 1984 of Vincent Price giving a charismatic interview on Aspel & Company; the option to watch the scenes that were cut from the original UK theatrical release (although these are of noticeably poorer quality) and alternate opening and closing credit sequences. Other special features include an informative documentary about the life of Michael Reeves “The Blood Beast: The Films of Michael Reeves” which offers some insight into the difficult working relationship he had with Vincent Price; Intrusion: Michael Reeves short film; the original theatrical trailer and a stills gallery.

The disc offers no subtitles, an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, picture format 1080p 24fps AVC MPEG-4, audio Dolby Digital 2.0 mono and the Blu-Ray disc is playable in regions A, B & C and is released in the UK on Monday 13th June.

UK DVD Review: Eaters – Rise of the Dead

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Eaters: Rise of the Dead (2010)
Distributor: Chelsea Films
DVD Release Date (UK): 13th June 2011
Directed by: Luca Boni & Marco Risto
Starring: Alex Lucchesi, Guglielmo Favilla, Claudio Marmugi, Rosella Elmi
Review by: Keri O’Shea

There must be a masochistic impulse lurking within me somewhere because a) I am very, very, very burned out on zombie films, and yet b) I actually requested the screener of Eaters: Rise of the Dead out of a selection of other, non-virusy -bitey-post-apocalyptic-scenario movies. Why do I do it? I suppose I’m always looking for the next Day of the Dead, always hoping that a once-beloved genre will rise again (heh) to impress the hell out of me. More to the point though, I’d say, is to ask why indie filmmakers in such significant numbers continue to make zombie flicks. Are they genuinely hoping to make the next DOTD? Are they fanboys/fangirls themselves? Are they swayed by the potential of the genre to allow for severe budgetary constraints? Or are they plain lazy? The fact is that there’s a real glut of walking dead indies out there that just keep on coming, for whatever reason, and the filmmakers have a real job on their hands to make their films workable, notable and likeable.

As for Eaters: Rise of the Dead, much of the plot will seem familiar to horror fans already, although first-time directors Luca Boni and Marco Ristori make a reasonable amount of headway with overlaying ideas of their own. We start out on the wrong side of the Great Epidemic, a virus deliberately spread by an anonymous religious megalomaniac calling himself the Plague Spreader: two zombie hunters, Alen (Guiglielmo Favilla) and Igor (Alex Lucchesi) are in the employ of a research scientist called Gyno (Claudio Marmugi) who sends them out to collect ‘specimens’ in return for their board and lodge. Also installed at their base is a woman called Alexis, Alen’s girlfriend as-was (Rosella Elmi): Alexis was initially infected with the virus and is still ill, but hasn’t yet succumbed to the final stages of the illness. Gyno suspects she’s the key to finding a cure, but to carry on his work he needs more zombies.

Alen and Igor head off on their rounds, meeting along the way: an erstwhile religious painter who uses undead body parts as ‘life’ models for his art, a group of neo-Nazis (who are possibly the campest Nazis I’ve ever seen since…well, the Nazis) and, eventually, other living humans who can shed some light on Dr. Gyno’s ‘benevolent’ experiments.

You don’t have to look far to see the Day of the Dead influence there, so I’ll cut to the chase and talk about what makes Eaters distinctive. The first thing I’d say stands out is the film’s Catholic connection. It isn’t all that surprising in an Italian horror film I know, and of course faith has figured in several examples of zombie horror down through the years, but Catholicism is tackled in a pretty overt way here. Even when the film is being questioning in tone, the Church provides context aplenty for the film’s plot. For example, the plague starts out by affecting women only: we see a news report lamenting the ‘zero birth rate’ before the disease goes on to cause more catastrophic, cross-gender symptoms. When things get desperate, we know about it because we’re told that the Pope has committed suicide (no other figures on the world stage are mentioned). Talk of the ‘annunciation’, ‘sin’ and ‘the inferno’ are in there too, not to mention a demented priest!

So we have a familiar scenario, we have an abundance of religious context…what we also have, actually, is a film with a pleasing aesthetic and a frankly knock-out score. A strong sepia tone is used here, draining the colour out of the film and going some way to belying the budget. The directors have also made sensible use of their special effects, mostly playing to their strengths by using shadow, angle and pace to avoid lingering on the undead long enough to find fault (bar for some close-up shots of some of the best SFX). There aren’t hordes of zombies/infected here, but those we do get to see look pretty good, with some well-executed gore. As for the score – created by Skinny Puppy’s Justin Bennett and Stefano Rossello of Italian industrialists Bahntier – this is stellar, both jarring and oppressive in just the right quantities. As in the glory days of 70s and 80s Italian horror, the score helps to bring the film together.

As to flaws…well, this film is slow. It’s very dialogue-heavy, often to the point of inanity (and Igor especially is peculiarly toilet-focused, using the world ‘asshole’ at every opportunity). All this conversation between the two main characters does little to move the plot forward, and doesn’t help the pace either. The guys ostensibly have one, simple enough task to do – collect some zombies, in a world overrun with the fuckers. This takes them well over an hour, and even then they don’t get it done properly! There is little in the way of connection between the different legs of their errands en route, either, and at times the film struggles to maintain cogency, especially towards its explosive close.

Overall, Eaters struggles with some familiar problems not helped by pitching straight into a saturated genre but there is definitely potential here. Don’t be afraid of Uwe Boll’s name being attached to this (as producer) because I think Boni and Ristori deserve some credit for this as a first, flawed but interesting calling-card.