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By Ben Bussey

One simple fact about horror, which any vaguely knowledgeable fan can tell you but which seems so often to be forgotten by the wider audience, is that the genre first and foremost speaks to and for the outsider, the ‘other,’ those who for whatever reason cannot find a place for themselves in mainstream society. Inevitably, this means horror often addresses, be it overtly or implicitly, what we now refer to as LGBT issues. This is certainly the case with Dolly Deadly, the feature debut of writer-director Heidi Moore, which centres on a deeply traumatised, possibly transgender orphan who escapes from his miserable life into a bizarre dreamworld where his homicidal tendencies slowly but surely take form. Yet as grim as that synopsis might sound, this is no dour kitchen sink shocker; nor is it yet more half-baked no-budget DV schlock, even if first appearances might suggest as much. Moore and company present us with a colourful nightmare reality that’s as compelling as it is unsettling, and hand in hand with this give us one of the most satisfying outsider horror movies I’ve seen since Lucky McKee’s May.

Benji (Justin Moore) lives in a trailer park with his grandmother Mitzi (Kimberley West-Carroll), a cosmetics saleswoman, and her boyfriend Donald (Jay Sosnicki), a layabout toy boy using Mitzi as a meal ticket. Neither one of them seems to care much about anything but themselves, and they certainly don’t care about Benji, whose mother died in a bizarre cosmetics-related accident right in front of him when he was just a baby. Given this heritage, and the fact that just about all his mother left behind for her son was her extensive doll collection, it probably isn’t too surprising that Benji has been left with a fixation on those old-fashioned notions of feminine beauty, and regards the dolls his best friends. It’s also hardly surprising that these same proclivities lead to Benji being regarded an even greater hindrance by his unwilling guardians, and bullied by the other children of the neighbourhood. As his misery and torment grows day by day, Benji escapes further into a fantasy world populated by his dead mother and her dolls; and as reality grows ever more cruel, the dolls speak up louder, urging Benji not to take it anymore.

I feel I need to preface the following remark with the disclaimer that it is, in fact, intended as a compliment: in some ways, Dolly Deadly feels like the movie Rob Zombie really wanted to make when he did Halloween. No, his po’ white trash revision of the Michael Myers story didn’t really explore questions of gender identity, but otherwise we have a lot of similar things going on here; a young boy, deeply devoted to his mother, ostracised in his community for being somehow different, the target of abuse both at home and on the streets. However, Heidi Moore has cast even younger with her central psycho killer-in-waiting and a number of his tormenters. This is a pretty bold move, as not only does it make for more grueling viewing to see young kids involved in scenes of cruelty, it also puts huge demands on the child actors involved. I stress this point particularly as Dolly Deadly is a microbudget DIY production; let’s face it, in many such films it’s hard enough to find competent adult actors, let alone kids who are up to the task. Happily, young Justin Moore (son of the director, as is supporting actor Lawrence Moore) is really quite remarkable as Benji, giving a wonderfully natural performance and never at all seeming fazed by the weirdness of the material. He just seems like an ordinary, innocent kid playing make-believe, which on a basic level is really all that Benji is; except the character doesn’t know where the make believe ends. The adult actors, too, prove more than up to the challenges Dolly Deadly sets them; much as it’s asking a lot of very young actors to put them at the centre of such a story, it can also no doubt be rough on the grown-ups who have to be so cruel to the kids on camera. (We can but hope no one in the movie was taking a method approach.)

Still, as well-acted as the movie is, Dolly Deadly is a clear instance of the director being the real star of the show. Heidi Moore does some really striking work here, crafting a visually arresting film which on the one hand evokes the 80s VHS influence which seems so vital in horror today (yep, there’s a lot of green and pink neon lighting going on), but at once boasts a more avant garde, art film feel. Key to this is how the dolls themselves almost become characters in the film; through a combination of suggestive editing and lighting and a few very effective stop-motion animation sequences, the inanimate objects seem to come to life to wonderfully eerie effect.

If I have one complaint of Dolly Deadly, it’s that it perhaps goes on five minutes longer than it really needs to, owing to a prologue scene which feels a little extraneous. There are also a few moments which really betray the film’s ultra-low budget conditions, as well as the necessary precautions taken for the sake of the younger actors; there are some less than convincing gore FX shots, and one brief moment when a child actor is meant to be reading a porno magazine but is clearly thumbing through something more suitable for children. Still, these are very minor issues; goodness knows I’ve seen plenty of DIY indie horrors with a great many worse crimes to their name, and the bulk of them weren’t put together with anything close to the skill and vision we see here.

If you need further evidence of how thin the line between art house and trash cinema can be, look no further. Dolly Deadly definitely rates among the best feature debuts I’ve seen in 2016, and I very much look forward to seeing where Heidi Moore goes from here.

Dolly Deadly is available now in the US on DVD/Blu-ray combo pack and on demand at Vimeo, from Legless Corpse Films.

Dolly Deadly from LeglessCorpse Films on Vimeo.

By Ben Bussey

Biopics are always tricky. Bring any true life story to the screen, and questions will always be asked about just how accurate a representation of the events it really is. These concerns are amplified when the story in question is fresh in the popular consciousness, and centres on figures of some cultural significance. Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy is all of these things, and 30 years on from its initial release, it makes for peculiar, troubling viewing. One can only imagine how it came off at the time, barely six years after Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen died.

The film opens on a slow, portentous scene of Sid (Gary Oldman) sitting near catatonic, being grilled by the NYPD whilst the bloodied corpse of Nancy (Chloe Webb) is carted away. Then we flash back to the previous year, meeting Sid and his mate John (Drew Schofield) as they stagger around an affluent London street casually trashing a Rolls Royce. Moments later they’re up in a woman’s flat, and Sid just as casually sprays graffiti all over the walls whilst John eats a plate of presumably cold beans. That’s right – they’re punks. Dependent on your point of view, they might come off either gleefully anarchic and rock’n’roll, or a pair of colossal twats. This dichotomy persists with most of the characters we meet over the next two hours, and your enjoyment of the film is certain to vary according to how the viewer relates to this colourful ensemble – and, in particular, the two title characters. On a basic level, they’re all pretty much entirely unsympathetic, and often downright contemptible – yet, while the film does not gloss over the inherent horribleness of its characters, it also seems constantly at pains to convince us there’s some underlying romantic and heroic quality to them.

This never sets out to be Sex Pistols: The Movie, but naturally the band are a key focal point for the first half of the film, and while there’s clearly some fun to be had hearing such classic tracks as Pretty Vacant and God Save The Queen, these sequences also prove a bit of a chore. A key problem is Schofield’s John Lydon; he’s terribly miscast, coming off as a pantomime impersonation of the charismatic frontman. Meanwhile, Steve Jones and Paul Cook barely get a look in, with actors Tony London and Perry Benson treated as little more than extras – but they’re not the background players viewers are likely to remember. As well as giving Gary Oldman his first leading role on film, Sid and Nancy also boasts an early role for Kathy Burke (who would later reunite with Oldman on his first and to date only directorial effort Nil By Mouth, and get the best actress award at Cannes for her trouble); and, more notoriously, a small supporting turn from Courtney Love as a junkie friend of Nancy’s. Cox reportedly created the role for her after she pushed hard to be cast in the female lead, reportedly declaring “I am Nancy Spungen.” I’m not about to give anyone a history lesson in the 1990s music scene, but the real-life parallels here are striking and uncomfortable.

The Love connection (pardon the pun) underlines one of the key problems with Sid and Nancy: it’s so deeply entrenched in the pop culture of the late 20th century that it’s difficult to take it simply as a film in its own right. Naturally this will vary according to how well acquainted the viewer is with the subject matter; I’m hardly an obsessive Pistols fan, but still can’t help noting how recreations of certain iconic moments – say, the Grundy interview, and Lydon’s “ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” – feel stagey and inaccurate. Lydon reportedly had little input into the film, and was characteristically outspoken in condemning it afterwards; and Cox, to his credit, admits in the extras that he probably should have heeded Lydon’s advice and attempted a more heavily fictionalised take on the material. As it stands, Sid and Nancy toes an awkward line between kitchen sink realism, and dreamlike surrealism, which – despite some very striking images (Sid and Nancy kissing a New York alley whilst trash falls from the sky in slow-motion, for instance) – never quite sit rights given the very real ugliness of the story.

It’s quite sad that, having gone straight to directing this after his iconic debut Repo Man, Alex Cox has never really hit such heights as a filmmaker again; indeed, as a young film fan in the 1990s I knew him not as a director but as the host of BBC2’s Moviedrome (and I still hold him culpable for intensifying my adolescent sexual insecurity because of that one moment in Grim Prairie Tales, which Moviedrome screened). While there’s much about Sid and Nancy that is hugely misjudged, it still leaves one in no doubt that Cox knows how to put a film together – and given that his cinematographer is the now-legendary Roger Deakins, there’s no question that the film looks fantastic (although the Blu-ray transfer does have a bit of a grainy image, which proves distracting). And of course, Sid and Nancy set something of a precedent for Gary Oldman, who has frequently been the greatest strength in any number of flawed yet fascinating films (Coppolla’s Dracula being an obvious example). Even though, strictly speaking, Oldman was a little too old for the part – the actor was 28 at the time, and Vicious died at 21 – his natural magnetism is undeniable.

Unfortunately, the same can’t really be said for Chloe Webb as Nancy. To be fair, she’s playing the part that was given to her, that of a selfish, unstable, thoroughly unsympathetic young woman; but that’s literally all we get. There’s nary a hint of a redeeming quality to her, and given Webb’s loud, nasal delivery, she’s just profoundly annoying from the off, and this is a significant problem given how much time we spend with her, particularly in the latter half of the movie when – following the break-up of the Pistols – the title characters become pretty much the sole focal point, slipping into a downward spiral of addiction, squalor and despair from which they will not return.

The PR material for this 30th anniversary re-release pushes hard on the ‘cult classic’ angle, but does Sid and Nancy really warrant this status? Well, it certainly fits the essential ‘cult’ criteria inasmuch as it under-performed on release, but has since been warmly embraced by a small but devoted audience. Still, I don’t want to get on a soapbox, but I do find it worrying to think that many viewers may be taken in by Cox’s portrayal of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen as some sort of modern day fairy tale romance. Again, to be fair to Cox, his interview in the extras sees him express regret over how much they sentimentalised the story, rightly singling out the closing dream sequence as a particular mistake. Whilst Sid and Nancy plays out to some extent as a cautionary tale, there’s no avoiding a sense of ‘heroin chic’ at play, a glamourised nihilism reinforcing the myth that dying young is in some way admirable. Maybe some of us would call that the spirit of punk rock; I just call it a waste. The story Sid and Nancy may be a true tragedy, but that certainly doesn’t make them Romeo and Juliet.

Following on from a limited theatrical re-release, Sid and Nancy 30th anniversary edition is out on Blu-ray and DVD on 29th August, from Studiocanal.

Isn’t it well past time that sharks became truly scary again? Beyond the original Jaws, it’s debatable any film has ever presented those formidable sea dwellers as true objects of terror, and in recent years it’s pretty much a given that any film which features the creatures in the title is going to be an utterly stupid, cut-price, SyFy Channel pantomime: Sharknado, Sharktopus, Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus… and so it goes. It’s hugely encouraging then, to see a major Hollywood studio prepared to put some real weight (not to mention budget) behind a comparatively grounded tale of a lone surfer who inadvertently winds up caught in the middle of a great white’s feeding ground, and must fend off injury, exhaustion and overwhelming odds to stay alive. Whether the film in question winds up any more accurate a portrayal of real shark behaviour than any of the aforementioned direct-to-DVD schlockbusters is another story, but to a certain extent that’s hardly the point. You’ve got innumerable National Geographic documentaries out there if you want to see the truth about sharks; but if you want a gripping, tense survivalist thriller with a liberal dash of monster movie stirred in, The Shallows may be just what you’re after.

In many respects, The Shallows feels like a throwback to the intimate trapped-in-one-place shockers which sprang up a few years back – 127 Hours, Buried, Adam Green’s Frozen – but in concept and execution, I’m most reminded of the underrated Burning Bright (Brianna Evigan trapped in a house with a ravenous tiger? Forget about it).

Blake Lively takes the lead as Nancy, a Texan surfer and medical student who we’re told has recently dropped out of school, and gone on something of a personal pilgrimage to a secret beach somewhere in Mexico; so secret, she doesn’t even know the name of the place. However, it’s a place Nancy feels a deep connection to, as her recently deceased mother, also a surfer, rode the waves there whilst pregnant with her. Clearly Nancy’s got a bit of that classic surfer free spirit thing going on (or at least, that’s how surfers always are in the movies, I don’t know any in real life), but she also doesn’t seem that good at planning ahead; having got a ride through expansive woodland to a beach she doesn’t know the name of, she’s made zero arrangements to get back later, and misses her one chance at a ride when the two other surfers she meets there head off home while she’s still on the waves. And of course, it’s only once those guys are as good as gone that the shit hits the fan, as Nancy finds the ravaged carcass of a humpback whale floating nearby – the meal ticket of the dreaded Carcharodon Carcharias. But it would seem the whale meat hasn’t satisfied this big boy, as he proceeds to go straight after Nancy, who soon has a nasty bite in her leg, and only three possible places of refuge: the whale carcass, a patch of reef, and a rusty old buoy. And so the stand-off begins.

Originally entitled In The Deep – not the most appropriate title given it takes place 200 yards off shore* – Anthony Jaswinski’s script was named on the 2014 Black List, an annual Hollywood poll of the best un-produced screenplays on the market. It’s not hard to see how this was deemed a no-brainer with the studios: it provides a juicy role for an up-and-coming young actress, completely justifies keeping her in a bikini for more or less the duration, and combines an exotic sun-drenched setting with the mother of all nature’s terrors. However, while it works as a high-concept spectacle, it also manages to be a surprisingly intimate and understated affair, keeping things character-based without drowning (no pun intended) in gratuitous flashbacks and exposition. All this being the case, in some ways it is a surprise they cast Blake Lively – an actress who, despite having been in the business for some time, remains comparatively anonymous in the popular consciousness (she’s best known for being married to Ryan Reynolds, or to some of us for being the niece of Night of the Creeps star Jason Lively). Happily, this may be one of those roles they like to call ‘star-making.’ Lively’s relative anonymity works in her favour, and she proves more than up to the challenge of holding our attention with minimal dialogue. And yes, of course, it doesn’t hurt that she fills her skimpy bikini very well.

As for the other key attraction; director Jaume Collet-Serra adheres to the wisdom of Spielberg and keeps the shark mostly unseen, building tension through editing, suggestive camerawork and brief glimpses of the formidable antagonist. When we do see the big bad, it’s naturally all CGI, and that’s one place where The Shallows does slip up a little. While it is a studio production, it wasn’t exactly made on a blockbuster budget (IMDb lists its budget as $17 million), and it’s the FX that make this most evident. Sure, it’s more impressive than the rubbery sharks of the Jaws movies or the video game graphics of all those SyFy productions, but it’s hardly the most convincing CGI ever; this extends beyond the shark to a number of other sea creatures which make an appearance, as well as Lively’s face being digitally transposed onto her surfing double. These moments don’t ruin the film, but they do tend to take you out of the moment somewhat.

That having been said, the obvious CGI isn’t necessarily a problem if we think of The Shallows as a monster movie – and, all verisimilitude aside, that’s ultimately just what it is. I’m no shark expert, but it’s well established that they very rarely attack humans, so for one to so relentlessly stalk one the way this bad boy does – particularly once the inevitably melodramatic final act kicks in – pretty much beggars belief. But again, this isn’t a nature documentary; it’s a bit of crash-bang-wallop entertainment, and very effective at that. It’s truly tense throughout, and boasts more than a couple of old-fashioned jump scares which I’m not ashamed to admit got me. Obviously it’s not about to dethrone Jaws, but as a movie custom designed to make you afraid to go back in the water, The Shallows gets the job done better than many mainstream efforts in recent memory.

The Shallows is in cinemas now, from Sony.

*Just to further confuse matters, the upcoming Johannes Roberts shark movie 47 Meters Down was briefly set to be released as In The Deep.

By Ben Bussey

When the most prominent words in the PR of a new release are ‘from executive producer Ben Wheatley,’ two key thoughts immediately come to mind: firstly, it’s a shame that writer-director Nick Gillespie doesn’t get full credit for his own work (although he’s hardly the first director to be overshadowed by an exec producer credit; Quentin Tarantino’s name was all over the publicity for Roger Avary’s Killing Zoe, as was Edgar Wright’s on Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block). Secondly, the emphasis on Wheatley, and his most celebrated movies Kill List and High Rise (the latter of which I must admit I haven’t seen yet, if it matters), would seem to imply that this new film will attempt an unconventional blend of genres, with a vaguely abstract, surreal approach which leaves the viewer questioning what they just saw. With this in mind, I suppose it’s fair to say that Tank 432 (originally entitled Belly of the Bulldog) is a Wheatley-esque work – and much like Wheatley’s films, it seems specifically designed to divide opinion.

A small army unit is making its way across rural terrain, two hostages in two. Among their number are the anxiety-ridden Reeves (Rupert Evans), the bullish commander Smith (Gordon Kennedy), and Capper (Michael Smiley), who has already sustained a nasty leg injury. Exactly where the soldiers are, and why they’re there isn’t clear – but they’re all very much on edge, constantly on the lookout for an enemy that they know is hot on their trail. Anxious to find safety, they stumble across a seemingly abandoned tank in the middle of a field, and seeing little alternative they squeeze inside. This soon turns out to have been probably an even worse idea than remaining out in the open, as the door jams and they find themselves trapped in the tight space. But as if the intense claustrophobia and lack of personal space isn’t enough, revelations as to the truth behind their mission will soon fry what little remains of everyone’s sanity.

This is one of those awkward instances when there’s ostensibly plenty to recommend the film, yet I find myself struggling to give it a recommendation. It’s a nice idea, and for the most part well-made, but all in Tank 432 just left me cold. A key reason for that, I think, is its over-dependence on playing the mystery card. For at least the first half of the film, almost nothing is explained about the soldiers and their mission, and while the intent may have been to promote a sense of intrigue, it may instead wind up testing the viewer’s patience – particularly if you figure out (and/or guess) the essentials of the final revelation early on. As we learned from M Night Shyamalan’s meteoric fall from grace, building a film around a big smart-arse climactic twist is liable to inspire more contempt than praise. Don’t get me wrong; Gillespie’s work here doesn’t come off anywhere near that smug and self-important. Even so, I couldn’t help feeling the whole endeavour to be a bit of a carrot-dangle.

Having said all that, I’ve no doubt other viewers may take more from Tank 432 than I did. It may strike me as a little too clever-clever for its own good, but there’s certainly no denying that it doesn’t play safe or replicate a set-up we’ve seen many times before. This kind of bold, imaginative genre-bending is something to be encouraged, I think, and it’s encouraging to see a lot of this going on in the UK. The cast all do well, and it’s certainly a handsome-looking film, making smart use of clearly limited funds and locations. I remain curious to see where Nick Gillespie goes from here, as on this evidence he’s clearly a filmmaker with potential, but in this particular instance I was not won over.

Tank 432 is out on DVD and digital on 22nd August, from Kaleidoscope.

By Nia Edwards-Behi

For my sins, I’ve not seen nearly as much canonical European ‘art’ cinema as I probably should have, all things considered. I am, however, a big fan of one Ingmar Bergman, and when he’s claimed that Andrei Tarkovsky is “the greatest”, then really it’s a bit of a crime that it’s taken me this long to watch any of his work. Tarkovsky’s most famous and well­ known film, to my knowledge anyway, is Solaris, and so I suppose it’s appropriate that that is the film that I should see first, because otherwise, where do you even start with a giant of cinema like Tarkovsky?

The 1972 film has re­emerged as part of a massive Tarkovsky retrospective, in cinemas and on home media, by Curzon Artificial Eye, which has seen all seven of his feature films released on brand new digital prints. There have also been special events and newly commissioned essays, posters and more. I’m not familiar with his work, but the season has no doubt been something of an absolute blessing for fans of his work or of art cinema as a whole, and it’s credit to Curzon for putting together such an elaborate season of films.

Cosmonaut and psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to a space station in orbit of the planet Solaris, where the original crew appear to have abandoned their mission because of the mental crises they’re suffering. Upon arrival, he discovers his only friend in the crew, Gibarian (Sos Sargsyan), has killed himself. The other two crew members, Drs. Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn) seem relatively indifferent or uninterested in Kelvin, at least until he too experiences the very thing aboard the station that has made its crew so useless. Kelvin sees visions of his dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), and learns that Solaris is a sentient being which uses the humans’ memories as a weapon, of sorts, against their investigations. Kelvin, the alien manifestation of Hari and the other crew members must decide what it is they must do to confront and escape the power of Solaris, and in doing so face philosophical and personal quandaries of their own.

So what’s an arty Russian film from the 1970s doing getting review on a site like BaH? Well, it’s sci-fi, innit, and, if you’re to take the whole thing about how each and every one of us humans is self-absorbed and myopic, then it’s also pretty brutal. But, in that lies an interesting crux in finding some motivation in Tarkovsky’s film. In her essay on the film as part of this Curzon retrospective, Jemma Desai notes Tarkovsky’s “explicit disdain for the concept of genre in general,” and his famous criticism of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “for being too enamoured by the spectacle of the genre.” (This essay, among others, can be found here.) Well, excuse me, Comrade Tarkovsky, but I spent the duration of your film hoping for a Monolith to appear and make things a bit more interesting.

Yes, I’m being flippant – truthfully I found Solaris to be quite captivating, and there is absolutely no doubting Tarkovsky’s position as a master of cinema as a language. But, I’m also a genre fan, and actually reading that did rub me up the wrong way, even if it’s hardly surprising. It’s the same binary thinking that makes, I don’t know, gorehounds go ‘ew, art cinema!’ or, say, art critics attempt to coin derogatory terms like ‘New French Extremity’. Genre and art are not mutually exclusive, even if each ‘side’ tries incessantly to convince us otherwise, thus perpetuating an endless cycle of cultural othering which ultimately serves no purpose other than to make ourselves feel good about not being other people.

Well, hang on a minute. Maybe Tarkovsky’s onto something after all. At the core of Solaris – for me, anyway, I don’t doubt there are many interpretations of it – is Kelvin’s stubbornness, and, in particular, the increasing realisation that the Hari that manifests on the space station above Solaris is his own version of her, without, perhaps, the sadness, or disappointment, or worry, or anxiety of his late wife. And even so – Hari the Second eventually longs to be destroyed. On board the station, judging by the mental states of the other men on board, and Kelvin’s eventual, head-in-the-sand fate, hell is quite literally other people, even when they’re your own idealised manifestations.

Solaris isn’t the sort of thing that will satisfy or keep the attention of everyone, and nor should it have to. Slow is slow, and unless you are won over by Tarkovsky’s style then you’re not likely to find much to cling onto. Having said that, the other most striking and enjoyable element of the film for me was easily Natalya Bondarchuk’s absolutely stunning performance as Hari. While the rest of the cast, to me, did their job as well as they needed to, Bondarchuk completely embodies the confused, anguished and enigmatic Hari. While the film is ostensibly about Kelvin, Bondarchuk brings Hari to life so vividly that she’s practically the lead – and given her role in the story, that’s magnificently apt.

Apparently Tarkovsky eventually claimed to have regretted showing any fidelity to Stanislaw Lem’s original novel (Lem had expressed his dislike for the film), stating that “the rockets and space stations – required by Lem’s novel – were interesting to construct; but it seems to me now that the idea of the film would have stood out more vividly and boldly had we managed to dispense with these things altogether.” I do wonder if anyone would have broken it to him that even if he’d dispensed with all the apparent trappings of science-fiction that he seems to have to so disdained, then he’d still have made a cracking ghost story. Even if Tarkovsky would resent the fact, it must be said that there is a lot for a genre fan to enjoy in Solaris, and, cinematic artistry aside, that’s what makes it worth watching.

Solaris is out now in the UK on limited theatrical release, and comes to DVD & Blu-ray on 8th August, from Curzon Artificial Eye.

By Ben Bussey

As a site primarily focused on horror, BAH has of course noted the resurgence of the anthology format in the genre this past half-decade or so. While it would be a pretty big stretch to declare Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales symptomatic of this new wave of portmanteau horror, in its own distinct way the film does fit comfortably within the subgenre, given it strings together a number of loosely connected stories, distinctly nightmarish in nature, which take place within a shared story world. Perhaps most significantly, the film tackles material which we might easily regard as perhaps the true birthplace of horror: the fairy tale.

Clive Barker, Guillermo del Toro and many other such erudite, eloquent gorehounds have argued (correctly, to my mind) that when you boil it down far enough, there really is no division between fantasy and horror. Del Toro has explored that territory in his films, Pan’s Labyrinth being a particularly potent example of this; and other films like Neil Jordan’s classic The Company of Wolves had delved into the terrain before. Tale of Tales inevitably invites comparison to both those films, but it’s something else entirely. Rather than taking an abstract approach to fairy tales, contrasting them with contemporary reality as del Toro and Jordan’s films did, Garrone (whose earlier work I must confess to being unfamiliar with) has embraced the format directly, in all its simplicity, beauty, and hideousness. The result is a truly haunting, fascinating and compelling piece of work.

The film adapts three tales (although it feels more like four) from the tales of Italian writer Giambattista Basile, apparently a forebear to the likes of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. The first key story casts Salma Hayek and John C Reilly as a King and Queen who are distraught over their inability to conceive a child, and in their desperation take the advice of a mysterious wise man who warns them that sacrifice will be necessary – and that the Queen must eat the heart of a sea monster. Sure enough, she soon bears a child, but of course there are some unforeseen complications of which I’ll say no more.

Meanwhile, Toby Jones is the monarch of a neighbouring kingdom, who is tasked with finding a suitable husband for his daughter (Stacy Martin), but is greatly distracted by his bond with a rather unusual pet – and when a suitor for his child is selected by means of a contest, the girl does not find the dashing romantic hero she had hoped for. Finally, our third tale casts Vincent Cassell as a lusty playboy king whose life of orgies and indulgence has left him jaded, and finds himself bewitched (figuratively speaking – an important distinction under the circumstances) by the singing voice of a peasant woman whose face he has never seen. He sets about wooing her in a somewhat forceful manner; being the king, he’s used to getting what he wants. But again, this female stranger is not quite what he imagines her to be.

Of course, fairy tales are always easy to surmise in terms of plot, but it’s often a bit trickier to discern quite what, if anything, they’re really trying to say. Sometimes the symbolism isn’t that hard to decipher, other times it all just feels utterly surreal. Fittingly, Tale of Tales toes this line, relaying the stories in as simple a manner as an early Disney movie – but, crucially, without ever diluting the darkness at their heart. As is surely self-evident from the 15 certificate, the comparisons to The Company of Wolves and Pan’s Labyrinth, and – oh yes – the picture above of Salma Hayek eating a heart, this most definitely isn’t a kid’s movie. The small-screen success of Game of Thrones has surely played a role in making adult audiences more open to the notion of fantastic material dealing with mature subject matter, although happily Tale of Tales doesn’t go quite so apeshit with the gore, profanity and nudity, although there are some eye-opening moments of the former and the latter, including an absolutely hilarious introductory scene for Cassell’s debauched monarch.

Anyone hoping for reassuring, non-challenging viewing which provides easy answers will not get what they’re looking for here. What you will find is a veritable feast for the senses, which thankfully doesn’t leave the intellect feeling undernourished. Above and beyond all else, Tale of Tales is the most visually striking film you’re likely to see all year, with a classic, painterly eye applied to more or less every single shot, and it leaves me hugely regretful to only be experiencing it for the first time on the small screen; no doubt it’s a hugely immersive experience at the cinema. It also boasts a wonderfully atmospheric soundtrack, and tremendous performances from the whole ensemble.

Definitely one we can expect to see on a lot of best of 2016 lists in about five months time, Tale of Tales is one of the few movies of the year so far which I can comfortably declare an unequivocal must see.

Tale of Tales is out on Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray on 8th August, from Curzon Artificial Eye.

By Ben Bussey

The label of ‘worst horror movie of all time’ is a strangely coveted one within cult fandom. Many self-professed lovers of what would typically be regarded as trash cinema will go out of their way to see that which is proclaimed to be the poorest known example of its craft, and director Wayne Berwick’s Microwave Massacre has long worn that badge of honour with pride. Initially released in 1983 having sat on the shelf untouched by distributors for several years (generally a reliable indication of badness in itself), the ultra low-brow, low budget mish-mash of comedy, horror and T&A movie has by all accounts become quite a cult favourite, although I must confess that I’d never seen it nor even been particularly aware of it prior to my review copy of this new Arrow Video Blu-ray coming through my door.

Having now seen it, I can’t agree with the ‘worst ever’ label (which I understand was plastered all over its initial DVD release from Anthem Pictures), but I will certainly concur that Microwave Massacre is a very, very bad film. And not necessarily the good-bad kind.

Comedian Jackie Vernon takes the lead as Donald, a construction worker who would seem to be going through a bit of a midlife crisis, thanks to that age-old problem: he married a woman he can no longer stand. The real meat of his frustration (not entirely a metaphor in this context) is his wife’s habit of attempting adventurous, exotic meals; the first scene sees Donald sit down to lunch with co-workers who don’t take him seriously, and while they chow down on standard meat sandwiches, Donald has what appears to be a full size raw crab in his lunch box. It’s much the same when he gets home in the evening, his wife always attempting some grandiose culinary experiment – cooked, of course, in their brand new over-sized luxury microwave. Naturally, the question of why Donald doesn’t consider preparing the meals himself never comes up, but one evening when he’s had all he can stands and he can’t stands no more, the mild-mannered schlub cracks, murders his wife, chops up her corpse and hides the remains in the freezer. But then, quite by accident, Donald winds up cooking a bit of his late wife for dinner, and finds to his astonishment that it’s the best meat he’s ever had – so soon enough, he’s on the prowl for other women with whom he can broaden his palate.

It’s not a bad central conceit at all, and if handled correctly it might have resulted in a great comedy horror; alas, there is almost nothing in Microwave Massacre that is handled well. It’s a jaw-droppingly amateurish production on pretty much every level: the writing, acting, direction, and gore FX are all absolutely terrible. The film tries to get around this by being in the joke, filling up its 75-minute running time with fourth-wall breaking looks to the camera and odd lines of dialogue which indicate that the filmmakers know very well how stupid the whole thing is. We often see similar tricks employed in Troma movies and the like, but they manage to hold our attention by keeping things loud, fast and bulging with histrionic performances, excessive gore and frequent gratuitous nudity.

Now, Microwave Massacre certainly has some of these things; the opening credits play out over a montage of an anonymous large-breasted woman walking down the street near the construction site, who is shortly relieved her top under staggeringly contrived circumstances, and the scene would appear to be set for a sex comedy that would do Russ Meyer proud. A few more tit shots ensue (in a manner which would actually seem to serve the plot, believe it or not), as well as the inevitable murder scenes, but unfortunately the lion’s share of the action is taken up by painfully inept dialogue sequences, in which the already limp writing is rendered even flatter by uniformally dreadful performances and an excess of pregnant pauses which make the film feel overlong, even though it runs at barely an hour and a quarter.

All this having been said – why, you may ask, do I not agree that this is the worst horror film ever made? The simple answer is, the makers of Microwave Massacre were clearly never even under any pretence of trying to make a good film. It’s stupid and sloppily made because that’s exactly the way they intended it to be, so in its own way it’s a resounding success; it’s only when a film sets out to be good yet fails miserably that it can really warrant being classed as one of the worst films ever.

That having been said – Microwave Massacre is indeed a complete piece of shit. Those with a deep appreciation for films which are truly terrible may well find it to their taste, but for me the joke wore thin very early on, and it’s not a movie I can ever see myself having any desire to revisit. Still, if you are up for it, Arrow have done their usual sterling work – far more than the film deserves, in this instance – with a nice-looking transfer, and extras including new interviews with surviving members of the cast and crew.

Arrow Video release Microwave Massacre to dual format DVD and Blu-ray on 15th August.

By Tristan Bishop

Dear old Michael Winner. Loathed by serious film critics and restaurant owners worldwide, and engendering responses in the public ranging from revulsion to fascination, Winner was undoubtedly an original – an opinionated playboy whose films often seemed more like excuses for him to hang out with his Hollywood heroes than personal works of art. In later years, when the films dried up, Winner came into his element as a media personality, becoming known as much for his insurance adverts and his frankly batshit Twitter account as any of his artistic endeavours.

Despite this, many of Winner’s films do actually stand up reasonably well, especially his 60’s British films (mostly starring his long-time friend Oliver Reed), which swung between madcap comedy and kitchen sink drama, and the series of American films he made with Charles Bronson: Chato’s Land (1972), The Mechanic (also 1972, and remade in recent years with Jason Statham failing to approximate Bronson’s stony-faced magnetism), The Stone Killer (1973); and what must surely be his crowning achievement, 1974’s Death Wish, a grim and gritty tale which launched an entire subgenre of vigilante films. Sadly, the next 20 years saw Winner’s fortunes suffer from diminishing returns (culminating in 1999’s Parting Shots, starring an obviously ‘unwell’ Chris Rea). 1983’s The Wicked Lady comes from around halfway through this period, and, aside from camp value, has little to recommend it for rediscovery.

The Wicked Lady is actually a remake of one of the largely forgotten ‘Gainsborough melodramas’, a series of British costume dramas from the 1940s (which included in their number Fanny By Gaslight, a 1944 effort which, frankly, I am only mentioning for the giggles). Faye Dunaway (who seems a little too old to be playing the part) stars as the titular Lady Barbara Skelton, who arrives at the home of her sister Caroline (Glynnis Barber – aka Makepeace from Dempsey & Makepeace) after being invited to be bridesmaid for her wedding to Sir Ralph (Denholm Elliott). Being a wicked lady, however, Barbara is soon seducing Sir Ralph herself and steals his hand in marriage. However, despite her new-found wealth, Barbara is soon bored, and when she gambles away a piece of her mother’s jewellery, she takes inspiration from the famous highwayman Jerry Jackson (Alan Bates), and, disguising herself as him, takes to robbery to get it back. Finding the criminal act to be an exhilarating experience, Barbara eventually teams up with Jackson whilst seeking to protect her identity.

Well, make no bones about it; this is far more a dog’s dinner than a Winner’s dinner. Far from the grimy feel of the Bronson films, here Winner attempted something approaching a ‘proper’ film, along the lines of a golden age swashbuckler. But, of course, the old adage of the leopard being unable to change its spots rings true here: this is the sort of frothy adventure where cupboard doors being opened reveal scantily clad couples ‘at it’. One wonders whether Winner had Ken Russell’s The Devils in mind here – an opening shot with a decomposing corpse certainly seems to reference that film – but sadly where Russell was a master of deploying opulent debauchery to make wider points, Winner appears to be shoehorning his excesses in with the hope of keeping the audience awake. This strategy does work on occasion – most notably the standout scene, in which Dunaway engages in a whip battle with a topless woman, which is pretty impressive in its levels of audacity; but mostly you will find yourself drifting off unless you have a very high tolerance for trashy costume drama.

The cast mostly acquit themselves with little embarrassment – unsurprising when you have such talents as Prunella Scales and John flipping Gielgud in relatively minor roles, but Dunaway’s lead performance is a thing of wonder. Not in a good way, you understand, as here the Hollywood legend breaks ranks, ignores the fact that the rest of the cast are wisely playing it straight, and goes for full-on pantomime dame, with wide eyes flashing. It’s frankly hilarious, and fans of grand dames chewing on the scenery will definitely get their money’s worth with this. It’s just a shame that there’s so little else to enjoy here, and as such the film can only be recommended for those looking for a camp giggle.

The Wicked Lady is available now on DVD from Second Sight.

By Ben Bussey

The new wave of anthology horror has tended to be a little haphazard; take the none-more-random ABCs of Death movies, or the Dread Central-produced Zombieworld and Monster Land, which literally strung together entirely unrelated short films. It’s nice, then, to see portmanteau movies which harken back to the great days of the subgenre with a loose but clearly identifiable unifying element. Southbound does just this, by setting its nightmarish tales along the same stretch of bleak, unidentifiable desert highway, situated somewhere between the middle of nowhere and the bowels of Hell, with Larry Fessenden on Crypt Keeper duty as a radio DJ.

Directed by V/H/S trilogy veterans Radio Silence, Roxanne Benjamin and David Bruckner, plus The Pact II’s Patrick Hovarth, Southbound follows the rules of the best anthology horrors by presenting us with five distinct tales each dealing with a distinct brand of threat and menace, from demonic entities, to sinister cults, to the considerably more grounded horror of what to do if your home comes under attack, or if you accidentally hit someone with your car. As with any anthology movie, there are some stories which feel a little insubstantial, and others which you’d half like to see play out at greater length and in more detail – but they’re all succinct enough to keep boredom from ever setting in.

Just so I don’t spoil all the surprises for the uninitiated reader, I’ll avoid going into specifics on the individual stories (that’s always the dilemna when reviewing an anthology movie: whether to break it up story by story, or give a more general overview). Suffice to say, Southbound is the most fun I’ve had with a portmanteau for a while. As the tales are unified by setting if not theme, there’s a similar aesthetic overlying the entire enterprise, and not unlike Trick’r’Treat (or other non-horror anthology movies, like Pulp Fiction or Go) the tales sometimes overlap in surprising and effective ways.

Southbound also contrasts nicely with a lot of contemporary anthology horror movies because it never seems that the filmmakers are trying to out-fucked-up each other. Anyone who’s ever seen the V/H/S or ABCs of Death films will most likely struggle to recall much in terms of story detail, instead reflecting on a wall-to-wall cacophony of naked bodies and bodily fluids of all description. Nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but when it’s piled on in such abundance it can get a little numbing. No danger of that with Southbound; all concerned here are far more concerned with building atmosphere and tension, with the real shocker moments coming through unexpected plot developments and moments of surrealism. As such, it’s no surprise the film has been likened to The Twilight Zone. Of course, this is not to say that gore’s off the table completely; there are a few suitably grisly moments which certainly earn that 18 certificate. Sex never really enters the picture though, and one gratuitous bra shot is as close as we get to nudity. (Oh, what are you complaining about? You’re on the internet, it’s not like you can’t find tits anywhere.)

Okay, so I know I said I’d avoid specifics on the stories, but I will say this much… David Bruckner’s hit-and-almost-run story is to my mind the most effective story, whilst Patrick Hovarth’s is probably the most throwaway, but all of them look and sound great, with strong performances throughout (as well as Fessenden, other actors with notable horror credentials include more V/H/S veterans in Chad Villella and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, and Fabianne Therese of Starry Eyes and John Dies at the End). But Radio Silence’s opening and closing stories are the ones that boast the most memorable imagery of the film. It’s faintly ironic that this is a production of the same core team behind V/H/S, as the winged skeletal phantoms we see here (remarkable CGI work, given this clearly wasn’t an especially big-budget affair) are clearly reminiscent of the spectral figure from the posters for the ABCs of Death movies…

Southbound is released to DVD, Blu-ray and digital download on 8th August, from Studiocanal.