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Review by Ben Bussey

Sharks have had to put up with a lot over the years, haven’t they? Kept as pets by Bond villians; blown to smithereens and/or electrocuted by Roy Schieder; facing the wrath of LL Cool J after eating his bird. So how do they fare when pitted against Academy Award® winner Halle Berry? Schieder had the oxygen cannister and the harpoon gun, LL had the gas and the lighter, but Berry has… her motivation!

I wonder what it is with director John Stockwell and sea movies. He seems to do little else. First it was the Kate Bosworth/Michelle Rodriguez surfer flick Blue Crush, then the Paul Walker/Jessica Alba free-diving treasure hunt movie Into The Blue; and now this, which I can only assume would have been entitled Dark Blue were it not for fear of being confused with the Kurt Russell/Ving Rhames police drama from a few years back. Oh, and let’s not forget his partially beach-bound torture movie Turistas (AKA Paradise Lost) with Melissa George. What can we gather from the similarity of this guy’s projects? Does he have a fondness for exotic locations? Does he relish filming attractive women in swimsuits? Or is he just repeatedly typecast as a director? Whether it is some of those things, all of those things or none of those things, we would have no cause for complaint so long as his films delivered the goods – but from what I’ve seen, they generally fail to do so. As to whether Dark Tide is the exception – well, when a film with a big name Academy Award® winner goes direct to DVD, that should give you a bit of a hint.

The opening plays out like an aquatic Cliffhanger. Out on the waves in happier days, Halle bounces around in her bikini without a care in the world, waxing lyrical about sharks to her photographer husband Olivier Martinez’s video camera, whilst flirting unconvincingly with every man on the boat. Bad sign, obviously, and soon one of her nearest and dearest is fish food. X amount of time passes and, naturally, she just can’t bring herself to dive with sharks again – but that’s where the money is, and with her marriage in ruins and her business headed the same way she really needs hard currency. So when her estranged hubby sets her up with a loathsome British rich bloke (Ralph Brown, AKA the perpetually stoned dealer from Withnail & I) who’s prepared to pay through the nose to swim with sharks without a cage, she basically has no choice but to agree. Naturally the small boat is a hotbed of tension immediately; Halle clashes with hubby, rich bloke clashes with teenage son, everyone clashes with rich bloke. Obviously it’s all going to boil up to the point where someone has to get eaten. Sadly, it takes way, way too long to reach that point.

Should we respect the fact that Dark Tide takes a premise with B-movie written all over it, and treats it entirely seriously? I get the impression that’s what they expect the audience to do. That’s what we want in these times, apparently: popcorn flicks that are “dark” and “edgy” and “realistic.” God forbid they might actually be fun, or anything. Dark Tide is determined to beat the audience around the head with its own seriousness, and emphasise how tortured its protagonists are. It gets old really, really fast. If the idea is that all this backstory will add dramatic weight when the shit hits the fan, it might have helped if things went properly south a bit sooner than about twenty minutes before the end. As it is, the jaws of our fishy friends can’t strike fast enough. But alas, even when the sharks do get chomping, the damage isn’t sufficient to satiate our bloodlust against these annoying bastards. Nor is it really enough to warrant the 15 certificate the BBFC have slapped it with – it’s considerably less gruesome than the (unbelievably) 12-rated Jaws. And considerably less good, as if that needed to be said.

And sadly, no: not even multiple glimpses of Halle Berry’s scantily clad torso are enough to keep Dark Tide from being a total waste of time. That said, it may actually come as a surpise how sporadic Berry’s bikini shots are (though Stockwell makes the most of them, squeezing in as many gratuitous voyeuristic shots as he can get away without seeming too sleazy). Sadly, Berry is in this instance less interested in showing off her talents than showing off her talent, in an actorly fashion. But here’s the thing – and please, I can’t be the only one to have noticed this… Halle Berry really isn’t very talented. At all. In fact, she’s really quite a bad actress. I actually haven’t seen Monster’s Ball so I don’t know whether her Academy Award® win was justified, but in pretty much everything else I’ve ever seen her in her performances have been utterly forced and unnatural. And guess what; Dark Tide doesn’t break that trend. How she’s remained at the top so long I really don’t know, although the fact that she does still look so scrumdiddlyumptious might have a little something to do with it.

Tedious in the extreme, Dark Tide might look to make a big splash but it delivers little more than a damp splodge. You’d be best off not biting for this one.

Dark Tide is out on Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray on 22nd October from Revolver.

Review by Tristan Bishop

The dictionary describes the word excision as ‘removal by cutting’ – which, ironically, is the opposite of what we’re presented with here, as Excision is an elongated version of a short film from 2008 with the same name. It passed me by in the original format, but apparently did well enough to warrant some money spent on bringing it to feature length. I had heard a great deal about this film before I received my copy – a lot of it very positive, and a smaller amount rather less so – and a glance at the cast list (Malcolm McDowell! Traci Lords! John Waters!!) served to amp my curiosity up to a massive degree. Words like ‘disturbing’ and ‘beautiful’ were being used with abandon. ‘Sounds like my kind of thing’, I thought, and so I fed the little disc into the DVD player and prepared to be impressed.

Excision is the story of a teenage outcast called Pauline (played by AnnaLynn McCord), with a religious mother (amusing casting here as she is played by former underage porn star Traci Lords) who just wants her to confirm. She also has a younger sister who suffers from cystic fibrosis. Pauline, it transpires, is a little odd – she picks scabs, wants to become a surgeon, has very odd dreams/fantasies and a rather unhealthy obsession with blood. She propositions a high school jock to take her virginity and, in a rather unlikely twist, he agrees. Meanwhile she is sent to see a priest to try and iron her out (good casting again as John Waters is the man in the dog collar), which she doesn’t exactly take kindly to.

Unfortunately that’s pretty much all the plot I can give you without a visit to spoiler hell, and if it seems like there isn’t really much story here, it’s because, well, there isn’t. Excision is only 81 minutes long, but it feels twice the length, and rather repetitive, as we are given an endless parade of ineffectual authority figures trying to ‘help’ whilst Pauline has her fantasies and slowly lets them spill over into real life. We don’t get a real sense of movement with this, however – we know from the offset that Pauline is disturbed, and we spend the film waiting around for this to reach a tragic outcome. Unlike the masterful We Need To Talk About Kevin, which amps up the tension using a clever narrative structure and increasingly disturbing revelations, this film just kind of plods along with various surreal and slightly icky moments, which did give me some slightly queasy stomach moments at times, but nothing approaching real engagement with the material.

The other reason for lack of engagement here is the script. Pauline is obviously supposed to be a sympathetic character despite her gruesome interests, and we are supposed to feel sorry for her as she deals with the repression of the authority figures in the film. Unfortunately she is also one of the most annoying, self-centered and rude central characters in any film I have seen in recent memory, and, whilst occasionally over-bearing and inconsiderate, the adult characters do mostly seem to want to want to help her. Perhaps it’s my advancing years, but I spent most of the film wanting to grab Pauline and shake her and tell her to stop being such a dick to everyone.

There are commendable things here: the dream sequences are visually stunning, painterly almost, but they serve to do little other than remind us that Pauline is ‘odd’, and actually end up being a little irritating because of this – I would much rather see some acting doing the same job. The performance by AnnaLynn McCord is actually rather good, and quite the physical transformation; and Traci Lords’ work here is actually excellent, proving that she is, once and for all, a proper actor. Unfortunately, McDowell and Waters are wasted in what amount to cameo roles, which served to heighten my disappointment, as I could watch both these guys recite the phone book and not get bored.

Perhaps I wasn’t the target audience for this film, having never been a teenage girl with a surgery fetish (and actually, even I was, I may have been mildly offended by it), but I was alternately bored and irritated throughout Excision. Some ‘removal by cutting’ may have been required after all.

Excision is out now on Region 1 DVD and Blu-Ray from Anchor Bay. In the UK, it’s screening at numerous festivals this month before hitting DVD & Blu-ray in the UK on 12 November 2012, from Monster Pictures.

Review by Stephanie Scaife

Apartment 143 is an exercise in tedium if ever there was one, and a fine example to back up Keri’s recent editorial detailing exactly why we’re all so fed up of found footage movies and why they should be wholeheartedly discouraged, if not wiped out entirely from the horror genre. Apartment 143 is the first feature from young Spanish filmmaker Carles Torrens and it is written by Rodrigo Cortés (Buried, Red Lights). It is also so painfully generic and so forgettable that even a day after watching it I’m struggling to recall the details of the plot (what there is of one).

We’re introduced to a team of parapsychologists led by Dr. Helzer (Michael O’Keefe) who go to investigate the home of the White family, which has been plagued by paranormal goings on. Alan White (Kai Lennox) and his two children, Benny (Damian Roman) and surly teenage daughter Caitlin (Gia Mantega) have only just moved into Apartment 143 after being forced out of their family home due to various bad things happening; unexplained drops in temperature, phones ringing, objects flying around etc etc. However, bad luck for the White family because whatever it was terrorising them seems to have followed them into their new home. Flanked by Ellen (Fiona Glascott) and Paul (Rick Gonzalez), Dr. Helzer goes through every trick in the haunted house manual before the final big reveal at the end, which of course includes an oddball psychic (Francesc Garrido) and lots of scenes that try to scare you by using the following structure; quiet, quiet, quiet, LOUD NOISE, FLASHING LIGHT, quiet, quiet… you know the drill.

The biggest issue I had with Apartment 143 was just how dull it was. The characters all talk about every possible explanation for the paranormal events as well as all of their fancy ghost hunting equipment at great and tedious length, and for something that is supposedly “real life” caught on camera, there sure is a lot of exposition, not to mention a creepy soundtrack that I can only assume must have been orchestrated by our ghost. They do at least mix up some of the shots with handheld camera, traditional talking heads, surveillance footage and the like in a bid to try and stop the film from lagging, but even at a brisk 75 minute running time, I still found myself staring at the ceiling and checking my emails intermittently. Never a good sign, especially when the film in question is supposed to be scary.

Anyway, not only have I never been a fan of the found footage genre (with the exception of perhaps Chronicle and Troll Hunter) but Apartment 143 is also a particularly bad entry into this already overstuffed canon. It is unoriginal, predictable and not in the least bit frightening. There is very little to recommend about this film at all, except perhaps the acting which is pretty decent considering what they had to work with. Avoid at all costs.

Apartment 143 is available now on Blu-ray and DVD, from Momentum.

Review by Kit Rathenar

It’s only fair of me to admit that I’m probably not the target demographic for a film like Closed Circuit Extreme. Then again, I really don’t know who IS the target demographic for the flood of torture/rape movies currently going around. I’d quite like to find out, if only so I can make sure I’m never alone in a room with any of them. The kind of mind that can handle films like this at anything other than arm’s length with a pair of mental tongs is one I’m not anxious to get too close to.

Tongs firmly in hand and squinting through my fingers, then, let me begin the dissection. Closed Circuit Extreme is a variation on found footage, being recorded on a set of miniature spycams that a pair of university students have concealed around the house of the man they believe to be responsible for the disappearance of their friend. On the upside, this tactic avoids the nausea-inducing shakeycam of most found footage, but instead it substitutes a whole new kind of viewing discomfort with eyeball-jarring CCTV glitches and piercing electronic “vwip” noises accompanying every single crosscut. I can imagine this style going over well, though, with a generation raised on Big Brother-style reality TV, so we’d probably better get used to it, as I bet it catches on. As a way to shoot a film it places interesting demands on the actors, as the camera can’t track them when they move; everything has to happen in the viewing arc of one of the cameras, but at the same time the cast have to appear unaware that they’re being observed. Closed Circuit Extreme achieves this with a mix of well-chosen camera placement and some carefully considered blocking, and I’d definitely accord props to veteran actor Stefano Fregni as the killer David De Santis. He does a very believable job of portraying a man who thinks he’s alone in his own house, and throughout the film his performance is convincingly both human and horrifying.

Indeed, going purely on the acting and directing, part of me wants to call this a good film (barring the strange decision to get the entirely Italian cast to deliver their lines in English, as their accents are uniformly so thick that I’d have found it easier watching this in subtitled Italian). The part of me that had to pause it several times before I could get to the end, however, begs to disagree. Sure, this is a grotesquely realistic portrayal of how a serial rapist and killer might act in his own house, complete with the repeated rape and then murder of one girl, plus the rather quicker death of another who was simply unlucky enough to get in his way. But why make such an accurate portrayal in the first place, or watch it (unless, like me, you drew the short straw to review it)? That, I can’t tell you.

Perhaps the clue is in the name – Closed Circuit EXTREME? Is this purely meant to be a test of the nerves and endurance of a viewer? Or is it a brutal piece of social commentary? Was I really meant to sit there hissing “run, run, RUN!” at the characters through gritted teeth, or feeling my stomach roil with scalding hate and anger as De Santis forced himself on a bound and semi-conscious girl? Is this film simply a wake-up call to the world at large that these things happen and they aren’t okay? I don’t know. But while I was impressed by the directing and acting of Closed Circuit Extreme, this very realism is its weakness in the end. I definitely reacted hard to what I was watching, but not because I was truly responding to the film itself. Rather, I was reacting to the fact that it recreated experiences I’m already too familiar with – fear, victimisation, rape – and reminded me of how savagely I hate those things in the real world.

Art may hold up a mirror to life, but in the process it should also show us something we couldn’t otherwise experience. And so, contrary to what it would doubtless like you to believe, Closed Circuit Extreme’s problem isn’t that it goes “too far”. It’s that in a bid to duplicate reality with too much exactness, it risks distracting the viewer from its own best features with gratuitous emotional triggering and yet still goes no further, in any direction, than reality itself does already; and so as art, it becomes ultimately hollow. Intellectually I appreciate that this film is well observed and that it’s a remarkable study in filmmaking technique, but I can’t love it and I’m hesitant to recommend it. Don’t try this one unless you really like having your endurance challenged.

Closed Circuit is out now on DVD and download from Revolver.

Review by Tristan Bishop

Caution: some spoilers ahead.

I think I’ll be upsetting no-one, save possibly the future producers of Hostel 4, when I say that torture porn as a dominant horror genre is on the way out. The first Saw film was 8 years ago, and what will doubtless be forever considered the artistic pinnacle of the form, Martyrs, was four years after that. Since then we’ve been subjected to an endless stream of increasingly boring tales where people are tied to chairs and have various nasty things done to their bodies with garden tools and kitchen implements. Save the occasional gem like The Loved Ones, it’s been an ever-decreasing spiral, leaving us fans feeling like we are the ones being tied to our chairs and tortured, albeit with boredom and over-familiarity rather than sharp blades – a slower and more painful fate entirely.

Which brings us to Into The Lion’s Den. A film which sets itself apart from the Saw/Hostel crowd by one thing: sexual orientation. That’s right folks, this is gay torture porn. A sub-subgenre I had previously not stumbled across (although I have seen a few other gay genre pieces, from slashers to the utterly bizarre 70’s biker film The Pink Angels). So far so good – we have novelty appeal at least, but is the film itself much cop?

We start with three friends on a road trip, but these are no teens in search of kicks, but three gay men in their mid-30s, heading to New York to live it up. Johnny is the ringleader – outspoken, voracious in his appetites and a little bit of a loose cannon (an early scene shows him seducing a gas-station attendant before stealing his trousers and driving off without paying!); Mikey, who is altogether more insular, getting over a long term relationship and (it turns out) getting over the news that he is now HIV positive; and their friend Ted, a sheltered black guy who it seems has only recently come out and is determined to get some ‘life experience’ out of the trip.

So far so good – But Johnny is stalling for time before they get to NYC and they end up having to stay the night in a cheap hotel in a redneck town. Johnny convinces the others to go out and take in the nightlife – but it turns out he has hidden intentions, as he has been communicating with a man over a ‘Grindr’-styled phone app called, rather bluntly ‘Bender’. He leads them to a bar called The Lion’s Den where they stick out like the proverbial sore thumbs (not helped by Johnny’s tight T-shirt with the words ‘blowjobs happen’ emblazoned upon it), get into a fight over a case of mistaken identity, and go to leave. However, Johnny decides to stay, get drunk and await his potential conquest…

Of course this is a big mistake, as it turns out the barman and his wife are the ones who lured him there. Theirs is a special relationship indeed, as they love each other, but he is gay, and so in order to keep their marriage alive they kidnap, drug, rape and torture men, before feeding them a drug cocktail so strong it wipes their memories entirely. Of course, Johnny’s friends go looking for him, and walk straight back into a trap…

The basic plot is simple as they come, and something we’ve seen a million times before, but this film is interesting primarily due to the characters themselves. We’re so used to seeing annoying teens in our horror films that to suddenly be confronted with characters who are not only more ‘mature’ (at least in age terms) but also have interesting problems and interactions with each other, that it seems like a genuine and welcome blast of fresh air. Johnny is having trouble coming to terms with the fact that he is ‘an ageing party boy’, Mikey is dealing with a broken heart and the onset of a life-threatening condition, and Ted still seems to be taking tentative first steps into his new lifestyle. We actually care about these characters – yes, over half the film is taking up with characterisation and scene-setting, but in this instance it just works, helped by a decent script which avoids too much cliché, and fine performances from all three of the friends (especially Mikey, who is very likeable).

SPOILER ALERT:

Once the actual horror film gets going things are maybe less successful, as the husband and wife team, whilst OK, don’t have the acting chops of the main trio. What is interesting to me about these sequences is that you don’t see much male rape on film – let only male rape by a woman. These sequences don’t perhaps have the shock value that you might expect – Johnny mostly laughs throughout his ordeal, which angers the couple so much that they end up accidentally killing him, for instance, but they are also not shot in a way conducive to titillation (in stark contrast to the aforementioned gas station scene, which features an almost-hardcore blowjob).

Unfortunately the film is further let down by a REALLY poor and slushy ending which seems shipped in from a gay romance, and left me rather scratching my head, so unfortunately I can’t recommend Into The Lion’s Den as a decent horror film, but it IS interesting and kept my attention and respect up to that point, so if you’re in the mood for something a little different, you could do worse.

Into The Lion’s Den is out now on Region 2 DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures.

Review by Kit Rathenar

What do you call a relentless tide of mindless, drooling, moaning horrors that keeps coming, is apparently limitless in its scale, and is impossible to hold at bay forever no matter what fortifications you erect or how well you arm yourself? That’s right: indie zombie movies! It seems like literally everybody, no matter how limited their film-making experience, wants to try their hand at a zombie flick these days; the genre has been worked, aptly enough, to death and beyond. I’m actually working on a theory that zombie movies are no longer a cinematic art form but a performance one: the true goal of the exercise doesn’t seem, any more, to be the production of a finished film that’s worth showing to the world. Rather, it’s to generate an excuse for you and all your mates to cover yourselves in fake blood and shamble around your local town centre moaning and attempting to eat each other, presumably for the sheer fun of doing it. And while I can understand the impulse, and indeed sympathise with it to an extent, there are other ways to get it out of your system. Zombie LARP events exist for a reason.

That being said, it was inevitable that a compilation of sixteen short zombie movies, clocking in at a massive five-hour running time, was going to be a mixed bag. Monster Pictures claim to have assembled the “Ultimate Zombie Feast” with this selection, but in all honesty if this is the ultimate shortlist, then I dread to think what the ones that didn’t make the cut were like. Many of the entries here are okay in and of themselves, but putting them all together and watching them at once they stack up to form a portrait of a genre that’s become bloated with complacency, cliches and self-indulgent directing.

There is, however, one film here that I would unreservedly recommend, and that film is Tarunabh Dutta’s Savages. Billed as “one of India’s first independent zombie films”, it’s forty minutes of truly affecting, powerful horror that follows the tragic fate of four friends who unwisely go trekking out near the site of a former government biochemical facility. On a whole other level to anything else in this collection, it has the smarts to develop its characters and focus on them above all else, rather than just filling time until it can throw its special effects budget at the screen. The warm, affectionate introduction we’re given to the characters makes their later suffering and emotional conflict personal and engaging, and the zombie element of the film is there to serve and advance the narrative, rather than the reverse – ironically making this movie far more shocking and impactful than anything else here. In truth, the highest praise I can give this film is to say that it shouldn’t have been included here at all, because it deserves much more attention and respect than it’s going to get via this particular distribution route. See Savages even if you watch nothing else from this collection.

After that, I’d give the next tier of credit to those films that at least bring some imagination, charisma or a twist to the table. Bren Lynne’s nine-minute Kidz is my favourite after Savages, taking the premise of three children caught in a zombie apocalypse and going in the last direction I was expecting, to charming effect. Next after that I’d probably pick Jay Reiter’s Arise, a joyously brutal romp in which a blue-collar conspiracy theorist called Thanatos (what a name) is forced to take on the role of action hero when a zombie plague at his workplace threatens his girlfriend and her daughter. It’s simple but it knows it’s simple, and the surprise bonus of a ferocious death metal soundtrack won this reviewer over on the spot (why don’t more horror films use extreme metal when it works so well?) Meanwhile Tor Fruergaard’s It Came From the West is without doubt the weirdest offering here, a Danish puppet animation set in the Wild West and featuring cowboys, Native American stereotypes and a steam-powered chainsaw in a surreal performance that’s about half-and-half Sergio Leone and Looney Tunes. At the other end of the seriousness scale, Joseph Avery and Matt Simpson give us Plague, following an illegal immigrant who seeks out a new life in the UK only to run headlong into a zombie outbreak – filmed with no dialogue, only voiceover, and a cold and shadow-drenched visual style, this is one of the more effective and harrowing offerings here.

Additionally, I’d say a good word for opener Zombeer, the shambolic but fun tale of a drunken brewmaster who boils alive in one of his own vats, accidentally giving birth to a batch of beer that turns anyone who drinks it into the living dead. Chemical stimulants also play a pivotal and hilarious role in The Book of Zombie, the longest film here at just over an hour, in which a small Utah town suffers a zombie outbreak that only affects Mormons. Tongue firmly in cheek, this movie bowls through all the classic zombie cliches and invents a couple more that deserve to become staples in their own right, before finishing with a punchline whose genius will only be marred if it results in the directors receiving a lawsuit. I’ll spoil no further.

While most of what remains is simply middle-of-the-road, perhaps unavoidably there are a couple of real clangers in the mix as well. Fear of the Living Dead manages to combine a weak script and a nonsensical plot twist with a nasty gloss of misogyny (why is the female lead tough and competent only until she encounters the male lead, whereupon she turns into a clumsy, shrieky, cliched movie damsel?) Zombie Harvest is a weird fusion of bathos and gross-out, unable to decide whether it wants to be a pastiche or a parody and somehow accomplishing the worst of both worlds. The Skin of Your Teeth, meanwhile, isn’t as actively bad as either of these but does manage to be the most pointless zombie film I’ve ever seen, coming off like a random clip lifted from the middle of a feature film that would have had to be pretty generic to start with.

For the record, the remaining films are Zomblies (three quarters of an hour of shooty, shouty military-vs-zombies mayhem that appears to be trying to emulate the success of films like Dog Soldiers but without the same calibre of script, though it does conjure up enough of a budget for some cool action sequences); Not Even Death (a tragic but ultimately predictable little tale of a husband who refuses to part with his beloved wife even after her transformation into a zombie); Zombies and Cigarettes (which takes the classic zombie-occupied-mall plot and combines it with a hapless protagonist who’s trying to court the girl of his dreams and keep her alive at the same time); Bitten (a woman comes home as a newly infected zombie, in a short-short which feels more like an promo for the special effects team than an actual film); Paris By Night of the Living Dead (reminiscent of one of those action movie trailers that spoil the film by showing you all the best scenes, though here with the advantage that the other eighty minutes of the film in question was never made so you just get all the cool scenes in one place – and bonus points for destroying both the Sacre Coeur AND the Eiffel Tower in a twelve-minute film) and Dead Hungry (a bizarre little zombie romance with a gag-inducing comic twist). All of these would potentially be fine on their own, but taken in sum with everything else in this collection, zombie fatigue is likely to set in sooner or later for all but the most easily pleased diehards.

Though if you do like zombies that much, it’s possibly still worth your while to buy this box set. Just whatever you do, don’t watch it all in one go, or you really will have no brains left by the end…

The Ultimate Zombie Feast is released to Region 2 DVD on 8th October from Monster Pictures.

Review by Kit Rathenar

Whoever wrote the publicity material for Piyapan Choopetch’s My Ex didn’t necessarily do it any favours by trying to push it as a revenge thriller in the mode of Fatal Attraction, as the prospect of yet another revenge horror movie made my blood run cold in all the wrong ways. It took me a second glance at the briefing to realise that this film actually had a supernatural component at all; which is misleading to say the least, as on viewing it quickly becomes clear that while it’s certainly a tale of romantic revenge, My Ex is first and foremost a ghost story. The plot centres on handsome actor Ken, whose indecisive and self-centred approach to his love life is providing the gossip rags with endless material, but leaving a trail of wronged and broken hearts in his wake. When he jilts his pregnant lover Meen in favour of the pretty, spirited Ploy, all while still fending off the distraught pleas of his previous side-girl Bow, he unwittingly ensnares himself in a web of jealousy, madness and vengeance that takes “till death do us part” to a whole new level…

Despite not being initially sure what to expect, I enjoyed watching this film. While it doesn’t seem to have had a huge budget it balances this by refusing to overreach itself and Choopetch’s choice of a relatively steady, measured pace, coupled with his keen eye for visuals, add a gloss of richness and depth that effectively raise the artistic stakes. This is a beautiful film to look at, and I found it easy to become absorbed in the plot despite its comparative simplicity. The lighter scenes of Ken and his various lovers in happier moments add dynamic range and shading to the drama, while the luxurious sets and unremittingly beautiful scenic backdrops offer a setting that makes the horror sequences all the more striking by contrast.

The horror itself meanwhile is very much in the classic Asian cinema mode, with its flickering ghost girl who pops in and out of the corner of the screen at first only to become more and more hideously present as time wears on; black-haired, grey-skinned, rotting and mutilated, she’s nightmarish enough to raise a shudder even when she’s no longer relying on jumps and suspense to scare the viewer. I particularly enjoyed the sense that there’s no effective limit to the ghost’s power, or her imagination – she can turn up in photographs, dreams, the bath, or the passenger seat of a car with equal ease and the consequences will be horrible every time. For those who prefer the gorier side of horror there’s also enough to satisfy, including a magnificently grand guignol suicide scene that graphically justifies every bit of My Ex’s 18 rating just as I was starting to wonder why it had deserved one. Adding to this is the use of purely hallucinatory or psychosomatic violence that allows characters to live through more than their fair share of suffering; and indeed a certain dreamlike quality pervades the entire movie, emphasised by the numerous flashbacks and some simple but effective tricks with colour and filters.

It has to be admitted that in the last analysis this is still very much a genre flick, but it’s not a bad one by any means. If you’re a fan of Asian horror, revenge drama, or simply of beautiful cinematography, you’ll probably enjoy My Ex. Just don’t ever watch it with a date.

My Ex is released to Region 2 DVD on 8th October from MVM.

Review by Kit Rathenar

Perhaps accidentally, there’s something grimly topical about Géla Babluani’s 13. In the run-up to an election that’s seeing America tear itself apart over the question of whether its citizens should be free to die in the street if they don’t have health insurance, this movie opens by introducing us to Vince (Sam Riley), whose father is in need of life-saving surgery that his family can’t afford. Vince works as an electrician; while on a call he overhears the owner of the house discussing an unspecified means whereby he plans to make a vast sum in a day, only to die of a drug overdose mere minutes later. In desperation, Vince steals the all-important envelope that was meant to lead the dead man to his chance of a fortune. Following the instructions in it, he is drawn into the dark underworld of Russian Roulette, where wealthy men wager millions on the desperate and the damned who are willing to have guns put to their heads in exchange for the chance of walking away rich. It’s a harrowing scenario, and yet somehow a horribly believable one.

While 13 is an American remake of the director’s own earlier work 13 Tzameti, which I haven’t seen, I was impressed immediately to realise that despite a stellar cast (featuring such luminaries as Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, and Ray Winstone), a glossied-up Hollywood thriller this film is assuredly not. The camerawork is pragmatic, simple and unforgiving; the characters and sets eschew magazine-cover perfection in favour of a worn, lived-in, and deeply human aesthetic that frames the brutality of 13’s subject matter in a deeply apposite fashion. Resisting the urge to glamorise his setting, Babluani instead adds little touches that emphasise the underground, seedy nature of the Russian Roulette game despite the wealth of the men bankrolling it; from the hand-painted bare bulb that acts as the players’ firing cue, to the master of ceremonies balancing precariously on a simple stepladder as he directs the proceedings. I’m glad Babluani chose to take this route, as it lessens the chance that the viewer might themselves try to romanticise the subject matter. Instead, we’re forced to come face to face with the horror of it just as Vince himself does.

And speaking of Vince, despite great performances across the board this film indisputably belongs to Sam Riley. As Vince is forced through the rounds of the game, we watch his innocence and personal morality burn away like paper under a blowtorch until by the end of the film he’s gone from a naive youth whose only fault was his desire to help his family, to a man and a killer whom no sane person would want to mess with. With relatively minimal dialogue to work with, Riley acts this transformation with stark believability while still firmly retaining the viewer’s sympathy for Vince’s plight; the white-knuckle tension of the game’s final sequence, the “duel” in which two men stand with their guns to each other’s heads and pull their triggers, is truly intense and credit for that has to rest in large part with Riley.

Sadly, the very success of this scene is what sets up 13 for a last-fence fall. The denouement of the duel is everything that could be asked of a thriller’s finale; but instead of ending on that high note Babluani chooses to add a ten-minute coda which ties up several loose ends of narrative but does so at the cost of draining the film’s energy and closing on a minor-key whimper that’s all the more depressing after the spectacular bang he’s already given us. I’d have happily seen this cut in favour of a bit more insight into the supporting cast. In particular I’d have loved to see more of Alexander Skarsgård as Jack, Vince’s handler at the game who shows his young charge a kindness and patience that fascinate by their very unexpectedness; or of Mickey Rourke, as the washed-up but likeable desperado Jefferson. And there’s an entire additional film that could clearly have been made about Jason Statham’s Jasper and Ray Winstone as his brother Ronald – what kind of man enters his own mentally handicapped brother into a game of Russian Roulette anyway, let alone repeatedly?

Although then again, that question does nicely summarise the sense of lingering unsettlement that I took away from 13. Despite its flawed finish, this is still a savagely entertaining little film that nicely blends character, tension and moral challenge, helped rather than hindered by its cold aesthetic and no-frills cinematography. Recommended.

13 is available on Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray on 8th October, from Anchor Bay.

Review by Ben Bussey

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a trio of Australian psychobilly girls – smoking hot homicidal maniacs, one and all – hide out at a sleepy beach town and wind up doing battle with a carnivorous leviathan. If that does indeed sound familiar, it may be because Marc reviewed it about seven months back when it was released in the US under its original title El Monstro del Mar. No idea why it’s been subsequently deemed necessary to drop the ‘el’ and ‘del mar’; was someone worried we’d think it was a Spanish film? Huh. Time was title changes like that only happened in America, like when Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter was renamed Ready To Wear, for fear that US audiences might think the film was French and, you know, wouldn’t go see it. Oh well, as gratuitous title changes go this certainly isn’t one of the worst in recent memory. The key point is still there: what’s that coming out of the sea? Is it a monster? It’s a monster.

Writer/director Stuart Simpson seems to be taking a Night of the Creeps-ish approach here, lifting tropes from a broad variety of vintage B-movies, dropping them in the proverbial blender and seeing what comes out after hitting the purée button. What we’re left with in this instance is some midway point between Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and a Roger Corman creature feature, but with a modern, Rodriguez/Tarantino edge. The threads, hair-dos, tunes and cars are old school, but the swearing, gore and general on-screen debauchery go way beyond anything they could get away with in the 50/60s. Obviously Simpson’s film is not the only one of recent years to wear its influences on its sleeve like this, but as we’ve seen a lot from most modern neo-grindhouse, such films always run the risk of winding up being less than the sum of its parts. So, does Monstro! add up to a satisfactory 75 minutes  – or is it just Bitch Slap with a giant killer octopus…?

Well, the fact that it is only 75 minutes certainly doesn’t hurt. Monstro! is indeed drowning in artifice, with an attitude and aesthetic that’s every bit as pasted-on as the tattoos on the leading ladies (and I’m not casting assumptions there, the behind the scenes footage reveals as much). From the black and white, Faster Pussycat-aping intro with its car-top go-go dancing, to Blondie’s exaggerated hips-wiggling as she disrobes for a swim, to the deluge of bad girl trash talk – everyone getting called “toots,” “chicky babe” and so forth – there’s barely a second of action that rings true. However, none of this is enough to keep Monstro! from showing the viewer a good time. Yes, it’s as hollow as an Easter egg, but the chocolate still tastes pretty good on the way down.

To address the obvious, it certainly doesn’t hurt at all that the cast are very easy on the eye. The core bad girls Baretta (Nelli Scarlet), Snowball (Kate Watts) and Blondie (Karli Madden) are plenty appealing in their surrogate Tura Satana/Haji/Lori Williams roles, and Norman Yemm is suitably cantankerous as Joseph, the disabled geriatric warning of the perils of getting in the water (his wheelchair surely being another nod to the Meyer classic). But perhaps the one semi-surprise in the film is that the real central protagonist is Kyrie Capri’s Hannah, Joseph’s Catholic schoolgirl granddaughter whose search for identity and struggle with the demons of her past really gives the film its main drive. The stereotypical bad girls are really never anything more than that – their murderous, psychotic ways go without explanation or apology – but Hannah’s personal journey from shrinking violet to bad-ass kraken fighter does lend just that little bit of weight to proceedings. Plus, not unlike her more dolled-up co-stars, Ms Capri is also a pleasure to look at. Much as Marc said before me, I must confess that I actually didn’t mind too much that none of them get naked. I know, I can’t believe it either.

It would be easy to bemoan how contrived and unoriginal it all is, but ultimately Monstro! isn’t the kind of film that sets out to change the face of cinema. It’s short, snappy, sexy and sleazy enough to forgive its shortcomings; and for such a clearly low budget film that was shot in only 15 days, it’s much more aesthetically pleasing and technically proficient than most. Making this DVD an even sweeter deal is the inclusion of two of Stuart Simpson’s earlier short films, Acid Spiders and Sickie, which are less contrived but considerably gorier than the feature; by no means a bad thing. Pop this disc on in the midnight hour with a roomful of friends, a belliful of booze and your expectations in check, and I doubt you’ll come out the other end with too many complaints.

Monstro! is out on Region 2 DVD on 22nd October, from Monster Pictures.