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Review by Stephanie Scaife

Oculus is the new film from Mike Flanagan (Absentia) and despite the innocuous title and rather unspectacular marketing campaign, it’s actually a little bit more interesting than your standard horror-lite multiplex hit. It’s so unusual these days to find a horror movie that tries to do something different, and actually succeeds on some level that, although flawed, Oculus delivers in a way that is unexpected.

Kaylie (Karen Gillan, sporting a convincing American accent) and her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) have differing memories of a traumatic incident eleven years prior. Kaylie believes that a mirror with supernatural powers is responsible, an item that she has finally tracked down and purchased at auction, convinced that she can have revenge on it for killing her parents. Tim on the other hand has just been released from a mental institute, and years of psychologists and doctors have convinced him that these are the false memories of a troubled childhood and that there is a far more rational explanation as to what happened.

What I liked about the film was that for the first half hour or so you’re not sure which of the siblings is correct, and this is something that I feel could have played out for longer to create more tension; but inevitably there is something sinister at work, and as Kaylie is proved right her glee is only too apparent whilst Tim struggles to come to terms with what is going on around them. The films plays out both in the present and in flashback, where we gradually find out how events transpired in the past and how they are being recreated in the present. Katee Sackhoff and Rory Cochrane are excellent as Kaylie and Tim’s parents in flashback whose marriage is gradually torn apart whilst the kids look on helpless.

Now this supernatural force likes to play tricks on its victims. It is also left almost completely unexplained which I definitely liked: we don’t know what the mirror is or why it is doing what it’s doing. This is what stopped the film getting bogged down in too much exposition and waffle. For once I also found that what we did get in terms of spookiness was fairly interesting, if not straight out of the Freddy Krueger school of haunting, so we as the audience are never exactly sure what is real and what is imagined, or what is a combination of the two. In one of the film’s cleverest scenes a conversation plays out between the two siblings, but when they watch it back on the CCTV footage the words are the same but their actions are completely different. It’s eerie and genuinely surprising; it’s just a shame it’s one of the only scenes that made me sit up and pay attention.

These subtle mind tricks play out through the movie, such as Kaylie accidentally eating a light bulb when she thinks it’s an apple, and other moments which may or may not be illusion. The mirror clearly likes to keep its victims on their toes and Kaylie may have overestimated her ability to take control it via technology and timing. Although the ambiguity pretty much goes out the door midway through, I think there is still an argument there that the entire thing is the product of an abusive and neglectful childhood and its repercussions – this may just be my reading into it, but I always tend to lean on the side of crazy humans as opposed to actual supernatural activity.

I think where the film lets us down, and in a fairly major way, is that it’s just not scary. Not even a bit. As a supernatural thriller it works fairly well, but as a horror film, not at all. Every scare is either signposted a mile off or from The Ring book of spooky scares, so unless you’re the kind of person to find The Conjuring scary then this is not likely to ruffle your feathers. In fact, my biggest complaint about Oculus is that it really seems to think that’s it’s better and scarier than it is – and yes, sure it’s better than 90% of straight to video horror fare, but it’s no Let the Right One In or Martyrs. Basically this is an above average film that does some interesting and original things with the genre, which for horror is saying something. But if you’re a diehard fan, don’t get your hopes up too much.

Oculus is released to UK cinemas on 13 June.

Review by Tristan Bishop

The masters of the classic Italian horror film were never confined to just one genre. Dario Argento, arguably the most dedicated of the horror directors, also made westerns early in his career. Mario Bava made westerns, sci-fi and peplums (historical muscle man films) even after astounding the world with his official debut Black Sunday, and Lucio Fulci was no different, as Contraband proves. In fact, Fulci worked in a variety of genres from the 1950s onwards, from spy films to comedies, before eventually entering the horror/giallo field with One On Top Of The Other (1969) and A Lizard In Woman’s Skin (1971). Even after the worldwide success of Zombie Flesh Eaters in 1979, Fulci made the occasional foray outside of the genre which made his name – notably the post apocalyptic sci-fi The New Gladiators (1983 – ripped off by Stephen King for The Running Man) and Conquest (also 1983), an attempt to jump on the Conan The Barbarian bandwagon. Even when working outside the horror genre, however, Fulci knew what made his films successful – buckets of gore. Contraband, on the surface a straightforward Mafia revenge flick, contains more of the brutal red stuff than most of today’s horror upstarts could dream of splashing across the screen. Thankfully those indefatigable miscreants at Shameless have now issued this on DVD in a totally uncut print, so fans of the Maestro’s horror hits can appraise it for themselves.

The plot starts in the harbour of Naples, where smuggler Luca (Fabio Testi, a mainstay of the Italian crime flick) evades a police raid by blowing up a boat and faking his own death. Suspecting an informant, Luca and his brother Mickey take their concerns to their Mafia-connected boss. The same night, someone sets fire to Mickey’s stables, killing his prize racehorse. But worse is yet to come. On their way back from the stables they encounter a police roadblock which turns out to be fake, and the ‘cops’ open fire, killing Mickey. At Mickey’s funeral, symbolically carried out in the Naples harbour, Luca vows revenge for his brother, and goes after Scherino, a mob boss he suspects of ordering the hit. Unfortunately it turns out that Scherino had nothing to do with it, and there may be new bosses in town. Can Luca fight the rival gangsters, whilst avoiding the police hot on their tails, and can he protect his long-suffering wife and young son whilst he does it? Or will the whole thing end up as a grim bloodbath with no-one’s innocence left intact?

Well, yes, it’s the latter, let’s face it. But then you’ve probably already guessed that. And, to be fair, Contraband, despite being a lot more cogently plotted than Fulci’s more famous horror work, is hardly a masterpiece of story-telling. The performances are standard of Italian exploitation too (although the English dub on offer alongside the original Italian audio is superior to most), but that’s not really what you come to a Fulci film for, is it? We’re here for the rough stuff, and boy does Lucio deliver on that front. The film features an unflinching close-up Bunsen Burner torture scene, stabbings, a truly nasty rape and bullets riddling throats, heads, stomachs and pretty much every conceivable part of the human body. In fact, there’s as much gore on show here as in any of Fulci’s classic period horrors (in fact it was made right in-between Zombie Flesh Eaters and City Of The Living Dead), and, due to the realistic tone of the film, it feels even nastier and grittier than any of them. New York Ripper might be the closest of Fulci’s other films in tone, although here the debated misogyny of the director is only evident in the one aforementioned scene.

The technical credits of the film are a real who’s-who of classic period Fulci too – the wonderful Fabio Frizzi on music (sadly not one of his best, but a passable funk bass and bongo motif), Vincenzo Tomassi on editing, and the great Sergio Salvati working the camera, so fans of their Euro exploitation will know they are in safe hands here, and of course there are the traditional godawful disco scenes (with terrible music and even worse dancing) and bottles of J&B on display. Fans of 70’s/80’s ephemera will also have a field day here – Testi wears an amazing fur coat at one point, and the late queen of Italian sexploitation Ajita Wilson is seen playing a game of Pong for a split second (as well as flashing various bits of her anatomy).

I last saw Contraband on a VHS under the title The Smuggler (one of seemingly dozens of titles it has been released under) back in 1996, and many of the gruesome images have stayed with me for nearly twenty years, although I couldn’t remember any of the plot details. In fact, I’ve had trouble recalling them after watching it again last night, but it doesn’t really matter, because if you want a rough, no-nonsense Italian crime flick with the violence and sleaze turned up to 11, you’ll do no better than Contraband. Thank you, Shameless!

Contraband is out now on DVD from Shameless Screen Entertainment.

Visit http://www.shameless-films.com/ to learn more.

Review by Ben Bussey

Perhaps the key problem with most modern attempts at grindhouse is that they’re just too cute. All wacky camera angles, edits and music cues, bright colours, knowingly outlandish dialogue and scenarios: the bulk of these movies, from the high profile (the Machete movies) to the instantly forgotten (Bounty Killer), are delivered in a painfully contrived and self-conscious fashion, not so much giving you a sly wink as grabbing you by the shoulders with a wide-eyed tooth-baring grin and shouting “it’s a joke, get it?” directly into your face. People seem to lose sight of the fact that, a hell of a lot of the time, real grindhouse/exploitation cinema was a very, very ugly affair. Look at Thriller/They Call Her One Eye; the Female Prisoner Scorpion and Ilsa movies; hell, the likes of Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave. Their relative technical crudity is one thing; the content is something else entirely, and a great many of these movies retain the power to truly shock and appall, our detached, irony-tinged contemporary perspective be damned.

I daresay fans of such bona fide nasty old school exploitation may be pleased to see at least one neo-grindhouse movie making a concerted effort to evoke that spirit of real grimness and cruelty. Taking what sounds on paper like yet another yawn-inducing bad girls in the desert movie (yep, because we’re all so anxious for more movies like Bitch Slap), writer-director Peter Grendle’s Blood Soaked is one of the nastiest pieces of work I’ve encountered for some time, in which bubblegum college kid theatrics are swiftly shoved to one side in favour of unrelenting misery and torment. Sound like a good time…? Maybe not, but maybe that’s not the point. I personally have never been a great fan of torture movies, mainly because they’re just not fun to watch (I know, real appropriate for someone who writes for a site called Brutal As Hell) – but even so, I can’t deny when they’re done well.

It all starts out simply enough. Following a brief intro setting up our antagonists Sadie (Laina Cathryn Grendle) and Katie (Hayley Derryberry) – two orphaned sisters with an appetite for destruction, hiding out in a New Mexico desert bunker – we meet our final girl in waiting, Piper (Heather Wilder), all peachy smiles as she pulls up to her new dormitory home, ready to start life as a college freshman. Planning to keep things loose with the boyfriend she left behind, it turns out Piper doesn’t take too long to try out that whole college girl sexual experimentation thing, as she quickly befriends out-and-proud Ashley (Rachel Corona), and in the aftermath of an inevitably beer-fuelled party in the desert things gradually get less-than platonic… but then, of course, those orphaned sisters show up and throw that shit headfirst into the fan. See, these sisters aren’t just totally nuts; they’re also totally Nazis, the daughters of an escaped SS scientist. And, you’ll be astonished to hear, they don’t have anything too pleasant planned for our young would-be lovers.

What I like about Blood Soaked is that it keeps you on your toes. Sure, it’s hardly the most innovative and unpredictable movie you’ll ever see, but it does take some tonal shifts that you’re unlikely to see coming. The opening twenty minutes or so of Piper and Ashley getting to know one another have a clean-cut cutesiness that’s surely no accident, making it all the more of a sucker punch when Sadie and Katie come charging into their world fists-first. From there on, we’re into textbook torture territory; imprisonment, humiliation, bullying, endless cries of anguish. Sure, we’ve seen plenty of this in the past decade, but there’s something uniquely unsettling about it here; perhaps it’s the Nazism and homophobia, perhaps it’s the fact that it’s young women torturing other young women. Either way, the ick factor is high.

However, midway through the sudden shock twist-and-turn approach maybe goes just a little too far. For the sake of avoiding spoilers I won’t divulge the full details of Sadie and Katie’s master plan, but to my mind it’s a bit of a misstep. With one plot device, Blood Soaked goes from something genuinely unpleasant into more far-fetched, cartoonish territory, which comes close to undoing much of what went before. Some rather misjudged, almost comedic music cues don’t help matters much there. Then again, this might also be deemed in-keeping with real grindhouse, which often featured such jarring shifts in tone and content. (Remember those comedy cops in Last House? Yeesh.)

As for anything else the viewer might find a bit jarring… Blood Soaked is clearly very much a microbudget DIY affair shot on basic DV, so inevitably it doesn’t look or sound all that great. As tends to go hand in hand with this, the performances are also variable at best; while the aforementioned leads do a fine job, some of the smaller supporting roles are handled rather sloppily – not helped by the sense that they’re fairly throwaway characters anyway. And as mentioned already, the musical score (largely keyboard-based from the sound of it) has its ups and downs, changing wildly from scene to scene to keep up with the persistent shifts in tone.

All that said, there’s a lot to be found here that we don’t always get from microbudget horror. Peter Grendle seems to have a more cinematic eye than many, getting some striking shots of the impressive desert setting, and by contrast getting a really squalid atmosphere from the underground bunker scenes. Like I said, I’m no great admirer of ordeal horror, but I have to admire any microbudget horror filmmakers who strive to make something more than an hour or so of disposable entertainment. Blood Soaked is a film clearly designed to get under your skin, and when all is said and done it’s successful in this; as such, it’s definitely a film that horror fans should sit up and take note of.

Blood Soaked is released to Region 1 DVD and VOD on 17 June 2014, from Wild Eye Releasing.

Review by Karolina Gruschka

The Battery is an independent movie production written and directed by Jeremy Gardner, who also plays Ben, one of the protagonists. It is a story of two unlikely friends brought together by a zombie outbreak and about how they deal with each other and the situation they find themselves in.

Often understood as a term refering to the combined force of artillery on a battlefield, ‘the battery’ bears also a further meaning within the movie’s context. In baseball jargon it is employed to describe the relationship between pitcher and catcher, who in a joint effort become the primary attacking force against the opposing team. The main characters, Ben and Mickey are both baseball players who only know each other from the field; despite their clashing personalities they have to work together to face the walking dead (and living, who can be worse at times).

For a zombie movie, the undead hardly show themselves in The Battery. And when they do, they seem barely more life threatening than a bunch of rabid sloths. I sense that what we are dealing here with is not a horror film as such, but a drama set in a horror context. The viewer does not find out exactly when, where and why the zombie outbreak occurred, yet, this does not really matter, as the situation simply forms a backdrop for the relationship between Ben and Mickey and their ways of coping. It reminds me a little bit of Bear Grylls current survivalist series The Island, in which a group of ordinary men from different walks of life have to fend for themselves on a desert island. Returning back to the ‘simple life’ can bring out different colours and nuances in everyone and ultimately reveals who is a survivor. Ben and Mickey find themselves not on a desert island, but in a just as deserted post-apocalyptic North America.

Despite its zombie infestation and the prevailing paranoia between different groups of humans, this brave new world seems almost like a better place. Both stay away from the contaminated cities and roam the country like late 18th century romanticists, rediscovering the beautiful and sublime in nature. While Ben experiences wanderlust, Mickey dwells in nostalgia and a yearning for love. Ben has accepted reality and almost embraces their situation by trying to make the best out of it. In his energetic and hands on approach, he is the one who ‘hunts and gathers’, thinks realistically, makes decisions, is aware at all times and keeps spirits up for both. Mickey’s romantic nature, on the other hand, leads to depression, desperation, apathy and delusion. We mostly see him with his headphones on, listening to music (using an old school battery run portable cd player) in an attempt to avoid reality and in hope of all returning back to normal soon. Mickey even keeps a winning scratch card in his pocket, believing he might be able to cash in on the $1,000 in near future. After months of not coming across other human beings, the interception of a female voice on a radio transmission only fuels his nostalgia and ultimately leads to team Ben and Mickey’s downfall.

Mickey does rely on Ben a great deal (even when Ben is injured), but he plays not an entirely useless part in the battery. I believe that Ben needs somebody like Mickey – somebody to take care of – to give focus and meaning in a hopeles situation.

I first saw The Battery at The Abertoir Horror Film Festival 2013; I must admit that I was quite disappointed with the movie at first. I felt like it was a feature length The Walking Dead but with a much slower pace and hardly any action. There is a scene, for instance, where Ben and Mickey brush their teeth in real time. Even the climax of the movie seems to go on forever and is ‘shown’ from the perspective of a character who actually cannot see what is happening.

Maybe I just went in with the wrong expectations of seeing a zombie horror, maybe this film is not made for buzzing festival attendees. When I watched The Battery for the Second time – in the comfort of my own home – I enjoyed the movie for all the reasons I disliked it for at first. The long scenes of ‘nothingness’ set the serene atmosphere and highlight the desolation the two main characters find themselves in. I even found myself excusing the ending as an interesting attempt to show how the protagonist must have felt being left in the dark about whether he will escape his situation or not.

Considering that The Battery was shot in only two weeks and with a budget of a meager $6,000 I think the crew consisting only of a couple of friends, has done a brilliant job at creating a beautiful and intelligent picture. Viewers who are into their indie and folk rock will also thoroughly enjoy this work as music has a strong presence in The Battery.

The Battery is released to home entertainment in the UK on 21st July 2014, from Metrodome.

By Tristan Bishop

The giallo seems to be growing in popularity year by year. The current surge of interest in the genre can perhaps be credited to (or at the least has been heavily bolstered by) the discovery and championing of the soundtracks to these very Italian murder mysteries by DJs, record collectors and vinyl reissue companies, which in turn leads people to seek out the films the scores were originally recorded for. A whole new generation of horror fans being weaned on black-gloved killers brandishing straight razors, replacing those who burnt themselves out on ordeal horror and found footage is a nice idea (although, if I am to let my snobbish side show for a moment, I can’t be the only one slightly annoyed when people misuse ‘giallo’ to refer to any Italian horror film, and I still insist that Suspiria isn’t one), especially when it means brand new examples of the form are being released.

The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (gotta love that title, eh?) is the latest in the line of neo-gialli, following on from Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet’s previous film Amer (2009) and their ABCS Of Death (2012) segment ‘O Is For Orgasm’. Whilst the former dealt with three separate incidents in (one presumes) the life of a woman, and the latter was a pop art collage dealing with sex and death. Strange Colour attempts, at least on the surface, to take a straightforward thriller plot and reflect it through the duo’s obsessions and cutting edge film techniques.

Klaus Tange is Dan Christensen, who upon returning home from a business trip, discovers his wife is missing. His increasingly hallucinogenic search for her takes in an array of characters that live in their building, from a mysterious old woman who relates a scary tale of her husband’s disappearance, to a woman called Barbara, who enjoys naked rooftop smoking. A suspicious police inspector and a disgruntled landlord get swept along in the search, eventually learning that the building contains secret passages and rooms behind the walls of the apartments, and attendant revelations/fates for each of them.

A little odd but fairly straightforward plot-wise you might think, but this one is as metaphysical as they come. At times you might think that Klaus has killed his wife, or that she has simply run off, or that he never had a wife at all, or that, perhaps, the entire building is a metaphor for male fear and desire of women. There are no easy answers here – I’ve now seen the film twice and I have no more clue of what it was really about after the second viewing. But it’s not a film about answers, or really much about narrative at all – a lot of it plays out like an experimental art film, with kaleidoscopic images, quickly-edited still frames and all manner of trick camera work.

What the film IS about is style, and not only in the techniques used. Forzani and Cattet know their gialli, and the film is a love story to the opulent style and sleazy violence of those 1970’s gems. From the astounding music sourced from Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai’s soundtrack work (not all of it from gialli originally), to the be-gloved, mysterious killers with their knives and razors, even down to the name of Christensen’s wife, Edwige (after Edwige Fenech, one of the quintessential stars of the genre).

But whereas in a 1970’s giallo, elements of surrealism would sometimes creep into the thriller framework – reaching its pinnacle with Guilio Questi’s totally barking (and quite brilliant) Death Laid An Egg (1968) – here we have full-on madness, with the directors quite literally tearing down the walls of genre form and twisting recognisable aspects into their own psycho-sexual voyage. In my opinion it’s not as focussed a film as Amer, and slightly tests the patience over the course of 102 mins (one scene involving a buzzer going off several times seems to be deliberately grating), but the astonishing visual style of that film is in overload here, and whether you enjoy this film or not will rest entirely on whether you can let go of logic and concrete narrative and enjoy the ride or not. For my part, I loved it.

The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is released on Region 2 DVD on 23rd June 2014, from Metrodome.

Review by Stephanie Scaife

Stuart Gordon’s cult classic gorefest Re-Animator is being released again, this time as a 2-disc special edition Blu-ray and DVD from Second Sight Films. For those who aren’t familiar with the film, it is the brainchild of theatre maker Stuart Gordon, who made his name by setting up the avant-garde Organic Theatre Company in Chicago before setting his sights on celluloid. Like many aspiring filmmakers Gordon was advised to make a horror movie for under $1million, as low-budget genre movies always recoup their money. Initially looking to make a contemporary Frankenstein movie, Gordon was pointed in the direction H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, a series of short stories, which he originally tried to develop as a television series of six 30-minute episodes. After being informed that there was no market for that sort of thing in television, Gordon was put in contact with producer Brian Yuzna, who convinced him to take Re-Animator to Hollywood and make it into a movie.

After viewing a cocktail of horror classics from the previous decade, including the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween and The Toolbox Murders, Gordon took his inspiration yet knew that he wanted to go even further, and even attempt to outdo these films. The result was the Re-Animator that we all know and love today, one of the most outlandish and excessive horror movies ever made (well, until Jackson made Braindead), and a fantastical blend of Romero-style zombie gore through the more traditional narrative route of Frankensteinian mad science.

Jeffrey Combs stars as Herbert West, a medical student who has become obsessed with the idea of bringing the dead back to life, and develops a serum which he believes will revolutionise medicine. However, after overdosing his dead college professor in Switzerland, resulting in some heinous side-effects, West flees back to the United States, where he moves to New England to attend Miskatonic University. After renting a spare room from fellow medical student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) West quickly turns the basement into his own private laboratory, as well as setting his target on Cain’s pet cat, Rufus.

West is immediately at odds with the egotistical Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), a faculty member whom West considers to have stolen the theory of ‘brain death’ from his previous mentor (and victim) Dr. Gruber. Not only this, but Hill has become infatuated with the university Dean’s daughter, and Cain’s Girlfriend, Megan (Barbara Crampton). After being kicked out of medical school as a result of Hill’s intervention, both West and Cain team up to reanimate some corpses in the hopes of salvaging their medical careers, and more importantly for Cain, his scholarship. Of course, things do not go according to plan and things go from bad to worse… culminating in one of the most memorable scenes in horror film history, and according to Gordon the first ever visual pun committed to cinema, where Hill’s re-animated head literally gives head to a restrained Megan.

Re-Animator is a true classic; it’s one of the few films (along with the likes of An American Werewolf in London) that actually succeeds as a horror comedy, being both funny and scary in equal measure. The gross-out special effects are mostly very impressive, even by today’s standards (a re-animated Rufus notwithstanding) and work as proof that horror tends to work at its best on a limited budget with in-camera special effects.

Having been available in innumerable editions on VHS, Laser Disc, DVD and Blu-ray, is this new version worth parting with your hard earned dough? In short, not really. Unless you don’t already own Re-Animator or you’re a completist, then there isn’t really anything new here. The only real difference is that with the Blu-ray edition you get the “Unrated” and the “Integral” (R-rated version) together for the first time; otherwise, all of the other special features including the Resurrectus documentary and commentaries were already available on previous releases of the DVD. Apparently it’s a brand new restoration of the Unrated version, but I couldn’t really tell the difference between that and the other version currently available on Blu-ray.

Now, this may seem like a negative review but it really isn’t. I mean, I love Re-Animator as much as the next person, but when you’re expected to fork out £20 on a Blu-ray you’d ideally hope for a more exciting package than what’s on offer here. Not only are the documentaries and commentaries rehashes, but they’re not very good – particularly the director’s commentary with Stuart Gordon, which is so mind-numbingly dull he really should just stick to making movies and not talking about them; I made it about an hour through before nodding off. The other commentary with Brian Yuzna, Jeffrey Combs et al is far more entertaining, thankfully, but whilst the documentary is also entertaining, the main players are telling the same stories that they tell on the commentaries, so there is little new information here. It’s a shame really that Re-Animator didn’t fall into the hands of the likes of Arrow Video (who released a great version of Beyond Re-Animator), because it really is lacking in the special features department. It’s just as well that the film is so darn good.

Re-Animator is released on DVD and Blu-ray on 2 June from Second Sight.

Review by Ben Bussey

This writer is but one among many who have often wondered just how football ever came to be referred to as ‘the beautiful game.’ It’s always struck me as a profoundly ugly spectacle, with its mob mentality, aggression, and tendency to turn otherwise rational human beings into ranting, raving animals, to say nothing of what it does to the less-than rational. And, of course, increasingly nowadays the sport is even more off-putting in its emphasis on obscene profiteering, scores of young players literally earning more money in a week than most people can hope to earn in several years, filling the coffers of the club owners whilst the communities which originally gave birth to the teams are left crumbling. (I lived in Liverpool for ten years, I’ve seen what it’s like in the Anfield and Goodison Park areas.)

So – mention to me that a zombie apocalypse is going to break out in the middle of a football match, and I can’t deny a part of me is keen to see that. To give Goal of the Dead its dues, though, the ugly underside of football is exposed long before the walking (or in this case running) dead get their teeth into proceedings.

Sam Lorit (Alban Lenoir) is the footballer who I think it’s fair to say all footballers fear becoming: the one on his last legs. Though still under forty and clearly physically fit (the locker room scenes will attest to that), his career is as good as over, and he’s hoping to go out in style with one last match, as his superteam Paris Olympic head in their plush coach to sleepy small town Caplongue. For most of the team, it’s no big deal – particularly not ambitious, cocky young star player Idriss (Ahmned Sylla), whose eyes are set on a lucrative contract in London – but for Sam it means a great deal, as Caplongue is the hometown, not to mention the amateur team, that he left behind seventeen years earlier to pursue his career in the big leagues. However, Sam’s never been back home in all that time, and is not aware just how hard most of the townspeople took his departure. A few have good personal reasons to resent Sam; most are simply bitter that he didn’t take them with him on his path to fame and fortune. Unfortunately, one among the latter is an unhinged local doctor, who has dreamed up a somewhat excessive revenge based around turning Caplongue’s star player into a literal football monster. And wouldn’t you know it; the medical condition with which he infects said star player proves ever-so-slightly contagious…

Given that Goal of the Dead is co-directed by Benjamin Rocher, the filmmaker responsible for stylish but vapid zombie action flick The Horde (which I seemed to be less impressed with than most back in 2010), it should come as no surprise that this new football zombies movie certainly looks good. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen a new French horror movie that really grabbed my attention, but there can be little question that they’re produced many of the most noteworthy genre entries of the century thus far, and the nation has more than proven its ability to produce slick, beautifully shot, well-edited scary movies with decent performances and often great gore FX. Goal of the Dead is absolutely no exception, boasting great work from cinematographer Mathias Boucard and editors Dimitri Amar and Nathalie Langlade. The cast, too, handle themselves well for the most part, Lenoir giving a very nice leading turn as Sam, managing to make him sympathetic in spite of his many glaring flaws, and Bruno Salomone proving wonderfully loathsome as the sports agent who embodies the greedy, uncaring, corporate entity that has long since eclipsed any hint of real sportsmanship in football.

Not unlike The Horde, though, Goal of the Dead most definitely has its little problems. Most notably, given it’s a whisper shy of two hours, it’s far longer than any light-hearted comedy horror movie really needs to be. A lot of this could have been avoided with the removal of a few gratuitous subplots – the comic relief in the form a small band of fanatical local supporters, for instance. It also smacks of self-indulgence when, at the midway point, a second title sequence dramatically announces the latter hour of the film as a seperate entity, this half directed by Thierry Poiraud. Yes, I get it, it’s a little pun on football being “a game of two halves” – but given that moments later the story continues on exactly the same course as before, it’s a pointless deviation, particularly when things were a a bit on the overwritten side already (making it little surprise the film credits no less than six writers).

Even so, Goal of the Dead remains a perfectly entertaining film, squeezing in some genuine surprises and funny moments whilst ticking most of the boxes for a contemporary horror comedy. The zombie make-up FX are great, and the method of spreading the infection (all I’ll say is, it’s not via bite) is an agreeably repulsive break from the norm. While it may drag on a bit for my taste, the action scenes and football sequences are well-paced, and will probably get the heart thumping for those who get a bit more excited about football than I do (which, as I think I’ve made clear, isn’t too difficult). Goal of the Dead earns a place alongside Steven Chow’s Shaolin Soccer as evidence that, while genre film and sport may seem odd bedfellows, they can produce healthy offspring – and, while it doesn’t shy away from the many grounds on which it is easy to resent modern football, I daresay it does so without invalidating the position of those who love the game regardless.

Goal of the Dead is released to Region 2 DVD on 7 July 2014, from Metrodome.

Review by Quin

There is a famous quote from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung that has always stayed with me: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Personally, I’ve always tried to remember this when dealing with difficult people. It doesn’t always help in the moment, but if nothing else, it serves as a good reminder of how I don’t want to be. Raging Boll is a documentary where this quote serves as a central theme, yet the quote is never even used. But clearly everyone involved could use a little self awareness, with a lot less ego, because pretty much everyone here is unbelievably guilty of projecting their own faults onto others.

Sorry if that all sounds a bit judgey or high and mighty, hopefully I’ll explain why I feel this way. In case the pun in the title went sailing over your head, this is a documentary about film director/writer/producer/sometimes actor turned boxer Uwe Boll. The super clever title is a play on the Martin Scorsese film Raging Bull (Which is about former Middle weight champion fighter Jake LaMotta and it’s my favorite film of the 1980’s.) The first half of Raging Boll is about who Boll is as a person and a filmmaker. We meet his family, who seem pretty normal, yet in the next segment he promptly starts talking about how messed up his childhood was – trashing them in the process. Upon further clarification, he says that he was lonely as a kid but found movies as an escape from this loneliness. It would seem that any feelings of anger he has for his family are no more significant than the rest of the anger that he has burning inside of him. See? Uwe Boll is raging. And he doesn’t want you to forget it for a second.

Boll is definitely a hard worker, after all he has made over 30 movies. Almost all of them have been universally panned. This has lead him to be known as the German Ed Wood. He has also been called the world’s worst director. But he keeps doing what he’s doing with no stopping in sight. Not even an online petition for him to retire can make him stop making movies. Uwe Boll obviously knows what we need to see at the movies and everyone else is wrong. Right? Well, here is where the second half of the film comes in… Uwe Boll has finally had enough of the critics (most of which are actually internet trolls pretending to be critics) and damnit, he’s gonna do something about it. Boll has trained as an amateur boxer and has decided that he wants to fight anybody who says his movies are bad. This is one of those good ideas on paper that you laugh at and say to your friends, “Oh man, that would be so great!” Laugh some more and then go on with your life. But Boll is a hard worker, a man of integrity and possibly a little manic – and he got a huge fight promoting company to back him and the contenders actually showed up. Some of them included a 17 year old web blogger, the CEO of Something Awful and a journalist for Ain’t it Cool News. One of his opponents remarks, “I feel like I’m in Rocky IV, but I don’t have a whole country behind me.” Neither does Boll, all he has is Golden Palace.

Basically, the whole fighting event gets way out of control and if you felt any bit of sorrow for Uwe Boll, that totally goes away. Then something surprising happens, you realize that this has been the world’s greatest anti-bullying documentary. It could even be called Raging Bully. But Raging Boll shows that there is an endless cycle that goes back and forth between the bully and the bullied (I’m only speaking of Boll’s situation here, not most bullying where there is a bully and a blameless victim… I just want to be clear.) The internet critics and trolls have truly driven Uwe Boll insane. He is a guy who would have been much better off not reading his own press. He even goes as far as to call his critics “Unhappy, jealous psychos, who need this to feel better.” But after pummeling a few of them, literally, he says, “There is a real world out there and it can hit you. So you have to be careful about what you say.”

Basically, this movie shows that Uwe Boll is full of contradictions and he seems like a big jerk. But to be honest, his critics seem like even bigger jerks. Uwe Boll is definitely not a good director, but he’s absolutely and without a doubt not the worst. He’s made a handful of truly unwatchable films, but his more recent stuff, while repetitive in theme, has gotten much better. He won’t be winning any awards anytime soon (except maybe a Razzie) but he is probably also here to stay. I think we even need Uwe Boll. I’d take him over Michael Bay any day.

This time last year, it was “Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!” Today, it’s “Let them fight!” After making a valiant, but ultimately less than successful attempt to revive the daikaiju for the CGI blockbuster age with 2013’s Pacific Rim, Warner Bros and Legendary Entertainment have stepped right back into the ring with a movie many of us have been hoping to see for a long time. Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla might not be quite everything that everyone was hoping it would be, but let there be no misunderstanding – this is a movie made in absolutely the correct spirit, with the correct understanding of just what it is that’s so special about the central character, and indeed the giant monster genre overall – which, of course, is a hell of a lot more than can be said of that late 90s Roland Emmerich movie of the same name (and I say that as one of the few who actually doesn’t mind the Emmerich movie that much…)

Godzilla is and has always been a singular figure in pop culture; even with other such giant monster icons as King Kong having come first, there’s just something so specific and unique about the big G that really makes him stand apart. He’s an almost-literal mountain of contradictions, as heroic as he is villainous, as awe-inspiring as he is terrifying. His monstrous nature, to say nothing of his fire-breathing act, immediately tie him to the myth of the dragon – and yet the dinosaur connection lends him just that tiniest bit of real-world plausibility. As such, he is every bit as much at home in horror, science fiction, and fantasy adventure; every bit as appealing and iconic in his native Japan as anywhere else in the world; and, as this latest movie in particular proves, every bit as welcome in a mainstream blockbuster at the multiplex as a cult midnight movie marathon. Edwards and co recognise this, and have clearly done their utmost to craft a movie which appeals as much to the uninitiated as to the hardcore fan – and, while the rather mixed reactions seem to indicate they may not have entirely succeeded, I think they came very close indeed. They’ve done a far better job than Pacific Rim, for one (and, again, I say that as someone who did quite enjoy Pacific Rim.)

The key surprise for me was, this is nowhere near as dark and brooding a film as I had anticipated. As soon as Gareth ‘Monsters’ Edwards was announced as director (and apparently he was their first and only choice for the job), the mind boggled at the possibilites; I for one was immediately envisaging something with a quiet, understated, almost art film quality, not unlike that of Monsters itself. And when those first trailers came out: the 2012 San Diego Comic Con teaser, with its trail of devastation displayed against Oppenheimer’s murmur “now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds;” the second trailer’s almost Saving Private Ryan-ish quality to the troops taking the HALO jump over San Francisco, catching a glimpse of the giant monster stepping over the city through a slightly fogged-up visor, with no sound but the falling soldier’s quickened breath… all this seemed to point toward one of the doomiest mainstream blockbusters ever made. I get the feeling that some may be disappointed to find that, in fact, it takes a fairly standard blockbuster tone – but I for one don’t have a problem with that at all. At his best, Godzilla has always been first and foremost about spectacular entertainment for more or less the whole family. Anyway, Edwards still gives us a plenty more to chew on with the rest of the popcorn.

The most common complaint I’ve seen of the movie is that it places way too much emphasis on the human story, at the expense of the monster action. I can’t dispute this; Edwards’ movie and Max Borenstein’s script do, without question, pad things out a tad bit more than is really necessary. For starters, I’m not sure we really needed the story to begin fifteen years earlier with a nuclear power plant catastophe that turns Bryan Cranston’s brilliant nuclear physicist into an obsessive conspiracy theorist, anxious to uncover a truth which the viewer already has a pretty good grasp on. Sure, a bit of tragic family history perhaps lends some weight to his father-son relationship with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s young USN Lieutenant, and subsequently Taylor-Johnson’s relationship to his wife Elizabeth Olsen and their young son… but when giant bloody monsters are walking the earth set to squash everything in their path, I’m not sure we need reminding that the stakes are high. Even so, to my mind they didn’t overdo this side of things, though I gather there are many who disagree. I also have to point out that it’s hardly alone among Godzilla movies for focussing too much on the people when all we really want to see are the monsters.

Still, if Cranston, Taylor-Johnson and Olsen (and, briefly, Binoche – chill, that’s not really a spoiler) bring the human drama to lift this all above standard blockbuster territory, fear not, for Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins are on hand to bring us straight back into sci-fi fantasy tropesville, as the obligatory providers of exposition and vaguely scientific explanations. Yes, such figures are pretty corny stereotypes, and no, neither character gets to do much other than stand around looking anxious, but let’s face it – you can’t get too realistic when it comes to Godzilla. Yes, so, in the original he represented the A-bomb attacks on Japan, and in this movie he seems as representative of 9/11, Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsnuami – but he’s still our hero. And yes, Godzilla is without doubt very much the hero here, seemingly called up from depths thirty storeys high – sorry, I just had to – in order to combat the threat of the MUTOs (I won’t give away what that proves to be an acronym for, but I laughed and I’m sure you will too, and I’m fairly confident we’re supposed to). I like that, despite the degree of scientific plausibility the film tries to attach to events, the Big G himself retains this very mythic quality; Mother Earth’s secret weapon, called from his slumber by some unknown force when the world is in need of help, in much the way that pot-smoking skinny dippers wake up Jason Voorhees.

The question remains, of course, as to why they insisted on creating new monsters for Godzilla to fight, rather than drawing on his existing opponents from the Toho movies. Still, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the MUTOs; they’re very cool original monsters, balancing elements of the Alien Queen with the bugs of Starship Troopers, only a shitload bigger (but, this being a 12A/PG-13, not as bloodthirsty). We’ve had some pretty sweet monsters come out of Hollywood this past decade, what with Clovie of Cloverfield, the Kraken of Clash of the Titans, and of course the Kaiju of Pacific Rim, but I daresay the designs of Godzilla leave them all in the shade – and, of course, that extends to the new improved 2014 incarnation of the King of the Monsters himself. I’m not sure there’s any higher compliment I can give than this: at no point did I think to myself, “enough with the CGI, why can’t it just be a man in a suit?” The monsters might not be so wobbly and the sets might not look like they’re about to snap, but when Godzilla and the MUTOs throw down, damned if it isn’t every bit as thrilling a spectacle. And if the climax of the final fight doesn’t leave you grinning ear to ear, I’d seriously ask yourself what has become of your soul.

Still, call it a hunch but given that the opening weekend’s global haul of $190 million has effectively greenlit a sequel immediately, I suspect we won’t have too long to wait to see the likes of Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah be reborn in CGI to bring more crazy monster action to our cinemas. I certainly hope not, anyway. Looks to me like the giant monster movie is well and truly back, and I doubt I’m alone in saying I hope it sticks around for a while.

Godzilla is in cinemas just about everywhere now, from Warner Bros.

Review by Quin

What would you do if you were ever put into a scenario where you met yourself? Yes, I know it’s a strange question, and it’s one that I’ve never really considered before. There have been tons of films over the years featuring clones and doppelgängers, but +1 does it in a pretty new and original way. The film also brings up some pretty chilling philosophical ideas. This leads me to think, if I met myself, I’d probably die of fright. It would mean reality as I know it, now ceases to exist. To paraphrase The Amazing Criswell in Plan 9 From Outer Space… can your hearts stand the shocking facts about doppelgängers from outer space?

I have to be honest and tell you that I hated the first 20 minutes of this movie. This is important that you know this because if you start watching it and find yourself hating it too, you’re really going to want to stick with it. +1 starts out like your typical teen movie. David is having a surprise visit to his girlfriend’s fencing match (that’s not the typical part) with flowers in hand. After the match he accidentally hits on his girlfriend Jill’s opponent. Her back is to him and she’s dressed like a fencer (I looked it up, that’s what they’re called) when she turns around and kisses him, David notices it’s not Jill (looks like David’s non-evil/good intentioned plan has been foiled) but he keeps kissing her just long enough for his girlfriend to come in and see what he’s done. Rats! Foiled again! She runs off, understandably pissed off, but the movie needs this silly misunderstanding to move the story along to bigger and better things.

The movie, still in its awful setup phase, moves the setting to a ridiculous mansion. This is where the equally ridiculous party is going to take place. Post high school kids file into the place for one of those parties that can only happen in the movies, much like doppelgängers, they do not exist in this reality. The party goers consist of equal parts hipsters and stereotypes – sometimes both. There’s a girl hanging out wearing a bikini as well as a Native American headdress. If cultural appropriation wasn’t enough, they threw in a nude asian woman covered with sushi – she’s just laying there, being referred to as the body buffet (Just so you know, this doesn’t end well for anybody – there’s a merkin and a karate kick.) Just as my blood was beginning to boil, these rich, hipster idiots start playing indoor tennis using a tennis ball dowsed in vodka and set aflame. It was around this time when the lightbulb went on…the filmmakers are satirizing hipsters and rich people and a bunch of other things. As angry as I was getting, I admired it for its subtle buildup. The reason I think it doesn’t work is because it will most likely make too many people shut it off before they realize what is going on. And like I said, the rest is fun and thought provoking.

As the party is getting underway, a short blackout occurs. it’s revealed to the viewer that something fell from the sky and hit a power line. It explodes and sparks and then sort of glows with a blurry light complete with sci-fi noises. This causes the rest of the night to spiral into chaos, sending doubles of everyone loose into the party. One nerd finds himself with the rare opportunity of having sex with the popular chick in a weirdly hilarious scene. But the hero of the film, David (played by the plastic faced yet versatile actor Rhys Wakefield) realizes what is going on and uses the opportunity to try to fix his relationship with Jill.

There are so many reasons why I really like this movie. I love that it has updated the basic plot of old 1950’s science fiction movies. There would be no +1 without The Blob or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But the tone it creates is more like a cross between Spring Breakers and Animal House. However, while there is neon everywhere in +1, I didn’t see a single toga. The detail in the film is great as well. There is a young woman standing on a toilet staring at the ceiling. The camera moves past her from time to time and she’s still there. The dialogue is a strong point as well. When your ear picks up on the satire, lines like, “These fancy strippers are making all the girls horny!” become hilarious. Then when the movie shifts back to philosophical seriousness, we get some very well written conversations. There’s even a reference to the book of Talmud. Overall, +1 made me realize that a doppelgänger invasion would be way worse than the zombie apocalypse. Luckily, I think +1 explored the topic as far as it needs to go. I doubt that movies about people’s doubles will be the next big thing.

+1 is available now on Region 1 DVD via MPI Home Video.