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DVD Review: Kingdom of Gladiators

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Review By: Aaron Williams.

So: do you like movies about gladiators? No, that’s not an Airplane reference but a reviewer asking you, the reader, why you’d be at all interested in such a blatant attempt to cash in on the sword and sandals phenomenon that arrived on the heels of the success of films like 300 and their ilk. Even if the idea of a ‘sexed’ up world of swords, warriors and demons does indeed get you hard then you should look elsewhere instead of this dismal excuse for film-making.

In a brief prologue we learn of King Wolfkhan and his desire for a wider rule that leads him to making a pact with a demon: he will become unbeaten in all his battles in exchange for the soul of his first born child. He becomes so consumed with his conquests, the fact that he has put his daughter’s life up for grabs slips his mind and years later, the demon fulfils his side of their bargain and snatches his child (all this is told to us in a pretty unremarkable 2D animation). Three chosen warriors, champions of the local fighting tournaments, are given the task of hunting the demon down to break its hold over the kingdom, saving their world…bored yet? I don’t blame you at all.

Even after the first five minutes you’ll be cursing yourself and your damned sense of curiosity for leading you to pick up this abortion. If you make it past that point without hitting the off button on your remote, than I commend you squire! The production values are pretty much non-existent leaving us with little more than a few extras hired to wander around fields and old castles in shoddy period clothing squawking some of the most hideous dialogue ever committed to paper.

The performances are truly shocking even for this straight to DVD video dungeon that I’m sure even Kim Newman would choose to stay well away from. The only other place you’d see performances of this quality would be to visit your local medieval re-enactment show: actually I hereby apologise and would like to strike that last comment from the record, that would be offensive to those taking part in said re-enactment.

Not all the fault should be focused on the performers here as the director seems to idea of how to frame a simple shot, the editing is so chip-choppy I would be surprised if they just pulled in someone who was in-between putting wedding videos together. In a scene where two characters were engaged in combat – I didn’t really care who they were – you can clearly see two extras in the background, lightly exchanging blows like two ten year olds. Did they even check the rushes for this at all?

For those of with a warped love of Ed Wood style disasters – don’t be fooled. I implore you not to waste your time with this dross and do something a lot more enjoyable with your time, like slam your head in a car door. This is one of those films that will leave you scratching your head at how it ever got a green light at all. Avoid.

Distributed By: Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment
Directed By: Stefano Mila
Starring: Maurizi Corigilano, Sharon Fryer, Leroy Kincaid

DVD Review: J-sploitation Goes Feminist in ‘Ninja Girl’

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 Review by Ben Bussey.

I don’t know if I can speak for everyone, but when I hear of a new Japanese DVD release my gut impulse is to expect some or all of the following: cheap DV photography, pretty girls in rubber performing martial arts, and ridiculously excessive gore. When the film in question is called Ninja Girl and is directed by Seiji Chiba, the man behind Alien Versus Ninja, you’d be forgiven for going in with such preconceptions. This being the case, Ninja Girl may catch you slightly off guard. Yes, it’s shot on crappy looking DV and boasts pretty girls kicking ass, but the rubber and gore are notable for their absence. Perhaps even more surprisingly, in the place of the usual fetishistic splatstick we have efforts made toward a microbudget ninja movie with feminist leanings. That may sound unlikely, and in all frankness it doesn’t really work. But there it is.

The set-up is that a group of young women of the Kouga clan have been abducted by two ninjas from the Iga clan. In early scenes reminscent of Apocalypto (but on clearly a fraction of the budget), the women are tied in a chain and dragged through the forest with no clue as to where they are being taken or why. Soon enough, it is revealed they are being taken back to the Iga village to become, as the Igas put it, instruments of pleasure. Naturally the captive women are less than thrilled by this prospect, and soon enough a break for freedom results in some sadistic cat and mouse games. However, one of the captives, Kisaragi (Rina Takeda), is considerably more than she seems. Yes, you guessed it, she’s a deadly Kouga ninja, there to bring down the Iga sex slave trade once and for all.

Seiji Chiba is clearly going to pains to make something a bit different and a bit more challenging than most contemporary Japanese exploitation. While his earlier film Alien Versus Ninja (which I reviewed a while back at Ka-Boomski) was a virtually plotless beat-’em-up, albeit with an incongruously slow and verbose opening half hour, Ninja Girl dispenses with the more fantastical excesses and places greater emphasis on dialogue. For the most part the film cuts between three concurrent scenes in which the male ninjas verbally intimidate their female prey. As such, there’s more than a hint of I Spit On Your Grave to proceedings, as we see not only the depravity of the men but also learn how deep that depravity goes in their culture.

However, as well-intended as Ninja Girl might be, it all fizzles out pretty darned quick. There’s no escaping the sense that it just takes itself too seriously. A great many J-sploitation films squeeze in a hefty dose of social commentary (look out for my next Definitive Directors article on Yoshihiro Nishimura sometime in the coming month), but this is conveyed with humour, adding an intelligent edge to the excessive silliness on display. In largely dispensing with the excess, and emphasising talk over action, Ninja Girl just isn’t as much fun to watch. It doesn’t help that it doesn’t have the scale or budget to really explore the premise to its full potential, staying almost entirely with the core cast for the duration and abruptly coming to an end after barely 65 minutes, just as the story seemed to be going somewhere. Chiba gets points for ambition and intention, but I trust in future he doesn’t forget to give the audience more of the entertainment value they expect to go along with his social conscience. 

Ninja Girl is released to DVD by MVM on 10th October 2011. But trust me, it’s nowhere near as action-packed as the clip below would have you believe.

 

DVD Review: Christopher Walken Goes Action Hero in ‘McBain’

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DVD Review by Ben Bussey.

Yes, I know, on reading this title many will have the same initial reaction I did: “What? That Schwarzenegger piss-take from The Simpsons? It was a real movie?” Well, yes and no. This is indeed a film called McBain, and features the title character firing innumerable bullets, blowing up an inordinate number of vehicles and buildings, and laying waste to untold quantities of fools in the process. However, this film does not star the Austrian Oak, nor any other monosyllabic muscleman of his ilk. Instead, the lead here is taken by none other than Christopher Walken. This film having been made in 1991, Walken was still a couple of years shy of his Tarantino-fuelled renaissance, but he was still an actor with the likes of The Deer Hunter and King Of New York on his CV. To see him headline a fairly conventional action film must have been a bit bizarre at the time, and it’s even more so now. What it does underline, however, is that despite its Vietnam vet characters and gun-crazy carnage, McBain is a somewhat different animal from your average 80s action flick; and yes, make no mistake that while it may have arrived just after the decade ended, McBain is an 80s movie through and through, and in many respects a very fitting way to mark the end of the era.

Witness the unmistakeable 80s-ness of the plot: in the final days of the Vietnam war, Walken’s McBain is rescued from a POW camp – and no, so far as the viewer is made aware he doesn’t have a watch up his ass – by Frank (the eternal badass Michael Ironside), Eastland (Steve James), Gill (TG Waites), Dalton (Jay Patterson) and Santos (Chick Venerra, who disproves my theory that no other man in the history of the world was ever named Chick aside from Budd Abbott’s character in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein). It is Santos to whom McBain owes the greatest debt for gunning down the VC who would otherwise have ended McBain’s life. Pledging to one day repay his debt, McBain returns to civilian life, as do the others. Eighteen years later, Santos is leading an uprising in Colombia, attempting to overthrow the corrupt dictatorship and bring back democracy to his homeland. Santos pleads into TV cameras for assistance from the US government; this is not granted, and soon enough Santos is publicly gunned down by El Presidente himself (Victor Argo). Not long thereafter, McBain is visited by Santos’ sister Christina (Maria Conchita Alonso of The Running Man), urging for his help in the resistance. So it is that McBain sets about getting the old team back together, and blowing much shit up in the name of freedom.

Yes, it’s testosterone central. We have ageing Vietnam vets in Hawaiian shirts, string vests, Panama hats and Wrestlemania caps blowing away coke deailers and dangling corrupt businessmen off rooftops in New York, before loading a plane with guns and ammo and illegally flying to Colombia to liberate the nation held captive by the drug trade. If Bad Boys 3 ever gets made, one would hope it will be at least as off the chain as this. Most endearingly, and most indicative of the film’s era, is the fact that pretty much all this shoot-’em-up insanity is realised practically; I quickly lost count of how many explosions occur, but so far as I can tell pretty much all of them were done for real. This alone makes McBain a breath of fresh air in this era of dilluted, CG-addled action movies. To my great regret I’ve yet to see any other films from James Glickenhaus (whose most celebrated film The Exterminator recently got a stateside Blu-Ray release, reviewed here; a UK Blu of this is coming from Arrow in November), but on this evidence it’s clear he knew how to get maximum bang for buck, and it’s sad to see his directorial career did not continue far beyond this film.

However, McBain does not begin and end with the carnage. As the casting of Walken might suggest, there are considerable efforts made here to make a film which – by the standards of the genre, at least – is serious, sophisticated and socially conscious. And believe it or not, to a large extent it works. Avoiding the jingoism that saturated most 80s movies, Glickenhaus shows us a world that is far from black and white in its morality. There is corruption on all levels of power both inside and outside the US, from the blatant barbarism of El Presidente to the callous disinterest of the US Commander-In-Chief. Big business is also brought under attack, and even Luis Guzman’s drug dealer is given the chance to give his side of things; that selling coke is the only way they can make a living in tough times. Of course Glickenhaus paints with very broad strokes, but he’s definitely attacking the greed-is-good culture which dominated the US at the time. And while he may use the old action staple of the highly skilled white Americans rushing to the aid of the repressed foreigners, Glickenhaus does not fall into the usual trap of making the resistance seem powerless and inept; McBain and company are clearly fighting alongside the Colombian rebels, not leading them.

Once again, Walken does seem an odd fit for a film such as this, but that very incongruity is part of the film’s charm. Whereas Stallone so often aims to present selfless bravery but invariably lapses into posing and sentimentality, Walken and the rest of the cast really do play their parts as old professionals just doing what comes naturally, with self-sacrifice and courage under fire taken in their stride. All this considered, in many respects McBain feels like the film The Expendables should have been. It’s an effective portrait of old soldiers enjoying one last hurrah, and a touching swansong for what was arguably one of the greatest periods for American action cinema. And, of course, lots and lots of shit gets blown up real good.

With a disc boasting an exclusive James Glickenhaus interview and a supplementary booklet written by Callum Waddell, ArrowDrome will release McBain to DVD from September 19th.

DVD Review: Territories

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DVD Review by Aaron Williams 

It’s an ugly term ‘torture porn,’ and it’s thrown around way too often in today’s cinematic climate. For those who pay their admission fees simply to catch sight of faceless victims being systematically disembowelled only to have narrative and characterisation fall to the wayside, it’s the mark of a hell of a good time – for the rest of us, it couldn’t be further from the truth and I’m sure everyone involved in Territories will agree. Forget the juvenile antics of Eli Roth and his ilk, director Oliver Abbou has a far meatier meal for our starving brain cells.

Five friends – couple Jalil (Micheal Mando) and Leslie (Nicole Leroux), screenwriter Michelle (Cristina Rosato), Gab and Leslie’s mute younger brother Tom (Alexandre Weiner) – travel from a wedding when they are pulled to a stop by two men who identify themselves as border patrol. They co-operate peacefully with the officers despite how unhinged the two men appear. Just as everything seemed to be calming down Tom’s stash of weed is found which sends the two officers into a frenzy. They begin to ferociously process the gang, forcing them to strip at gun point then imprisoning them in cages built for trapping wild animals.

The origins behind the ‘officers’ cruel methods are soon revealed. Left psychologically scarred by the first Gulf war and guard work at Guantanamo Bay, Samuel (Roc LaFortune) and Walter (Sean Devine) have been hidden away in their isolated forest cabin for far too long, two forgotten tools of the American military now obsolete, confused and very dangerous.

It can be easy to quickly wade into the all too obvious political subtext here – the images are screaming out at us – strip the film to its core and we have a nasty little survival horror on our hands that nods to Deliverance and perhaps even tips its hat at Texas Chainsaw. Reading the press release, it spares no time in telling us this was brought to us by the producers of the splatter-fantastic The Horde so admittedly, I was pumped for another intense French horreur. What we have here is a far more grounded nightmare. If heads started exploding or flesh starting tearing then the film would lose a lot of its punch.

Watching the friends unravel under interrogation, slowly loosening their grips on their dignity is pretty upsetting as the lack of food and water begins to make them weak – even more terrified of the consequences of resistance. It’s these key scenes of what is pretty much a film heavily reliant on the performances where I wondered if the actors had the chops to take them to such extremities. Luckily, the performances are pretty solid with Michael Mando standing out.

We do get to spend time with the deranged odd couple Samuel and Walter, offering much needed respite from the torture scenes and giving us a revealing insight into the dynamic between them. Again I was surprised how much the actors stepped up to the plate here, especially for a straight to DVD title. The men come across as a twisted take on George and Lennie from Of Mice And Men, maintaining their impromptu army encampment, hating the liberal world and any outsiders unlucky enough to pass on through.

Things take a slight turn as we completely lose focus of the primary characters when we are introduced to a private detective (Stephen Shellen) hired to track down the prisoners. Not an unwelcome narrative development by any means, but it’s so jarring that it seems to deflate the sense of dread that has been built up in the preceding hour, almost as if the writer was stumped as to where to take the victims next. But thankfully there’s no lazy cat and mouse scenes of victims hiding in dark corners in a final bid for freedom, seen far too often – save that for the next slasher (sorry slasher films, I still love you!)

An impressive little straight to DVD shocker with brains then, that sadly missteps at the last hurdle. Sure, the writing is guilty of taking yet another wagging finger at America but don’t let that put you off from an otherwise memorable first outing from what promises to be a prominent name in horreur!

Catch Territories on DVD on the 12th of September from the good people at Arrow films.

DVD Review: The Man With The Severed Head (1976)

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Review by Ben Bussey.

Now how’s about this for a premise: during a heist gone wrong, gangster Jack Surnett (Paul Naschy) takes a bullet in the head. Obviously he can’t go to a regular hospital, so his fellow gangsters take him to one of those disgraced doctors who can only find work doing dodgy operations for the mafia. Alas, this problem goes beyond the expertise of said doctor, so they take him to the only people who may be able to help: a husband and wife duo, doing pioneering work in neurosurgery. Naturally such respectable doctors are loathe to do such dirty work, but when the gangsters threaten the life of their daughter they have no choice but to comply. And what is the only way to save Surnett? Drum roll please… a brain transplant. And in a curious twist of fate, it seems the most suitable candidate for a brain donor is none other than Surnett’s arch nemesis, a ruthless criminal popularly known as the Sadist. But of course, such a procedure cannot be carried out without messing up the patient’s head somewhat.

Yes, it’s a hell of a premise. And oh, how I wish the film was half as fun as it sounds, for while The Man With The Severed Head may have Euro-eccentrivity in spades, good grief is it boring.

I should perhaps first confess that, much to my shame, I remain uneducated in all matters relating to Paul Naschy. Indeed, I must further confess I didn’t know of him at all until his death almost two years ago (which was commerated here at Brutal As Hell in this touching obituary). I do intend to rectify this, though in my defence his films are not widely available in Britain so far as I can tell. Regardless, I wish I’d had a better starting point than this painfully slow, utterly uninvolving dilly-dally between gangland crime tale and mad scientist horror.

The Man With The Severed Head seems a somewhat less than auspicious title to mark the first release from Arrowdrome, the new imprint from Arrow Films oriented specifically toward cult cinema. Cult is a notoriously tricky label to pin down, generally referring less to what a film is, than what it is not; films of diverse style, tone and content unfied due to a common distance from what is deemed mainstream. (Phew, maybe some of that MA rubbed off on me after all.) So it is that the films we regard cult tend to go to relative extremes: excessive violence and sex, and/or just plain weirdness. The Man With The Severed Head delivers plenty of the latter, but not so much of the former two. That said, the DVD extras do boast several extended ‘erotic scenes,’ as they are credited; in truth they’re very poorly staged soft porn sequences that are about as erotic as a sumo wrestler kneading dough in your grandmother’s kitchen. (Yeah, not sure where that one came from.) Quite why they’re missing from the feature I don’t know, but they wouldn’t have saved it.

I suppose it’s possible I’m missing something here; that there’s some unique artistic sensibility at work within what I perceive to be 70s European filmmaking at its laziest; that what I take to be the complete absence of tension, pace and atmosphere is in fact a distinct aesthetic. If so, the devotees are welcome to it. I’m quite happy to remain ignorant, thank you very much. Yes, I’ll be sure to see some more Naschy movies, but I’ll be sorely disappointed if they’re anything like this one.

Arrowdrome will release The Man With The Severed Head to DVD on 12th September.

 

DVD Review: Arrow Video Presents ‘Pieces’

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Review by Stephanie Scaife.

Pieces (1982) is a cult classic exploitation slasher flick from Spanish filmmaker Juan Piquer Simon (Slugs, Monster Island) and here it is in a fantastic and lovingly created brand new edition from Arrow Video, sporting a vast array of special features and some rather eye catching newly commissioned art work.

The film starts off in 1942 with a young boy doing a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. His mother takes particular offence to the puzzle and smashes it up, and without so much of a thought as to the time and effort he may have put into solving it. Naturally the boy is upset by the irrational and hysterical actions of his mother, so he does what any young sociopath would do in this situation; he hacks her to death with an axe then cuts her up into little pieces with a saw.

Fast forward 40 years, and still tormented by his childhood memories, our killer goes on a mass murdering rampage of beautiful co-eds at a Boston university (although the film was entirely shot in Spain). It seems very much like he’s still got a chip on his shoulder about that jigsaw puzzle, as he hacks his victims to pieces in a bid to create his own puzzle by combining different parts of his victims’ bodies together. The tag line reads, “You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!” meaning you could do just as well in Boston, I guess. So unsurprisingly our killer’s weapon of choice is the chainsaw, although he sometimes has to make do with a very sharp and pointy knife.

On the killers case is college student and lothario Kendall (Ian Serra), Police Lieutenant Bracken (Christopher George), and Mary (Lynda Day George) who poses as a tennis instructor to infiltrate the school and try and figure out the identity of the murderer. Meanwhile, girls are being killed in increasingly elaborate and unsubtle ways. But really the plot is somewhat irrelevant here; it’s all just filler between death scenes, one of the only things that this film manages to deliver, and in the process raising more than a few chuckles from me. My particular favourite being a surprisingly well shot murder sequence involving a water bed, a knife and a lot of flailing around. Although, somewhat unnervingly, I learnt afterwards that all the blood and gore in the film was supplied by a local abattoir and none of it was fake, adding a rather unpleasant ick factor to the whole thing.

Pieces is a fairly typical slasher film from this period; the plot is preposterous, the dialogue is poor and the dubbing even poorer, the victims are all semi-clad young women, and you can spot the killer a mile off. But for all that it is also fairly likeable in a sleazy sort of a way; if logic and storytelling is less important to you than boobs and bloody death scenes then there is a lot to admire here. The thing with Arrow Video is that it makes even its mediocre releases appealing with the inclusion of such lascivious art work and the sorts of special features that invite the nerdiest of nerd outs. With Pieces you get an introduction from Jack Taylor (who stars as one of the university professors in the film), a featurette about Taylor and his experiences making the movie, audio commentaries and a documentary about the legacy of Pieces called Pieces of Deconstruction: Looking Back at a Grindhouse Gorefest. So all in all it’s a fairly worthwhile investment for any horror fan.

For an alternate view on Pieces, please check out Editor-in-chief Marc Patterson’s review of the Grindhouse DVD release by clicking here.

Pieces is currently available on DVD.

FrightFest 2011 Review: The Divide

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Review By Stephanie Scaife.

If like me you have a penchant for post-apocalyptic narratives that are unrelentingly bleak and mercilessly grim, then The Divide is definitely the film for you. Xavier Gens made his name as part of the new wave of French horror filmmakers with his flawed but endearingly bonkers Frontier(s) which soon led to the inevitable call from Hollywood, culminating in the rather dreadful videogame adaptation of Hitman. This was a disappointing turn of events from such a promising young director, however unsurprisingly reports have been flying around stating that the film was extensively fiddled with and re-shot by Fox, who reportedly thought Gens’s cut was too violent. So, with The Divide he has returned to filmmaking on a much smaller scale which has enabled him complete creative control, including shooting chronologically and allowing the cast extensive opportunity to improvise. Unsurprisingly this is also a return to form.

The premise is fairly simple; New York is nuked and a group of survivors find themselves holed up in the basement of their apartment building that also doubles as a fallout bunker, created by their paranoid 9/11 survivor maintenance man, Mickey (Michael Biehn). The survivors consist of half-brothers Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Adrien (Ashton Holmes) their wild card friend Bobby (Michael Eklund), Eva (Lauren German) and Sam (Iván González) a young couple whose relationship is on the rocks, Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her young daughter Wendy (Abbey Thickson), and the world weary Delvin (Courtney B. Vance).

 Early on in the film outsiders in HAZMAT suits break into the basement and quickly prove themselves to be pretty far removed from the rescue committee that the survivors had been hoping for, instead welding the basement door closed, permanently trapping the survivors inside. This is when their resolve starts to slip; they realise that no help is on the way, their supplies are dwindling, and the radiation poisoning is starting to set in. What little trust they have in each other soon begins to vanish as they discover that Mickey has been holding out on them and keeping a massive stash of supplies hidden, creating bubbling tension that erupts in violence and  torture.

Weeks pass, people get sick, their hair starts to fall out, they are coughing up blood and becoming increasing aware of their own mortality. Cabin fever also sets in and with their dwindling sanity goes any shred of humanity that they had left. Their desperation becomes palpable and it soon it becomes every man for himself, kill or be killed. With Micky indisposed, Josh and Bobby assert their dominance over the group, controlling them with mind games and fear. Both Milo Ventimiglia and Michael Eklund turn in incredibly strong performances as their characters become increasingly psychotic and power hungry. Michael Biehn also gives his best performance in a long time as the paranoid cigar munching janitor, along with Rosanna Arquette who gives a brave and unnerving performance as the desperate Marilyn. All of the characters may initially appear to be stereotypes but this quickly changes as they become increasingly unpredictable and each occupies their own grey area; being both at once sympathetic and depraved. There are no clear heroes or villains in this film. Eva is perhaps the character to retain a sense of composure but even she is ultimately only looking out for herself.

If you’re looking for a happy ending, or even something verging on life affirming, then The Divide is probably not the film for you. From the get go this is a character study under the guise of a post-apocalyptic horror movie, not that it isn’t those things, but really this is a film about the truly loathsome and fickle nature of humanity . Clearly this is the sort of film that will divide people; I’ve seen criticisms of it being almost indulgently grim to the point of excess and the improvised acting leading to hammy shouting competitions. But I disagree; I think the improvisation adds a raw sort of realness to an unfathomable but altogether unsurprising narrative that deals with a very difficult theme. This isn’t an easy watch, but I was riveted from start to finish.

 The official website states that The Divide will be in theatres in 2012, although not specific date is given. But if you are a fan of challenging cinema that will stay with you for days after viewing, then I’d highly recommend keeping an eye out for this.

The Divide (2011)
Directed by: Xavier Gens
Starring: Michael Biehn, Milo Ventimiglia, Roanna Arquette

 

DVD Review: John A. Russo’s ‘Midnight’ (1982)

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Review by Keri O’Shea.

If it’s true that ‘the Devil has all the best tunes’, then what does that tell us about unholy forces on our cinema screens? Well, it appears that Satan not only sells, but has found himself a comfortable niche in horror and exploitation movies. The results of this can be great; I’ll admit to a real soft spot for trashy takes on the dark arts, but what do you know – I’m also picky, and so far as John Russo’s Midnight (1982) goes, I get the feeling that Old Nick was merely drafted in to add a dash of something extra to a familiar formula. Folks, this is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with horns. There’s more than that, though: Russo has effectively managed to make a film which checks nearly every exploitation box imaginable – cramming in everything from racism to murder to rape – but nonetheless tension is hard to come by here. Midnight is definitely grim, but it’s also a rather bleak trudge through its subject matter.

The opening scenes seem to be setting up a group of lunatic fundies too, rather than folk at the other end of the spectrum. A mother and her children find a girl in an animal trap but they refer to her as a ‘demon’ before knocking her out. Who is she? Who are they? We don’t know, because we’re moved along to meet a teenage girl called Nancy (Melanie Verlin). Nancy runs away from home when her drunken stepfather tries to force himself on her, and finds herself joining up with two petty criminals called Tom (John Hall) and Hank (Charles Jackson) who are road-tripping down to Florida.

Another pair of  travellers – Reverend Carrington (Bob Johnson) and his daughter – get a lift part of the way, and when Tom and Hank talk about their route onward the Reverend warns them that there’s trouble in them there woods: people going missing, racist locals, the sort of thing you’d associate with such a quantity of plaid in any given area. So much for his advice, though, because when a grocery heist (!) goes awry, the van ends up right in the place it shouldn’t.

The main problem I had with the film was that its most entertaining scenes seemed to be that way accidentally. For instance – and if you’ve seen Midnight then you may well know which scene I mean – there’s a killing fairly early on which is done so clumsily that you could believe, as per how it sounds, that it’s the victim cackling, not the murderer. For a horror movie, the quality of the action  (specifically murder) scenes here is inexcusable, totally unbelievable and ham-fisted. For some viewers this’ll all be part of the charm and if you like your grimy 80s cinema then Midnight certainly has a lot to offer, but even in the most warped internal logic of a low-brow movie I cannot see how you can kill someone by running a tap on their head…otherwise, the bulk of Midnight is somewhat jaded, plodding in pace and pretty seedy. All the male characters are bullies and perverse shits, and the teeth-clenching race references along the way really underline the film’s age. Of course this is trash cinema and I don’t therefore expect the characters to be ambassadors for good conduct, but the experience overall was more depressing than diverting. This effect was increased by the washed-out, drab colouration of the film: Arrow have, as always, done their utmost to present the film well, but I suspect the original format was this way and there ain’t much you can do about that.

It’s not my favourite of Arrow’s new batch of releases, then – though it’s by no means all bad, and the occult sequences are worth waiting for – but where this will probably sell is as a nostalgia piece for those who saw it on VHS in the 80s. There’s no substitute for revisiting films you discovered way back when; this happens not to have been one I ever persuaded my parents to rent out for me, but were this the case then I might be a lot more enthusiastic here and now. As it stands, I will say that Midnight is an iniquitous little oddity, albeit too much road movie and not enough Satan. Oh, but – hey, you might also enjoy the chance to see some early Savini SFX and an appearance by John ‘Martin’ Amplas here, as well as some in-depth ‘talking head’ extras from Amplas and Russo after the main feature.

Distributor: Arrow Video
DVD Release date: 5th September 2011
Director: John Russo
Starring: Lawrence Tierney, Melanie Verlin, John Amplas, John Hall

FrightFest 2011 Review: Deadheads

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Deadheads (2011)
Directed by: Brett Pierce, Drew T. Pierce
Starring: Michael McKiddy, Ross Kidder, Thomas Galasso, Benjamin Webster
Review by: Ben Bussey

When American twentysomething Mike (McKiddy) wakes up one day to find himself in some kind of strange incubation chamber, he doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. Stepping out into the world, he soon finds out. It’s zombie time. The walking dead are everywhere. And most alarming of all – Mike’s one of them. He may have retained his mental faculties and not developed a hunger for human flesh, but he’s good and dead, and soon realises he has been for three years. Promptly he crosses paths with Brent (Kidder), another articulate zombie. With few alternatives for company the two quickly hit it off, and ponder what to do with their undead existence. The only thing that matters to Mike is finding his long-lost girlfriend and popping the question he meant to ask three years earlier. This can only mean one thing: road trip. Along the way they pick up their own pet zombie and befriend a kindly old Vietnam veteran, with a zombie-killing survivalist and a couple of gun-crazy government operatives hot on their tail.

As the sons of Bart Pierce, special effects photographer of The Evil Dead, Brett and Drew T Pierce have a certain degree of family heritage to live up to. This is clearly not lost on them, given that they’ve found room for a scene watching Evil Dead at the drive-in, and grabbed themselves the endorsement of the mighty Bruce himself. But let’s not dismiss Deadheads as nothing more than the work of Hollywood brats coasting on the coattails of their parents Julian Lennon style. First off, if anything they’re Michigan brats. Second, and most importantly, the Pierce Brothers have done something that very few zombie films manage or even attempt; taken a genuinely fresh and unexpected approach to the subgenre. As a zom-rom-com, comparisons with Shaun of the Dead are of course inevitable, but as a zombie road trip buddy movie it’s something else entirely.

 I asked the Pierce Brothers in the Q&A if they were prepared for the potential backlash this film could attract for its distinctly atypical zombie behaviour. After all, plenty of fans get angry enough when zombies are able to run; such purists are unlikely to be happy about zombies who still walk, talk and think as they did in life, and don’t even need to feed on the living. Nor is any explanation ever ventured as to why Mike and Brent are this way while the rest are classic shuffling flesh-eaters, which may further rile some. My advice is to take the film in the spirit it is intended, and none of this need be a problem. It’s clear from the beginning that Deadheads is not exactly the most serious zombie film ever made. This is not to say it’s entirely light-hearted; there are some fairly dark and shocking moments including onscreen child deaths, and there are also more than a few moments of genuine poignancy. As much as I’m loathe to make further comparisons to Shaun of the Dead (when approaching horror comedy it seems pretty much impossible not to these days), it’s an appropriate point of reference in this regard; much like Shaun, Deadheads manages to successfully balance humour, horror and drama, and this is one of its great strengths.

However, overall the emphasis is very much on the laughs; and oh yes, there really are plenty of laughs to be had. Not unlike Fanboys last year or indeed Tucker and Dale Versus Evil this year, FrightFest is a great location for Deadheads as this is geek comedy central, bulging with film references and clever wordplay. There is tremendous buddy chemistry between McKiddy and Kidder (wow, there is a lot of kidding going on… sorry), with Kidder’s Brent very much the goofball to McKiddy’s straight man Mike. Not all the jokes entirely work – one particular debate as to whether a werewolf could be killed by a sandwich falls completely flat – but when it’s on form, it’s hilarious. Of particular note is Benjamin Webster’s Agent McDinkle, a gravel-throated macho asshole supreme with a handlebar moustache, a zero tolerance attitude to lawbreakers, and a fair portion of the best lines in the movie. Indeed, he delivers my single favourite line from any film at FrightFest 2011; all I’ll say is it’s a variation on a famous lyric from a fairy tale.

Coming in the midst of so many downbeat films full of pain, despair and pessimism (well, it is a horror film festival after all), Deadheads made for a most refreshing change of pace. If you like good guys and happy endings as much as you like walking corpses and brain-smashing violence, then Deadheads should be very much your cup of tea. Funny how many of us gorehounds are really just sentimental bastards at heart, isn’t it…?

 

FrightFest 2011 Review: Kill List

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Kill List (2011)
Directed by: Ben Wheatley
Starring: Neil Maskell, Michael Smiley, MyAnna Buring
Review by: Ben Bussey

Contract killer Jay (Maskell) hasn’t worked in months. He lives comfortably with his wife (Buring) and their son, but the debts are starting to pile up, not to mention the marital tensions. Anxious to avoid taking on a job after a bad experience on his last one, Jay resists any offers until the problems at home reach breaking point. Seeing no alternative, he accepts an offer from his best friend and business partner Gal (Smiley). The client is enigmatic; the contract is for three deaths. But it soon transpires that this is not the sort of job Jay and Gal are used to, which threatens to push them way beyond their comfort zone and into some very dark and dangerous places indeed, both figuratively and literally.

Kill List premiered on Sunday 28th August at FrightFest; i.e. almost 48 hours before this review came online. During the festival I’ve been doing my best to get reviews of the most notable films up as soon as possible, but in this instance I’ve held back just a little, and there’s a reason for this. When writing up a film within hours of seeing it, there’s always the danger of rushing out a gut reaction that isn’t necessarily the most level-headed response, and I think if I’d rushed this one out straight away that’s what you’d be reading now. See, here’s the thing; the problem I’ve had with Kill List isn’t so much to do with the film itself as the way it was sold to us at FrightFest. As the weekend’s sole Total Film-sponsored screening it was clearly marked out as a festival highlight, and given a gushing introduction from Total Film’s Jamie Graham, promising something which would rock us to the core. However, by the time the end credits rolled, I for one was distinctly underwhelmed. This gave way to annoyance. I’ve already gone and expressed that annoyance on Twitter, and I gather (in turn) I’ve rather annoyed director Ben Wheatley in doing so. I hardly think that should weigh too heavily on Wheatley’s mind right now, however, given the huge amount of praise the film is gathering elsewhere. Many are declaring Kill List not only the best film of FrightFest 2011, but also the best British film of recent years.

And here, once more, is the thing: Kill List deserves praise, as does Wheatley, and his cast. It is a very well made film indeed, boasting powerful performances, and a brilliantly realised naturalistic atmosphere that shifts organically from humour to melancholy to aggression to dread and beyond. It should almost certainly mark out Ben Wheatley as one of Britain’s most notable genre directors, and hopefully bodes well for the future of actors Neil Maskell, Michael Smiley and MyAnna Buring as well.

But is it the next British horror masterpiece? In this writer’s humble opinion, no.

One of Kill List’s key strengths, as others have rightly argued, is that it makes a pointed effort to break with convention. To hear the premise – world-weary hit man takes on one last job that goes wrong – you’d be forgiven for anticipating something a bit corny, but nothing could be further from the truth. Shooting in an almost guerilla, fly-on-the-wall style, Wheatley shows the world of these assassins in as realistic a fashion as possible, which naturally includes an emphasis on the mundane; signing in and out of hotels and the like. The cast are credited as contributing additional dialogue, and in the Q&A they confirmed that while the script was followed closely there was a fair amount of improv involved, which comes as little surprise. Maskell, Smiley and Buring all give phenomenal performances, entirely convincing as people who share history, and this goes some way to selling the overall premise as real. Dead Man’s Shoes is a good point of reference to the kind of vibe we get.

However, this verisimilitude is stretched pretty thin by the final reel. I’m not about to give spoilers, but the narrative goes to some bizarre places that might not be anticipated; then again, a straight hit man movie wouldn’t be too likely a candidate for FrightFest. It would seem the intent is for the overlying naturalism to be maintained once things go off the map, but to my mind this was not the case. I respect that this is a film striving to surprise and confound, but I couldn’t help but feel this ultimate outlandishness only served to undermine that which had gone before.

Then there is what I consider (and I know I am not alone in this) Kill List’s biggest problem of all; the climax. Once again I’m not about to give anything away, suffice to say that the ending of Kill List is borderline identical to that of a certain other notorious horror film of recent years. I gather from comments made since that the similarity is entirely accidental, and that Wheatley has not even seen the film in question. Now, I appreciate that filmmakers have budgets and deadlines to adhere to, and understand that such unconscious coincidences can occur, but – as the saying goes – ignorance is not an excuse. Kill List is screening at FrightFest. The film in question is most certainly not unknown to the FrightFest crew. FrightFest themselves have been doing plenty to help promote the film in recent months, as have Total Film. I find it very hard to believe that in all that time no-one involved with Kill List on any level has failed to notice the similarity, which is immediately apparent. If your film is intended to subvert expectations you need to know what those expectations are, and if you’re aiming it at genre afficionados you’d better make damn sure you’re up to speed on the genre yourself. All this considered, I find it very odd indeed that it seems to be the ending which is garnering Kill List the most praise, with many declaring it utterly unexpected and devestating. It might have been so, had it not already been done elsewhere.

Still, none of this should be taken to imply that Kill List is not a film worth seeing. It is not the greatest British film in years; it is not an utterly unpredictable, genre-twisting masterpiece. But it is without question a very good film, and that should be more than enough; it’s a great deal more than most.

 

FrightFest 2011 Review: The Woman

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The Woman (2011)
Directed by: Lucky McKee
Starring: Pollyanna McIntosh, Sean Bridgers, Angela Bettis
Review by: Ben Bussey

Within a suprisingly short distance of one another exist what would appear to be two polar opposites of human life. The Cleek family live an affluent and comfortable existence in their beautiful ranch home, whilst in the woods nearby a feral woman (McIntosh) exists day-by-day as a scavenger. Out hunting one morning, family patriach Chris Cleek (Bridgers) finds the woman in his sights and decides to take her home. He captures her, chains her up in the fruit cellar, and informs his family that it is their duty to teach this woman how to be civilised. Whether Chris Cleek is in any position to demonstrate the real nature of a civilised human being is, of course, another matter entirely. 
 
At the time of its announcement, I felt very conflicted about The Woman. On the one hand it was a collaboration between Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee, and involved Angela Bettis: this was a cause for great personal excitement, given that I regard Ketchum far and away the greatest horror novelist of our time – indeed, one of the great American writers full stop – and that McKee and Bettis’s May is one of my absolute favourite films of this century. On the other hand, this is ostensibly a follow-up to Offspring, Andrew van den Houten’s somewhat lacklustre screen adaption of what is easily Ketchum’s weakest novel. The idea of McKee and Ketchum working together on a story about wild cannibal people did not sit well, given that both artists seem at their best when dealing with very real human concerns in a realistic context. Happily (well, perhaps that isn’t the word I should be using), The Woman is certainly not just a cannibal movie. Nor should it really be regarded a sequel to van den Houten’s film; aside from the presence of Pollyanna McIntosh in the same role, this is very much a stand-alone film requiring no prior knowledge of Ketchum’s Off Season/Offspring universe (which is presumably why the title was shortened from Offspring: The Woman as originally planned). With distinct echoes of McKee and Ketchum’s respective masterworks, the aforementioned May and The Girl Next Door, this is an intensely atmospheric, intelligent, character-based tale of abuse, intimidation and inhumanity.
 
And let us just state this for the record: anyone who would consider this film misogynistic is, in no uncertain terms, an idiot. Yes, that means you, guy from Sundance. Though, as McKee wryly remarked in the Q&A, you can’t buy the kind of publicity that man has given them. (If you don’t know what I’m referring to, click here.)
 
To give a little personal perspective, as a husband and father I do worry from time to time that I might not be as strong a male role model as my children need. The great thing about The Woman is, it makes me step back and realise that my approach to parenting really isn’t that bad. After spending an untold portion of our lives watching tales of good guys and bad guys unfold on screens before us, we may from time to time become complacent, and feel like nothing can really shock or sicken us anymore. Then along comes a character like Chris Cleek; a smiling, outwardly friendly, seemingly ordinary man with such jaw-dropping cruelty within him. Intelligently, the film for most part shows not his abusive behaviour, but rather its reprecussions. From the first scene, we do not see Chris so much as shoot an angry look at his wife or children. Clearly, he does not need to. His wife (the ever-brilliant Bettis) remains softly spoken, obedient, and clearly terrified at all times. Their eldest daughter (Lauren Ashley Carter) keeps her distance and escapes into her iPod at every opportunity, whilst the youngest daughter is too little to see what’s going on. Then there’s the middle child, his son. Young actor Zach Rand was a particularly great find here, handling the difficult material with great maturity, conveying such cold, emotionless detachment; he’s almost like Christina Ricci’s Wednesday Addams, except not in the least bit funny. It’s a tremendous performance, almost as chilling as that of Sean Bridgers.
 
Then of course we have Pollyanna McIntosh as the woman herself. I’d be lying if I said her performance in Offspring made much impact; in the context of a cannibal children film, she rather blurred into the general savagery of proceedings. Here, as the wild woman taken out of her natural habitat, she is under a considerably tighter spotlight, and her performance is nothing less than a revelation. While there is no mistaking that the film’s sympathies lie with her and the family, it does not negate the brutality of which she too is capable. She endures much needless suffering, but she certainly inflicts her fair share of it as well, not all of which may we might deem justified.
 
This is absolutely a film which deals with cruelty and exploitation, but this of course does not mean that the film itself is cruel or exploitative, with onscreen violence for the most part kept to a minimum. Given the subject matter and content, it might be a surprise to some that the only element of the film I had any real objection to was the soundtrack. Not unlike May, there is a heavy emphasis on guitar and vocal-based indie rock, in this case mostly original songs from Sean Spillane. In terms of personal music taste I have objection to these songs whatsoever; there are some really nice tunes in there. What I’m less sure of is how appropriate they are in the context of this film. Oftentimes the songs and their lyrics feel very obtrusive and at odds with the images we are seeing. However, from more remarks of McKee’s after the screening, I get the impression this may well have been the point; further efforts made to challenge convention. God knows I’m glad not to have another shock-horror soundtrack full of corny jump scare noises, or another mournful piano-based score, so perhaps in time I may come to regard The Woman’s score a blessing.
 
And yes, I do think time is a consideration here. This I have no doubt is a film we will still be watching and talking about in years to come, and after a little time in the directorial trenches this should put Lucky McKee well and truly back on the radar of the greatest filmmakers working in horror today. It’s his finest film since May, the finest film of Jack Ketchum’s work yet, and though at the time of writing there are two days of films left I strongly suspect it will turn out to be the finest film of FrightFest 2011. In other words, make damn sure you don’t miss it.