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Review by Ben Bussey

About twenty minutes into this film, I found myself wishing I’d taken a leaf out of Annie’s book and attempted this one as an as-it-happens review, much as she did with Adam Chaplin recently. As this slightly oddball, clearly cut-price attempt to capture the Dracula prequel market on DVD prior to the release of Universal’s big budget Dracula Untold later this year (no, it’s not an Asylum production, but the thought process is clearly much the same) I knew that an ancestor of Abraham Van Helsing was bound to show up at some point. Along comes the moment of his entrance, and first off all we hear is a ridiculously hammy, clearly affected Romanian accent, and slowly the figure emerges from the shadows, revealing himself to be a man of clearly advanced years dressed like a cross between Baron Munchausen and Dick Turpin with what appears to be a prosthetic hook nose and a massive handlebar moustache and OH JESUS CHRIST IT’S JON FUCKING VOIGHT!

Really, Jon Voight? Really? Why? How? Please tell me this is one of those “I happened to be on vacation nearby and it was only a few days work” deals, like how they reportedly drafted Harrison Ford into The Expendables 3. I mean, okay, all the old greats seem to star in nothing but complete shit these days, but… you know… it tends to be complete shit that plays in cinemas and presumably pays quite well, at least. I’m sure Transformers, the National Treasure movies and even Anaconda paid old Jon handsomely whilst taxing him very little as an actor. You only need to look at the cover art of Dracula the Dark Prince to know that this isn’t in remotely the same budgetary range, so I guess we’re to assume either Voight really desperately needed a little money, and/or he really had nothing better to do that week. Or, I don’t know, maybe he had a great burning desire to play Van Helsing; to follow in the footsteps of Van Sloan, Cushing, Olivier, Hopkins, Jackman (ahem), Hauer (ahem ahem), and bring that most iconic of vampire slayers to life. Or, in this case, something like the great-grandfather of the iconic vampire slayer. Whilst wearing a huge moustache and a false nose. I was half waiting for him to tell us, “no, it’s spelt Van Helsing, but it’s pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove.” (Just google it if you don’t get it.)

Having said all that: is Dracula the Dark Prince the utterly worthless waste of time you’re no doubt anticipating? You bet your sculpted buttocks it is. Midway through, my missus walked into the room and asked, “are you watching Merlin?” And that pretty much says it all. It’s a slightly extended episode of a BBC fantasy series, with a smidgen more blood and a few gratutitous tit shots thrown in. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of half-baked, sloppily-assembled crap we’ve long since come to expect from the direct-to-DVD market, and you can find spend more productive ways to spend 90 minutes scrubbing the underside of your toilet basin. But you know what… for what it is, I actually didn’t mind. Yup, it’s another of those “it’s shit, but not shit shit” deals. While I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to go to any trouble to see the damn film, it’s not without entertainment value if you’re in a really, really, really undemanding mood.

Anyway, plot… we start out on a little prologue of mortal Dracula (Luke Roberts) as a good Christian soldier hacking up the Turks in the time-honoured fashion, only to renounce God when he returns home to find his wife slain. Yeah, basically it’s the prologue of Coppolla’s Dracula, realised on the about the same budget that paid for Sadie Frost’s corsets. Skip forward a hundred years, and Dracula is sitting pretty on his Game of Thrones-ish throne while his right hand man/pimp Renfield (Stephen Hogan) keeps the guest rooms stocked up with scantily-clad suck toys. Meanwhile, he sends out his heavily armoured goons in big horned helmets to terrorise the land in a typically evil fashion, in search of a Biblical artefact which he can use to bring back the dead – or, in the hands of his enemies, could spell his destruction. But whaddya know, among the forces assembled to take him down is Alina (Kelly Wenham, who astonishingly was on Merlin once), who is the spitting image of Dracula’s century-dead bride. Taking her prisoner, the Dark Prince tries to find if any of the soul of his lost love remains – and in the process, wouldn’t you know it, she comes to realise he’s not so much totally and utterly evil as he is misunderstood.

Once again – yes, it’s absolute unmitigated crap. But it’s hard to be completely down on a movie which boasts seven foot black knights in horned helmets, warrior maidens in tight, impractical looking outfits, and excessively horny Gothic castles that look like they came out of a Playstation One. The ‘reimagining’ of the Count’s vampiric origins as rooted in Old Testament mythology is naturally a bit ham-fisted, but Dracula the Dark Prince is hardly the first or worst offender in this regard. And sure, it really isn’t much of a horror movie, more a kind of Gothic fantasy adventure with just enough raunch and violence to guarantee a 15 certificate – but hey, cheapo sword and sorcery is fun too.

So yes – once again – Dracula the Dark Prince is complete pants. You need never lose a wink of sleep over missing it, and by no means should you go to pains to track it down unless you really have an excess of time and money on your hands. Still, if it should so happen to cross your path and you don’t have anything especially pressing on your agenda – honestly, there are worse ways to flush an hour and a half of your precious life down the crapper.

Dracula the Dark Prince is available now on Region 2 DVD from Kaliedoscope.

Review by Ben Bussey

What would you do if you knew it was your last day on Earth – indeed, the last day on Earth full stop? We tend to love our post-apocalyptic fantasies – in which, invariably, it is not life itself but the social order that has been eradicated – but movies which actually face the end of everything head-on are a little thinner on the ground. It’s not hard to see why; after all, seriously contemplating not only your own death but that of everyone you have ever known isn’t necessarily that good for shits and giggles. I haven’t seen Von Trier’s Melancholia just yet (and I can’t pretend I’m in any hurry to do so), but I gather it’s hardly laugh-a-minute stuff.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that The Devil’s Bargain isn’t exactly light-hearted entertainment either, given that it centres on a married couple (Chloe Farnworth and Jonnie Hurn) wandering alone through the countryside, who are not only awaiting death from above in the form of a big fuck-off asteroid, but are also struggling with the fall-out from a tragic accident which took their son a few years earlier. However, in setting the action back in the early 1970s, writer-director Drew Cullingham would seem to be not only addressing the eternal, unavoidable question of our own demise, but also the demise of the 60s dream, as our hippy protagonists find their faith in the ideals of peace, love and togetherness (not to mention their ideas about the soul, or lack thereof) sorely tested in their final hours – particularly once they are joined by a third party (Dan Burman) who proves to be more than he initially seems.

As I remarked when we posted the trailer for The Devil’s Bargain back in December, I wasn’t going into this film with especially high expectations, given Drew Cullingham was previously responsible for the very poor Umbrage: the First Vampire. Credit where it’s due, then: The Devil’s Bargain is not in any way a predictable follow-up to that rather derivative, poorly-realised B-movie horror. First off, it’s clearly nowhere near as commercial a premise, and doesn’t neatly conform to any genre conventions. Unsurprisingly given its period setting, it does somewhat evoke the British cinema of the era, with distinct echoes of Michael Reeves, Nicholas Roeg and Ken Russell; and given that, by all accounts, it was a shoestring production made on a tight schedule, it certainly does look and sound good, the camera keeping close to the actors most of the time, boosting a sense of claustrophobia despite the wide-open spaces in which the action takes place.

All this sets The Devil’s Bargain up as something with great potential. However, things don’t necessarily develop in the most interesting way. Given the big philosophical questions about life, the universe and everything which invariably come up when contemplating the end, I suppose it was inevitable that this winds up being a very dialogue-heavy film indeed, and given the smallness of the cast it often feels more theatrical than cinematic – not that this is necessarily a problem, particularly given that Chloe Farnworth and Jonnie Hurn both turn in very good performances. The real problem, on pretty much every level, is Dan Burman’s character. First off, Burman’s performance really pales in comparison with his co-stars, coming off very forced and unnatural (though again, the excessively verbose nature of Cullingham’s script has to carry a lot of the blame there). But really, it’s the character himself, and his role in the narrative, that is the real problem. Without giving too much away, it turns out he isn’t quite the perfect stranger he is at first presented as being, and the wedge he drives into the central relationship sends the whole thing spiralling away from the grander questions of mortality into rather more mundane, soap opera-ish melodrama; a series of revelations clearly intended to intensify matters in fact only serve to cheapen it all.

Speaking of cheapening matters – my final complaint relates not to the film itself, but the manner in which it has been marketed, Cullingham having emphasised the production’s alleged motto “no money, no clothes, no fear,” whilst publicity materials ‘warn’ the reader that the film contains full frontal nudity. Seriously now… it’s 2014. Everyone and their mother have seen more explicit things than this, possibly with their mother in the room at the time. Okay, so the cast spend a fair bit of time (not the duration, I might add) with their clothes off, but this is hardly Nine Songs or anything; male members remain flaccid, and penetration shots notably absent. The sad thing is, selling The Devil’s Bargain this way really serves to misrepresent how the film handles the nudity and sex. Again, given that Umbrage: the First Vampire featured female nudity which decidedly was on the exploitative side, I suspected Cullingham might follow suit here – but I’m happy to say he really doesn’t. The nude scenes are not handled in a voyeuristic fashion, and Chloe Farnsworth is not subjected to any more or less physical scrutiny than her male co-stars.

All in all, I do feel that The Devil’s Bargain isn’t as good as it might have been – but even so, there’s no denying it’s an admirable break from the norm, making a concerted effort to do something that challenges the audience, and doing so in a visually interesting manner. It’s deeply flawed, no doubt about it – but it has its shrivelled, black, pessimistic heart in the right place.

Learn more at The Devil’s Bargain website and Facebook page – and/or watch the film below.

Review by Ben Bussey

My mama always said that life is like a microbudget indie movie from a first time writer-director: you never know what you’re gonna get. Oftentimes the results are a little messy, with inexperience and uncertainty very much in evidence. However, there’s often a spark of real excitement and a charge of creativity that we tend not to find in the latest work from someone who’s been at it for years. A debut feature is invariably fuelled by hunger and ambition, and while sometimes that manifests itself in a complusion to win over as wide an audience as possible, there are also instances where the filmmmakers instead go in there with more of a ‘nothing to lose’ attitude, and try their hand at something genuinely unconventional, challenging and risky.

Australian writer-director Adrian Goodman has quite clearly taken the latter option with Wakey Wakey. In so doing, he and his crew have put together a movie which is atmospheric and abstract, sinister and sensual, by turns fascinating and frustrating, but never less than compelling. It certainly won’t be to all tastes (given the genre orientation of this website, I should stress that it isn’t really a horror film in the strictest sense), and perhaps it falls just a little short of its full potential, but there can be no question that it stands apart from the bulk of microbudget indie fare in this day and age.

Essentially a two-hander, Wakey Wakey centres on Josie (Laura Wheelwright) and Samantha (Fabiana Weiner), two young women – sisters, half-sisters, step-sisters? – who, while the parents are absent, are housebound in their fancy-looking futurist/post-modernist/whateverist home. Josie suffers from severe narcolepsy, which forces her to stay at home under Samantha’s supervision, wearing a helmet at all times. Inevitably the circumstances put a strain on their relationship – but it seems that Josie doesn’t mind too much, as she appears to have the kind of feelings toward Samantha which are not generally encouraged between siblings. However, quite apart from the physical peril it puts her in, Josie’s condition also means she’s in a constant state of uncertainty, never quite able to distinguish dream from reality – and it may be that Samantha is using this to manipulate her.

When I first saw the trailer to Wakey Wakey, I won’t deny the first description that came to mind was “Goth lesbian Eraserhead.” A crass kneejerk reaction, yes, but honestly not that wide of the mark – and none of this is in any way a bad thing. The first, most striking aspect of the film (and again, the thing that really makes it stand apart from most microbudget indies nowadays) is that, unless I’m very much mistaken, it was shot on good old fashioned black and white 16mm, rather than the now-standard DV. I cannot overstate what a refreshing change this is. While of course I understand the practical and financial advantages of shooting digitally, the sad reality is that in most instances it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as film. As such, Wakey Wakey has an aesthetic appeal that’s sorely lacking in the vast majority of modern microbudget movies, bringing to mind such monochrome delights as Aronofsky’s Pi, and – of course – Lynch’s Eraserhead. Nor do the aesthetic pleasures stop at the visuals, as Simon Eddy’s soundtrack is also powerful, atmospheric stuff, in-keeping with the overall industrial-goth mood.

Of course, given the movie to a large extent revolves around unconsumated girl-on-girl lust (and a seemingly incestuous attraction to boot), you’d be forgiven for expecting sordid and sleazy results. Happily, this is not the case. It’s rare indeed that I feel comfortable describing any film as erotic – it’s such a frequently misused term, so often applied to anything that your average Joe Bloggs could get a wank out of, which simply isn’t the same thing. However, Wakey Wakey has – yes – a genuine underlying eroticism, slow-burn sexual tension which – to the credit of both the director and the actresses – is maintained without ever getting explicit or resorting to cheesecake tactics. As this sexual energy is balanced out with an overriding air of the nightmarish, Wakey Wakey winds up a veritable emotional smorgasbord, with a least a subtle whiff of sadomasochism.

Why, then, do I feel Goodman’s film doesn’t quite fulfill its promise? Well – at barely 60 minutes, it’s a little short, and can’t avoid a sense of anti-climax. Obviously given the somewhat surreal nature of proceedings, the finale was never going to provide all the answers, and I’m very glad that it didn’t – but even so, it really does feel like it just cuts off too soon, before a natural conclusion has been reached. Even so, the hour that preceeds that too-sudden ending is beautifully realised enough that I can still wholeheartedly recommend seeking out Wakey Wakey as soon as you are able, and keeping an eye out for Adrian Goodman in the future.

A special WiH month screening of Wakey Wakey is happening in Melbourne on 13th February; learn more at the official Wakey Wakey website and Facebook page.

Review by Ben Bussey

It all could have gone so well. A dystopian futuristic fantasy for the Occupy generation, Bounty Killer shows a devastated world in which – hooray! – the white collar criminals have actually been held accountable for their crimes, every tax-dodging corporate fat cat having been forced into hiding with a price on their heads. Into this new frontier come those noble men and women whose profession is in the title. Two of the best are Drifter (Matthew Marsden, British actor who was in Rambo and played Charlie’s brother in Lost) and Mary Death (relative newcomer Christian Pitre). It’s immediately obvious these two share a little more than a propensity for high-octane slaughter – but when a new contract comes in revealing that Drifter might not be all he seems, where will Mary’s loyalties lie?

It’s really not a bad premise – and the first scenes alone seem promising, as bounty killers storm a swanky hideaway for the rich and shameless, dealing out bloody justice on those who I daresay the bulk of us feel most richly deserve it in this day and age. But this is just the opening scene. Those overtones of satire and social commentary quickly fade into the background, and for the bulk of the movie Bounty Killer plays out more along the lines of a dystopian western, with choppers standing in for horses.

Again, that might sound promising. But don’t get your hopes up. Director Henry Saine, whilst clearly influenced by the recent neo-grindhouse wave, may have the good sense to avoid the now rather played-out pseudo-70s aesthetic thing, but he hasn’t managed to craft a film that is visually interesting at all. There may be a ton of gun fights and plenty of splattery deaths, but there’s no kinetic energy, no sense of threat, no thrills. Instead, Bounty Killer promptly lapses into outright tedium, with a plot which, whilst initially intriguing, is sure to leave the viewer utterly indifferent in little to no time. I won’t lie to you – I very quickly lost track of what was going on, and found almost no reason to care either way.

Matthew Marsden… I’m sorry, but if ever a guy did NOT have the words ‘leading man action hero’ branded on his forehead, it’s him. The mere fact that one hails from the same isles as Jason Statham does not bestow upon one that same gruff and manly magnetism (and I should know). He’s utterly unconvincing as macho man Drifter, nor does he have much chemistry with either a) his painfully unfunny comedy sidekick Barak Hardly or b) his fellow bounty killer/protégé/love interest Christian Pitre. Given that the cover places Pitre (and, unsurprisingly enough, her cleavage) slap bang in the middle, the PR for Bounty Killer seems rather geared toward pushing the actress as the film’s great discovery. Well… I dunno, I guess there’s always the possibility she’s a star in waiting, but I very, very much doubt this film is going to do much to launch her. In common with pretty much everything about Bounty Killer, she just comes off a bit bland and middle-of-the-road, and while all involved may be doing their utmost to make Mary Death an iconic anti-heroine, there’s just nothing memorable about what they’ve created here.

About the only other real weapon in Bounty Killer’s arsenal is a perhaps surprising number of once-big names they’ve managed to draft in for supporting roles, with cameos from the former Mrs Griswald Beverly D’Angelo, the former TX Kristinna Loken, and the former crazy-guy-in-big-movies turned crazy-guy-in-little-movies Gary Busey. I’ve not doubt that it’s hoped all this is going to boost the fan appeal of a movie so clearly striving for cult status, not unlike when Hercules, Xena and Gabrielle had cameos in Bitch Slap; but, not unlike that turgid mess of a wannabe cult film, Bounty Killer is fighting a losing battle from the start, trying too hard, delivering too little, and failing miserably in just about every respect.

Yup – in case I haven’t made it clear, this is one to miss.

Bounty Killer is out on Region 2 DVD, Blu-ray, VOD and download on 27th January 2014, from Anchor Bay.

Review by Tristan Bishop

In our digital, cloud storage age, it’s almost impossible to imagine films becoming ‘lost’ – as soon as they’ve been converted to a software format then they can be duplicated, shared and stored many times over at negligible cost. This wasn’t always the case of course – when your movie came as multiple cans of film, they took up actual physical space, whether in warehouses, film labs or the dungeons of dedicated collectors. And not only is physical space limited, but film is notoriously fragile – especially very old film. You may know the statistics already, but if you don’t, it is estimated that way over half of all films made before 1950 are lost. Shocking, isn’t it? Even more shocking is that 90% of American films made before 1929 no longer exist, beyond footnotes in dusty reference books and perhaps a few production stills. Thankfully there are people out there working tirelessly to track down missing films and restore them – a pause here to give thanks to Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video, a man who did arguably more than anyone else to locate, clean up and preserve literally thousands of long-lost exploitation films, and who sadly passed away a few weeks ago at the scarily young age of 56.

It’s not always obscure exploitation films that become lost, though – sometimes a high profile film would do badly at the box office and disappear, never being released on home video or DVD because it’s just not seen as commercially viable to do so, despite any perceived value the film itself might have. Wake In Fright (also known as Outback) fits firmly in this category. Directed by Ted Kotcheff (who later had his greatest success with Weekend At Bernies), it was adapted from a novel by Kenneth Cook (who later wrote the intriguingly-titled Killer Koala and Wombat Revenge) by a Jamaican-British screenwriter called Evan Jones (who also wrote the scripts for These Are The Damned and Modesty Blaise), Wake In Fright bombed at the box office on release, partially due to a critical savaging from Australian critics who perceived it as an attack on their way of life from a bunch of UK-based upstarts – possibly neglecting to mention that the novel was written by an Australian in the first place.

Critics were far kinder in the UK and France (in fact the film was premiered at Cannes and was nominated for a Palm D’or), but this did not translate into ticket sales. In any case, as it has a habit of doing, time worked its magic and eventually many of the top Australian directors started to sing the praises of the film and rightly pointed out that, whilst it was in no way definable as a success, it kick-started the Australian film boom of the 1970’s – leading to the now fashionable ‘ozploitation’ films. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the film got lost. It was never released on home video, and all the theatrical prints of it had become too degraded to show. The film’s editor, Anthony Buckley, launched a campaign to track down a full copy of the film in 1994 – a search which spanned the globe and an entire decade before it was finally tracked down in Pittsburgh, and in 2009 the full, restored film was finally shown again in Australia, and now makes its way to the UK again with a cinema run and Blu-ray release from those lovely folks at Eureka.

The story is a pretty simple one – a young school teacher called John Grant (Gary Bond) is teaching in an isolated outback school, and is heading back to Sydney for Christmas. In order to get there he needs to travel to the town of Bundanyabba to catch a connecting flight. On arrival in Bundanyabba (affectionately known to the natives as ‘the Yabba’) he meets a friendly policeman (played by the enormous iconic Aussie actor Chips Rafferty, who died almost immediately after filming completed) who proceeds to first get him steaming drunk and then introduces him to the other local past-time, the game of ‘two-up’ – in a gambling den at the back of a cafe. Grant, seeing this simple game as a way to buy out his teaching contract which is keeping him in his isolated school, proceeds to lose all of his money. Luckily the locals seem friendly enough, and, whilst he misses his connecting flight, he finds himself adopted by them and drawn into their world. Unfortunately, whilst he initially is quite happy to get involved in the hunting, fighting and hard-drinking world, he soon discovers a more sinister side to proceedings, and perhaps a few truths about himself.

Wake In Fright isn’t really a horror film as such – the events and characters in the film are based in the real world, but it works as one. This is not to say that it paints the outback as an inhospitable place, or the locals as one-dimension villains – this is more of a fish-out-of-water tale, with the more refined and educated Grant viewed with suspicion by the residents of The Yabba, and finding himself thrown into situations in which he is not comfortable. The horrific centrepiece of the film concerns a kangaroo hunt on which Grant is taken. This sequence is long and contains a great deal of graphic footage of real animals being gunned down and stabbed, which will be extremely gruelling for most viewers (I found myself more and more sickened as these obviously intelligent creatures died horribly on camera). The film even comes with a pre-credits statement as to how the film-makers worked with the humane associations of Australia and the UK on this sequence, both of whom were apparently eager for the film to show the reality of kangaroo hunting which, at least at the time, was a nightly reality for many in the outback. We are meant to be utterly appalled at what we see, and it works – Grant’s misgivings at the hunt are few, and his willingness to be involved in the more violent aspects makes the film even more resonant.

The nastier aspects aside, the film is balanced, non-judgemental and even sympathetic towards its setting and characters – especially towards Doc Tydon, played by the late great Donald Pleasence, in one of his most eccentric roles (and fans of Donald will know this is really saying something) as an alcoholic doctor without a license who hides his disease (and his ‘aberrant’ sexual urges) in a town where downing your pint in seconds is considered polite. Tydon is really the key to the entire film, an outsider to all society who at first takes Grant under his wing and then eventually awakens (in fright!) repressed parts of Grant’s own personality. Without spoilering too much, the climax of the film is extremely well-handled – many reviews have read this a specific way but there appears to be a wonderful vagueness to the way this plays out that leads me to suspect certain events may not have happened at all, and Grant is responding to a fear of himself rather than to any real life trauma.

Wake In Fright is not an easy watch (although Pleasence is a sheer joy as ever), and has no easy answers , but I found myself replaying certain scenes in my mind for a couple of days afterwards, and any fan of challenging cinema, horror or not, would be advised to check it out.

Wake in Fright will be in selected cinemas in the UK & Eire nationwide from 7 March, before being released in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack on 31st March 2014, from Eureka’s Masters of Cinema range.

Review by Nia Edwards-Behi

A young man disappears shortly after ingesting an experimental drug as part of a research project. An old friend decides to investigate his disappearance when she digs deeper into his research into drug experiments by the US government during the 1960s. She finds herself in cahoots with a washed-up author, and together they desperately attempt to escape the murderous beings which seem to emerge from the rift in existential planes caused by taking the drug. Banshee Chapter’s jump off point is the real-life Project MKUltra, the decades-long CIA operation which saw thousands of experiments conducted on human test subjects in order to research the possibility of mind control. Although a variety of methods were used – almost all entirely illegal and, hopefully by anyone’s standards, immoral – the project is most famous for dosing test subjects with LSD and other drugs.

Given the incredibly interesting historical inspiration for the film, the end result is really quite lacking. Although, overall, I enjoyed Banshee Chapter, there are several major weaknesses to the film that mean I can’t whole-heartedly recommend it. First and foremost, Katia Winter as the film’s lead, Anne, is painfully dull. Anne is supposedly a woman desperately seeking information about her missing, likely dead, friend, and further more a red-blooded journalist seeking to uncover the dark history her friend was researching. Whether a poor performance from Winter, a symptom of weak storytelling, or, more likely, a combination of both, Anne is an uncharismatic lead character, lacking completely in the drive and enthusiasm that she should have. She comes across as bored from the very start of the film and as a result it’s particularly difficult to care about her fate by the film’s close, when she finally gets to be a bit more animated.

The weakness of the lead character does appear to be a result of all-over poor storytelling. The narrative is ham-fisted and forced, while the dialogue, though never laugh-out-loud bad, often leaves a lot to be desired. Having said this, Ted Levine is wonderful as the Hunter S. Thompson pastiche Thomas Blackburn, a drug-addled author. Levine gruffs his way through the film’s best dialogue (though, admittedly, that’s not the highest praise), never quite going so far as to chew the scenery. Given the explicit real-life point of reference for his character, his eventual fate in the film, without wishing to be too spoilery, seems somewhat tasteless.

Another gripe I have, which does seem to be a matter of personal taste, is with the style of the film. My heart sank a little at the first instance of found footage in the film, but happily said sequences are sporadic, varied and put to good use – so for the most part we have video records of experiments in place of people running around an abandoned lab. Bizarrely my gripe then lies with the majority of the film, the bits that aren’t found footage. This is entirely because they are stylistically similar to the found footage segments. The camera movement is very fluid and handheld, and while never really verité in style, it distracted me that the segments were filmed in such an indistinct way to the supposedly ‘documentary’ or found-footage elements of the film.

All these gripes aside, though, when the film gets down to business, it delivers on jumps and scares. Tension is effectively built in these set pieces, and while many of the jumps are predictable they’re nevertheless extremely effective at times. This is aided by the film’s real-world historical connection, the idea that hallucinogenic drug experiments did take place augmenting the impact of the experiments going wrong. However, as I said to begin with, this undeniably spooky concept is never entirely taken advantage of, and instead it feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity to have so strongly linked the film’s narrative to these real life experiments.

Essentially, then, though I wouldn’t necessarily discourage anyone from watching Banshee Chapter – it’s enjoyable enough – I also wouldn’t particularly recommend it. You might jump in the right places and the hairs on your arms might stand up once or twice, when the credits roll you might just feel a little bit cheated.

Banshee Chapter is released to Region 2 DVD and VOD on 27th January 2014, from Intense Distribution & 101 Films.

Review by Ben Bussey

Remember when you’d never heard of Vin Diesel? Remember when this fairly unassuming little movie called Pitch Black showed up, and delivered a far better sci-fi/horror take on Assault on Precinct 13 than John Carpenter himself had managed with Ghosts of Mars (and I say that as someone who actually quite likes Ghost of Mars)? Well, Vin Diesel and returning writer-director David Twohy certainly remember those days – and it seems they’ve done everything in their power to bring them back with this labour of love, return-to-square-one third instalment in the Riddick series. The film doesn’t ignore the events of the ill-advised second movie The Chronicles of Riddick, but casually puts them to one side, getting back to what we really want to see – one gravel-voiced badass trapped on an unfriendly planet full of seriously nasty monsters, whose only hope of getting out of there is to form an uneasy alliance with the other humans, who either want to imprison or kill him.

Riddick is a film it could be very easy to be indifferent about. It’s a sequel to a movie from about a decade ago, mid-budget, C-list cast, following a pretty standard formula – indeed, it often feels less like a sequel to Pitch Black than an outright remake. And yet, there’s a certain charm to movies like this these days, for the simple reason that they don’t get made that often anymore. Nowadays, in most instances low-budget action/creature features are really low-budget, with one-time marquee names like Lundgren, Van Damme and Seagal now mainstays of supermarket DVD shelves; and on the other side you’ve got the megabudget Hollywood productions, which more often than not water everything down for a PG-13 – not unlike The Chronicles of Riddick did. It’s comparatively rare these days that we get a movie which occupies the middle ground in terms of scale and budget, and doesn’t hold back from a restrictive rating. Though the suits tend not to covet the audience for this type of fare, it most definitely exists, hence Dredd made such a big splash in a small pond.

Is Riddick as good as Dredd? Definitely not. It’s not as good as Pitch Black either. But it certainly is making the effort to give the fans what they want, and pay homage to all manner of old-school testosterone-fuelled cinema (aside from the old Assault on Precinct 13 influence, it’s not hard to detect the hints of Rambo, Predator, and a textbook Apocalypse Now homage). On top of all that, though, Riddick has some curious things going on under the surface which I suspect may make some academics very happy indeed.

First off, for what seems like such a simple popcorn movie, it has a pretty unorthodox structure. For much of the first act it’s essentially Tom Hanks’ Castaway in space, with Riddick going Robinson Crusoe on the hostile rock where he’s somehow found himself marooned. These early scenes play out almost entirely without dialogue, and it feels like about twenty-five minutes in once we get a flashback that explains how he ended up there. It’s not too long until the classic rag-tag bunch of interstellar mercenaries show up in hopes of claiming the bounty on Riddick’s shiny, goggles-clad head – and then, for what feels like about the same length of time, Riddick all but disappears. It’s a curious decision to go from an opening which focuses entirely on the title character, only to omit him almost entirely for much of the second act – but this serves to make Riddick a source of dread again.

Or does it? Really, does anyone find Vin Diesel intimidating anymore? I’m not going to assume that everyone alive has ever seen his Facebook page (though in fairness he does seem to have about 100 billion likes), but really, after you’ve seen enough shots of him staring wistfully at the sunset whilst waking barefoot on a beach, it’s not so easy to buy him as Mr Tough Guy.

Here, I suppose, is where I might do well to tread carefully… perhaps we haven’t all seen his Facebook, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that most of us have at some point heard the rumours that Vin Diesel is gay, which to the best of my knowledge he has never confirmed or denied. Of course it’s nobody’s business but his own either way – although, again, he’s posted enough Facebook photos of himself staring wistfully at the sunset whilst waking barefoot on a beach for it to feel like he just might be dropping a hint, nor are any of his movies are exactly short on homoerotic overtones. However, there’s something more going on in Riddick. Devin Faraci over at Badass Digest has already spoken at length about the bizarre psychosexual subtext of this movie (e.g. Riddick turned off by naked concubines, yet flirting creepily with Katee Sackhoff’s Dahl – the film’s one confirmed gay character), and I can’t really add anything to his assessment; I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what Diesel and Twohy are trying to say here, but I don’t think for a second that any of it is unintentional.

But assuming you want to ignore all that shit and just get into the action – I daresay Riddick still has enough going on to keep you gripped. This really is an ‘ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it’ scenario, with monsters not unlike those from Pitch Black, but instead of ‘once it’s dark, we’re fucked,’ it’s now ‘once it starts raining, we’re fucked.’ There’s a nice balance of practical and CG, although the design of these new beasties isn’t perhaps as distinctive as those of Pitch Black – however, as Faraci also notes, these latest monsters are inescapably phallic…

It might be just a little too long and too oestentatious for its own good, but for the most part Riddick is a perfectly enjoyable B-movie romp. If Diesel and Twohy want to keep on churning these out once every five years or so, I’ll happily keep checking them out – though I won’t deny I’ll be keeping a close eye on the subtext the whole time.

Riddick is availble now on DVD, Blu-ray, download and on-demand services from Entertainment One.

Review by Ben Bussey

Another found footage movie.

Will those four words alone not suffice? Do they not immediately tell you everything you need to know? Do I need to mention cameras running at all times when any reasonable person would have turned them off, the bulk of the screen time taken up by unconvincing relationship scenes involving boring two-dimensional characters you couldn’t have cared less about in the first place, and wobbly, erratic camerawork getting even wobblier and more erratic at those rare moments when things threaten to get interesting, thereby denying us even a glimpse of whatever it is that’s supposed to be the big threat, ultimately leaving us utterly cheated in every respect – only to then have the dreaded “cop watching footage days later” ending and proceed to continue in proper film mode for a further ten bloody minutes?

What makes it hurt most of all is that Frost really needn’t have been this way. Scientists on a glacier uncovering something that shouldn’t have been disturbed – yes, obviously it evokes The Thing (as does the other upcoming release, the similarly formulaic but far more entertaining Blood Glacier), but it’s still hardly one of the most frequently utilised horror movie set-ups, and the potential is there to do something genuinely haunting and cinematic. Even more teasingly, there are brief moments when Frost comes close to doing this, when not in found footage mode: we open and close on some nice, atmospheric opening close-ups of the ice, and have some really quite beautiful Shining-esque aerial shots along the way. But nope, for the bulk of it, it’s an uninteresting thirtysomething couple, on the glacier for no readily discernible reason, spending the bulk of their time having boring relationship issues which – again, for no readily discernible reason – they keep the camera on throughout. That said, they do stop short of filming themselves in bed, even though they come close – which, frankly, feels like yet another way this boring bloody film robs us of any real entertainment value, given that we get almost no look at whatever it is that is threatening them.

I know there’s always that ‘power of imagination’ argument to be made, but there’s also the argument that this is just lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy filmmaking at its most boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring.

Sorry, but if they can’t be arsed to make a proper movie, I can’t be arsed to write a proper review.

Frost is out Region 2 DVD on 10th February 2014 from Entertainment One.

Review by Stephanie Scaife

I am not the intended audience for Insidious 2 so this makes it slightly difficult to write a fair review. I’m a film snob and I’ve seen so many horror movies that when a film such as this relies so heavily on the tried and tested conventions of the genre I’m simply overwhelmed with the sense of déjà vu. Not a jump scare goes by without me sighing and rolling my eyes. I’d seen James Wan’s Saw, The Conjuring and in preparation for this I also recently watched Insidious – I didn’t enjoy any of these films. These are horror movies for people who aren’t horror fans, where the cheap scares, convoluted plot and stock characters make for fun and scary viewing.

Insidious 2 has pretty much entirely the same set up as Insidious, with the family having relocated to except this time instead of Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai’s (Rose Byrne) son being trapped in the Further (the spirit world), it’s Josh who draws the short straw leaving his human body free to be possessed by a malign spirit. So Renai enlists the help of Carl (Steve Coulter), Specs (screenwriter Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) to figure out why Josh has now gone all Jack Torrance on them and to uncover his secret past.

Now, when I watched Insidious I’d found it to be fairly dull and predictable, and Insidious 2 is just more of the same; it’s repetitive and clearly a lazy cash in based on the success of the first film. Let’s hope that, like Saw, Insidious doesn’t turn into one of these franchises that drags on and on, churning one out each year around Halloween with an ever increasingly confusing mythology to match my decreasing interest/comprehension (delete as applicable). This isn’t to say that Insidious 2 is a bad film per se, but it’s entirely perfunctory which I think is oftentimes worse that something that is tangibly poor.

Patrick Wilson gives it his crazy-eyed best as Josh, but poor Rose Byrne is reduced to being nothing more than a squealing wreck. The comic relief of Carl and Tucker feels silly and misplaced with the only real saving grace being in the form of Barbara Hershey. Also, I hasten to add that many including our own Ben seemed to quite like this film, so I could just be getting bogged down in my own particular tastes and biases.

Although the official title contains the word “chapter” indicating that this is a continuation of the first film it actually acts as both a prequel, where we learn about Josh’s history with the supernatural and also as a direct sequel picking up in the aftermath of the first film. I can only assume that with any further chapters they will have to widen the field slightly as the focus on the serial aspects of the story has already seemingly removed any sort of originality and creativity, of which there was limited supply to begin with.

Ultimately though it’s pointless having a whinge about mainstream horror films and their successes because these films will still keep getting made and swathes of popcorn munching cinemagoers will continue to fork out the money to do so. You only have to look at the $5million budget and the $93million gross takings to see exactly why these kinds of films get made…

Insidious Chapter 2 is available now on Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray, from Entertainment One.