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Review by Ben Bussey

Let me get the nit-picking out of the way first: goodness gracious, great balls of banality, is Sinister a prosaic title or what? Fine, so it evokes the atmosphere of the piece, but really, was it a choice between that and Spooky/Eerie/Moody etc? This on top of the prominent credit “From the producers of Paranormal Activity and Insidious” and I cannot deny that, in spite of the largely positive word of mouth, I went into Sinister expecting nothing more than another glossy, multiplex-friendly haunted house flick full to bursting with unnecessary loud noises and obvious jump scares, of which at least a third would surely prove to be fake-outs.

Is Sinister actually as naff as all that? Not at all. But neither does it retroactively warrant a spot on my best of 2012 list. It’s a perfectly watchable and engrossing account of a rational sceptic coming to the gradual realisation that he’s in the middle of some highly irrational goings-on. When all’s said and done, though, it’s a pretty hollow experience that leaves you more or less the same as it found you.

Still, Sinister does serve to remind filmmakers of one key lesson that can be overlooked: the value of an above-average actor in the lead, who is really treating the film seriously. Happily, that seems to be the case here with Ethan Hawke, who does not come off as unwillingly slumming it the way so many big name actors do when taking on lowly genre roles. Quite the contrary, he comes off genuinely invested in making the role believable and compelling, and his charisma goes a long way to making Sinister work.

As the improbably named true crime author Ellison Oswalt, Hawke fills the time-honoured role of the writer in need of a hit who moves his family somewhere spooky, because that always works out so very well for families in horror movies. To a certain extent I do share Tristan’s feelings that the professional writer as central protagonist is a rather overused genre convention, but as someone who attempts to balance out family responsibilities with a writing career of sorts, I found plenty to relate to in Hawke’s character… though that may have less to do with the writing than with all the sitting in a darkened room watching gory films, all the while hoping the kids don’t wander in. Indeed, I do wonder if there might be some pointed commentary toward horror fans going on here: our perserverance in watching every new bit of nasty that comes our way, even as it gets progressively nastier. In a sense this is perhaps emphasised more by the comparative lack of on-screen unpleasantness, with Hawke’s ever-more horrified facial expressions telling most of the story for the content of the grisly home movies. After all, for the most part Sinister does adhere to the preferred mood of restrained understatement that has long dominated ghost movies, the rise in popularity of which might seem to imply that torture is on the way out. No bad thing, I feel.

Hawke may be very much the star of the show, but this is not to say he’s without able support. As the neglected wife and kids, Juliet Rylance, Michael Hall D’Addario and Clare Foley all fare well, giving believable performances in roles that could easily have lapsed into cliché and/or been completely neglected. Also offering a refreshing break with cliché is James Ransome’s amusingly nicknamed Deputy So-and-So, the young local cop who at first seems nothing more than an overbearing fan of Ellison and an incompetent officer of the law, who in fact turns out to be more vital than he seems.

As a character piece, then, I enjoyed Sinister plenty. But all this talk about it being one of the scariest films in years? Really? I’m not one to play the “I’m so big and hard and none of this shit scares me” card – because I’m bloody well not, and anyway I like it when a horror movie genuinely catches me off guard – but what can I say, Sinister didn’t freak me out in the least. Yes, I was for the most part gripped and enthralled, but I certainly wasn’t terrified at any point. Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why, in spite of the film’s strengths, it really didn’t resonate much with me, nor do I see myself having any great desire to revisit it. Neither am I particularly filled with hope at the news that a sequel is in the works. Let’s not forget that old “from the producers of Paranormal Activity” thing. The last thing we need is another of those franchises churning these out year after year with the usual law of diminishing returns, or more often than not diminishing quality… oh well, as ever I wait to be proven wrong.

Sinister is released to Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray on 11th February from Momentum Pictures.

Review by Annie Riordan

Spoiler warning.

It’s so difficult to review a boring movie. It’s like trying to describe the difference between ecru and beige to a color blind albino.

Not that nothing interesting happens in Indiscretion. A ton of shit happens. There’s naked nude people having sex, and there’s blood and… more nudity-nakedness sex having and… more blood, and it’s all very bloody and… sexy, I guess. But still, by the time the sex is had and the blood is spilled, it just doesn’t seem like very much happened after all.

Liz and Patrick are an average 20something suburban couple, living in the spacious house that Liz’s mom left her and trying to ignore the fact that their relationship is holding together about as well as a shattered Ming vase wrapped in soggy Scotch tape. You see, Liz cheated on Patrick about two years earlier and Patrick still has all these trust issues that no amount of couples counseling has been able to repair. So, it seems like the perfect time to rent one of the vacant upstairs bedrooms out to some guy Liz met online. They sure could use the extra money and, short of buying her a six-pack of G-strings, slipping her some roofies and shoving her into a frat house on a Friday night, I can’t think of any better way to get the old suspicions brewing and the slut accusations flying fast and furious asap, can you?

Just to make matters worse, their car is in the shop so they have to send Liz’s annoyingly over-the-top chatty gay brother to pick up the couch-crasher – whose name turns out to be Alessandro – at the train station. On the long drive back to Liz and Patrick’s place, Gay Brother (I forgot his name already) cheerfully fills Alessandro in on the sordid details of Liz and Pat’s relationship, the untimely death of their mother and the long standing belief of New Englanders that everyone from the state of Massachusetts drives like an ignorant, entitled asshole (and even though I’ve only lived in New England for just over a year now, I tend to agree with this assessment more often than not).

Anyway…

As luck would have it, both Liz and Alessandro belong to that rarest of subspecies: people who hang out online a lot and are amazingly Smoking Hawt in person. Good thing they didn’t meet through OKCupid or the movie would have fallen flat on its face once it was revealed that Liz was a muffin-topped, duck-mouthed hoochie and Alessandro was really a douchcanoe named Steve who has mastered the art of sucking in his gut whilst snapping pics of himself in the bathroom mirror. But no: Alessandro is apparently on vacay from a Calvin Klein underwear shoot, and Liz’s tits are as perky as the day is long. Pat’s no slouch either, but he seems to be the only actor who did NOT agree to appear totally naked in this flick, so who cares?

Cut to the chase: Alessandro gets a load of Liz, blows a load in the shower and instantly starts plotting how best to get her away from Pat. Using his arsenal of knowledge gleefully gleaned from Gay Brother, Alessandro starts planting the seeds of doubt. And with Liz passed out cold on a double dose of Ambien, he also makes a very dedicated attempt to plant his own seed while Pat is otherwise occupied.

Liz also happens to belong to yet another rare subspecies: women who start manifesting symptoms of pregnancy – including full-on blow-your-groceries morning sickness – just four hours after conception, a full month before such symptoms normally kick in. But hey, we’ve only got twenty minutes of film left so let’s drop kick this bitch. Whose baby is it? Will Pat assume the worst? And what secrets might he be hiding from Liz? Tune in tomorrow for another episode of Indiscretion.

The film finally erupts into volcanic violence: eyes gouged out, ribcages crushed, throats slashed. But it takes a while to get going and has a couple of false starts before it finally gets to the red stuff. There’s far too many hiccups along the way, i.e. “I hit the bad guy and he’s down so let me go check on my wounded lover and uh-oh he slipped away while I wasn’t looking so now we have to creep through the house to find him” crap. Oh, and if you’re trying to run away from a killer, just fucking run. Unless you live in a cinderblock factory, don’t bother throwing stuff into his path to slow him down… especially when all you have at your disposal are fluffy couch cushions, ficus trees and Skittles. If you’re going to be that goddamned dumb, you just deserve to die.

Our story ends on a nice nihilistic note that I wasn’t expecting, and contains a neat little twist that I sorta saw coming but which still kinda worked, but the amount of “suspension of disbelief” required of me was far too much to ask. It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It was just kind of…there. Patrick is an asshole, Liz couldn’t outwit a staple gun and Alessandro comes off more like a slightly creepy shoe salesman than a full blown serial killer. I didn’t give a fuck about any of them, and never for one moment did I feel any empathy, fear or concern. Watching Indiscretion is a bit like staring at an ecru wall for an hour and a half. Or is it off beige?

Review by Tristan Bishop

“Don’t believe the hype” suggested Public Enemy, way back in the mists of time, at the dawn of recorded culture (the late eighties). It was a warning that subsequent generations of humanity could do with heeding, and it seems particularly relevant at the moment, with several releases from the last six months being hyped to the heavens and then being released to extremely mixed responses – I needn’t single out any films here, those of us with an interest in horror films will know them all too well. Hype can drum up interest and get bums on seats, but it can also negatively impact perception of a film – calling something (I’m pulling this out of thin air so apologies if it mirrors the tagline of something) ‘the most shocking and original horror film of our generation’ is only going to make the audience question whether it is on viewing.

But we can’t help it – it’s human to fall for hype, especially when it appeals to our tastes. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen something expecting to be blown away and then been bitterly disappointed, and I’ve also witnessed films with much to enjoy about them that have been negatively affected by over-hyping.

Crawl, is unfortunately, a film which falls into the former category. I was enticed by the sound bites I had seen (including a great write-up by someone whom I admire), and many references comparing it to Blood Simple by The Coen Brothers, which is a GREAT film full stop. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The setting is a rural town in Australia. The scene is set when a mysterious Croatian appears and shoots a garage owner in the forehead. It transpires that the Croatian is a hitman hired by a local bar owner/drug dealer to off the garage owner over a bad debt. However, as he is leaving town the Croatian crashes his car and ends up at the house of one of the waitresses from the bar, who is expecting her boyfriend to come home and propose at any moment.

That’s actually it for plot. I have seen reference to the film’s ‘suspenseful chain of events’, but, well, not so much. Admittedly there is a nice moment tied into a break-in at the bar, but if you are making a modern film noir then you might need a few more twists and reveals. This might actually be forgiveable if the film was filled with interesting characters, but aside from one (or maybe two if you include the sleazy bar owner, who is quite fun), the characters are bland and unexplored. The ‘heroine’ of the piece is particularly lifeless, but I think blame here lies in the scripting rather than performance of Georgina Haig (whose character is called ‘Marilyn Burns’, for all you Texas Chainsaw fans).

But before I slam the film too much, there are some positives here – the cinematography is very attractive, for instance, so kudos to Aussie veteran Brian J Breheny (Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert) there. But the single most impressive thing about Crawl is the performance of George Shevtsov as The Croatian – scanning George’s IMDb credits reveals a man who has done a fair amount of work in short films and TV over the last 40 years, but whose most high-profile role was probably The Doctor in the excellent Nicole Kidman thriller Dead Calm back in 1989. Here, he embodies the role of the Croatian (billed as ‘the Stranger’) like a dream, his calm but expressive, almost kindly face (and it is a PERFECT cinema face) matched by his stone-cold killer demeanour and very deliberate movements. It’s a stand-out, powerhouse performance which is unfortunately deserving of a much better film.

You may be thinking now ‘OK, that sounds quite good – one excellent performance but a slight plot, this could be watchable’. But the problem is further compounded by two things – a script which hinges on a couple of unbelievable contrivances (no spoilers though!) and first time director Paul China’s bizarre idea of how to build tension – he regularly stops the action for up to five minutes at a time for the characters to, well, not do very much at all – like, reach veeerrrrryyy sloooowly for a doorknob. This has quite the opposite effect of what was presumably intended (unless what was intended was a tribute to the ‘anti-films’ of Andy Warhol, which I doubt), and ended up dissipating any interest in the events on screen. This is an unfortunate directorial choice which ultimately ends up turning what could have been a minor but fun film into a dull and irritating experience – the film lasts all of 80 minutes, but these pauses conspire to make it seem a lot longer. In fact, without these periods of inaction the film would barely last an hour. And the title? Well, it’s clever, see, because all the main characters end up, err, crawling at some point or another.

Which brings me back to the hype again, as I have seen the film described in many places as ‘tense and slow-burning’ – an effect obviously desired by the film makers, but which resulted in a film which draws attention to its own flaws – most unforgivably that of being far less clever and cool than it thinks it is – and one which could probably be improved by a long, slow burning.

Crawl is released to UK cinemas, DVD and Blu-Ray on 25th February, from Arrow Films.

Review by Annie Riordan

“Based On Actual Events.”

God how I hate seeing those words at the beginning of a horror movie. It usually means that somewhere, at some point, some very small event occurred which is now going to be blown way out of proportion, sexed up for your viewing pleasure, and stuffed full of gore which not only never happened but also defies all of the known laws of physics. The Haunting In Connecticut? Sorry kids, never happened. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Yeah, more like the Wisconsin Elmer Fudd graverobber. The “truth” behind those Based On Actual Events movies is usually disappointing to say the least, a pale shadow withering beneath the sound and fury of its tarted up Hollywood cousin.

Not in this case, however.

The true story of The Dybbuk Box (which can be found at http://www.dibbukbox.com/ or seen on the Paranormal Witness episode of the same name) is a horror enthusiasts wet dream. It’s the tale of a lonely little Jewish wine box, sold at auction after its elderly owner died at the ripe old age of 103. Her dying wish: to be buried with the box, which she steadfastly swore must NEVER be opened. Instead, an antiques dealer gets a hold of it, opens it and watches helplessly as the box is bought and returned several times, following complaints of foul odors, nightmares, poltergeist activity and strange, dark emanations. The box goes on to plague the lives of people halfway across the country after being sold on eBay, causing illness and pestilence, and apparently now sits in the basement of a disused house, shunned and collecting dust, its current owners too frightened to deal with it. Now THAT’S a great horror story! And it’s apparently all true, backed up by numerous witnesses all over the country who started out as skeptics and ran away hardcore believers after being exposed to the ugly little cabinet with the Hebrew inscriptions on it. I for one wouldn’t touch the fucking thing. Better safe than sorry.

But no, the Hollywood fuck-up machine can never be satisfied with a perfectly good story. However, this time around, rather than gussying it up and trying to pass it off as more than it ever was, Ghost House and Sam Raimi – for reasons unfathomable – decide to water it down and remove every aspect of the story that was either interesting or scary. By the time they were through with it, the only thing that The Possession and the story of the Dybbuk Box have left in common is the box itself. That’s where all similarity ends and the sanitized, PG-13 teenage-target tale begins.

Affluent white, suburban yuppie couple divorces, even though they still really love each other. Joint custody of bratty teenage daughter and introspective artsy daughter commences. Cutesy bonding scenes at dad’s bachelor pad (we ordered pizza, oooh, how naughty!) intertwine with life as usual at mom’s house with her stiffly unappealing new boyfriend. Blah blah let’s stop at a yard sale long enough for introspective artsy daughter to catch sight of a dusty old box that no little girl would ever look at twice. When she starts acting weird, we’ll blame it on puberty and the stress of the divorce long enough for dad to figure out what’s happening and mom to realize how much she needs him so they can team up and save their little girl from the forces of evil which have been making her eat like a pig, dry-heave and start up a moth collection. Oh, and can we shoehorn Matisyahu into this somehow?

The origin of the box is ignored. How the demon got in there to begin with isn’t considered important. A brief venture into the Hasidic Jewish community of Borough Park in Brooklyn could have been quite interesting, but is simply used for exposition purposes and tossed aside once it has served its purpose as a vehicle in which to drop off the aforementioned Matisyahu. The acting is fucking awful: Kyra Sedgwick is glassy eyed and seems to have been told that she was playing the part of a Stepford wife. Jeffrey Dean Morgan does the best he can, but just doesn’t have jack shit to work with. The kids are stereotypically one-dimensional. Everyone plays their part woodenly and by-the-numbers, and disappears over the horizon once they’re done. The climactic scene, set in a hospital where nurses stations are never staffed and the morgue attendants all called out sick, is so silly as to be painful. This is just slumber party dreck. I’ve seen scarier commercials for lawn furniture.

So why am I wasting my time, and everyone else’s, reviewing a film that we all knew from the get-go was going to reek harder than a rotting woodchuck carcass in an overflowing outhouse?

Because it could have been good. And considering the meaty source material, it SHOULD have been good. But it’s not. It sucks. And it sucks because Hollywood doesn’t give a fuck about originality, or truth, or integrity. Movies like this are the inflatable sheep of the sex world: mass produced, blankly identical and totally lifeless.

The Possession is available now on Region 1 and Region 2 DVD, Blu-ray and VOD from Lionsgate.

Review by Stephanie Scaife

Piranha may be more familiar to many as the Alexandre Aja 2010 remake in which Jerry O’Connell’s penis is chomped off by one of the titular creatures and spat out of the screen at you in 3D, or even its reprehensible follow up Piranha 3DD, but the original 1978 Roger Corman production actually has a lot more going for it than you’d think from first glance. Firstly it’s directed by a very young Joe Dante (Gremlins, The Howling etc.) with a screenplay from John Sayles, which immediately elevates it above your usual schlocky B-movie, and what we get is an utterly nonsensical but nevertheless watchable comedy horror romp.

Heather Menzies stars as Maggie, a plucky private investigator sent to track down two missing teenagers who have disappeared during a hiking trip to Lost River Lake. Along the way she teams up with Paul (Bradford Dillman), a local drunk who is reluctantly goaded into become her tour guide of the local area. Together they come across a military testing facility where Maggie finds a necklace belonging to one of the missing hikers. As military testing facilities are want to be in such films it’s all very suspicious, with its jars and tanks filled will all sorts of freaky fishy specimens. Thinking that the teens may have drowned, Maggie drains the lake within the facility, unaware that she’s just unleashed a hoard of super intelligent weapon grade piranha into the local river network! Dr. Robert Hoak (Kevin McCarthy) is the scientist behind these fishy mutations, a Vietnam War project known as Operation Razorteeth, and after realising Maggie’s mistake they embark on a mission to destroy the piranhas before they reach the local water park and summer camp. Of course, I’m sure you can figure out what happens next…

Piranha is definitely a cut above the usual production line Corman cash in, and although it is a blatant spoof/homage/rip-off (delete as appropriate) of Jaws, it has its own merits. Of course it could never reach the level of its primary influence, Jaws being one of the best films ever made in my humble opinion, but Piranha takes a frankly ridiculous idea and makes it good fun. It steers clear of too many rubber fish shots and relies largely on fast editing, sound effects and suggestion alone, which works for the best as when you do see the piranhas they are clearly on the end of sticks being twizzled around by some poor prop guy in a diving suit; thus essentially and unfortunately stopping the film from have any genuine scares. However, there are a host of decent performances, particularly from Dante regulars Dick Miller as the water park owner determined to cash in on spring break, and Paul Bartel as the tight-assed summer camp leader. Piranha is a pure popcorn movie that insists you switch your brain off and just go for the ride, but it remains with good reason a cult favourite and was clearly a calling card for Dante to hone his skills and eventually go on to bigger and better things.

The Blu-ray quality is mixed, with the picture sometimes looking great and other times looking no better than on old VHS. The sound quality too was sort of hit or miss, but the piranha’s infamous “chattering” sound remains particularly creepy and is noticeably accentuated here. The Blu-ray does however come with a host of excellent special features including a fascinating commentary, a new making-of and some original behind the scenes footage.

Piranha is released on Blu-ray on January 28th, from Second Sight.

Review by Tristan Bishop

I will start this review by making a fair assumption about the readers of Brutal As Hell – you’ve probably seen a lot of horror films. And a favourite topic amongst horror film maker and viewers in the last 30 something years has been the serial killer. I’ll make another assumption – you may well have seen a romantic comedy or two in your time, perhaps one of those ones in which a 30-something lothario finds his soft side when forced to take care of a child or a monkey or something like that. Well, Chained is sort of a straight cross between both types of film. Kind of Maniac meets About a Boy. Almost. Interested? Confused? Let me explain.

The excellent Vincent D’Onofrio stars as Bob, just your average cab-driving misogynist serial killer, who we are first introduced to as he picks up a mother (Julia Ormond, in what basically amounts to a cameo appearance) and her young son Tim on their way home from a trip to see a scary movie. He drives them to his remote house, kills the mother, let leaves Tim unharmed. At first, he seems uncertain of what to do with the boy – obviously killing him is not an option, Bob only kills women throughout the film – and starts to demand that the boy be something between a housekeeper and a slave, doing the chores, but not allowed to touch the TV, and only allowed to eat what Bob leaves on his plate. Bob also renames the boy Rabbit.

The years pass and Tim grows into a teenager, played with a brilliant nervous awkwardness by Eamon Farren (whose features almost resemble his animal namesake), and the relationship between Bob and Rabbit changes – Rabbit cleans up Bob’s gory messes without much complaint, and Bob eventually tries to become some kind of father figure, trying to give Rabbit some kind of education (in anatomy, rather fittingly), and eventually attempting to mould him into Bob’s own image, whereas Rabbit, who seems content enough to carry on his slavish existence, wants to draw the line at committing murder himself. Eventually as Bob forces things towards his goals, Rabbit has some difficult choices to make.

Chained is not an easy watch by any means. It mostly plays as a two-character, one location film with occasional appearances by female victims and one or two excursions into the outside world. This is confidently pulled off by director Jennifer Lynch, who may finally, on her third feature, be showing enough talent to move out of the shadow of her father David. She shoots the film with sickly, diseased-feeling interior yellows, and the outside world as overpoweringly bright, heightening the feeling of intimacy between Bob and Rabbit when they are inside the house. As the film goes on interplay between them becomes more human, almost affectionate (almost), and Bob is given a flashback/dream sequence which gives us some clue as to why he is such a monster, and also to his intentions towards Rabbit. Both men’s performances are excellent, with D’Onofrio especially chillingly believable, and the tension that builds towards the film’s climax is very subtly handled.

For a film which features a character who inflicts a lot of violence towards women, there is a surprising scarcity of murder onscreen – there are a couple of onscreen killings and a mercifully brief flash of sexual violence, but mostly we see bodies in the aftermath as they are disposed of. I did discover that the film was actually cut down in the US from an NC-17 to an R rating with the removal of a few shots, so I’m not entirely convinced we have the uncut version here in the UK (I am unable to verify this). However, Chained is pretty damned disturbing in the form I viewed – more so because the horror here comes both from Bob’s own conviction that what he is doing is OK (“it’s because they are all whores,” he explains angrily to Rabbit, as if it should be obvious; “But they seem like nice people to me”, Rabbit contours, only to be told he just doesn’t get it), to the casual mundanity of the everyday existence of the two (such as playing memory games with the ID cards of the murdered women).

In fact, the only negative point I want to bring up with this film is also kind of the best thing about it – the ending. Without giving any spoilers, there are two elements to the ending. The first is actually brilliant, a rug-from-under-feet moment which works on confounding our own expectations about how film forces you to think. I actually gasped a ‘wow’ out loud to myself when watching (hopefully my flatmates weren’t listening). The second element seems to be a little too much of a standard Hollywood twist ending (could this have been down to studio meddling?), and whilst it would be a perfectly acceptable bit of work given some decent foreshadowing, it seems both unnecessary and pandering to those who wanted more resolution. I would love to discuss this further but spoilers prevent me – so do me a favour, go rent Chained, then come corner me, buy me a pint and we can talk. We’ll all come out of this on top, as Chained is an audacious, disturbing and fascinating film, and I like beer.

Chained is released to Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray on 4th February, from Anchor Bay. For another take on the film, see Steph’s review from FrightFest 2012.

Review by Dustin Hall

Following in the footsteps of Pan’s Labyrinth, Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, and the Orphanage, Guillermo Del Toro brings his distinct horror styling to Mama, another film in his ‘dark fairy tale’ genre. Though written and directed by Andrés Muschietti, it still bears many of Guillermo’s tropes, passed down from his producer’s chair. If there’s a child/children being haunted by a supernatural force in a vaguely fantasy setting, you can almost be sure its a Del Toro film.

Mama’s story circles around the custody battle for two little girls, Victoria and Lily. As wee babes, their father went nuts, killed their mom and kidnapped them into the woods. In an abandoned cabin, the trio is found by a strange spectral creature, who kills Dad and then proceeds to feed the girls a steady diet of cherries, rats and moths.

We jump ahead five years later, when the girls are eventually found, still living feral in the woods, shadows of their former selves. They are taken back to civilization, and immediately made the center of a custody battle between their maternal aunt and their father’s twin brother, along with his punk-rock, child-hating, laissez-faire girlfriend. Eventually, the girls’ doctor grants custody of the girls to the brother and the girlfriend, on the grounds that he gets to use the girls to make a case study of them and write a book about their recovery.

Unfortunately for the young couple, they only move from one custody battle to another, as the girls bring with them the ghostly creature from the woods, whom they call Mama; she’s a creature that teleports around, guarding the girls jealously. The ghost is harmless enough at first, feeding the girls weird forest treats and playing with them late at night, but as the girls begin to become attached to their new family and used to society, Mama begins to lash out at the surrogates, lethally stalking anyone who comes between her and the girls.

Much of the dynamic of Mama is the search for understanding between kid-hating girlfriend Annabelle (Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty), and the two little girls. Their adoptive and caring uncle, Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, A Game of Thrones), is taken out of the picture extremely early thanks to a chance encounter with Mama. Left alone, Annabelle has to find some way to discover her deeply repressed maternal instincts, calm the wild children, and solve the mystery of Mama.

Shoe-horned into the side of all of this is a sub-plot about the girls’ psychiatrist who is also investigating Mama, believing at first that Mama is actually the split personality of older sister Victoria. Of course, since the audience knows from the beginning that Mama is real, none of this is really pertinent, or goes anywhere, aside from supplying Annabelle with all the research she needs about Mama, without having to strain the credibility of the character’s intelligence by having her investigate on her own. Also, there’s the jealous aunt we’re supposed to hate, even though she clearly would have been a more prepared adoptive guardian, whose plot goes nowhere. She’s kind of instrumental in getting the girls, physically, to the finale, but since Mama can fly and teleport and can carry the girls around with her, it all seems unnecessary.

Trite sub-plots aside, Mama is a pretty solid creep-fest. The story quickly establishes itself, and the imagery of the wild little girls, and the ghostly, floating Mama, will give a lot of viewers the chills. Throughout the whole, the tension builds, little by little, and makes for a pretty classic ghost story. Custody, reluctant surrogacy, and weird kids are nothing new to horror by any means, but the way Mama uses those themes makes the characters mesh in a way that is believable, and sympathetic. The well-meaning but fragile family unit in peril is a particular focus of Del Toro’s horror ventures, and is key in making everything work. If you can sympathize with the family, you’ll fear for them. If you can’t get into them, then the suspense just isn’t there.

For most, the ending will be the make-or-break moment of the film. Despite the sub-plots, a couple of weird VFX choices, and one pretty major plot contrivance, Mama holds the audience all the way to the climax, keeping them jumping, straining, and nervously laughing all the way through. It was eerie and fun. But the finale does show Mama in her full form a lot, which does take some of her mysterious terror away, and the final moments are bitter-sweet, not the clean, happy ending that many audiences would want. For myself, I was glad for the somber end, as for me, it’s not horror if it ends well, but it does seem to have a polarizing effect on those who watch.

Despite some differences in tone and style, the themes and many story elements of Mama make it similar to Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, and it will appeal to a similar audience. For those who like a slow burning ghost story, or perhaps a family drama mixed with their horror, it’s worth checking out. But for the gore-crowd, you got nada, this one’s not for you.

Mama is on currently on general theatrical release in the US. It opens in UK cinemas on 22nd February, and in most of Europe in the following months.

Review by Spooky Sean

Directed by Kern Saxton, and written by Kern Saxton and Destin Pfaff, Sushi Girl is an interesting mish-mash of the crime and horror genres. It contains some powerful scene chewing from certain members of the cast, but the actors’ performances vary in gravitas widely. This, and certain plot developments keep it from rising above mediocrity.

The plot revolves around a meeting of six criminals who attempted to steal jewels, and failed. They are known collectively as Fish (Noah Hathaway), Crow (Mark Hamill), Max (Andy Mackenzie), Francis (James Duvall), and Duke (Tony Todd). They had a driver, but he isn’t there for the dinner meeting, though his name is Nelson (David Dastmalchian) if you’re curious. Duke has a boner for Asian culture, hence the Sushi Girl (Cortney Palm).

The Sushi Girl is very eye pleasing, as she’s naked and covered in sushi for most of this film. So, for staying nude and completely still on a table for most of the film, Cortney Palm easily has the most challenging role. Her performance once she speaks isn’t awful, but it’s hard to close a film that’s just been dominated by a several other actors for roughly an hour and a half. Tony Todd, Mark Hamill, and Andy Mackenzie are at the top when it comes to delivery. Tony Todd, as Duke the ringleader, with his booming authoritative demeanor, both intimidates and hypnotizes with his monologues about an abusive father and Asian culture. Hamill as Crow, a foppish, blonde-haired sicko is equally fantastic. He’s a very memorable character, and one almost wishes the film were just a crime/buddy comedy with Duke and Crow. Hell, they could call it Duke and Crow! Mackenzie as Max, a bruiser with an explosive temper, isn’t as good as Duke or Crow, but he has his moments. Max’s ferocity is certainly a thing to behold. No one else can match these three, nor their intensity. No one gives a terrible performance; it’s just hard to outdo Todd, Hamill, and Mackenzie once they get yelling at each other. This film is all about Tony, though. Not since Candyman has Todd delivered such a performance, and to be fair, it’s because he’s mainly only had bit parts since.

One thing that keeps this film from moving beyond the middle-of-the-road is how derivative it seems. Saxton channels Tarantino so hard, but I would rather not have to watch another knock-off. Yes, the concept of a whole film based around a human decoration which must stay quiet is somewhat unique, but not for the horror genre. A little film called Saw already did that. And, the twist ending, if you can even call it that, is extremely useless. Of course it has something to do with the Sushi Girl; why else would she be in the title of the movie! Not to give away the ending, but it also seems like it required a lot of factors to have occurred in order for things to have gone exactly as planned.

There are horror elements in the film, mainly in the level of violence and torture which occur. However, it seems to be one of those films where you wonder what the point of it all was. All I took from it was that it’s tough to be a Sushi Girl, and you shouldn’t get in a car accident after a robbery. And to not eat Fugu, the poisonous blowfish. But, come to think of it, I already learned not to eat Fugu from that Simpsons episode where Homer eats it and almost dies. So, I guess all I took from it, is that being a Sushi Girl must be annoying, don’t fuck over criminals, and don’t get in a car accident after a robbery.

It’s worth a watch, as the pacing, flashbacks, and set design are proficient. Still, it’s really just an exercise in giving Tony Todd and Mark Hamill a chance to yell and act like criminals, which is the film’s main selling point. If this film were just Mark Hamill and Tony Todd, with occasional inclusions of other actors, it would have been good – arguably no matter what the plot was. Fast food employees, call center workers, explorers of space or the ocean, professional mascots down on their luck: any of these would have worked with Todd and Hamill. So, you watch it for Candyman and Luke. Well, that and for the naked lady on the table. Must have been awkward as hell for her. You don’t watch it for the plot. It’s ridiculous. And I just wanted to watch either Jackie Brown, or Reservoir Dogs after finishing it. Dear every filmmaker, stop trying to do Quentin Tarantino. Just do you.

Sushi Girl is available on demand now in the US.

Review by Kit Rathenar

I went into British indie found-footage movie Hollow aware that it had previously managed to outrage my dear colleague Annie Riordan (read her review here), but hoping that I might have better luck with it. Maybe it would have more resonance for an English viewer. And indeed, at least I can’t fault its Brit credentials or the location, which is the gorgeous countryside around the Suffolk village of Dunwich; including a sinister tree, a ruined priory, and an assortment of cliffs, beach, fields and woods. For a shakycam flick, Hollow does do a surprisingly good job of showcasing its setting.

Into this rural idyll, enter the cast: Scott, a successful career asshole with a malicious sense of “fun”; his fiancee Emma, a bookish lass who should probably be in a convent just to protect her from her own taste in men; her awkward, geeky best friend James, who is apparently recovering from some kind of mental breakdown; and James’s new girlfriend Lynne, a single mum and party animal who’s more oblivious than ill-meaning. This odd quartet go to spend a weekend in the cottage that belonged to Emma’s dead grandfather, where they run into a legend about a creepy tree that’s supposedly haunted by a hooded figure and where an alarming number of young couples have hanged themselves. And of course someone decides they have to poke the ancient evil in the nose to see what happens, and from there… well, you know the drill.

While the cast are plausible and I did find myself sympathetic to them at least half the time, there’s almost too much realism to them and their interactions. An odd complaint, you might think, but characters who aren’t larger than life in any direction require really great direction to make them engaging, and Hollow bogs itself down by attempting profound human interest when it actually offers nothing that you couldn’t watch at a party or down the pub any night of the week. But it’s so determined to focus on the cast anyway that I’d almost think director Michael Axelgaard didn’t really want to make a horror movie at all. The horror elements here are formulaic, uninspired, and seem bolted on by rote to a film that’s actually trying to be a mildly depressing slice-of-life drama.

Hollow also spotlights the problem that found footage movies force a very specific affectation onto the cast. For the plot to be documented as required, somebody in the group has to accept the role of a maladapted misfit who can’t bear to switch off their camera no matter what’s going on. And the rest of the group have to allow this, instead of giving the offender a stern talking to/administering a swift beating/taking their camcorder and dropping it in the river, any of which might be a valid response to someone refusing to come out from behind their damn camera and interact with the rest of you like a human being. Hollow attempts a solution by having the characters dependent on the camera for a light source, and the light only functioning while the camera is recording – and James, in the aforementioned role of camera-waving sociopath, does sometimes outright lie to his friends about whether he’s filming or not – but the mere fact that such lengths were required highlights how pernicious a flaw of the genre this is.

But it’s the final twenty minutes or so that ultimately destroys this film. Not only does the climax portray all of the characters in an abysmally poor light – seeing two women argue for a good five minutes about whether the one man present should do something, without either of them once suggesting that they themselves could or should if he won’t, makes me want to spit nails – but the endless repetition of “let’s switch off the camera to save the battery”, only for it to promptly come back on again to capture another minute or so of pointless recrimination, is unendurable in all the wrong ways. By the close of the movie I was praying for the unknown evil to just hurry up and off everyone so I could go and get my dinner, and although I did get my wish, the ending is slipshod, relies on the crudest of jump scares and crying-women-mean-it’s-scary-honest cliche, and doesn’t even have the decency to be explicitly supernatural after all that. Weak everywhere it should be strong and without even the self-awareness to descend into redeeming trashiness, I can’t recommend this one.

Hollow is available on Region 2 DVD on 28th January, from Metrodome.