Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

If I’m honest, when I got offered the chance to review a film called ‘The Killage’, a certain amount of devilment made it seem like a good idea. Devilment, and who knows – maybe even a little bit of optimism. We get a lot of DVD screeners sent through to us, many with frankly uninspired titles (particularly if an otherwise decent title has been changed by a distribution company which thinks its target audience in the UK are morons) so I suppose I hoped The Killage – as one of the absolute worst names I’d heard in a while – would be absurd enough to really own a title like that. It could have done. It could have been bold, and ready to poke fun at itself because it had real ideas. It could have, and incidentally, since watching it I’ve remembered that optimism is a frankly arse-backwards philosophical standpoint which lays itself wide open to disappointment and takes no account of the world as it stands.

What to say about this film? I mean, it starts with the obligatory modern horror trope of a person-tied-to-chair surrounded by menacing DIY tools, which never helps, before ditching that particular blaring plot marker to take us somewhere in suburban Australia to meet a gang of people somewhere in the 18-25 age bracket, all about to go off to – camp, silly, for some sort of team building exercise. Perhaps in some execrable attempts at being ‘meta’ (a lofty if now common cinematic aim which this film NEVER achieves) we have the standard array of stereotypes – an apparent goth who looks more ill-at-ease in black lipstick than even goth themselves do, a ‘jock’ called Jock (geddit?) who is meant to be the buff sporty one but looks suspiciously like he wouldn’t know a dumbbell if it was labelled and then of course, the others – the bimbo, the bitch, the flamboyant gay man, the one who you know is going to be the ‘final girl’ from the minute she arrives…the slightly geeky ones, the stoner one – ah, you get the idea.

As they head off to the back of beyond for camp, you have plenty of time to sift through your early impressions of these people as they enjoy the incomprehensible urge to yell their godawful lines at one another, and you’ll be able to wonder just how much the film is sending itself up. As the jokes start whistling past your head, if you’ve any standards at all then you’ll decide that no, the film isn’t genuinely sending anything up, because it isn’t smart enough to do so. You can’t just cherry-pick the most inane elements of a frankly mostly boring genre, add in a few more dick jokes and turn up the volume an obnoxious amount to get a film. Well, you can – but why would you?

Anyway, once at the camp, we go though the usual whodunnit formula for a few murders via some CGI which looks like it’s been done on a Sega Megadrive, all until one character is left. Poor writing, bad acting (with the exception of final girl Rita Artmann, who deserves better) and loathsome characterisation means it’s very hard to care.

Ah, but aren’t I just missing the point? Let me see. I never read other reviews before watching a film myself, but curiosity got the better of me – so I bit the bullet and went through a few. It’s a funny thing: in a couple of cases, I read the word ‘satire’ as applicable to this film. I certainly saw the word ‘spoof’ attached to it, too. To start with the word satire, I don’t feel like The Killage was really removed enough to hold anything meaningfully up to ridicule; it isn’t smart enough for irony, and dodged sarcasm to call a character Dickman. You want a satire on the slasher genre? Try Behind the Mask. As for the word ‘spoof’, despite there being overlap with satire this is usually used now as a get-out clause, a means of accusing anyone being critical of lacking humour. ‘It’s a spoof, you’re not meant to take it seriously!’ Right, because taking issue with a spoof cannot be done. It’s immune. And to call a film out on its obnoxious, crass depictions of, say, a gay man (‘twist’ in the tale be damned) means you just haven’t got your head around it. To which I say, bollocks – you want to write that lazily, then expect some people to have good reasons to dismiss your work. You can’t hide behind the ‘joke’ defence forever (especially if the film isn’t actually funny). This film is not a satire, or a spoof – it’s a lame, cynical attempt to turn a quick buck, a cheap trek through everything which has been done better elsewhere.

I usually try to make it a point that I never write anything about a film that I wouldn’t say in person to the filmmaker(s) – I’m not generally into polemic for the sake of it, and I don’t think manners hurt. But seriously, if I could talk to Joe Bauer, it would be to ask him why he thought anything here was a good idea. From its opening bars of canned music, The Killage is childish, glib and deeply stupid. It’s not excessive enough to be OTT (the lack of practical effects contributes here), has no twists nor makes any comment that adds anything to the genre, and no finesse at any stage to make it appear competent. Made in 2011, it’s apparently been in stasis since then – and it should have stayed there. The only claim The Killage can really make is that it’s actually worse than the title suggests.

The Killage will be released by Monster Pictures on 26th October 2015.

By Keri O’Shea

Although he’s clearly been working hard in his other capacity as a prosthetics specialist, I had been wondering what had happened to Paul Hyett: director since he brought us that mesmerisingly grim movie The Seasoning House back in 2012, which screened at that year’s Frightfest. Well, he’s back in a directorial capacity with Howl (2015), and you wouldn’t need to be a genius to work out that – given the title, the poster blurb and the full moon shot – it contains a specific, rather different kind of brutality to the wartime vision of his first feature film (though while we’re on the subject, whoever opted for that bloody cliched handprint-on-window poster art for this wants bloody shooting). So it’s clearly a creature feature of a specific kind; the question is, how does it compare to other films within this reasonably sparse, but often problematic genre?

Train guard Joe (Ed Speleers) is an ambitious guy within the remit of his profession, but when we meet him, he’s in a frustrating place. Having just been turned down for a promotion, the first treat in store for him in the role he had hoped to ditch is an extra shift on a last train out of Waterloo to some back-of-beyond location in that dangerous, unchartered area known as Not London. On board is the usual ragtag bunch you get at that charmless hour of the evening: workaholics, gobshite teenagers, slightly uncomfortable pensioners and the obligatory Train Lech. Still, these things are to be expected, and the journey seems to be going as well as these things ever do, right up until it isn’t; without warning, the train grinds to a halt, ditching power in the process. The driver (Sean Pertwee) gets out to investigate – and that’s the end of him.

Now, just two members of staff – Joe, and assistant Ellen (Holly Weston) – remain alongside an increasingly irate group of passengers, a few of whom demand to be let off to walk the last few miles to the next station. Joe starts off fretting about the future of his job as the reason people shouldn’t do so, but they’re happy to ignore the disappeared driver, the full moon and the pitch black woods in order to get home (which, if you think sounds unreasonable, you haven’t spent very many hours using the borked British rail system). Thing is, Joe and Ellen soon find the driver when they try to leave alongside their passengers, and seeing what’s left of him gives them one of the more compelling reasons to hole up in the train instead. Something is out there – something dangerous – and if those on board want to survive, then their only hope is to work together against whatever preternatural predator now hunts them.

Hyett has chosen to work with a couple of the same cast he used to good effect in The Seasoning House here, namely Rosie Day and Sean Pertwee, though he clearly doesn’t want to over-rely on them and as such they have bit parts only. This seems a bit of a waste, really, as Pertwee in particular has the chops for genre cinema; perhaps Hyett felt he really wanted a very young actor to play the thwarted shift manager Joe, and Speleers is decent enough, if a little monotone in places. Still, familiar cast or unfamiliar cast, creatures or no creatures, one of Howl’s key strengths is in something Hyett also does in The Seasoning House – which is to create a sense of claustrophobia and helplessness, a potent combination. Howl gives us a competent glimpse of a horror staple, namely just how vulnerable people are when even a few miles ‘off the grid’, and it’s at its best in a few key scenes: when the camera pans down from some of the passengers wondering what the hell is causing the delay, through the train’s chassis and to the carnage going on underneath the train, this shows flair and even a little of the glib humour which crops up elsewhere in the film.

This brings me back to the creatures themselves, though, and I have to say that, despite some phenomenally creative SFX where the critters are concerned (hallelujah for werewolves which look original and even fearsome), the werewolf motif overall falls rather flat for me. As much as I want to see more creature features grace our screens, I want to be able to differentiate between the creatures which make it there, and frankly when we have a group of disparate people being forced to overcome their differences and barricade themselves into a confined space to defend against a relentless foe (ahem) then it could be a zombie, a vampire, an omnipotent redneck, any horror staple you like. There’s really not that much in Howl to distinguish these baddies as werewolves save for the phase of the moon outside, and certainly nothing substantial about mythology, cause, anything of the sort which may have raised the plot up beyond the most obvious level. Add in the contagion element present in this plot, with a bitten passenger slowly ‘turning’, and it feels more and more like a zombie movie by any other name…

The could-be-anything enemy is there then, and in addition to that, Howl pitches in rather too many tropes for the average horror fan’s liking. For instance, humanising an awful human being is code for the fact that they’re about to get offed, when it would have been more interesting to have us ask ourselves whether we wouldn’t still be able to empathise with a twat, rather than someone who momentarily turned out to be lovely after all. On the converse of this, layering awfulness on awfulness until a character can barely stand the weight of it is further proof positive that bad things will befall them: more nuance, more ambiguity would have helped the characterisation, again, raising the plot up.

I always want to champion werewolf horror as I’d generally like to see more of it around, but sadly Howl doesn’t quite fit in with this wish overall. Competently made on a technical level, it nonetheless treads a safe path through genre conventions without really making much of the source of the horror it spends ninety minutes on. Finally, elements of threat disparity collude to see the film out with a bit of a whimper. As far as directorial calling cards go, The Seasoning House is still by far and away the best bet.

Howl gets a theatrical release on 16th October and its home entertainment release on 26th October 2015.

By Keri O’Shea

Almost the moment the opening credits roll on Jon ‘Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer’ Knautz’s newest film, Goddess of Love, we can see that our female lead, Venus (Alexis Kendra) is something of a culture vulture. Learning to speak French? Check. Ballet? Check. Piano, yep; drug addiction which makes her look intermittently wasted but doesn’t altogether detract from her overall attractiveness – you betcha. Still, perhaps she’s a finishing school drop out, or for whatever reason, be it down to drugs or something else, she’s also stripping by night to make ends meet. This… doesn’t seem to be her forte, to be fair.

She’s given a few handy pro tips on how to empty wallets by fellow dancer Chanel (the wonderful Monda Scott, and someone, somewhere please give her a starring movie role) but for all of the sage advice, it doesn’t go well. The first customer she gets after the pep talk tells her she looks like his dead wife, and somehow they still end up at dinner together. They seem to hit it off, too – professional distance be damned – and start seeing each other. Venus can cook but one meal and that’s pasta, but what the hell. It might just be love. Young lovers need the carbs.

Months pass, however, and with them goes the honeymoon period; one day, Venus sees another woman’s name pop up on Brian’s phone, some old friend called Christine (who also models for his photography). She copes with this as admirably as any nervy, drug-addicted and insecure female ever has, i.e. not at fucking all, and so when Brian begins going incommunicado altogether for days at a time, it’s clearly getting under Venus’s skin: she becomes obsessive, paranoid, her mental state ever more fragile. Is Brian cheating on her? In getting to the bottom of the question, Goddess of Love offers us abundant nudity, red wine from the bottle, and puking.

I sound like I’m really down on this film, but to tell the truth – I’m not. Okay, on one level it was a surprise, considering the last thing I saw by this director was very much in the ‘horror comedy’ category, and this is neither a horror nor a comedy. In fact, I’m struggling to place it in a genre at all, which means little in terms of reviewing it per se, but may affect its likelihood of finding an appreciative audience. Market it as a Neighbor style horror and risk criticism of its largely bloodless nature, sell it as a psychological thriller and get it in the neck because it’s just too crass and horrific in places (for a woman who seems to only turn up to work a handful of times during the film, incidentally, Kendra spends a lot of the time in various states of partial or full undress which can look a bit, well, odd; if that has now encouraged you to check out the film for boobs alone then I posit that no one looks good sitting naked on a toilet).

Despite some misgivings about the genre aspect, though, there are many things to enjoy here. In terms of how the film looks, it’s really very good. The production values here are rock solid; it’s well-miked, well-lit and well-shot, with an evident eye for effective angles and reveals. The lead actors aren’t massively at ease in some places, but give Kendra some proper flip-outs to work with and she shows she can do a great deal with it – ditto Elizabeth Sandy (playing Christine) who goes from lady-who-lunches to bat-wielding harpy in a heartbeat. And then, in some ways it’s refreshing that the film deviates from one of its possible courses; I’d assumed this delicate and naive stripper would be victim to some sadist who just happens to frequent strip clubs; thankfully, this isn’t the case. But my god does this film play on the worst stereotypes of female behaviour, too (and yes, I know stereotypes have one foot in truth, even if we might not like to admit it). Venus is positively painful to watch, with the constant sending of unread texts, the clinginess, the determination to throw everything into a short-term relationship with, well, with a bit of a dick. I understand that what follows for her and for the plot is rooted in this behaviour, but still – it’s frustrating stuff, and the ol’ ‘unhinged female whose attempt at a relationship acts as a touchpaper for her descent into madness’ has been done elsewhere.

In fact, if I was going to compare this film to anything, it’d probably be Lucky McGee’s May (2002): the earlier film’s tagline ‘Be careful – she might just take your heart’ seems to be echoed in Goddess of Love’s own ‘Be careful who you get close to’. But although you sometimes find yourself rooting for Venus – flaws and all – in the same way you find yourself rooting for Bettis’s May, Goddess of Love as a film ultimately lacks the shock and sympathy I felt at the end of May. Whether this is because the depth to Venus’s character is signposted so lightly and early, because there’s more of an attempt to maintain overt sexuality in Venus, or even because the conclusion takes one more step into a tried and tested exploration of psychosis is something to be debated.

By Tristan Bishop

Due to Asami August here at Brutal As Hell I’ve had a good excuse to revisit some of my favourite Asami performances, as well as discover some new ones (the insane charms of Sukeban Boy are now counted amongst my favourites) and make mental notes of a few more must-sees thanks to the sterling reportage of my fellow BAH writers. One of my original ideas for a piece this month was covering one of her AV features (that’s a porn film, for those of you not familiar with the lingo) – an idea which, although appealing at the time (in the sense of bringing a new perspective to things, of course) soon turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. How, for instance, does one review pornography in an interesting manner, beyond appraising the physical attributes and noise-making skills of the players involved? (and, frankly, I would find it a little embarrassing to write). Added to that, it turned out to be damn near impossible to actually track any down – The AV films haven’t been released in the West, I can’t Google in Japanese, and, it turns out, using ‘Asami’ as a search term when poking around in the less salubrious areas of the internet doesn’t help much, as there appear to be a large number of Asian porn stars with that name. That was a frustrating evening’s research, I can assure you. Instead it was suggested that I take a look at one of her ‘pink’ (softcore) films, and so I browsed her filmography marking titles like ‘Prison Girls’ for possible investigation. In the end I decided on Erotibot – after all, who can resist a title like that?

Erotibot is the story of Tamayo, who is the daughter of a rich inventor and a servant girl – and apparently heir to a massive fortune when her father passes away. Tamayo has been raised in a mansion by two robots – a suave butler droid named Number One and a hulking metal beast called Number Two. On her 18th birthday she receives another robot which she names Sukekiyo. Sukekiyo is not as advanced a model as number one, with his big silver head and frequent malfunctions, but he is by far the most human, and it doesn’t take long for Tamayo and Sukekiyo to fall in love with each other. However the path of girl & robot love never runs smooth, and it transpires that Number One has been programmed to attend to Tamayo’s ‘adult education’, causing Sukekiyo not a little heartbreak. On top of this the inventor’s legitimate daughter Tsukiyo (played by another very popular AV star, Maria Ozawa) and her female ninja sidekick Azami (who else but Asami) have heard that Tamayo is in line for the inheritance and are out for blood.

This review can stand as a lesson in doing your research however – firstly Asami is hardly in the film, and given very little to do next to the other two actresses (although, as always, she looks great). Secondly, well, the film somehow manages to be incredibly boring, even at 72 minutes (Apparently there is a version out there somewhere which runs an additional 15 minutes, but in this instance I’m glad I didn’t put myself through any extra suffering). A few Philip K Dick references at the start of the film got me thinking that maybe this would be an interesting take on what it means to be human, but it isn’t – it’s mostly a slushy romantic comedy with a few sex scenes, and a bit of gore in the final ten minutes. Added to this is the fact that the film is obviously ~extremely~ cheap. Now we’re used to our Japanese exploitation being on the budget side – that’s all part of the charm – but when you have silver-painted wellingtons standing in for robot feet and a number of shots where you realise the rooms have no roof, the lack of action (and under-use of Asami) gets even less excusable. As for laughs, well, there are none. Director Naoyuki Tomomatsu wrote and co-directed (along with Yoshihiro Nishimura) the brilliant Dracula Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl, and the drop in quality here is actually astounding – he is also the man behind Lust of the Dead (as covered in Asami August by Ben) which, although I’ve not yet seen it, sounds at least a more interesting proposition than what is on offer here. Was it a complete waste of time? Well, the cast are uniformly attractive, but anyone looking for pure titillation will get more bang for their buck elsewhere.