Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Tristan Bishop

Small casts, man. Low budget horror films with small casts always start the old alarm bells going. More often than not you’ve got ninety minutes or so of tedium awaiting you. The same goes for single location films. Unless we’re talking Alfred Hitchcock then these generally don’t come off all that well – setting your film in one place takes a big set of (figurative) balls and a certain level of literal cinematic mastery. Unfortunately it seems the world currently has a surplus of the former and a lack of the latter. You can only imagine my intense joy, then, when I came across In Fear. A low-budget British horror/thriller about two characters. Set almost entirely in A CAR. I’ll be honest, I readied myself for an hour and a half of boredom and settled comfortably in my seat.

There’s not a great amount of plot I’m able to recount for this film without major spoilers, but here’s what I can – Ian De Caestecker (TV’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D) and Alice Englart (Beautiful Creatures) star as Tom and Lucy, a young couple who have recently gotten together. They are driving to a music festival in Ireland and have stopped off at a pub, where Lucy visits the bathroom. Tom insists they leave the pub swiftly, stating that he has had to buy the pub a round after a misunderstanding with a local. He then proceeds to tell Lucy that he has booked them a hotel room for the first night. Lucy initially resists, saying she had arranged to meet friends on the festival site. She soon relents however, and they set off in search of the hotel. Unfortunately the place seems a little off the beaten track, and eventually they realise they have been going round in circles. No matter which way they read their map and the road signs they always seem to end up at the same place. And it’s getting dark. They soon begin to realise someone might be playing games with them. But who?, and, more importantly, why?

As you might have gathered from my opening paragraph, I didn’t exactly have High Hopes for In Fear. Thankfully I was very pleasantly surprised, as even though Jeremy Lovering’s feature début is small-scale and lacking in much plot development, it manages to be a well paced little film that delivers tension in spades. In Fear succeeds where many small cast films fail by featuring two likeable, naturalistic performances from the two lead actors. The idea that they have only known each other a few weeks and don’t totally trust each other quite yet adds subtly to the sense of paranoia which is key to the film’s first half – The idea of being trapped in a car in the dark, lost on a country road with someone who isn’t quite a stranger but isn’t quite a friend is certainly an unnerving one, and Lovering really manages to make it work. Editing, soundtrack and cinematography are all to a high standard, and combine with an excellently foreboding credits sequence to create the palpable sense of dread that the title suggests. Word has it that the director withheld the script from the actors whilst filming, and, if true, that certainly seems to have worked. Of course, halfway through, the film takes a slightly different shape, and one which amps up the tension considerably, ensuring you’ll be on the edge of your seat until the high impact conclusion.
Some people seemed to dislike the film for its relative lack of incident, but if you enjoy a slow creeping thrill on a low budget, then In Fear is definitely the right place to be.

In Fear is available to buy now.

By Keri O’Shea

It is of course a huge cliché to begin this review of Big Bad Wolves by professing my ignorance of Israeli cinema – but such it is, and if it’s going to be repeated elsewhere, it’s no doubt just as true from other quarters. Israel and film just feels beyond Western reach in so many ways; our concepts of the country tend to come more via current affairs – often bad news – than through contact with what could well be a thriving arts culture, but so little permeates through to us that, well, Israel still feels like a closed book in this respect. So, Big Bad Wolves is the first Israeli feature-length film I have ever seen, and as such it would be ridiculous to extrapolate too much about filmmaking in the country as a whole. However, I will gladly say that this is one of the finest, darkest crime thrillers I have had the pleasure to watch, and that if – if – the directors and writers Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado are capable of more work of this calibre, then they will definitely and deservedly be on the ascendant from here on in.

The plot starts as it means to go on, splicing the everyday in with the briefest, but significant interludes which spell personal disaster for everyday people. We see a group of children playing hide and seek in and around a deserted house; a little boy finds one of his friends but when they go back to where the other girl was hiding, she’s no longer there. This leads to a hunt for the girl, undertaken by what at first seems like a criminal fraternity but turns out to be the cops, led by the charismatic, but flawed Micki (Lior Ashkenazi). Their investigation has brought them to a diminutive local figure, a teacher named Dror (Rotem Keinan): we are not told why he’s in the frame, or if there’s any good reason for it whatsoever, but the first major error in a catalogue of them is that, as they rough him up for good measure in a disused warehouse, their actions are filmed by a kid using his mobile phone. This puts a downer on Micki’s relationship with his boss, especially when the clip hits the equivalent of Youtube, but more to the point when the missing girl is found – dead – in a grotesquely-staged tableau, Micki is partly blamed, and then moved to a new department.

But Micki – with the implicit knowledge of his boss, it seems – retains an interest in catching this child killer, and just cannot let the case be. Likewise, someone else seems to be interested in what he is doing, unbeknownst, for the moment, to him. As those with a vested interest in trapping the predator collide, all are drawn into a savage, claustrophobic situation in which the most noble human impulses hold hands with unmitigated savagery – albeit framed by the most mundane details, as normal life just goes on around them, for as long as it feasibly can.

Wow. The first thing I’d say about this film is how brave I think it is to tackle an emotive subject like child abduction and murder head-on: it takes some doing to carve an engrossing narrative out of a subject which, in modern times, can quite simply provoke hysteria, especially when that narrative refuses to shy away from the grisly details – without, though, ever sinking to using these simply for shock, or to exploit the potential for emotional response. Of course, the subjects raised can make for unsettling viewing; that’s a given. Yet, another aspect of the film which prevents the type of crime underpinning the plot from ever feeling wanton is simply that we are kept in the dark. We are no omniscient audience – hell, we don’t even get to know what the cops know. Why is Dror in the frame? Should he be? Do they have the wrong guy – could this all be a horrible mistake? Because of the several strands of ambiguity which are woven through the film, we are made to feel even more uncomfortable – made to witness horrific acts undertaken by desperate men, though never made to feel we are being traipsed into a ‘torture porn’ scenario (despite the film opting for a much-hated torture porn trope of mine). Throughout, I had no idea who to believe or where my loyalties should lie. Once I felt I knew, the film would perform an about-face and make me reconsider. No one acts as expected, right down to the Arab character who gets a small role here, seemingly just to thwart everyone’s expectations of him. It’s testament to the superb writing at the heart of this film that it can challenge the audience like this, indeed several times as it moves forward.

Another facet to the skill of the writing stems from an aspect which, in itself, could be seen as a challenge: this film is fucking funny. Never for too long, and never where you expect it to be, but funny nonetheless. Sometimes the humour is sliced so thinly in amongst the film’s action scenes that you barely have time to give yourself permission to laugh. Sometimes, it’s more overt – and often challenging in its own ways by referencing childhood in places you would not expect: crime details read out as a ‘Once Upon a Time’ story; coins tossed to decide who commits an act of cruelty; wry exchanges between people in the throes of these acts. One of the film’s key themes seems to be surveillance – people seeing what they shouldn’t, or even going where they shouldn’t, and yet, this hefty topic is also made funny in places, like the Youtube plot-line. In effect, often you’ll laugh when you’d really rather not – though never losing sight of the main drive behind the narrative. The nuanced, developed characters at work here are, through the way in which they can make a joke out of the worst situation, or approach it in such a way, all the more human-seeming for it. We’re made to see that even at their worst, people are still people – a cold, hard fact, which often makes us more uncomfortable than the possibility of monsters.

A surpassingly bleak piece of cinema, Big Bad Wolves has both initiative and guts, holding onto its final shock until right at the end. It also has the courage to dodge out of any smooth resolution, landing us with a jagged, weighty ending after everything else. Big Bad Wolves kept me guessing until the final reel. On occasion, I am arrogant enough to suppose I’ve seen so many films that nothing can surprise me, but sometimes, it’s great to be wrong. I’m excited to see what these guys can come up with for their segment in the upcoming ABCs of Death 2…

Big Bad Wolves will be released on 28th April 2014.

By Tristan Bishop

You would have had to have been serving time in a cosmic prison not to have noticed that Marvel films have been running things in the past decade. Since the first two X-Men films at the turn of the millennium showed us how comic book adaptations should really be done, Marvel have seemed able to do no wrong, and now we can look forward to two or three quality sci-fi blockbusters a year from their stable. However, this was not always the case. Before Marvel took film production ‘in house’, many different people got hold of the rights to the characters and attempted their own films, which were pretty much universally awful. The entertaining slice of cheese which is Dolph Lundgren’s The Punisher (1989) aside, have you ever tried to sit through Albert Pyun’s 1990 version of Captain America?

Dr Mordrid may not at first glance appear to be a Marvel adaptation, but on closer inspection it starts to look an awful lot like Dr Strange. In fact, it transpires that Full Moon Productions (yeah, it’s Charles and Albert Band again!) used to own the rights to the character, but this expired before this film was made…Which makes this 88 Films re-release look extremely timely, given that a megabucks version is currently in the planning stages. Fact fans might also like to know that Dr Strange was actually one of the first Marvel properties to go live action – there is a 1978 TV movie with Peter Hooten in the role!

Jeffrey Combs here stars as Mordrid/Strange – a centuries-old wizard/alien sent to Earth by a being called The Monitor to foil an evil sorcerer called Kabal (cult actor Brian Thompson, here looking like Chris Hemsworth in a Willem Dafoe mask). Mordrid has his hi-tech base in an apartment building with wacky old tenants, a love interest (a Rebekah Brooks lookalike in double denim) who just happens to be a police researcher, and a raven called Edgar Allan. Mordrid wears a nice blue cape and makes use of a magic amulet and a crystal ball which puts him in touch with a cosmic entity called Deaths Head. Apparently some prophecies are coming to pass – large amounts of ‘basic alchemical materials’ are being stolen around the world. The trail of course leads him to Kabal, who has escaped his cosmic prison and is gearing up to open the gates of Hell. Can Mordrid stop him in time?

You’re probably as intrigued as I was when I was sent this disc – the cast and production history make it a very intriguing prospect. But, unfortunately, this is flat stuff indeed. Combs is badly miscast as the good guy, Thompson looks laughable rather than scary and the wizardry/outer space stuff fails to excite on any level. For a Full Moon Production there is a paucity of sex and gore too – which shows the intentions of the film-makers to go for a more mainstream audience. There is one scene in which Brian Thompson kills a naked punk chick by placing his ring on her head (stop sniggering at the back), which feels like it may have been added at the last minute in order to get some exploitation elements in the mix, and the climax features a fight between two stop-motion dinosaur skeletons, as well as some VERY briefly glimpsed mini-monsters (it IS Charles Band after all), but when a film can even fumble a reanimated Saurian battle, then you know it isn’t worth your time. Dr Mordrid is a very good reminder that sometimes the old ways are not necessarily the best.

Dr Mordrid is available now from 88 Films.

By Tristan Bishop

Films tend to say a lot about the climate in which they were made – from the nuclear paranoia of 1950s creature features to the Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib atrocities many claim had an influence on torture porn/ordeal horror. The horror film especially lends itself to reflecting the fears of its audience, whether this is the intention of the film-makers or not, and so, with the increasingly bleak financial outlook of global recession, we are now beginning to see films which reflect people’s fear of poverty. For instance, this week I saw both Martin Scorcese’s tour-de-force The Wolf Of Wall Street, inspired by the Occupy movement in its examination of the excesses of real life stockbroker Jordan Belfort and Cheap Thrills – which deals with extremes of wealth and poverty in a very different way.

E.L. Katz’s début film as a director (he had previously collaborated with Adam Wingard as writer/producer on several features) has as its central character Craig (played by Pat Healy), a man struggling to support his wife and child on his meagre mechanic’s salary. Upon learning that he is to be laid off he takes a detour to the local bar to drown his sorrows, when he chances upon his old school friend Vince (Ethan Embry), whom he has not seen in five years. Vince is doing a little better than Craig, but works as a debt collector, and isn’t above a little of the old strong-arm tactics. They are invited to sit and chat to an obviously well-off couple – The loud, gregarious Colin (an excellent performance by David Koechner), who snorts coke off any available surface, and the beautiful but quiet Violet, who seems more interested in her phone than being out at what we’re told is her birthday celebration.

Colin likes to bet, however. He starts off by offering twenty dollars to whoever can down a shot of tequila first, and this escalates until a disastrous strip club visit where Craig gets knocked out by a bouncer after being dared to slap a stripper’s arse. When Craig comes round they are in Violet’s luxurious house, where the party is just getting started, the drugs and alcohol are flowing, and Colin’s bets are about to get a lot more outrageous, perhaps even dangerous.

The message of Cheap Thrills is pretty simple – The rich exploit the poor, and retain control over them by pitting them against each other. Divide and rule, oldest trick in the book. It’s by no means a subtle commentary on our times. In fact, not much about Cheap Thrills is subtle at all – as befits the title of the film, there’s swearing, sex, violence, assorted moments of gross-out comedy and drugs. Lots of drugs. In fact watching the film sometimes makes you feel like you’ve attended the wrong party and been force-fed lots of substances that are working together to make you feel rather off-colour, and you would really just like to go home and hide under a duvet. The genius of this, of course, is that the film is putting you straight into the mindset of Craig and Vince, right into their ordeal, but the downside is that, well, you might just feel a bit queasy and want to hide under a duvet. There’s no light relief; even the laughs come at the nastiest moments in the film, and even though at the start we have some sympathy for Craig, this soon dissipates. The film appears to be trying to make us question our own behaviours and the limits we would go to for money, but the lack of a sympathetic character means it just ends up being nasty people doing nasty things to each other.

This doesn’t mean it’s a bad film by any means, however – the aforementioned druggy energy, nasty laughs and solid performances make it an entertaining enough watch, which is a shame, as it had the potential to be so much more.

Cheap Thrills will be released in the US on March 21st 2014.

By Keri O’Shea

Well, it’s fair to say we’ve been offered found footage movies which cover a multitude of themes and genres over the past few years at Brutal as Hell, but a porno found footage movie? Yep, this is indeed the frame for Lucky Bastard, and when we got an offer to review it, I have to admit I tentatively raised my hand, not because I wanted to ogle the porn aspects (apparently there are already websites for that) but instead out of sheer curiosity about how found footage would work in this case…if nothing else, I thought, here was something the likes of which I hadn’t reviewed before. Would novelty be enough, though? Having sat through an incredibly banal found footage movie just a few days before, my hopes were admittedly not high that my faith would be restored in this particular format. Happily, however, what we get here is not just some thinly-veiled excuse to make a cheap piece of shit and sprinkle it with ass shots. In fact I was more than pleasantly surprised by just how entertaining and yeah, clever Lucky Bastard was.

For found footage, the initial scenes are pretty standard, but the movie gets these almost-obligatory crime scene set-ups out of the way and then quickly moves onto something altogether more engaging, though not before reminding us that we’re definitely in porno territory when a waiver appears on screen, telling us that the participants have given their permission to be featured…hmmm. And so, with that understood, we wind back in time by a week, and learn that Lucky Bastard is actually a feature which runs on a successful porn site run by the gruff but definitively worldly Mike (Don McManus) – and credit to the movie for playing with possible expectations from the get-go, initially seeming to set a couple of women up for the expected porn-torture-porn before revealing it’s all part of a shoot and – whoah – showing us that porn can even be consensual. Mike does a lot of different types of porn on his site, see, and he’s something of an entrepreneur: one of his most popular gimmicks is to invite subscribers to submit video blogs, explaining why they should get to be the ‘lucky bastard’ who gets to fuck one of the site’s hottest porn stars. For a new edition of Lucky Bastard, he has managed to persuade one of the girls, the legendary Ashley Saint (Betsy Rue) to do the deed, even though it breaks her ‘no amateurs’ rule. They select a guy from the submitted videos, book a plush house in San Fernando, and go pick up their guy, Dave (Jay Paulson).

He seems okay, although terrified, and evidently uncomfortable with the Lucky Bastard shtick whereby the lucky winner is filmed from the time of pick up to the scene itself – but Mike has a business to run, won’t be dissuaded from doing just that, and insists that the show goes on. The show does go on, and things go wrong, of course, in a series of ways which thankfully managed to carry some genuine tension along with them; some of the developments I could see, err, coming, and some I couldn’t – but overall, I at least cared about what was going on in a way which can be quickly lost (if it’s in there at all) in a shooting format which all too often threatens to degrade into an annoying dizzy spell.

For starters, one of the reasons that Lucky Bastard holds together so well is that it has a uniquely believable reason for everyone to be holding cameras, looking at footage, or for it all to be taking place in locations which are choc-ful of cameras. In fact, screw the mockumentary thing, porn allows this to work so much better; we seem to have at least one experienced cameraman and some tripods too. Then we have people who are eminently comfortable being on film in the first place, because it’s their living, and they understand how to appear in camera shots. Also, the movie happily dodges what I’d expected it to do, and that’s to fall into line and represent its characters, as per common consensus when it comes to porn as either ogres or exploited women, nothing more than the proverbial cannon fodder for something protractedly nasty and yet predictable to follow. Instead, we have real characters here. Particularly in the case of Mike and Ashley (where Rue’s performance was so believable that I looked to see if she was a genuine porn actress sidestepping into non-porn a la Jenna Jameson) there’s a real sense that they give a shit about one another. That’s refreshing. All the people in this film are by turns wry, sardonic and believable, and whilst not perfect, they have an element of charm.

Then, Lucky Bastard seems to work on two different levels altogether, again surpassing what I thought I’d be seeing here. On one level, to be clear, it’s a film which doesn’t take itself 100% seriously (which also helps in some of the scenes which can’t quite hold together as serious). You may snigger at, for instance, a dildo being left in the foreground of a supposedly menacing scene, or at Mike wondering aloud if ‘endangered species porn’ could be the next big thing. The script is slick enough to make you laugh. I like that. It also makes it clear that porn films like these are a product, so even though it shows pretty graphic sex on-screen (not hardcore scenes, but sometimes only for the love of pixellation) it also shows what happens after cut-scenes, and shows things going laughably wrong too, although sex is far more important for the context of Lucky Bastard – and that’s where the film shows it can be more interesting still.

Ultimately, I think what I liked about the film so much was how deftly it handled some pretty important modern-day issues. Yes, in a film about porn going wrong – I know, I know, I heard me too, but hear me out. It’s a film which doesn’t parade its bigger ideas, but by its very nature it’s asking questions about the intersection between the internet and real life. Identity, fantasy, and the relationship between the two are brought into a pretty neat focus during the film: when is a person acting, and when are they themselves? When a person becomes used to being filmed so much, does spontaneous speech begin to disappear – with a camera on a person, are they always going to talk differently, speak in some semi-scripted way because they know how they might appear (and is that why Dave is so resistant to it)? What control do we have or should we have once we’ve been filmed and that footage moves out of our control? To go back to basics – what’s in a name, even? I don’t want to represent this film as some great, lofty treatise on the nature of existence – it ain’t, it knows it ain’t – but it has ideas, and it uses a clever framework to hint at what might, just might be behind these. Sharp and watchable, Lucky Bastard has something about it, and even where it begins to falter slightly towards the end, I stayed grateful for this. As I usually have to add, though, watch the trailer at your own risk…

By Keri O’Shea

As a fan and as a reviewer, I can usually find plenty to say about the pre-release movies I get sent. It’s what we do here, after all. Whether I love a film or I hate it, I can – I hope – explain my response to it in a fairly detailed way, a way which might allow others to make a decision on whether or not to take a chance on the film in question. That’s my hope, anyway. However, Muirhouse has me at a complete loss. Muirhouse has been a transcendent experience unlike any other.

Allow me to explain that I am not giving the film the slightest scrap of praise in saying that. I mean simply that my initial indifference to yet another found footage movie altered as the film progressed. I moved from boredom, into confusion. From confusion, I became irate, and then angry. Eventually I overcame my anger, but to try and enunciate all of those emotions in a review? Forget it. You know how in Martyrs, Anna is tormented and tormented until she surpasses the physical plane, leaving her agonies behind? That’s pretty much what Muirhouse has done to my reviewing mojo.

Okay. The film starts with a shirtless man walking down a road holding a hammer, thence getting wrestled to the ground by some police. This is apparently Philip Muirhouse, an author, who has been at a haunted house making a documentary intended to accompany his upcoming book about …haunted houses. As you do. The rest of the film is his story, and I use the word ‘story’ in its loosest possible sense here. We are shown (and who the hell has edited this stuff together? When?) his preparations for said documentary, largely him doing take after take where he tries to introduce the damn thing and keeps making a mess of it (and are all of those attempts included here for posterity? You betcha!) before making plans to go to the notorious Monte Cristo house to continue filming. Oh, he’ll have to be there on his own. Oh. No reason not to carry on trying to make a documentary with no suitable equipment like a tripod or any perceivable point in mind. Bon chance, Mr Muirhouse!

That’s it. That’s the film. One man in a house. There is no character arc here, no beginning, middle or end, no increase in tension, no tension whatsoever, no plot, little dialogue, no resolution. No special effects. Nothing. If your taste runs to spending around an hour watching a man sitting in the dark doing fuck all except listening to the occasional thump from upstairs or occasionally running up and down stairs/in and out of the front door, camera in hand of course, then this might be for you. If you expect more from a film, then I guarantee you will be disappointed. Even within the lazy, derivative and nonsensical worst of this genre, this is a doozy. Whoever has put this footage together has made some baffling choices for inclusion (minute upon minute of a tape recorder operating? The botched intro over and over again? Stock footage of gardens!?) and call me a bluff old cynic, but it seems like a lot of the stuff here is simply padding to get the film up to its eighty minute total. There simply isn’t enough here for a film. NOTHING HAPPENS. And yet, even with all of the filler included here, there still manage to be ‘plot’ gaps.

Muirhouse is a lazy, aimless, pathetic excuse for a film. It has none of the elements you would expect, as a minimum, a film to contain. It uses a shooting style which has been done to death and somehow makes it simultaneously unbelievable and more tedious than other films of the same style. It lacks the courage of its convictions, giving the lie to its ‘supernatural’ theme by not bothering, or at least failing to include anything supernatural beyond things that go bump off-camera. It has no scares, and generates no interest in what happens to its by-and-large only character. When it has dragged itself along for an hour and twenty minutes, it just stops. It doesn’t even have the decency to tie things together at the end. It just stops. I cannot think of a single thing worthy of praise here. However, should anyone want an example of just what is wrong with a lot of modern horror cinema, Muirhouse could at least be held high.

And in the spirit of the film itself, here’s where I just stop.

Muirhouse will be released by Monster Pictures on 10th February 2014.

By Keri O’Shea

When I sit down to watch modern post-apocalyptic movies, I always find it interesting to see what, from the point of view of the Zeitgeist, we’re afraid of these days. What do we think is waiting in the wings, ready to consume us? Whilst we do still get horror stories based around nuclear warfare – the disappointing Xavier Gens film The Divide (2011) as one example – it’s nothing like it was back in the mid-twentieth century, when death by nuke seemed to many to be a very real possibility and this found expression in multiple horror and science-fiction films of the day. Nope; now there’s a new kid on the block, because prophesying about climate change has provided us with another potential end to life as we know it. The Colony (2013) is one such film which weaves a decent, if at times oddly-familiar yarn out of the elements. (Do you see what I did there?)

The year is 2045 and an unending snow has decimated the world’s population, leaving only small groups of survivors quite literally holed up in underground bunkers, doing whatever they can to maintain their colonies by looking for ways to perpetuate their dwindling food supplies whilst ever looking for a break in the clouds, some way they could access the sun’s power to produce fresh food once again. Things aren’t going well: their animals are ailing in their unnatural confines (“You know you’re screwed when even the rabbits won’t fuck”) and these small communities live in fear of the spread of viruses like the ‘flu. As if this wasn’t all bad enough, they receive a distress signal from another nearby colony, Colony 5; as all of the colonies have a mutally-assured policy of altruism, a small party, led by head honcho Briggs (Laurence Fishburne) heads out to investigate… I hope I won’t be deemed guilty of spoilers if I say that what ensues is not a big catch-up with the neighbours after a false alarm.

There are many commendable aspects to this film; I must say, I’m quite surprised at how many reviews have overlooked these, and indeed at how vitriolic a lot of other reviews have been. Firstly, the aesthetics of the film are gorgeous. Although we’re back to the whole snow/nukes thing in terms of how each fictional world came to be the way it is, I couldn’t help but think of the Fallout games (particularly the uber-bleakness of Fallout 3) during several scenes in The Colony. The existence of small, self-contained communities living in bunkers is an obvious comparison, but many of the urban landscapes, with their ruined buildings dwarfing the travellers and the remnants of the world as-was looking oddly grating against the lifelessness of the surroundings could almost be interchangeable. And that is no bad thing, to my mind, as games and movies edge ever closer to one another, why not have this sort of crossover? One of The Colony’s key strengths is in these perilous, pleasing and immersive visuals.

I was also interested that in the initial set-up it’s the preservation of the population, not overpopulation, which is at issue. Sure, not all dystopian horrors hinge on the hell of burgeoning numbers, but I liked the more co-operative set-up that people were trying to maintain at the story’s beginning. Is the film any less bleak for it? Not at all; by starting out this way it’s able to set the benefits of altruistic behaviour against the selfish survival instinct, and I found this satisfying to watch. Performances are decent; I didn’t recognise Bill Paxton as the meglomaniacal Miller, but he does well with what he’s given, and of course Fishburne is an old hand at dystopia by now. Funnily, despite his youth the Jesse Pinkman-alike Kevin Zegers is a bit of an old hand in horror himself, and in his role as Sam he also provides an occasional narrative voiceover during The Colony; again, I didn’t find this an imposition.

So far, so good. It’d be patently untrue to suggest that this is a perfect movie, however, and The Colony does have issues. Although, for instance, the film balances tension and action very well in its first couple of acts, it does feel at later points that it’s not quite sure what it wants to be. Is it a brooding drama, or an action flick? It definitely swings more towards the ‘action’ side of things as it moves onwards towards its close, and in a few ways I feel that this weakens the film. It sacrifices a couple of enticing potential plot lines to throw in more explosions; there are some wasted opportunities here, as well as a few sequences for high action’s sake which had me scratching my head. Indeed, for the same action’s sake, a few plot lines are very difficult to accept whatsoever – again, this is a shame. The Colony also falls into the trap of adding a few clichés along the way: some proselytising here, some rushed exposition there; an obvious martyr here, an evident dickhead there…

Still, for all that, I was motivated to keep watching. The Colony after all does what films are still primarily meant to do: it entertained me, even if there were glitches at times. I was intrigued by The Threat in the film, curious about the protagonists and – essentially – I wanted to see how their story ended. Sure, it seems unlikely that The Colony will become anyone’s favourite film of all time. It’s not going to change cinema for ever, and it won’t change your life. But you could do a lot worse with ninety minutes of your life and if you’re a fan of the genre, you too may get something out of this one.

Oh, and…don’t watch the trailer. It spoilers the entire film. Do the people responsible for these things not want anyone to actually bother watching? Or are they simply stupid? Jeez…

The Colony will be released by Entertainment One on 20th January, 2014.