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DVD Review: After Dark & SyFy Present ’51’

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Review by Stephanie Scaife.

51 is another of the After Dark Originals produced by SyFy, and a particularly lacklustre effort at that, which for this sort of low budget made-for-television movie should give you an indication of just how dull this is. Directed by Jason Connery (son of Sean), 51 is an army vs. aliens horror film that pretty much fails to deliver on almost every level and despite a few recognisable names in the cast, they all appear to be phoning in a performance just for the paycheque.

The premise is that due to decades of overwhelming pressure Area 51 has finally decided to let the media in, under strict supervision of course. The lucky few picked to gain access include reporter Claire (Vanessa Branch), TV anchor Sam (John Shea), camerawoman Mindy (Lena Clark) and photo journalist Kevin (Damon Lipari). Colonel Martin (Bruce Boxleitner) has been tasked with giving the visitors a heavily chaperoned tour of the facilities, which of course aims to completely overlook that fact that there are actual living alien specimens within Area 51. Rather inconveniently, on the very same day of the media visit Patient Zero, a hostile shapeshifting alien life form, escapes from his cell, goes on a killing spree and sets loose the other aliens held captive within the facility.

Also along for the ride are two rather whiney soldiers, Sergeant Hannah (Rachel Miner) who is deeply troubled by a past event where she was falsely branded a hero after committing an act of cowardice (which we learn via a pointless and badly delivered monologue) and Aaron “Shoes” Schumacher (Jason London) who spends the duration of the movie just looking very, very tired.

The plot itself is fairly derivative and nonsensical, borrowing heavily from other better films; for example, a scene where they are all tested in a bid to figure out who is the alien is unashamedly straight out of The Thing. Otherwise it’s just a matter of the small cast running back and forth through the same three rooms that are just decorated slightly differently each time to make it look like a large scale military base, being killed off by some rather dodgy looking and decidedly unscary aliens. Nothing else really happens and little is explained as to the ins and outs of Area 51 or where the aliens came from.

One positive that 51 has is the lack of CGI. The gore effects and the aliens are good old latex and fake blood, which I always appreciate over cheap looking and poorly done digital effects. Sometimes there can be something appealing about these sorts of schlocky low-budget films, but not here. 51 is mostly just a boring waste of 90 minutes that you’ll undoubtedly wish you’d spent doing something more worthwhile, like watching paint dry.

51 is available now on Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray.

Advance Review: Adam Mason’s ‘Luster’

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Keri O’Shea reviews Adam Mason’s to-date unreleased next film…

These days, film and TV are all about ‘the journey’. Executives love it; in fact, they’ll demand that it’s crowbarred into almost anything, because that emotional process of self-discovery makes for good viewing. To know oneself is to love oneself. Or is it? Luster, directed by Adam Mason, takes a compelling, darkly-humorous look at what happens when that journey is warped and ruinous rather than life-affirming. This is Jekyll and Hyde for the self-help generation.

Thomas Luster – played by the inimitable Mason regular Andrew Howard – is just a regular guy, doing his best to keep a handle on all the things regular guys have to contend with. He has a beautiful wife, a nice home, a successful business – and he’s exhausted, utterly exhausted, to the point that one day just bleeds into the next. His mind has even started to play tricks on him; he can’t remember where he parked the night before, can’t find his keys… Jennifer, his wife, suggests it might be time for him to ‘get some help’. The help he opts for takes the form of a trip to a friendly sleeping pill supplier living out of his car near Thomas’s place of work. A restful night should make a good start to getting everything back on track, he figures.

Someone disagrees: notes start to arrive offering commentary on how he has been behaving lately. Whoever it is knows about his trip to see Les, the dealer, too. Who is watching him? Thomas has his suspicions, and decides to set up a CCTV network at home to catch the culprit. What he discovers, however, jeopardises everything he values. 

Luster in some ways marks a change in style from Mason’s earlier work: not only is this a psychological thriller above being a straightforward horror, there is also deliberate humour here in a way I haven’t seen in his films before. From the array of grotesque characters, like Travis (played by Ian Duncan, who also starred in Blood River) and Halo (also acted by a Mason frequent flier, Pollyanna Rose) to the genuinely funny lines which occur throughout the film, Luster feels at ease with its ability to repel on one hand and amuse on the other. It’s a self-aware piece of film about someone struggling with self-awareness, and as such it isn’t afraid to play with audience expectations, even having fun with them. There’s mischief here, and it works. Alongside the black comedy aspects – and perhaps brought into sharper relief by them – are more characteristic Mason themes and handling, albeit played out in a less grisly fashion than usual. At the heart of Luster, the isolation of a previously blasé suburbanite leads to mania and murder, and where we’re shown this process happening, the atmosphere is nicely sinister. The idea of the ‘split self’, or the alter ego, is one of the most effectively creepy ideas in horror and it’s given a neat spin here. Together with the background radio spouting anti-nice guy platitudes and the use of the home security cameras as a conduit for Thomas’s communication with himself, it feels very much an up-to-date spin, too. You could draw some comparison to other films: The Machinist sprang to mind, and I could mention Fight Club, although Luster is rather more raw and definitely less self-congratulatory.

Andrew Howard is given a lot to play with in this leading role. He maintains his usual high standards of balancing madness and charisma in all the right places, but also he takes the opportunity to do something a little different here. As Luster, at least at the outset, Howard gets to play someone weak, confused and frightened: at least in the roles Mason offers to him, Howard doesn’t play the lesser man all that often. Here, Howard develops upon the psychosis he brought to The Devil’s Chair and manages, even when his character is behaving at his very worst, to make him oddly sympathetic. Notable mentions also go to the talented Tommy Flanagan as Les – currently on our screens in Sons of Anarchy – and Tess Panzer, Mrs. Luster, for striking the tone just right in their supporting roles.

So, Luster points out the downside of people knowing everything about yourself, and as a viewer you will be dragged between feeling unnerved and feeling amused during this film – like it or not. The ending will not work for everyone, but bear in mind that the moral of Luster is that nice guys finish last, and as such you can forget about a happy resolution. To go back to one of the opening lines in the film, ‘What good is doing the right thing?’

Frustratingly, despite being completed last year, Luster is currently – still – waiting for a release from Epic Pictures. Fingers crossed, this situation will be rectified very soon…

 

DVD Review: Bunraku

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Review by Aaron Williams.

I’m sure that those of you reading this review have been led here by your taste for the cinematically weird and wonderful and maybe even a good old case of curiosity. When Bunraku first arrived at my doorstep I will admit I was pretty pessimistic. The cover screams ‘Sin City cash in’ and the cast list won’t exactly have cinemagoers lining up around the block.

What is Bunraku, anyway?

Banraku is a form of puppet theatre from Japan, a national tradition for hundreds of years, telling stories of good versus evil, honour and heroism. Guy Moshe’s film is a fusion of not only Japanese tradition but Western ones too. Set against this origami city – yep, you heard that right, it’s literally an origami city – we have a tale that evokes the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone laced with a little 5os film noir.

An animated prologue – I’m getting pretty sick of these things now – introduces us to a post war world where guns have been outlawed and any battles fought are now contested with the a blade or a steady fist. Our story opens in the city ruled by a man named Nicola (Yeah, that IS a girl’s name) the wood cutter, a dab hand with his trusty axe and the leader of a band of deadly killers. Enter mysterious drifter (Josh Hartnett) and young Japanese warrior Yoshi, both with their own agendas. They clash at first but soon realise that if they are to topple the Woodcutter’s rule, they are to work together.

The set up should have had your ears pricked up in interest by now – on paper this all sounds great, in execution, it sadly crumbles from the starting gates. Initially the world is hard to take your eyes from, truly a dystopian cityscape you will never have seen before. A lot of the sweeping shots under bridges and between houses look like they were made with the recent fascination in 3D technology in mind. But as soon as the live action actors set foot on this curious landscape the illusion falls apart, now seeming like a Playstation 3 game.

Sin City was an obvious influence here but deep into the film’s running time I couldn’t help but think of Dick Tracy and (shudder) Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin. This has that same theatrical fun house feel where nothing is real and nothing should be taken seriously at all. This fusion of imagery has been accomplished far more successfully in the recent (and extremely excellent) Scott Pilgrim Versus The World.

Sin City was a large melting pot and murder, sex, death and madness with a film noir twist – Bunraku comes across more like a violent Saturday morning cartoon. Sure, said violence is indeed impressive, the fight scenes visceral and complex, but you simply won’t care. The narrative wanders aimlessly through a series of tired and tried situations that will bore the piss from you. Sure, it’s all very colourful and pretty but how old are you? If your answer is ten years old then the visuals will keep you impressed through the frankly way over long running time.

The performances are largely unimpressive with the exception of the every dependable Ron Perlman as the villainous Nicol. This man should be given much more work than he gets – and not just as a big red monster. It’s odd how a project with such a low budget was condemned to such a low profile release. This would have some life on the big screen with the right marketing push behind it – we’ve seen much worse haven’t we?

For those of you still curious enough, Bunraku will start its DVD run from October 10th courtesy of G2 Pictures.

DVD Review: The Dead (2010)

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Review by Keri O’Shea.

I’m going to start this review with a confession. When Ben, the UK editor, asked me to cover the DVD release of The Dead for this site (Ben’s note: I had already reviewed it at FrightFest 2010, which you can read here), I made a glib joke about not wanting to get in trouble with the director if I didn’t like the film: some of you who follow horror news online may know why I said that. When the movie trailer was first released last year over on twitchfilm.com, one of the film’s two directors – Jonathan Ford – launched into some incredibly irate responses to negative comments left on the site. This attracted attention to the trailer, but for all the wrong reasons, and it was down to Jonathan’s brother and co-director Howard Ford to come along and smooth over the ruffled feathers – which he did with good grace, I might add.

I haven’t relaxed my attitudes on how directors should act towards fans and fan writers, and as I’ve talked at length about this elsewhere, I won’t repeat myself here. However, having actually seen the film, I find myself in the position of sharing some of Jon Ford’s exasperation with judgements which were – even at that stage – being confidently handed out by a small number of posters at Twitch. Specifically, charges of racism were being made against the film; Jon Ford reacted badly to these. I can understand why. Once something or someone gets misidentified as ‘racist,’ that shit sticks. It’s a difficult label to remove: say nothing and suspicion grows, argue against it and find yourself evermore on the defensive. So let me just say clearly, before I move on with my review of this well-shot, strangely-beautiful and competent zombie movie, that I could identify absolutely nothing of racism therein, and if others have done so, consider me baffled and depressed by that fact.

Two military men are desperately trying to make their ways back to their families in an (unnamed) African country compromised by a blood-borne infection which is spreading out of control. When the last evacuation plane crashes on its way out, US military engineer Brian Murphy seems to be the sole survivor in a land now filled with dead men walking; as slow, deliberate and unsteady as they are, they are relentless. As he wonders what to do and where to go, he has his life saved by absconding local soldier, Sergeant Daniel Dembele – played by Ghanaian superstar Prince David Oseia – who had returned to his village, found his wife dead, and his son departed to a military base in the north. Whilst Daniel is grateful that his boy is apparently safe, he wants to find him. Despite expressing surprise that there are any Americans left in the country, Daniel suggests that Brian accompany him to the base: two people stand more chance of getting there safely, after all.

So far, so familiar. Yet, despite the fact that The Dead deals in these recognisable zombie movie motifs, what it does with them is both entertaining and proficient. It takes something of the spirit of much older films – think early Romero, or perhaps Fulci’s Zombi – in that there are no fast-moving zombies here, and we’re back with the (infinitely superior and far more sinister) plodding, inescapable dead. Having presented us with an old school version of the undead, the film chooses as its background somewhere quite new, at least to most Western audiences. The film was shot in the country of Burkina Faso, and as such, familiar horror is juxtaposed with unfamiliar, varied landscapes which are striking to look at. The Ford Brothers play to the great strengths of the appearance of the country, giving an impression throughout of beauty compromised. A vivid palate of golds, reds and sea-greens and a variety of styles of shots maintains this idea throughout. Dialogue is used sparsely: this, together with the slow-moving zombies and the sense of vastness communicated by the long shots lends the film a dreamlike quality, which when it gives way to moments of tension, feels like a well-handled change. Despite not being about to reinvent the wheel, The Dead is a well-made film which largely plays to its strengths.

Despite the fact that we have two soldiers as lead characters here, political explication is kept to a minimum: you could spend a great deal of time drawing out every mention of politics, or looking for symbolism, but for me the driving force of the film is family, with the inclusion of friendships, rather than being a treatise on militarism. Daniel is a strong character (and actually, a more effective soldier and rescuer than Murphy): his determination to see his son again makes up the most part of the plot, and Murphy depends on him. Murphy also shares his motivations: he is a family man, and his driving force is also to get home. The friendship between two men in extraordinary circumstances is believable, moving and nicely-drawn, despite the relatively low amount of dialogue. That is what I mainly took away from the film – that human relationships can endure, or develop, even under the most extreme duress. It’s a humane touch which only underlines the horror of the situation.

Like any indie, it’s not a perfect film. The sombre pace starts to stretch a little thin in places, although the film moves on just steadily enough to maintain interest (and, despite having seen hundreds of zombie films in my life, despite having a reasonable idea of what was going to happen, I was never bored here). The lead actor Rob Freeman maintains a po-faced militarism which renders some of his lines flat, and I’d have liked to see a more low-key performance from him. That said, things come together here in a moving way, there’s lots to like here, and fans of the genre will find enough gore and enough humanity to render this an effective story.

If the initial wave of nervous – and stupid – negative opinion surrounding The Dead stops people from giving it a chance, then that is, quite simply, a fucking shame. Getting films made anywhere in Africa isn’t the easy option, but the Ford Brothers did it, and they did a good job. This is a worthy addition to genre film which deserves our time and attention as fans. As an addendum: look at the film credits. Every single extra involved in the making of this film gets a credit, making this one of the most exhaustive lists I’ve ever seen, and if you’re interested in supporting the region where the film was made, there’s a link for you to do so.

Anchor Bay Entertainment will release The Dead on DVD and Blu-Ray from 10th October. You can also read Marc Patterson’s extensive interview with Jonathan and Howard Ford, from FrightFest UK 2010 Right Here.

‘The Dead’ TRAILER from Bryce Holland on Vimeo.

DVD Review: Kingdom of Gladiators

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Review By: Aaron Williams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Review by Ben Bussey.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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DVD Review by Ben Bussey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

DVD Review: Territories

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DVD Review by Aaron Williams 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review by Ben Bussey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

DVD Review: Arrow Video Presents ‘Pieces’

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Review by Stephanie Scaife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pieces is currently available on DVD.

FrightFest 2011 Review: The Divide

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Review By Stephanie Scaife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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