Take one look at the poster of Death Ship and its tagline 'those who survive the ghost ship would be better off dead!', and you can pretty much guess what you're in for. Death Ship is a run-of-the-mill, low-budget horror featuring a killer Nazi ship that feeds off blood and manages to lure some unfortunate genre archetypes on board for 90 minutes of rambling shenanigans. The one major plus that perhaps makes the film stand slightly above others of its kind is the presence of two genre legends - George Kennedy and Richard Crenna - both no doubt looking for an easy pay-day but lightening the mood nonetheless.
Grumpy and socially awkward Captain Ashland (Kennedy) is making his final voyage, transporting a ship full of dull socialites and holiday-makers around while his second-in-command Trevor Marshall (Crenna) waits patiently to take the reigns. When their ship is suddenly struck by a ghostly black freighter that blurts out warning messages in German, only a few survivors escape with their lives, drifting out to sea and eventually finding themselves on board the mysterious vessel. The group find nobody alive on board, and when the annoying lounge act Jackie (a young Saul Rubinek) is seemingly drowned by supernatural forces, it quickly becomes apparent that this is no ordinary ship.
The injured Ashland gradually becomes obsessed with taking command of the freighter, mocking Marshall for his lack of leadership qualities and developing a sudden fondness for the Third Reich. The scenes between Kennedy and Crenna, two strong leading men in their heyday, are when Death Ship is at its most enjoyable. Kennedy hams it up no end, but this only adds to the fun. Sadly these moments are few and far between, and the obvious lack of funding forces the movie to resort to endless scenes of inane chattering, gloomy shots of the ship's interior, and some terrible stock-footage where you can barely tell what's happening. One scene of Victoria Bugoyne trapped inside a shower spurting blood is undoubtedly memorable but inspires some unintentional laughs, but that is slim praise for a film that ultimately bores.
Shortly after World War II ended, the community of Texarkana, Arkansas were finally piecing their lives back together and preparing for a time of harmony and peace. That is, until a masked psychopath, dubbed the 'Phantom Killer' by the press, starts a killing spree that will shake the city to its very core. Writer and director Charles B. Pierce (who also has a supporting role as a bumbling deputy) flaunts his artistic license with the events that actually occurred in 1946, informing us that "only the names have been changed," when in fact the story is altered considerably to form a traditional thriller narrative, yet the result is an effective horror.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown could be labelled as one of the first 'slasher' movies, having emerged two years before John Carpenter's Halloween, the film that really kicked-off the genre. Yet while there is slashing-a-plenty, the film also works just as well as a police procedural and a docudrama, with the majority of the attention focusing on the heavy toll the murders take on the city's terrified inhabitants, and the desperate actions of the police trying to catch him. Reliable deputy sheriff Norman Ramsey (Andrew Prine) is given the task of overlooking the investigation, and when the few leads they have lead to dead-ends, legendary Texas Ranger J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson) - based on real-life Ranger Manuel 'Lone Wolf' Gonzaullas - is drafted in to take charge.
The highlights of The Town That Dreaded Sundown come in the form of some very effective murder set-pieces. There are no drawn-out stalking scenes of hapless victims running screaming through the woods or lashings of over-the-top gore. Instead, the killings are brutal and straight-to-the-point, with the sound of killers near-orgasmic breathing, which are muffled through the killer's gunny sack disguise, proving incredibly discomforting. What I didn't expect was the sudden tonal shifts to slapstick comedy. The inept deputy 'Sparkplug', played by Pierce, seems to have wandered in from a Marx Brothers set, with his frequently idiotic mishaps, such as accidentally driving Ramsey and Morales into a lake for them to emerge wet and grumpy, jarring the film's flow and carefully built atmosphere. These unwelcome comedy interludes are a constant and unnecessary distraction, and means that the film falls way short of the 70's horror classic it could have been.
Made during the era now known as the 'Disney Renaissance' between 1989 and 1999, Pocahontas is one of the least fondly remembered of a wave of films that also included the likes of The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion King (1994), all of which are now considered giants of the Disney back-catalogue. It received mixed reviews upon its release, with some seeing a bravery in the films desire to tell a more serious story, and others lamenting its lack of memorable musical numbers and three dimensional supporting characters. And 'mixed' is precisely the way I felt when the credits started to roll.
In 1607, a ship named the Susan Constant arrives at the New World carrying settlers and fortune-seekers from England. Led by the dastardly Governor Ratcliffe (David Ogden Stiers) who means to strip the lands of all of its riches so he can return to England as a success, the ship also carries the dashing John Smith (Mel Gibson), the captain seen as a hero by his crew-mates after saving young deck-sweeper Thomas (Christian Bale) from drowning during a storm. Further inland, the beautiful and free-spirited Pocahontas (Irene Bedard, with Judy Kuhn providing the singing vocals) fears the prospect of marriage to stoic warrior Kocoum (James Apamunt Fall), arranged by her father and tribe chief Powhatan (Russell Means). As tensions between the settlers and the natives grow, Smith and Pocahontas form a romantic bond that will shake the foundations of both camps.
Pocahontas deserves to be applauded for its refusal to gloss over the racial aspects of a story aimed primarily at children. Smith isn't simply the traditional square-jawed Disney prince, and early on boasts about the amount of 'savages' he has killed during his adventuring. There's clearly blood on his hands but, through his relationship with Pocahontas, learns of the value and importance of nature, as well as the peaceful ways of her tribe's culture. The song Savages has both sides portraying the other as, well, savages, demonstrating their natural fear and distrust of a culture they know little about. Yet there is a distinct lack of fun to the film, with only Pocahontas's animal side-kicks providing some much-needed light-hearted comic relief. Outside of the two leads, the supporting characters are wafer-thin, with Ratcliffe paying the moustache-twirling villain, and Powhatan the wise, mystical old man. It's also unlikely you'll be whistling the songs afterwards.
Ryuhei Kitamura's hyperactive video-game-brought-to-life Versus has a huge cult following and is absolutely adored by its dedicated fans, so I'll say state straight off the bat that I loathed almost every second of its exhausting 120-minute running-time. The film is chocked full of the kind of hyper-kinetic camerawork doing 360 degree spins around its leather jacket-wearing characters, who frequently pout and brood in an attempt to look cool, that cinema was swamped with in the wake of the huge success of The Matrix (1999), which itself was heavily inspired by Japanese cinema. But Versus has little grip on its muddled mythology, and the result is a gory, tiresome mess.
The story informs us that their are 666 portals on Earth that connect this world to the 'other side', with the 444th portal located in the Forest of Resurrection in Japan. Centuries ago, a lone samurai battles a few shuffling zombies before taking on a powerful priest who, with minimal effort, kills him. In the present day, two escaped convicts arrive at the Forest to wait for a gang of Yakuza who will take them to safety. One of the prisoners, #KSC2-303 (Tak Sakaguchi), becomes immediately suspicious of the Yakuza's intentions when they arrive holding a kidnapped girl (Chieko Misaka). The prisoner kills one of the Yakuza, who immediately comes back to life as a zombie, and flees in the forest, taking the girl with him.
There is no doubting that Versus is occasionally a treat for the eyes, with the editing in particular impressing during the numerous fight scenes. But the fights come one after the other, quickly becoming tedious especially since every battle is introduced by the characters posing while the camera swirls around them for what seems like an eternity. It doesn't help that all of the Yakuza are the type of preening morons seen in a thousand other films, strutting around in sunglasses and awful flashy suits and failing to pose any kind of real threat. The protagonist is also difficult to like - a generic bad-ass played unconvincingly by Sakaguchi, who seems to enjoy frequently knocking out the girl he has rescued as he fights the bad guys. It's meant to be darkly humorous, but instead feels simply misogynistic. At 2 hours, it's a headache-inducing struggle to get through, and is recommended only for hardcore fans of cult Japanese cinema.
The 1960's saw great political upheaval in Indonesia, with then-President Sukarno being overthrown by Suharto, and the Indonesian Communist Party finding themselves the subject of a widespread propaganda smear campaign. Death squads were created to systematically wipe out the Communist party and anyone suspecting of sympathising with the organisation. Between 1965 and 1966, it is estimated somewhere in between of 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians were murdered in a massacre widely ignored by Western countries. Shockingly, the heads of the death squads still hold power and influence in their country, with many now employed as high-ranking military officers.
A straight-forward documentary covering the topic would have no doubt been a powerful and upsetting experience, but director Joshua Oppenheimer, along with co-directors Christine Cynn and somebody listed as 'Anonymous', have rejected this approach and, with The Act of Killing, have subverted the genre entirely. Obviously appalled at the countries failure to highlight the atrocity and punish those responsible for the crimes committed, Oppenheimer has instead opted to give the killers the opportunity to tell their own story. Yet rather than talking-heads juxtaposed with archive footage, Oppenheimer gave them a film crew and the freedom to depict their acts in a movie of their own making. The results, quite frankly, are utterly astonishing.
Portraying their war crimes in a variety of genres that range from musical numbers and film noir to westerns and bizarre dream-like sequences, their cinematic vision is naturally cheesy and poorly handled, complete with bad acting and stodgy dialogue, with one gangster over-eager to dress in drag in an effort to lighten the tone (and succeeding in the process). However, Oppenheimer isn't interested in the final product (which we don't get to see), but how the film-making process affects those involved. At first, these killers, rapists and torturers are utterly loathsome, demonstrating absolutely no remorse whatsoever about their actions. One, Anwar Congo, gleefully displays his efficient method of murder, which involves strangulation by wire, while another boasts to his friends about the delights of raping a 14-year old girl.
Yet Congo, who is viewed as a sort of celebrity in his country, starts to reflects on the pain and suffering he has caused. In one scene, he plays a victim being interrogated while tied to a chair. When the wire is tied around his neck, the experience has a profound affect on him, sitting motionless in silence as his friends look concerned and baffled. He later watches it back, transfixed, and starts to break down. The Act of Killing is careful not to sympathise with its subjects (Oppenheimer quickly points out to Congo that his victims' experience would have been far worse), but at least tries to understand them. It's less about the atrocities Indonesia experienced than the act of killing itself, and what could possibly drive anybody to such cold-blooded barbarity. It's a powerful and moving experience like no other movie I've ever seen, and it is no overstatement to hail this as one of the greatest documentaries ever made.
Jay Roach's Trumbo, like many recent biopics so accurately lampooned in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), plays like a film version of a Wikipedia page, covering all the necessary key events from the topic's life without so much as attempting to dig beneath the surface of the man at the centre of it all, ushering in actors to do their best impressions of famous people, a device that seems to serve as a 'spot the movie star' game for the audience as opposed to having much of an immediate effect on the story. You may leave the film a bit more educated on the subject of the infamous 'Hollywood Blacklist', but you'll learn little about Dalton Trumbo himself.
The film is far too polished to truly transport you back in time to the 1940's and 50's, failing to achieve a 'lived-in' sense of time and place. Beginning with Trumbo (played by Bryan Cranston) on the set of Our Vines Have Tender Grapes and on the verge of signing a contract that will make him the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, his affiliation with the Communist Party of the USA comes under scrutiny by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and actor John Wayne (David James Elliott), with the latter seen delivering a speech on the threat of communism. Trumbo, along with other screenwriters, are called to testify by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and find themselves blacklisted from Hollywood when they refuse to answer questions.
What follows is little more than the key points in the history of this frightening abuse of free speech by a country that prides itself upon its democracy. It's a topic that will anger, confuse and frustrate you, but the film fails at doing the story any kind of justice by demonstrating a startling lack of emotion. Cranston, who somehow received an Oscar nomination for his efforts, seems to sleep-walk through the proceedings. Every line he is forced to deliver seems to be plucked right out of a Hollywood movie, almost as if it is destined to be someday carved into stone. Having loved Cranston since Malcolm in the Middle, I don't blame him for the limp performance. Director Jay Roach has made a career out of mediocre comedies, and he doesn't seem to possess the skill to convincingly juggle the facts with any resemblance to character development.
The people surrounding Trumbo are a collection of biopic archetypes and Hollywood celebrities. Trumbo's relationship with his wife Cleo (Diane Lane) predictably goes from solid to strained, as the lengths he must go to in order to find work begins to take its toll. On paper, Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper seems like an Oscar in the bag, but her antagonist is painted in such broad strokes that she may as well have been called Rita Skeeter, On a positive note, the only character acting like a believable human being is Frank King, a larger-than-life B-movie producer played by John Goodman, who employs Trumbo, working under a pseudonym, to doctor his scripts. He arrives like a force of nature, breathing fresh air into a film so utterly devoid of life. For a more informative and intimate film on the subject of the genius Dalton Trumbo, check out the 2007 documentary, also called Trumbo, instead.
In 1962, the Burmese government was overthrown in a coup by the socialist military, who maintained control of the country until 2011. During this time, Burma deteriorated into poverty, while any protests or statements made against the ruling government were quickly crushed through intimidation, torture, outlandishly long jail sentences and executions. In 1988, a series of marches, rallies and protests now known as the 8888 Uprising were brought to a bloody end as the military killed 3,000 civilians in the streets.
With the media controlled by the state and a ban on any footage leaving the country, the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) has trained its journalists to work as guerrilla cameraman, working in the shadows to capture any acts of oppression or revolution. They work as a network but rarely meet, communicating using mobile phones and internet chatrooms, and frequently putting themselves at great personal risk. Being captured could mean death, with our narrator, known as 'Joshua', having his footage wiped early on by secret police and being forced into exile. Clever reconstructions of Joshua receiving updates on a new uprising now known as the Saffron Revolution, led by the Buddhist monks, forms a tense narrative.
The footage captured by the DVB is astonishing, with the action taking place right before your eyes. It is also, at times, incredibly intimate. Early on, the monks distrust the DVB, suspecting they are secret police. When the cameramen are attacked by plain-clothes military, the monks protect them and trust is immediately solidified. You are instantly swept up by the protesters elation and feel their incredible sense of hope, so it's absolutely shattering to see it all torn away. Director Anders Ostergaard weaves the footage together expertly, and the film is wholly deserving of its Best Documentary nomination at the Academy Awards in 2010 (and probably deserved to win). It's as close as you could get to being on the streets of a country under a crushing regime, and the results are frustrating and terrifying.
Directed by: Anders Østergaard
Country: Denmark/Sweden/Norway/UK/USA/Germany/Netherlands/Israel/Spain/Belgium/Canada
It isn't difficult to see why Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl caused a bit of a headache for the censors back in 1929. Even for a movie made during the Weimar Republic era, a revolutionary time for cinema when directors were consistently pushing the boundaries with controversial tales of debauchery and Germany's seedy underbelly, the themes and social insight feel unnervingly modern. Teaming up once again with his muse Louise Brooks, the Kansas-born starlet plays Thymian, the naive daughter of a wealthy pharmacist who, in the opening scene, watches their maid leave the family home in shame when Thymian's father (Josef Rovensky) gets her pregnant.
Although it's clear to the audience, Thymian is puzzled as to why the girl has left. Her father's assistant, the creepy and much older Meinert (Fritz Rasp), invites her to the pharmacy that night on the promise to tell her everything, but instead takes advantage of the young girl and gets her pregnant. When the baby arrives, Thymian refuses to reveal who the father is but her family learn the truth from her diary, and insist that the two marry to avoid damage to the family's reputation. When she refuses, Thymian's baby is taken from her and she is packed off to a reformatory watched over by the intimidating director (Andrews Engelmann) and his tyrannical wife (Valeska Gert). After rebelling against the school, Thymian and a friend escape and join a brothel,
Like many films made during the Weimar era, Diary of a Lost Girl depicts the decay in almost every aspect of German society at the time. The lives of the rich are stripped bare, and their motivations are heavily questioned when the family send Thymian away not with her 'rehabilitation' in mind, but simply to save face. The reformatory itself is a cold and bleak place, where the director's wife bangs a rhythm for the inhabitants to rigidly eat their soup too. They are less concerned with helping the girls fit back into the society that has failed them, and more about satisfying their own sadistic desires. In one particularly effective close-up, the wife seems to be achieving some sort of sexual gratification from her monstrous behaviour.
The one place Thymian feels accepted on any sort of level is the brothel, a place where she can be herself without any kind of judgement or fear of social exile. While Thymian can at times be frustratingly naive and swoonish whenever she finds herself in the arms of a man, Louise Brooks delivers a tour de force performance that helps the audience maintain sympathy for her put-upon character, even when the film is at its most melodramatic. Even though the film is now 87 years old, Brooks's acting feels completely modern. Where most silent actors switch between rigid and operatic in their performances, Brooks is naturalistic and subtle, making it clear just why Pabst was so eager to work with her again after Pandora's Box,made the same year.
'Superhero fatigue' is a phrase commonly batted around amongst critics and forum lurkers whenever a new caped crusader is unleashed into cinemas. Cries of Hollywood running out of ideas are often heard too. Despite all of this, the likes of Spider-Man, Batman and the Avengers crew have Hulk-smashed the box office for years. Most impressively, Marvel's ever-increasing 'Cinematic Universe' has been building now for 8 years and 13 films, films that occasionally claw in over a billion at the box-office. This is not down to audiences simply flocking to the promise of CGI explosions and wise-cracks, but Marvel's insistence on keeping the formula fresh.
After a few years churning out average to above-average (and one excellent in 2008's Iron Man) origin stories for the individuals that would, in 2012, reluctantly team up to become The Avengers, producer Kevin Fiege was obviously wary of wavering interests. Marvel's work since 2014, since the mediocre Thor: The Dark World in 2013, has been exceptional, placing their heroes and villains in a variety of cinematic genres. Captain America: The Winter Soldier played out like a 70's spy thriller, casting Robert Redford to reinforce the tone, Guardians of the Galaxy often felt like bizarre B-movie with a bigger budget and a more talented cast, and Ant-Man, a movie many predicted to be a disaster, was a full-on comedy, bolstered by the presence of an effortlessly charming Paul Rudd.
The latest - and by far the best - is the third and possibly final entry into the stand-alone Captain America series. Retaining The Winter Soldier's directors Anthony and Joe Russo and also much of the same tone, Civil War pits its second most popular superhero against its first, Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man. Also along for the ride is almost every other hero on the roster, along with a couple of new ones. But what makes Civil War very much a Captain America film and not The Avengers 3 is the Russo's remarkable grasp of their characters. With Bucky Barnes aka The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) back on the scene as a very wanted man, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) finds himself torn between his loyalty to an old friend and being held accountable for his superhero actions. It is the friendship between the two that remains at the heart of the film.
When Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) accidentally causes mass destruction in Lagos on a mission led by Captain America, the Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt) informs the Avengers that the United Nations are passing a bill known as the Sokovia Accords, which will see them under the control of a UN panel. Full of guilt over his balls-up with creating Ultron, Tony Stark backs the bill, as do War Machine (Don Cheadle), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Vision (Paul Bettany). With little confidence in the government, Steve opposes the bill, and is followed by Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Ant-Man. Tensions are raised higher when The Winter Soldier is accused of bombing the UN conference in Vienna and becomes a wanted man all over the world.
What makes Civil War such a gripping film is its refusal to offer any easy answers. Depending on your own political and personal views, Captain America could be the antagonist of his own movie, causing a war between friends over his blind loyalty to a friend he knows is a mass-murderer, albeit a brain-washed super soldier experiment. On the flip-side, the character Downey Jr. has now immortalised and the hero to always receive top billing could become a knee-bending traitor seeking accountability for his own irresponsible actions during the events of Age of Ultron. More likely, and more interestingly, you will come to realise that there is simply no right answer.
So it all comes down to who wins the fight. And what a fight it is. One of biggest flaws of Batman v Superman was its failure to come up with a believable scenario that would cause the good guys to beat on each other only to come to realise they are on the same side. Not only does the brawl feel organic, taking place at Leipzig airport with each character allowed more than one moment to shine, but it also refuses to offer any easy solution or a big bad for the team to unite against. The motivation and plan of the film's villain, Helmut Zemo, played with a remarkable subtlety by Daniel Bruhl, is kept a mystery until near towards the end. And just when you think you finally know where it's all heading, it side-steps you and goes in a completely different direction.
The film's biggest flaw is the introduction of Spider-Man, who is finally back in the hands of Marvel after Sony's failure to re-boot the franchise with Andrew Garfield. Played by Tom Holland, who is the best Peter Parker yet, his entry into the fold feels shoe-horned and slightly awkward. But when he is let loose during the airport fight, he damn near steals it until Ant-Man shows his new friends just what he can do. The other newbie, Black Panther aka the Wakandan T'Challa (a gravelly Chadwick Boseman), plays a bigger role than you might expect, still learning and developing into the king he will become. Above all else, Civil War is simply a blast. With such care taken with its army of characters, each getting their own arc, its easy to become emotionally invested. So when Cap and Iron Man really get down to business, it becomes unbearable to think that one of them may not walk away. Bravo, Marvel and the Russo's.
It is evident for around 5 minutes of Gavin Hood's disastrous X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) that Fox were onto something with their casting of Ryan Reynolds as the gobby mercenary Wade Wilson aka Deadpool. That was until he had his mouth sown together and turned into a super weapon before he could resemble anything like the character who had garnered a legion of loyal readers in Marvel's comic-book world. Talks of a reboot were in the air even since, and despite Reynolds' public support of the movie and obvious fan anticipation, it felt like it would never happen.
With Fox now piecing their beloved and highly lucrative franchise back together following Days of Future Past's re-setting of the timeline (deleting Hood's movie and Brett Ratner atrocious X-Men: The Last Stand in the process), the 'Merc with a Mouth' finally arrived to glowing reviews, fan adoration, and a box-office taking that was beyond anyone's expectations. The early trailers teased that the character would be at his foul-mouthed, sarcastic best, and although Deadpool is set firmly within the same universe as Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, it certainly doesn't follow the same rules.
Deadpool is all about Deadpool, and so the plot can be summed up within the same sentence. The climax essentially plays out throughout the entire movie, with Ryan Reynolds' already-suited-up hero ambushing a gang of bad guys on a freeway and taking them out in various gruesome ways. We flash back to his time working as muscle-for-hire in New York, where he meets escort Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) at a bar and the two fall in love. Wade soon learns he has aggressive cancer, and, without Vanessa's knowledge, volunteers for an experimental treatment that he soon learns consists of torture at the hands of Ajax (Ed Skrein), who hopes to awaken latent mutant genes in his subjects. He escapes the lab with the ability to heal but permanently disfigured, with a plan to take revenge and win back Vanessa.
A lot of Deadpool's success has been put down to its R rating, and the film certainly flaunts its freedom to make dick jokes and kill its characters in a variety of gruesome ways. While this may be the case to some degree, it seems that people forget Deadpool is, most importantly, offering something different in an already-overcrowded superhero market. While the filthy sense of humour does grate at times, especially whenever Wade's friend Weasel (T.J. Miller) is on screen, Deadpool is anything but the traditional brooding superhero with the weight of the world on their shoulders, he is selfish and self-absorbed yet motivated by his love for Vanessa, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall and informing us that he is fully aware of his role in the movie. When he is dragged by X-Men Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) to Professor X's mansion, he wonders whether it will be Patrick Stewart or James McAvoy awaiting him.
But the low-key approach, although refreshing, also shrinks the movie. The fragmented narrative offers a slightly new take on the origin movie, but take this away and the film still falls into the same genre trappings. There's the love interest, the life-changing experiment, the forgettable bad guy - all tropes covered in a hundred films before it. So without an enticing plot to sink the teeth into, a lot falls on the charisma of Reynolds as a character intended to provoke a strong reaction. Thankfully, Reynolds gives his best performance, a role worthy of his natural screen presence and slightly idiosyncratic delivery. Whether the humour is for you or not (it certainly made me laugh out loud throughout), you have to admire director Tim Miller's belief in such a risky project, and it will hopefully open the gates to the possibility of more adult superhero movies in a genre always in need of fresh input.
In 1987, Clive Barker brought to the cinema screen a vision of horror and degradation that was tightly wound around a fascinating mythology of sadomasochistic demons from another world who questioned our own desire for the ultimate pleasure. It is no understatement to say Hellraiser changed horror, and its inspiration is still clear to see in modern horror, although none I've seen possess the ability to truly get under your skin (but thankfully not rip it apart) as Barker's film does. A franchise always beckoned and its first sequel, Hellbound, tried to develop its universe further but ended up a good-looking mess.
Hell on Earth signalled the series' rapid decline in quality and imagination. Ambitious young reporter Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell) is searching for that one big story to help project her career forward. While she wraps up a dull story at a hospital, a man covered in blood with metal chains protruding from his body held up by an unseen entity is rushed in, and is brutally ripped apart just as he is placed on the operating table. Knowing this could be her big break, she tracks down the woman who fled the hospital, Terri (Paula Marshall), and discovers her at a club ran by a slimeball named J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt), who has recently purchased a stone pillar possessing the trapped soul of Cenobite Pinhead (Doug Bradley).
Hellbound, for all its flaws, at least attempted to further establish the mythology, giving us glimpses of Pinhead before he opened the lament configuration. Although Pinhead appears in his human form, dressed in World War I attire, we learn little about his history, and combined with the horror icon's inexplicable new found love of quips and shouting, Hell on Earth feels completely disconnected from the films that came before. It's also cheap-looking, in particular a scene which sees Joey fleeing from Pinhead and his fresh-out-the-oven new Cenobite recruits is badly edited, consisting of feeble explosions while the unconvincing Farrell screams repeatedly. Surely an embarrassment for Barker, Hell on Earth contorted the idea of a visionary into money-grubbing franchise.
When taking into account the reputation of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick as one of the Great American Novels, it is surprising that so few directors have taken it upon themselves to adapt the epic tale of man against nature. The most famous and well-respected is John Huston's 1956 effort that starred Gregory Peck as the obsessed Captain Ahab and, dismissing the few straight-to-DVD efforts and TV movies over the past few years, it is really the only one of note. Ron Howard has also decided to side-step Melville's tricky beast in favour of the true story that inspired it, the sinking of the whaling ship Essex.
Almost as if Howard was afraid that the sight of a group of battered, starving sailors drifting would be too boring for the audience to stomach for two hours, the story begins with Melville himself (played by Ben Whishaw) paying a visit to the only remaining survivor of the Essex's doomed voyage, Thomas Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson). After a bit of nagging from his wife (Michelle Fairley) and the promise of whiskey, Nickerson soon begins spilling the tale he has kept bottled up for years, and reveals that it is not just a story of a giant, extremely peeved-off whale, but that of two men - first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) and captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker).
The men sitting behind the desks at the Nantucket whaling company view Chase, despite his impressive record at collecting whale oil, as a 'landsman' - someone born outside of the vast whaling family. Pollard is inexperienced and envious of Chase's reputation and popularity, and there personalities soon clash. Most is viewed through the eyes of the young Nickerson (played by Tom Holland, the new Spider-Man), and just when the two potential father figures reach a mutual understanding and finally discover whales after months at sea, they are rammed by a giant sperm whale and left hundreds of miles from shore with limited food, water and supplies.
You would think that a story so packed with sea-faring adventure and the promise of an unknown monster lurking beneath the surface would be effortlessly thrilling, but sadly In the Heart of the Sea is not. While certainly an overrated director, Ron Howard has made exciting films before, but here the action is so laced with obvious CGI that it makes it impossible to truly engage with the action. The film actually works best during its quieter moments. While peppered with survival-movie cliches and sluggish character development, its well-performed by the (mostly British) cast, particularly Walker, whose character arc pleasantly surprised me, and Holland, who is surely destined to be a star in the future. Still, we wait patiently for the film that does Meville, or the story behind his greatest work, justice.
I knew little to nothing about the 'mods' and 'rockers' of Swinging Sixties London and the fierce rivalry that bristled between them before going into the film, but Quadrophenia, Franc Roddam's film based on The Who's rock opera of the same name, completely immerses the viewer in their world. The images I tend to conjure of this important era in Britain's history is that of The Beatles running from a screaming crowd of ecstatic girls in A Hard Day's Night (1964). While Richard Lester's film has the fortune of being made at the time this movement was thriving, it's light-hearted fare, albeit a terrific one.
Quadrophenia doesn't pull its punches, and portrays the mods, in particular the young, alienated Jimmy (Phil Daniels) in all of their rough-and-tumble, amphetamine-popping glory. Adorned in the latest fashion and riding around London on his customised scooter, Jimmy funds his lifestyle by begrudgingly working as a post room boy for the kind of stiff-upper-lipped types he loathes. Outside of his job, he is a living nightmare for his parents, constantly out all hours listening to rock music with his friends and popping blue uppers to keep him on edge.
He is romantically invested in Steph (Leslie Ash), who is currently involved with another chap, but after he does finally sleep with her, he discovers that the experience didn't have the same lasting effect it did on him. Jimmy also learns that his friend Kevin (Ray Winstone), fresh out of the army, is a rocker and therefore an enemy. A sense of alienation builds inside of the protagonist, with only the sense of belonging within the gang and cheap drugs to help drag him through his depression. It all builds up to a visit to Brighton where, along with super-cool mod Ace Face (Sting), meet up for a huge brawl with a gang of rockers.
Backed by a terrific soundtrack from The Who, Quadrophenia recreates a fashion craze now long-gone, and does so convincingly with a real sense of time and place. Jimmy and his gang are all working-class, slumping through dead-end jobs to fund their lifestyle in spite of their humble upbringings, infusing the film with a sense of social-awareness. The group show no desire whatsoever to fit in the social structure of a society they feel is unfair, with Jimmy in particular feeling left hung out to dry. But the most impressive aspect of the film is the young Phil Daniels as the raging tearaway whose character often treads dangerously close to being plain loathsome. He plays the role with an irresistible charm and swagger that make him entirely sympathetic. An underrated cult gem.
At a camp in the woods for gifted youngsters, a group of senior counsellors sit around a fire telling spooky stories. Max (Frederick Neumann), the eldest head counsellor, recalls the urban myth of Madman Marz, a notorious local drunk and brute, who butchered his family one night with an axe not too far from where the camp now lies. The locals hanged him from a tree and left his body for the crows, only to return the next day to find an empty noose. He will re-emerge if his name is spoken, and so cocky youngster Richie (Tom Candela) takes the bait and challenges Marz to show himself. As the various couples break off into the night in the hope of sex and fun, Richie notices a shadow in the woods and stays behind to investigate. Meanwhile, a hulk of a man starts to bump off the teens.
The slasher genre produced a seemingly endless list of badly executed sex-and-murder-in-the-woods movies during the 1980s, all following a set formula, usually suffering from minimal cash injection and often made by directors never heard from again. As trashy as the majority of these movies tend to be, there's a morbid comfort to be had in their predictability, especially amongst horror fans. Just why I keep returning to the genre I know will ultimately disappoint is a question I asked myself at various points as I watched Joe Giannone's Madman, despite the film being one of the genre's better offerings, at least aesthetically speaking.
Shadowy lighting and a subtle use of music to announce the arrival of Marz help the film drum up some atmospheric set-pieces, and a few gory moments offer the desired amount of blood and just a little in way of invention. But these highlights are too fleeting, and for the most part we are made to suffer through terrible dialogue, sex scenes filmed like soft-porn, and some utterly atrocious acting from its young cast. The main group of characters are even more annoying than those commonly found in these types of movies, especially T.P. (Tony Fish), a grating douchebag with a belt buckle displaying his nickname. In order to flesh out the running time, characters are forced to repeatedly make stupid decisions so they can wander endlessly through the woods in search of each other. For slasher enthusiasts only.
When I first saw Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men 10 years ago, I loved it for its kinetic action and terrifying vision of a world devoid of newborns, made to feel closer to home by the fact that it was set in England. The grim near-future it depicted (set in 2027) felt authentic, with the lack of flying cars, fancy gadgets and futuristic fashion sense making for a more grounded experience. But it felt a world away. Ten years on, the film's unglamorous and sobering scenes of terrorism and refugee overcrowding takes on a whole new level of prescience. Switch on the news now and chances are you'll see footage similar to the grey landscape of Children of Men.
Activist turned paper-pusher Theo (Clive Owen) cynically drinks away his days, with the United Kingdom now one of the few safe havens left in the world, albeit a police state struggling to cope with the influx of migrants. He is kidnapped by militant group the Fishes, led by Theo's former lover Julian (Julianne Moore), and is forced to use his influence within the government to acquire transit papers for a young immigrant named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey). With the Fishes' motivations somewhat unclear and divided, Theo flees with Kee and nurse Miriam (Pam Ferris) through hostile terrain in the hope of delivering her to a group dedicated to curing infertility.
Politics and social awareness aside, the action more than holds up to today's standards, with three-Oscars-in-a-row cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's long takes and swirling camera still managing to take the breath away. In the films best sequence, Theo, Julian, Kee and Fishes muscle Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are subject to a surprise attack by an armed gang. Action nowadays tends to be edit-heavy with a hand-held camera blurring the proceedings, but Lubezki's fluid camerawork captures the immediacy of the situation while maintaining clarity. Mixing special effects and breathtaking choreography, it's a moment that terrifies, excites and shocks all at once. It is a technique that innovates without feeling gimmicky.
On a deeper note, Children of Men is not just a tale of caution, but also a study of what humanity desires of their children. Here, without children there is no hope. The youngest boy in the world has been stabbed to death, and the world has fallen into complete chaos with the sudden emergence of infertility. While some parents may view their children as an extension of their bloodline and a way to live on after death, some see them as the next generation with an opportunity to affect the world they will inherit. This sentiment is etched on Theo's face when Kee reveals her secret and his task becomes clear. As Theo, Owen proves why he was such a solid leading man for a brief time before retreating from the spotlight, and is backed by an subtly intimidating Ejiofor and a comic-relief Michael Caine as political cartoonist turned pot-grower Jasper. The real stars, however, are Cuaron and Lubezki, who have crafted a nightmarish vision that is both terrifyingly plausible and uncomfortably gripping.
Grumpy and socially awkward Captain Ashland (Kennedy) is making his final voyage, transporting a ship full of dull socialites and holiday-makers around while his second-in-command Trevor Marshall (Crenna) waits patiently to take the reigns. When their ship is suddenly struck by a ghostly black freighter that blurts out warning messages in German, only a few survivors escape with their lives, drifting out to sea and eventually finding themselves on board the mysterious vessel. The group find nobody alive on board, and when the annoying lounge act Jackie (a young Saul Rubinek) is seemingly drowned by supernatural forces, it quickly becomes apparent that this is no ordinary ship.
