Fede Álvarez directs Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez and Jessica Lucas in this terror and gore orientated reboot of the Evil Dead saga.
Not a perfect film but far better than it had any right to be. There’s a sincerity and lack of smoothness here that is really laudable. Whether doomed, possessed or resurrected, final girl Jane Levy is excellent. So much so that the middle act stalls when she is locked in the fruit cellar and the other four non-entities are killed off. If you came to see a new spin on the classic iconography and a man slip up on his girlfriend’s severed cheek, you’ll leave pummelled but contented. One of the classiest full-on bloodfests of the past decade.
Peter Hyams directs Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne and Robin Tunney in this demonic action thriller where a security specialist finds he is the only thing that stands between an innocent girl and a horny Satan.
An unsuspected issue of the 1990s was Arnie, the popular and behemoth superstar, struggled to find antagonists worthy of his stature. He’d taken on and killed intergalactic warriors, super upgraded terminators and the planet Mars at the height of his powers… the litany of British character actors playing drug lords and terrorists who followed didn’t really cut the mustard. So when Arnie Vs. The Devil Himself was mooted you can see why appetites on all sides of the projection booth might be whetted. Borrowing its aesthetic from Fincher’s Se7en and its mythology from the Bible (not really… Richard Donner’s The Omen is the true gospel here) End of Days is a fascinating lurch into horror for Arnie. The plot itself follows the pattern of Arnie’s biggest hit, T2, almost fanatically. Morally dubious killing machine finds his humanity so he can protect an innocent who is prophesied to be a key player in an impending apocalypse. The one overlooked element from the superior chase film is the near relentless action. Hyams (who joined the project just at it started shooting) loses sight of why we buy a ticket for one of these mega budgeted rollercoasters. The first seventy minutes only has one action sequence of note – Schwarzenegger dangling from a helicopter over Wall Street, fishing for a fleeing sniper like a mechanical claw hunting a cuddly prize. After that, the film gets lost in papal conspiracy, kinky bad behaviour from Gab Byrne’s sleazy Lucifer and the occasional jolt of body horror. The slambang eve of the millennium finale does eventually deliver the promised gunfire and pyrotechnics, some of the CGI holds up better than I remembered. Not anybody involved’s finest hour but it fills a Saturday night loudly and gives its beloved star a slightly meatier, more serious character to humanise his ass kicking with. Fine.
Luis Buñuel directs Georges Marchal, Simone Signoret and Michel Piccoli in this adventure movie where, after a revolt, the citizens of a mining town in South America go on the run in the jungle.
The biggest surprise about Buñuel Technicolor drama? What a solid traditional action movie it is. Very much in the spirit of Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Hitchcock’s Lifeboat or Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. The first act establishes the characters as they snooker themselves into being hounded by the corrupt military and experience a violent revolution first hand. Then we are lost in the jungle and those well defined types destroy themselves – their beliefs and their sins – in an unforgiving green inferno. Here Buñuel indulges in his expected surrealism; a mute girl’s hair entangled in the vines, a snake’s meat writhing under the duress of an army of ants, Signoret’s fallen woman emerging from the overgrowth in full glamorous evening gown. It starts off like a dirty joke… “A priest, a whore and a cowboy get lost in the jungle…”…. and ends like the book of Genesis. The two purest survivors leaving the Garden of Eden, no longer innocent but knowledgeable of a better life.
Ben Young directs Emma Booth, Ashleigh Cummings and Stephen Curry in this based on a true story chiller about an Australian couple who kidnap, rape and kill schoolgirls in their suburban home.
Opens with a fantastic shot: our ordinary looking predators spying on a playground netball game, the shadow of a hand caressing and oppressing the teen’s unsuspecting body. Hounds of Love is full of neat visual moments but you realise after an onslaught of showy overused tics like slow-mo or cross cutting that there’s not much else to it. Young is so fascinated in making his warped pair of nasties’ incongruous existence among the everyday look artful that he neglects plotting and set pieces. You could say this is a child of Cinema Du Look first, a character study second and an entertainment distant third. As a thriller it is only fascinated by taking a leering look at the distress, paranoia and self pity of its killers and current victim. The sexual violence is implied rather than shown, you are never sure whether the wife (a standout Emma Booth) was once tied to that bed and is equally terrified of being disposed of… or is the worst of the monsters, jealously indulging her violent little man’s perversions? We take a long, hard, often painterly look at evil but for very few traditional thrills.
Chloé Zhao directs John Reddy, Jashaun St. John and Irene Bedard in this coming of age drama following two Native American siblings growing up on a modern reservation.
Unspectacular debut that roughly sketches Zhao’s continued strengths and interests in frontier communities, loner’s intimacy and diminishing freedoms. Not a bad insight but struggles to hold the attention at a feature length.
Michael Caton-Jones directs Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Ellen Barkin in this period adaptation of Tobias Wolff’s memoir of his bullying stepfather in the 1950s.
Time hop! If you can get past the jarring shock of DiCaprio looking simultaneously like a baby and somehow exactly as he does now as a middle aged man then there is a solid drama here. The acting is uniformly excellent, the period detail handsome but I don’t think it is unfair to say an answer song movie could probably be made about Dwight… the single father who tries to teach his rebellious stepson the values of responsibility, scouting and respect. Both child and petulant petty adult seem like particularly hard work to live with.
Steve Rash directs Patrick Dempsey, Amanda Peterson and Courtney Gains in this teen romantic comedy where a geek hires the head cheerleader as his girlfriend for the month in the hope of boosting his popularity.
The original title of this was Boy Rents Girl. They may have changed the tasteless name but they can’t change the yucky vibe. The pacing is off, with the charmless Dempsey becoming the near sole focus of the film in the second half. Very hard to care about his eventual rejection by the other obnoxious airheads… and the last minute reconciliation with Peterson’s hottie feels hollow and unearned.
David Lynch directs Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper in this psychosexual mystery where a college boy returns home to find a severed ear, a distressed chanteuse and whole lot of nightmare beyond his white picket fence.
That’s a font for a title credit. Sexy cursive. What’s under that lawn? Decay, turmoil, writhing. Mr Beaumont Snr. is fucked up in his neck brace. We’re In! Are we? We dawdle in wasteland and zoom into an ear. Whose rotten detached headspace are we entering? The hospital and hardware store scenes seem superfluous. I guess Jeffrey needs to take the place of his father and that needs to feel mundane, ugly and distasteful. Detective John Williams: the open cop. Enter the dame 1: hard to think of Laura Dern as the good girl now but she’s as pure as a glass of milk here. A real Nancy Drew / Hayley Mills. Kyle MacLachlan’s dorky chicken walk. How many bobbysoxers did teenage Lynch woo with that move? Date at The Slow Club. Enter the dame 2: Isabella Rossellini is off the chain brave in this. After getting her ‘goddess of the stage’ introduction she is stripped, abused, frantic, bruised, vulnerable, catatonic. You never know what this Dorothy Vallens is going to do next. It is an unhinged, gut driven piece of screen acting that deserves more recognition. Obviously your more bombastic nasty lunatics (Hopper, Stockwell) obscure what Rossellini achieves here but…
The dark side of town. Four honks unheard. Sneaking a peek! This sequence feels like it goes on forever. Caught! Dorothy gets to be in charge for a little while. “Baby wants to fuck Blue Velvet!” The scissors, the gas inhaler… what are we watching, Jeffrey Beaumont? Who is Frank? One of cinema’s most unfathomable but bleakly funny villains… well played Dennis. Jeffrey can’t resist going back. “Hit me!” Joyride with the neighbour. Beer brand disagreement – PBR is endorsed, I’m guessing no product placement payola changed hands on this one though. Off to Sauve Ben’s cathouse. Al from Quantum Leap lost on downers, covered in pancake slap, ready to gut punch you. A heartfelt reunion behind closed doors – non-sexualised Dorothy ain’t for our eyes. Candy Coloured Clown. Work Light Karaoke. “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” Teleporting jump cut. Skanky car roof dancing. “Don’t be a good neighbour to her. I’ll send you a love letter straight from my fucking heart!” If I ever made a movie, I wish I could replicate just a tenth of the unease and unpredictability Lynch conjures in this middle act.
Shell shocked Kyle MacLachlan sitting on a bed trying to process his yen for a beautiful but distressed woman being raped by a baby and a daddy… Is he to a Frank? Full of dark desires and posing as a “well dressed man”?… Or a little boy who saw his parents at it and is warped for life by the lusts it defined in him? “Who’s that? Is that your mother?” the jocks ask as they are about to kick our hero’s face in and a naked woman appears distraught and wailing. I’m sure David has his own deeper interpretations of all the mysteries and visual clues. He always does, the tight lipped genius. Poor Sandy’s heart is broken. Police raid. Back in the apartment where the nasty always happens… a set design dry run for The Black Lodge. You can see the rough sketch of Twin Peaks in pretty much every authorial choice here. This room is where your sexual desires become nightmarish reality. Dirty cop still buzzing up right, nothing but electrified muscles. Walkie talkie con job. Really fantastic small scale denouement, other thrillers take note… Lynch can do the genre basics too! Shitty robot bird. Not even the shape of a robin. But all that squirming turmoil is mastered in its beak. “It’s a strange world.”
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro direct Dominique Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Marie-Laure Dougnac in this post-apocalyptic romantic comedy where the quirky residents of a Parisian apartment building await the latest janitor to be murdered and served up as their weekly sustenance.
An eye-popping mash-up of Gilliam-esque excess and Chaplin inspired slapstick. It loses the plot by the end but that ensemble manages to be more ornate and garish than the impressive fantasy production design. Cannibalism, suicide and troglodytes abound but its pure heart is always reassuringly in the right place. A unique treat for visualists and vegetarians.
Peter Watkins directs Katherine Quittner, Carmen Argenziano and Gladys Golden in the mockumentary about the US government sanctioned torture and murder of dissidents in a desert assault course.
Don’t ever choose Punishment Park! Yet that’s the choice for the draft dodgers, folk singers, social activists, drop outs, pacifists and Black Panthers in Peter Watkins’ gruelling but unsensational vision of American fascism. It is a fantasy, an alternative US, 1971 in a different reality. It could be the start of the timeline we follow in Alan Moore’s Watchmen where Watergate had no effect, Vietnam was a “success” and Nixon enjoyed a perpetual presidency. But is this Land of the Free under the thrall of background fascism so much more different than how the conservative majority dealt with the youth who didn’t play ball, spoke out and fought back? Is it too strong of an embellishment after the National Guard opened fired on student campuses indiscriminately, the kangaroo courts of Bobby Seale and Abbie Hoffman, and those hippies forced into having their buzz cuts by thugs outside Disneyworld? Punishment Park explores, references and recreates all these true life injustices finessing them into a nightmarish escalation. We follow two groups: one almost voiceless and nameless enduring the desert. The other – the next batch being processed and trialed before given their options. The accused enter a tent, are given a pointless chance to defend their politics (the improvised testimonies are sensitive and compelling) to a jeering, uncaring panel. And then they are given that choice… a life sentence in a penitentiary or a two day challenge to complete a punishment park. A futile trek through an arid desert, pursued by cops who will violently detain you. If you somehow outrun them, survive, reach the flag (the America they are seen as rejecting) then you no longer have to serve the prison sentence. But the cops and soldiers aren’t dehydrated, have vehicles, weapons, shelter… of course they are going to catch you. And with your one chance at freedom cruelly snatched from you, of course you are going to resist or run… allowing the pigs carte blanche to deal with you violently. A cunt’s trick. A cruel con. But isn’t that the American Dream summed up? You can get there if you strive hard enough, only those protected by the state stand between you and your freedoms… Freedom is always tantalisingly out of reach. Makes The Hunger Games and Battle Royale seem like juvenile cartoons in its grim, didactic and queerly mundane persuasiveness. The movie ends with the few survivors being carted off to the prison sentence they strove to avoid, and the next batch leaving the last vestiges of society to face the same dehumanisation. The international documentary crew stands helpless, like us, they feel complicit.
