Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

A young man wakes on a bench in a pedestrian square in the middle of an unnamed continental European city, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Before he can make any sense of his predicament, a group of four sharp-suited and white-masked assassins close in on him and shoot him dead. But he immediately wakes on the same bench, alive once more and back at the beginning of the same life-threatening scenario. Trying to control an overwhelming sense of panic and confusion, the murder victim struggles to make sense of what is happening to him and looks for a way to break the repeating cycle.

While Hollywood’s production factories continue to pump out a never-ending supply of mega-buck formulaic sci-fi, it is in the work of the micro-budget European indie fringe that many of the more interesting and experimental genre work continues to be found. Incarnation (Inkarnacija to give it its original title) is an excellent example of a group of filmmakers’ determination to produce a different sort of fantasy thriller with a sensibility and identity all its own.

The film is the debut feature of Serbian writer-director Filip Kovačević, much of it shot in central Belgrade (seemingly amidst the hubbub of unsuspecting shoppers and tourists).

It’s all but impossible to describe how the plot of Incarnation unfolds without spoiling the enjoyment that comes from the viewer sharing the main protagonist’s bewilderment at the inexplicable position he finds himself in. But what it is safe to reveal is that the writers are determined to keep the audience guessing for as long as possible, and not surrender to the expectations of the multiplex for immediate gratification and easy explanations. This is a story shaped by paranoia, existential angst and disconcerting shifts in perception. Kovačević wants the audience to embrace the uncertainty and go with it, as a series of bizarre clues and strange encounters suggest possible explanations for the man’s murderous conundrum.

The result is a movie that is intriguing, sometimes baffling, but rarely predictable. Combined with some excellent set design, first-rate cinematography by Uros Milutinovic (who likes to film the many chase sequences from amidst the runners) and well chosen and eerie locations all enhance the film’s sense of style.

In the lead role of the hunted man, Djordjevic delivers the right mix of distress and determination, but this is a film driven more by the realisation of an idea than by performance. Kovačević maintains an unsettling dreamlike atmosphere throughout, contrasting the everyday normality of the main urban setting with the victim’s disconnection from the world around him – as he tries time and again to escape his fate.

As the story relocates to the barren countryside beyond the city limits, the film moves towards its most surreal moments before some surprising hidden truths are uncovered in the final act, back on the main streets.

Not every plot thread is tied up in the film’s finale, and much is left open to audience interpretation – which may irritate some viewers. But Incarnation is the kind of intelligent, confident European genre filmmaking that rewards the attention it demands.

INCARNATION / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: FILIP KOVAČEVIĆ / SCREENPLAY: FILIP KOVAČEVIĆ, MASA SENICIC, IVAN STANCIC / STARRING: STOJAN DJORDJEVIC, DACA VIDOSAVLJEVIC, STEN ZENDOR / RELEASE: OUT NOW

Adapted from the somewhat basic 1989 Cinemaware video game, It Came From the Desert was shot in Spain by German-based Finnish Syfy director Marko Mäkilaakso on a budget of around $1m, with a cast of mostly English actors playing Americans, and is updated from the original’s rather pertinent 1951 setting to the present day.

With a title like that, there’s little doubt what kind of movie this is going to be. The question is, does it live up to those sixty-year-old b-movies it’s trying so hard to evoke?

Mostly, yes. The plot concerns a kegger party in the desert which brothers Lukas and Brian are planning to attend, aiming to win a motocross challenge that’s the main attraction. Brian (Smith) is the shy, brainy one, with a thing for local girl Lisa (Grasse), who the dumb, cocky Lukas (Mills) invites along. Lisa proves rather popular, so Brian huffs himself off into the wilderness, discovering a secret underground base where Dr. Renard (Arnold) has been breeding giant alcohol-guzzling ants, having spliced their DNA with that of the occupants of an alien spaceship which crashed in the area some decades earlier.

You can probably tell this doesn’t take itself remotely seriously, which is not to say the filmmakers are slacking in bringing it to the screen. The script ignores any shortfall in the budget and knowingly – without dwelling overmuch on the references – embraces as many of the clichés of the genre as it realistically can, although it might have been funnier (the sight of a twenty-foot tall ant guzzling from a can of root beer is quite striking, mind you). And the effects are more ubiquitous and rather better than you’d expect, given how much money Mäkilaakso and his team had to play with. You’re never under any mis-illusions about their quality, but it’s easy enough to forgive them and suspend your disbelief, given how much fun everyone seems to be having throwing all this together – and the location is well-chosen.

The success of this is down to the acting and the characters, though, and that’s a little bit of a mixed bag. The three leads are consistent and likeable enough to sell every questionable decision their characters make, and their accents are pretty good too; Grasse especially feels like a star in the making. But it’s hard to believe in such simple archetypes.

This isn’t especially ‘good’, and by setting its sights no higher than to pastiche the films it’s aping (as much Aliens as Them!) it falls short of being in any way meaningful. Nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable enough waste of time if your bar is appropriately low, and the characters will just about get you over the finishing line.

Extras: Trailer / VFX Breakdown

IT CAME FROM THE DESERT / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: MARKO MÄKILAAKSO / SCREENPLAY: MARKO MÄKILAAKSO, TRENT HAAGA, HANK WOON Jr. / STARRING: HARRY LISTER SMITH, VANESSA GRASSE, ALEX MILLS, MARK ARNOLD / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 25TH

Someone, somewhere must get a kick out of pittance-budget historical action dramas in which him off the telly, you know he’s in that thing we watch, a few hopefuls just out of acting school and a handful of extras trudge around the English countryside (although, in fairness, this time it’s Welsh countryside) caked in mud and pretending to fight one another. Now and again they shout “Arrrrghhh” and swing Poundworld plastic axes around their heads. If you count yourself in this elite band of the easily pleased, The Lost Viking is just for you and we really hope you have an enjoyable hundred minutes in its company.

A family of Viking ne’er-do-wells come ashore on the Welsh coast in olden days and no sooner have they set up their beach barbecue than they’re attacked by a vicious rival gang led by Wyman (Ross O’Hennessy who’s been in Game of Thrones, apparently) and young buck Vitharr (Dean Ridge who has previously starred on TV’s Vikings and who, we’d imagine, must be worrying a little about typecasting) can only watch helplessly as his entire family is brutally slain. Vitharr flees for his life, Wyman and his heavies in hot pursuit. Vitharr tries to fight back and, after being befriended by a friendly religious hermit, he falls into the clutches of tuppence-ha’penny Roman Centurion Cassis Dominus (James Groom) who has set up an amphitheatre (it’s marginally larger than the average garden feature) in which he forces his ragged prisoners to engage in fairly timid and not-entirely convincing combat… to the death! Unsurprisingly, Vitharr rises through the ranks, dispatching all comers, chumming up with the feisty Herja (Kezia Burrows) as he manoeuvres himself into position to exact his revenge upon the man who destroyed his family.  Hang on, Romans and Vikings??? Oh, well, suspension of disbelief and all that…

The Lost Viking isn’t actually as terrible as we might have feared – which is not to suggest for a moment that it’s in any way a particularly worthwhile use of your time. Some low budget, ambitious movies can use their tiny resources to their advantage but The Lost Viking, despite its competent use of wild and windswept Welsh locations, wears its lack of cash on its grubby sleeve. Admittedly, it’s a fairly low-key story but it still feels small – the amphitheatre sequences just look feeble, fights are lively but never gritty enough and scenes in Wyman’s encampment are realised, a little embarrassingly, by throwing a few white bedsheets over a frame and hoping for the best. On the plus side, the lead performances are gutsy and the script has an earnestness which does its best to paper over the cracks but the film’s dour tone quickly becomes wearing and there’s precious little in the narrative to justify its generous running time.

If you really can’t get enough of raging, pillaging Norsemen and tepid fight scenes, The Lost Viking will probably be your cup of mead. Anyone else might want to turn their longship in another direction and seek out something a bit more entertaining.

THE LOST VIKING / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: EMMET CUMMINS / SCREENPLAY: EMMET CUMMINS, DAVID SHILLITOE / STARRING: DEAN RIDGE, ROSS O’HENNESSY, KEZIA BURROWS, JAMES GROOM / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

While he’s sadly no longer with us, the legacy of Wes Craven in the horror genre and filmmaking as a whole still lives on. But back before Craven solidified himself as an all-time great, 1972 saw him put out his debut picture, The Last House on the Left. A movie overflowing with controversy, Last House has now been given a crammed new release courtesy of the brilliant folks at Arrow Video. Is this release worth your time, though, or does this particular road lead to nowhere?

For those unfamiliar with The Last House on the Left, the movie opens with young Mari (Sandra Cassell) celebrating her seventeenth birthday. Despite her parents concerns about her heading to the big city for a rock concert, she’s soon on her way to said gig with her BFF Phyllis (Lucy Grantham). Like so many youngsters in such movies of the day, the pair were soon on the hunt to find some marijuana to assist with their pre-gig partying. Before they know it, they end up at the mercy of a bunch of recently-released cons lead by David Hess’ Krug. What follows is notoriously brutal for its time, with Krug and his crew torturing, sexually abusing, and ultimately murdering the two girls. From there, we see a tale of brutal revenge come to the fore.

To give any further plot details would veer a little too much in to spoiler territory, but there’s a good chance you’ll have seen the 1972 effort already and be fully aware of what lies around the corner for Krug and Co. What will have you weighing up purchasing this new release, then, will be what makes it stand out from the earlier releases of Craven’s feature film debut. On that front, we have three different cuts of the movie included here, all with a 2K restoration that certainly helps to clean up a film that’s now 46 years old. There’s the uncut version, the R-rated version, and the infamous “Krug & Company” cut of the picture here, with that third cut being the most intriguing in how it actually slightly tweaks the known narrative a little.

The fact that this new release of The Last House on the Left is contained over two Blu-ray discs should give you an idea of just how much bonus material is included. Having three differing cuts of the movie itself is impressive, but there’s a jaw-dropping amount of extra content here. In fairness, a lot of this is archival, likely due to key players such as Wes Craven, David Hess, and Fred Lincoln sadly no longer being with us, but the archival material still gives a fascinating glimpse at a picture that was thrown in to the video nasties bin at one point in time. For longtime fans of Last House, it’s the new material that will be what has your eye, with The Craven Touch being the standout new addition here. And in fairness to genre podcasters Bill Ackerman and Amanda Reyes, they do a great job looking back at The Last House on the Left and its legacy during their audio commentary.

The Last House on the Left is still a tough watch, although fresh eyes to this film will maybe not find it quite as unrelenting and as upsetting by modern standards. That doesn’t mean to say that all of a sudden Krug and his gang are now angelical in contrast to the horrors that have followed in the subsequent decades, but more that the notorious reputation afforded to The Last House may be diluted by this point in the game should you have not seen the film before.

Is this Wes Craven’s finest hour? Absolutely not. What it is, though, is a first look at Craven’s masterful eye for social commentary on such a stage, with The Last House on the Left purposely designed to showcase horrific acts of violence and abuse as Craven’s response to the very real events of the Vietnam War. The legendary Craven believed that the constant refusal to show the exact details of brutality on the cinema screen had a numbing effect of sorts on what had gone on in Vietnam. Last House was his response to that, showing the brutal, unforgiving reality of life.

For Craven completists and longtime fans of The Last House on the Left, this release will be an absolute must-have. For those who have yet to see Last House or have often been put off by the reputation that hung over it for so long, this is the perfect opportunity to take in the movie without the shackles and ominous warnings of this being nothing but a trashy video nasty. The Last House on the Left is far from that, and it’s a hugely significant and relevant piece of horror history for a multitude of reasons.

Special Features: Three cuts of the film restored in 2 K / Brand new audio commentary by podcasts Bill Ackerman and Amanda Reyes / Brand new The Craven Touch featurette / Brand new interviews with March Sheffler and make-up artist Anne Paul / Never-been-seen Songs in the Key of Krug interview with David Hess / Two archival audio commentaries / Two archival documentaries / Archival interviews with Wes Craven and David Hess / Three archival featurettes / Deleted scenes / Outtakes / Trailers / TV and radio spots / Image gallery / Six lobby card reproductions / Double-sided poster / Limited edition perfect-bound book

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: WES CRAVEN / STARRING: DAVID HESS, SANDRA CASSELL, LUCY GRANTHAM, FRED LINCOLN, JERAMIE RAIN, MARC SHEFFLER, ESTELLE COLLINGWOOD, GAYLOR ST. JAMES / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 18TH

Frankly, given how clichéd and predictable the resolutions to every mystery thrown up by David Turpin’s script for The Lodgers are, it’s something of a miracle Brian O’Malley ever procured the budget to shoot it. Fortunately, the ability to surprise (or even maintain a mystery) isn’t all there is to O’Malley’s film, and The Lodgers passes ninety minutes in a creepy enough manner to sustain the viewer’s interest even as every speculation inevitably pans out.

It’s 1920, and in a huge, neglected mansion somewhere in rural Ireland, eighteen-year-old twins Edward (Milner) and Rachel (Vega) live in terror of what might happen if they break the rules passed on by their parents before they committed mutual suicide in the lake on the grounds four years earlier. At the foot of the main staircase, a trapdoor leads to ‘below’ where water emerges to drip upwards every night at midnight, and which whispers warnings to the twins when it looks like one or other might transgress the laws of the house. These decrees are given in the form of a nursery rhyme during the opening titles, and if they’re a little prosaic they’re easy enough to understand and form the basis for both the film’s jeopardy and its solutions.

Edward, who witnessed the incident in which his parents died, has become mentally broken and has refused to set foot outside the family home ever since, whereas Rachel, seven minutes Edward’s elder, on an occasional trip to pick up supplies from the local village encounters Sean (Simon), a veteran of the recent Great War who fought on the side of the English and quickly becomes captivated by the quiet, self-possessed yet mysterious young woman.

The rest of the film follows Rachel as she attempts to escape the curse that has trapped her family for generations, while simultaneously revealing the details of the spell and the provenance behind it. This latter element is a little awkwardly handled, given that Rachel rather than Sean is our identification point within the fiction, but O’Malley does show a great deal of sensitivity around and sympathy for his characters, and if their situation is overwhelmingly obvious – at least to an audience who’ve seen this kind of thing many times before – we at least care about the would-be lovers, even if the whey-faced brother is rather more difficult to like.

The half-Spanish Charlotte Vega is excellent in a breakout British role, especially considering the inherent leaps of faith she’s burdened with giving authenticity to, and in truth, there isn’t a duff performance in a bleak but beautiful, deliberately-paced and melancholy film that lacks only for a little levity. Even the inevitable ending, while signposted throughout, feels appropriate enough to satisfy.

Extras:  Trailer / Behind the Scenes / Deleted Scenes

THE LODGERS / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: BRIAN O’MALLEY / SCREENPLAY: DAVID TURPIN / STARRING: CHARLOTTE VEGA, BILL MILNER, EUGENE SIMON, DAVID BRADLEY / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 25TH

Gifted, the latest film from South Korean writer/director Jai-Hong Juhn, is an emotionally complex tale of desperation and madness in which a man’s murderous desires become harder and harder to fight.

Minsoo (Beom-June Kim) is sacked unceremoniously after eight years with his business firm, can’t find a new job, and is left by his fiancé. Struggling to make ends meet, he starts carjacking with his fiancé’s younger brother but the pressures of his newfound criminality spiral out of control, leading him down a dark, vengeful, path.

Jai-Hong’s innate compassion for his central characters makes this far more complex than simple black comedy barbarity. Jai-Hong has a reputation now for emotionally complex films and evocative approaches to macabre concepts, Gifted is no different. It would have been easy to construct a thrilling stream of murder/robberies, and there are parts of the film which operate close to black comedy with murderous montages, but it never gets there. The writing is way more focused on the emotional ramifications of murder and its effects on a person’s psyche.

One of his major talents is in playing with context. The film opens on a black screen, a man’s desperate panting evokes the idea of a chase, danger, but the reveal is tongue-in-cheek: he’s masturbating on piles of scattered cash. There are a good few set-ups like that before anything actually turns murderous. Expectations of horror frequently alienate the viewer from the realities of Gifted‘s world, often to cutting effect. Jai-Hong seems reluctant to give in to the film’s macabre side, but in the end, it means his film is a very dark, though tender, glimpse at the effects of ambition and love on a man’s soul. The final scene arguably indulges in blaming Minsoo’s wife for his desperation for money.

At its heart, Gifted is less of an American Psycho-style capitalist narrative, and more of a Falling Down type film. The stresses are huge and crime, at least theft, is presented as a victimless crime. The real issues start when those pressures, which have mounted since scene one, result in an exacerbated and depressing murder. From there, Jai-Hong doesn’t perhaps quite settle on a concrete message. Especially when some of the films best scenes are brutal murders.

In some ways it’s a film condemning capitalism at large, in others it seems to point a heavy finger towards expectant women as the catalyst for crime, which is kinda gross. All together though it can at least be earmarked as a surprisingly nihilistic dissemination of South Korean values. It’s not the sort of film you could love, but its one which could stay with you well past the credits.

GIFTED / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: JAI-HONG JUHN / STARRING; BEOM-JUN KIM, JUNGHWA BAE, YUL JEON / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Seasons 2 and 3 of Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal II have been merged here and rebranded here as a single season for this release. The plot points that were built up in the previous two seasons (or four seasons if you saw them in Japan) finally reach their conclusion.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal is not good. All the elements that have come to define the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise as a whole are here, the card game, the otherworldly threat, the lessons that the heroes learn along the way, all of it. However, these elements fail to truly come together in the way that they have in the past. Character arcs simply happen to move the plot along instead of contributing to organic character growth, the plot is somehow both underexplored and over-explained, and the emotional moments aren’t as effective as they could have been.

The big problem here comes in the form of one of the series antagonists. He is imposing enough as a villain, and the show deserves credit for a villain whose MO throughout the show is actually reflected in his duelling style, but his very presence and the way he approaches his goals undermines the message that the rest of the show seems to be striving for.

There are moments in which Zexal tries to be a series about how war pits different people against each other who have to fight for their survival despite neither being bad. It might have pulled this off but the unquestionably evil nature of Don Thousand severely undermines that. This isn’t helped by the fact that the exact nature of the threat facing the worlds involved in the series is never made explicitly clear. The characters just mention that one of them needs to be destroyed to save the other.

Similarly, the cast of characters are all likeable enough, but the show almost never capitalises on them. There are some good moments, but as a show, it is pretty forgettable.

As is typical with the release of a Yu-Gi-Oh! series there are no special features here, making this release only especially tempting for those without access to the show on a streaming platform or anyone who particularly wants to own the physical release for collection purposes.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal Season 3 Complete Collection is pretty close to the bottom of the barrel as far as its parent franchise is concerned. While it had interesting ideas behind it the show makes effective use of none of them and ends up basically going through the motions made standard by the Yu-Gi-Oh! Iterations that came before it. This release can be safely skipped, even by the most die-hard of Yu-Gi-Oh! Fans.

YU-GI-OH! ZEXAL SEASON 3 COMPLETE COLLECTION / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: ELI JAY, MARC THOMPSON, GARY LITTMAN, CHRISTOPHER KROMER, DAVID WILLS, EILEEN STEVENS / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 18TH

Geoff Murphy’s powerful and eerie 1985 apocalyptic thriller The Quiet Earth has tended to sail way under the radar of many fans of this particular storytelling subgenre. Hopefully, this handsome and sparkling new Blu-ray release from Arrow will go some way towards encouraging not only its existing admirers to revisit it but for it to find favour with audiences who might never have sampled its unsettling and occasionally metaphysical charms before.

The late Bruno Lawrence plays New Zealand scientist Zac Hobson who wakes one morning to find – in the traditions of the best apocalyptic fiction – that the world seems to have come to an end. But there are no bodies littering the streets of his hometown of Hamilton, New Zealand and no signs of destruction (although he does stumble upon the flaming wreckage of a downed aircraft, its unoccupied seats still buckled); it looks as if the entire population of the world has vanished overnight. Employed by  Delenco, an international consortium working on ‘Operation Flashlight’, an initiative intended to create an interconnected worldwide power grid, Zac hurries to his underground laboratory and reasons that the ‘disappearance’ occurred at the very moment Flashlight was activated around the world.

Zac stops short of taking his own life and tries to settle into a routine of gathering supplies and forging a comfortable existence as ‘President of the Quiet Earth’. Things change, though, when he meets fellow survivor Joanne (Routledge) and, later, a third in the form of burly Maori Api (Smith). The three realise that they appear to have survived as they were all at the very moment of death when what they have come to call ‘the Effect’ occurred. An uneasy love triangle develops but Zac is concerned by his own observations of unusual solar activity, leading to the very real possibility that the Effect might soon happen again. They put aside their burgeoning differences and set off to blow up the Delenco installation in an attempt to avert another catastrophe which could wipe them all out for good…

In many ways, The Quiet Earth presents as the stuff of the traditional ‘end of the world’ scenario. But it’s refreshingly free of the Hollywood gloss which has bedevilled recent entries into the genre; it’s gritty, almost matter-of-fact and rooted four-square in a believable and uncomfortable world brilliantly realised in the first half-hour or so of stunning sequences where Zac explores this new empty world. The film is best remembered for its final sequence; we’ll not spoil it here but Zac’s fate is commendably ambiguous and has, across the years, been the subject of considerable debate from an audience who have been purposely left to come to their own conclusions. Bleak, harrowing (but not without a black sense of humour here and there) and full of memorably haunting imagery, The Quiet Earth punches well above its weight and is a real undervalued classic of apocalyptic cinema. It’s a quiet triumph.

Extras:  Commentary, video essay / Kim Newman interview / trailer / stills / reversible sleeve

THE QUIET EARTH (1985) / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: GEOFF MURPHY / SCREENPLAY: BILL BAER, BRUNO LAWRENCE, SAM PILLSBURY / STARRING: BRUNO LAWRENCE, ALISON ROUTLEDGE, PETE SMITH / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 18TH