Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Dear God, Kenzi’s gone berserk! Yep, coming a long way since her Lost Girl days, Ksenia Solo stars in Pet, a psychological gore fest surrounding a lonely, shy and awkward man (Dominic Monaghan) working at his local dog pound where he crosses paths with a woman, who he becomes obsessed with. After finding more about her, including the ugly truth that gradually gets revealed throughout the later stages of the movie, he kidnaps her and places in a cage underneath the pound as a means of trying to “save” her soul.

The movie starts off having this creepy-stalker vibe to it, with Monaghan’s character becoming obsessed with Ksenia Solo after one chance encounter that came out of nowhere, and here, you can sort of sympathise with him, but you’re mainly just creeped out by him, as he predominantly comes off as a manipulative stalker. In fact, his nerdy reclusiveness and his obsession with Solo’s character to the point where he’s keeping pictures of her and talking to himself is bizarrely (and scarily!) reminiscent of Jamie Foxx’s Electro who obsessed over Spider-Man in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. It’s a miracle then that there was no sign of Hans Zimmer’s weird dubstep theme music.

However, the movie then slowly recovers from its limp first act, and its second and third acts, that involve this psychological warfare between Solo and Monaghan, are riveting stuff. It keeps you on the edge of your seat, grabbing your attention and wondering who is going to prevail in this battle of minds between these messed-up individuals. The downside is that it doesn’t get fully developed into anything by the end, and the movie would and could’ve been more interesting by adding in more “events that would transpire. Nevertheless, the concept is strong, and the movie is driven by a solid performance from Dominic Monaghan and an electrifying turn from Ksenia Solo.

Solo made a breakout splash on the scene thanks to TV’s Lost Girl and her scene-stealing turn as the lovable Kenzi, but here, we see a completely different side to her acting range, and it’s certainly twisted and messed up. Solo delivers a performance that balances the perfect mixture of vulnerability and innocence with deranged insanity and eeriness, and in many ways, she’s the central focus of the movie and what helps liven events up when it looks as though things are looking downhill.

Pet is a movie that is what it is, being nothing more than a solid psychological movie with plenty of gross-factor to spice things up for the audience and a terrific performance from Ksenia Solo. Even so, the movie is rather lumpen in the first act, and is never really developed into something that is more than what it was. It’s a film that helps pass 90 minutes of your life perfectly fine, but is nothing special to write home about, neither is it something that turns the horror genre on its head. Yet it definitely turned Kenzi on her head, that’s for sure!

PET / CERT: TBA / DIRECTOR: CARLES TORRENS / SCREENPLAY: JEREMY SLATER / STARRING: KSENIA SOLO, DOMINIC MONAGHAN, JENNETTE MCCURDY / RELEASE DATE: 13TH MARCH

The print might be a bit rusty in spots, and the effects might look rather creaky to modern eyes, but this 86-year-old movie still has a great deal to say, to a generation obsessed with 4G WiMAX, i-devices and 4K 5.1 16:9 HD, about the value and pace of change. Significantly, it also arrived around fifteen months before the adoption of the Hays Code, and it shows. The 1933 King Kong is up there with Citizen Kane and Casablanca as one of the genuine classics of Hollywood cinema.

We all know the story, of course. Robert Armstrong is Carl Denham, a wildlife documentary filmmaker who wants to photograph dinosaurs, but who is being persuaded to cast a girl in his next picture. Turned down by all the agents in town, he picks Ann Darrow off the streets the night before the Venture is due to set sail for the mysterious Skull Island, and Denham’s “greatest picture in the world.” Nobody knows what to expect when they get there, and Ann doesn’t have time to pack any underwear. Upon arriving, the crew are confronted by the indigenous common or garden natives, who steal aboard the Venture in the dark of night (“Crazy black man been here!” observes Charlie, the stereotypical Chinaman cook), intending to sacrifice Ann to their enormous pet ape. It’s Beauty and the Beast; we’ve been here countless times before, and will be so again.

But what the subsequent trips to Skull Island have missed, are the layers of commentary that Merian C. Cooper provides. Made just as the moving pictures were starting to really threaten Broadway’s theatrical dominance, Cooper sets his climax in a cinema doubling as a playhouse, complete with a “personal appearance” from the eponymous Kong. The insinuation could hardly be more obvious; if it’s spectacle you want, the film says, then there’s only one place to get it. And Cooper fills his film with an outrageous amount of spectacle, the giant ape being just the movie poster taster for all the weird creatures and Indiana Jones style derring-do he gets up on screen.

King Kong is also suffused in every frame with the kind of thoughtful compositions, imagination and creativity that Orson Welles would bring to his magnum opus at the end of the decade. It’s an achievement that Peter Jackson – for all his excessive efforts – couldn’t even begin to replicate. It’s 100 minutes of pure cinema, made before such a thing even existed – truly a pioneering work of art. It is also the film that made Fay Wray one of cinema’s true icons, still a household name nearly a century later. Remembered for her screams as much as her performance, and for her varying states of arousal throughout the better part of the running time, the scene in which Kong strips her half-naked is still improbably erotic and her demonstration of terror aboard ship gives Meg Ryan’s Sally a run for her money.

It’s a film that works on multiple levels, as simple but thrilling entertainment, as a satire of the changing times or even as a work of eroticism. And it’s an achievement every bit as towering as its title character.

Special Features: Merian C. Cooper Trailer gallery / Commentary (with Ray Harryhausen, Ken Ralston, Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray)

KING KONG (1933): SPECIAL EDITION / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: MERIAN C. COOPER, ERNEST B. SCHOEDSTACK / SCREENPLAY: JAMES CREELMAN, RUTH ROYCE, STORY BY EDGAR WALLACE, MERIAN C. COOPER / STARRING: FAY WRAY, ROBERT ARMSTRONG, BRUCE CABOT / RELEASE DATE: 6TH MARCH

Amy Adams is superb as Susan, a successful art dealer who seems to have everything she could want. Surrounded by the trappings of wealth she is emotionally unfulfilled. One day, the debut novel of ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives, a pulp Texan murder revenge thriller Called ‘Nocturnal Animals’, it’s dedicated to her. It’s cruel, violent and sad and, as the fiction-within-fiction unfolds, Susan is forced to confront past deeds which have led her to her current, guilt-ridden and unhappy existence.

 

With his second feature, fashion icon Tom Ford once again adapts and directs and, if anything, offers up an even more sophisticated concoction than his incredible debut, A Single Man. Like that film, Nocturnal Animals is an elegant affair, expertly crafted, exquisitely made and as beautifully tailored as a suit by the man himself.

And this works perfectly as we get to know Susan. In an astonishing opening sequence, her new gallery opening is going with a hefty swing, literally, as naked slow motioned obese bodies dance for the gawping throng, and for us. Hypnotic and repellant, beautiful and disturbing, this opening sequence sets the tone for the whole film, as we quickly learn that Susan’s world is as shallow as an LA pool in a drought. Her marriage is loveless and, whilst her work has provided her with material glory and a splendid home, she knows that the work she peddles is worthless.

As she reads Nocturnal Animals, the novel plays out for us too, and it’s a different world – vibrant colours, overwrought characters, dramatic situations. Importantly, what we’re seeing is Susan’s view of the story in which she naturally casts the author, her ex (Gyllenhaal) in the main role of the man seeking revenge for a brutal crime, with the help of hard-bitten cop Michael Shannon, superbly played.

Within this complex narrative comes a third element as memories of the affair between Susan and Edward come in flashbacks revealing why they split up, why Susan feels how she does and exactly why Edward’s bitter revenge tragedy is Susan’s legacy.

 

The interweaving narrative strands are deftly handled and Ford gets great performances from a brilliant cast, including some fantastic cameos from the likes of Laura Linney, Michael Sheen and a brilliantly camp Andrea Riseborough. There’s genuine fear and menace too, a nocturnal attack being one of the most uncomfortably upsetting scenes in recent memory, Aaron Taylor-Johnson creating a character you’ll hate for the rest of your life.

Some have seen the film as cold and remote, as Susan is, but this misses the point, and the fiction’s unlocking of her eventual need to address her past deeds leaves the climax as an even more devastatingly understated experience.

 

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: TOM FORD / STARRING: AMY ADAMS, JAKE GYLLENHAAL, MICHAEL SHANNON, AARON TAYLOR-JOHNSON, ARMIE HAMMER / RELEASE DATE: 13TH MARCH

Derek Cianfrance returns after four years with the period drama The Light Between Oceans, adapted from the novel by M. L. Steadman.

Traumatised World War One soldier Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) takes a job as the keeper of a lighthouse on an isolated island. He falls in love with and marries Isabel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander) and they both move to live on the island permanently. They attempt to start a family but Isabel tragically suffers two miscarriages. Shortly after the second, a boat washes up on the shore containing a dead man and a crying baby. They decide to keep the baby and raise her as their own. However, a few years later they find that there is a mother whose husband and baby were lost at sea and who still grieves for them.

This is the moral crux of the film and what most of the drama is built upon. Do Tom and Isabel keep the child who they have been the parents to for several years and who believes they are her real parents or do they give her back to her true mother? It’s a tricky situation and the film never quite gets to grips with it. The choice of the decision is difficult to come to terms with especially as we grow to have a fondness to Tom and Isabel. As the story goes on their decisions become a little harder to buy and a final clue as to the baby’s true fate feels too self-destructive.

The film works fine for its first two thirds but it slows down and gently unravels during the third. The relationship between Tom and Isabel is nicely played and there is chemistry between Fassbender and Vikander, both actors are, as always, eminently watchable. You feel warmth for them and their struggle for parenthood is keenly felt. However, the final third isn’t as interesting and the film starts to outstay its welcome after the hour and forty minute mark.

The Light Between Oceans seems like a strange project for Cianfrance to have undertaken. After the realistic and unromanticised relationship drama of Blue Valentine and the ambitious and sprawling family consequence drama of The Place Beyond the Pines, The Light Between Oceans seems too formulaic, too buttoned down and more restrained than his previous films. It’s got a Sunday evening forgettable feel to it; the sort of film your parents would watch with a bottle of wine and like but then forget about. It definitely feels like it had the promise of Oscar contention behind it when it was being made but just never achieved it. Its heavyweight cast do fine work but there is a lot of standing on hills looking aggrieved with a lovely landscape behind them.

The Light Between Oceans is a fine looking and well-acted film but its lengthy running time and tricky plot device dull any affecting drama and leave it slipping quickly from the memory.

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: DEREK CIANFRANCE / STARRING: ALICIA VIKANDER, MICHAEL FASSBENDER, RACHEL WEISZ / RELEASE DATE: 13TH MARCH

It’s more than four decades now since the likes of Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven busted down the doors of Hollywood with their independent horror movies, redefining the genre in irreversible ways. There are now a thousand and one Texas Chainsaw Massacre clones for every The Woman in Black, and when you’re low on budget the temptation to do yet another mad-axeman-in-the-woods – rather than something classier and more thoughtful – can be overpowering. But if you don’t want to be as lost among the foliage as your protagonists undoubtedly will be, you need a concept, visual or performance that’s going to make an audience take notice. Something memorable, defining, invocative. The kind of thing that, for all its faults and despite all the imitations, The Blair Witch Project had in spades. The kind of thing that My Little Sister, alas, sorely lacks.

Taking its cue from Hooper’s 1974 classic, and complete with its very own Leatherface, the Del Piccolos’ film actually won Best Horror Feature at the 2016 Italian “International Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Show.” Which presumably means there was little else on offer, because My Little Sister is unlikely to win any other awards.

The film starts with two couples trying to find each other in the woods somewhere unidentified. Actually, that’s a lie; the film starts with a titles sequence featuring the ersatz Leatherface’s mad mother wandering the forest trying to make out with the fallen autumn leaves, then opens proper with the first of two gratuitous nude scenes in which Sofia Pauly as Nadine watches her boyfriend having his face sliced off while topless, before escaping to reappear 45 minutes later just when she’s most needed in the plot. We then switch to Tom and Sheila (yes, Sheila – the Italian screenwriter’s grasp of the English-speaking world really is that poor; there’s also a newspaper cutting that’s possibly the film’s only so-bad-it’s-funny moment), who take Ben (David White, another indeterminately non-American)’s advice to get the hell out of dodge as the cue for the second gratuitous nude scene instead. Of course, if they’d got the hell out of dodge, we wouldn’t be here to speak about the rest of the film. Texas or not, you can guess the rest.

It’s not all bad. A couple of sequences almost manage real tension, and as played by Holli Dillon, our Sheila is almost a good reason to stay till the end credits. But the tempo is all over the place, there are some stupendous non-sequiturs in the plotting, and the absence of ADR in certain scenes renders a couple of fairly lengthy ones almost entirely unintelligible. With the best will in the world, this is barely even a drunken Friday-nighter.
 

Special Features: Short film: The Intruder / Making of Acid Burned Face / Interviews / Music Video / Trailer

MY LITTLE SISTER / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: MAURIZIO DEL PICCOLO, ROBERTO DEL PICCOLO / SCREENPLAY: ROBERTO DEL PICCOLO / STARRING: HOLLI DILLON, SAVERIO PERCUDANI, MATTIA ROSELLINI, SOFIA PAULY / RELEASE DATE: 13TH MARCH

How we still yearn for Sean Connery to renege on his retirement, given the ongoing success of Michael Caine in films like The Dark Knight and Kingsman.

 

Ever since he retired after The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman, Connery claims it is a lot more fun, but irrespective of this, he still manages to draw attention in anything he appears in and this is never more true than in the latest Eureka Blu-Ray release, Finding Forrester, which was originally released in 2000.

 

Given the ongoing concerns over diversity, Connery actually adds something to the mix with this film, which he also co-produced, with Gus Van Sant directing. It’s a warm, if occasionally sentimental, drama that evokes memories of the likes of Scent Of A Woman, Mr. Holland’s Opus and Dead Poets Society in terms of the dynamic between the teacher and student.

 

Set in New York, the film sees Connery as William Forrester, a reclusive novelist who takes a passing interest from his top floor apartment in the kids playing basketball across the street (and the occasional birdie that flies past his window). One of the kids, Jamal (Rob Brown) (a bright but underprivileged teenager) is given a dare by his friends to break into the apartment. He takes a letter opener, but gets surprised by Forrester in the process and leaves his backpack behind. Forrester throws it back onto the street to Jamal, who discovers that some of his writing books have been filled with comments about his writing. After the discovery that his test scores eclipse his school efforts, it transpires Jamal has also been offered a place in a prestigious private school, where a professor (F. Murray Abraham) takes an interest in Jamal’s writing abilities….

 

Finding Forrester more than confirms Connery’s ability to hold a film together with gravitas and stature that he has never lost after he made his final Bond film in 1983. Brown, in his debut film, is also very good and helps to define a dynamic relationship that echoes the one between Charlie and Frank in Scent Of A Woman.

 

Given the time of its release, Finding Forrester was a little close to Sant’s Good Will Hunting in terms of style, but it certainly provides as much entertainment as that film. Competent support from Anna Paquin as a student at the private school Jamal attends and Flashdance’s Michael Nouri as her father as well.

 

Overall, if you like the other examples we have cited, then you will lap upFinding Forrester. Ultimately, you will love Connery’s elder-statesman performance which is as good as anything he has done in the post-Bond era, alongside the likes of The Untouchables and The Hunt For Red October.

 

One does wonder still what Connery would have brought to Indiana Jones and The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull if he had agreed to do the fourth Indiana Jones film, not to mention the prospect of him playing Gandalf in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

 

FINDING FORRESTER / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: GUS VAN SANT / SCREENPLAY: MIKE RICH / STARRING: SEAN CONNERY, ROB BROWN, F. MURRAY ABRAHAM, ANNA PAQUIN, BUSTA RHYMES / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

A serial killer is finding his victims on a dating website. The police are in a panic as they warn people not to meet on dating sites. Jack (Ben Kaplan) and Kristy (Morgan Carter) decide to do something a little different for their first date and head out for a weekend in a cabin in the woods. However, the family who runs the cabin are a little weird, especially Momma Myers (Jewel Shepard).

Slasher.com has got a B-movie vibe to it. It’s got an electronic soundtrack harking back to the slasher films of the ‘80s and has dialogue like ‘This is my daughter Caitlin, she has blue hair’ and ‘That’s a nice spoon.’ ‘Thanks, it’s been in my family for generations’, which can surely only be from a place of homage. That spoon gets in on a lot of the action, so much so that it should actually get a mention in the credits. The acting is a little wooden, including a stabbing in the leg that seems quickly forgotten about, and is in some cases very over the top but that does lend itself to the B-movie vibe. However, the film doesn’t throw itself enough into this B- movie homage and it isn’t funny enough, which means you never quite shake the feeling that it might just be accidentally ropey. It doesn’t really have an original idea in its head. We get a cabin in the woods, the city kids unused to the countryside, creepy country folk and a town of locals who know each other and stick together.

Slasher.com does have a problem with its form. Its opening scene doesn’t have a lot to do with the film for most of the running time. However, the opening act is enjoyable enough and this is where we get a lot of the B-movie fun. The second act gives way to uninspired basement captivity which isn’t interesting or original. Things pick up a bit in the third act as a twist, though one you probably saw coming, allows certain characters to let loose a little. It’s a shame that this didn’t kick in earlier because it’s a nice idea, though not a new one, but it is more interesting than what was happening in the second act and the film does get a lift of energy. It’s just not quite enough to change your mind at the late stage. However, Slasher.com is quite well filmed with some nice crane shots and helicopter or drone shots establishing setting which suggests that D.O.P Brian Maurer may go on to do some good things.

Slasher.com doesn’t have enough going on to really recommend it but you might enjoy the B-movie atmosphere and the hints that some of its crew are capable of more.

SLASHER.COM / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: CHIP GUBERA / SCREENPLAY: CHELSEA ANDES / STARRING: JEWEL SHEPARD, R.A. MIHAILOFF, BEN KAPLAN / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

An Australian production that moved over to Alaska once a suitable location had presented itself, Sugar Mountain loses none of its character in the transfer, displaying its shared heritage with the likes of Picnic at Hanging Rock and Lantana throughout.

 

Although nicely balanced between a small ensemble cast, this is essentially the story of put-upon Liam West (Coffey), brother to the debt-ridden Miles (Roy) whose unlikely solution to his financial problems provokes the plot. When their fishing boat is impounded and their livelihood removed, Miles and his girlfriend Lauren (Webb) cook up an audacious plan, in which Miles will disappear for ten days on the lethal Sugar Mountain before returning a hero and selling his story to the papers. Mountaineering Liam organises food and shelter for his brother, but fails to take Miles’ recklessness into account – nor is the West’s plan sufficiently thought through to allow improvisation in the event of unforeseen possibilities. Needless to say, nothing goes the way they’d imagined it, and pretty soon Lauren’s father, chief of police Jim Huxley (Elwes) smells a rat. Added into the mix is the recently paroled Joe Bright (Momoa), who also has a beef with Miles.

 

While Miles’ “disappearance” might make up the substance of the film, really it’s just an excuse to examine the complicated relationships that have arisen in the small, isolated community – and the final third of Sugar Mountain is all about how those relationships unravel once things have come to a head. Smack bang in the middle of all the developments and revelations is Liam, for whom things go from bad to worse and then downhill from there. The only break the poor man catches is interrupted in the most unfortunate fashion, before being undermined twice over thereafter in even more calamitous ways. It’s a good job that Shane Coffey is as likeable, if also rather taciturn, as he is, otherwise Sugar Mountain might be a journey too arduous to take.

 

There’s not a lot of humour in the film. It’s a slow burn, albeit gladly not a glacially slow one, rather a story that takes its time but keeps things moving without ever hitting the audience over the head with its twists and turns. As such, it perhaps strays dangerously close to being uninvolving. By the time you reach the final scenes, which might have been sensationalised, you find instead it’s difficult to care who lives and who dies. On the other hand, the cinematography, acting, direction and score are all exemplary; it’s close to being great. But the bottom line is, this is a story about women manipulating men, and for all its strengths its themes are as outdated as the inhabitants of Sugar Mountain.

Special Features: Deleted scenes / alternative ending / short film: Cold War / trailer

 

SUGAR MOUNTAIN / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: RICHARD GRAY / SCREENPLAY: ABE POGOS, STORY BY ABE POGOS AND CATHERINE HILL / STARRING: SHANE COFFEY, DREW ROY, HALEY WEBB, CARY ELWES, JASON MOMOA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

When it was originally released theatrically in 2010, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg seemingly was a star vehicle for Ben Stiller. It didn’t really achieve great box-office success, despite some good reviews in the mix. As time goes on, it will be seen more as a forerunner of a showcase for the talents of Greta Gerwig, Brie Larson and Juno Temple, who all have gone on to achieve some success elsewhere (notably Larson who subsequently won a deserved Academy Award last year for her excellent performance in Room).

Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a carpenter who returns to his brother’s LA family home whilst they are on vacation in Vietnam. He meets his brother’s assistant, Florence Marr (Gerwig) who walks the family dog (Greenberg is apparently building a dog house for it) and whilst on his sabbatical from life, Greenberg also gets invited to a barbecue by his long-term friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans) at a mutual friend’s house and also encounters an ex-girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whom he confides his so-called plan of inertia whilst staying in LA…..

In the hands of the likes of Cameron Crowe or Woody Allen, Greenberg could and should be an enlightening tale of human emotional discovery and idealism, but unfortunately it falls down flat in a number of areas. It is promoted as a comedy-drama, yet there doesn’t appear to be much of either on show.

The biggest flaw and problem is that the main character story here is not Greenberg’s, but Florence’s. She is actually the first face we see on screen over the credits and something is drastically wrong when a lead title character actually doesn’t have a constructively resolved arc throughout the film.

Actors aspire all the time to show their colours in both dramatic and comedic roles. Tom Hanks is probably the big name example who has successfully made that transition from comedy to drama with the likes of Splash and Big to Philadelphia and Saving Private Ryan. Gerwig demonstrates a lot of presence which was heightened in her recent film Mistress America (itself a Woody Allen-wannabe film). Larson is also a strong presence in the film but sadly only appears towards the end of the film as Greenberg’s niece, when she hosts a party at the house to commemorate her leaving for Australia with her friend (Temple).

This reviewer tried to like this film a bit more than they have but it isn’t really the best showcase for genuinely talented people. Gerwig is the saving grace of this film, whilst Stiller needs to reassess his career and go for choices that demonstrate the strengths he has shown in films like There’s Something About Mary and Zoolander.

GREENBERG / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: NOAH BAUMBACH / STARRING: BEN STILLER, GRETA GERWIG, RHYS IFANS, JENNIFER JASON LEIGH / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW