Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

The Man sits at the end booth of a lonely roadside diner. A waitress watches curiously as person after person comes to sit opposite him and talk – is he a journalist conducting interviews? A therapist? The truth is, the Man makes Faustian deals with these people. They tell him something they want – for their husband’s Alzheimer’s to be cured, for the girl from a magazine centerfold to love them, etc. – and he gives them a task in return for that happening – from fathering a child to setting off a bomb in a restaurant. The only other condition is that they return to the diner regularly to update him on the details.

That’s the idea behind The Booth at the End, a show that may have passed over your radar when it first aired in 2010, followed by a second season in 2012 – but both seasons are now available as one DVD set. Sure, the concept may seem strikingly minimalist in a post-Breaking Bad TV landscape, in which we expect our shows to be blockbuster epics; this is exactly the opposite, as each season has just one set, with the stories playing out entirely over the diner table.

And yet these dialogues are remarkably compelling; Xander Berkeley’s Man interrogates his visitors with laid back sincerity, refusing to give direct help but guiding them into analysing their own flaws and desires, and the show invites us to take the same inquiring attitude. As their stories develop, it’s fascinating to learn what makes these characters tick and how far they’d go to get what they want, and to see their tasks progress and even intertwine; the first season’s strongest story sees one man tasked to kill a little girl, and another man tasked to protect the same girl, which results in some truly gripping viewing – even though we never see any of it happen!

The second season doesn’t have quite the thrill of the first, as some storylines fail to escalate as excitingly as they should, leaving you feeling like little’s happened by the time you get to the final episode. It does, however, give us some insight into the Man himself, leading to a very touching moment at the conclusion to a story about a woman who just wants to feel loved. Plus, even when some stories drag, there are more hits than misses and the pace of the series keeps it watchable; each season is comprised of five twenty-two minute episodes, so you can easily binge the whole thing in one night.

The Booth at the End may seem like the antithesis of Game of Thrones, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing; this sharply scripted series of interchanges shows that you don’t need a record-breaking budget to make a show that’s both intellectually and emotionally engaging.

THE BOOTH AT THE END: SERIES 1 AND 2 / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: JESSICA LANDAW, ADAM ARKIN / SCREENPLAY: CHRISTOPHER KUBASIK / STARRING: XANDER BERKELEY, JENNI BLONG, JENNIFER DEL ROSARIO / RELEASE DATE: JULY 11TH

It is entirely possible Luis Carvalho is the perpetrator of some elaborate joke; a cinematic chuckle if you will at all us punters who end up unwittingly sitting through his debut feature Jonah Lives. If not, then we worry for his career. It isn’t just that this “horror” film is bad; it is so anger-inducing, stomach-clenching terrible that it should never have been made, and certainly never, ever… ever have been released.

Opening with a confusing scene you discover later is somewhere in the middle act, Jonah Lives follows six teenagers who accidentally resurrect a murder victim bent on revenge. As the group seem to spend their evenings in a basement playing cards (just your regular teenagers then), they become trapped by the zombie-like Jonah and one by one are picked off in a variety of bloody, yet predominantly unseen ways.

Filmed as far back as 2011, this is a film that carries all the hallmarks of a wholly amateurish production. The dialogue and performances (bar Nicole Lasala as the annoyingly-voiced Lydia) are so dreadful you will see greater conviction at a primary school Nativity production. If there was a script, which is in itself doubtful, we suspect that during the copying process some of the pages were mixed up as characters constantly repeat themselves, to such a degree that you will scream at the screen in frustration.

There are more issues – and more than can be covered here – with the filmmaking itself. The editing is roughly the same standard on holiday movies you are forced to watch by excited neighbours recently returned from Disneyland. So ridiculously disjointed is the narrative, emphasised by the irritating repetition of lines, that you wonder if anyone involved actually watched the film before releasing it on a world unprepared for such a thoroughly miserable experience.

Apart from that one performance of barely passable acting, Jonah Lives contains nothing that warrants taking ninety minutes out of your life for. It is mildly interesting that it has taken five years for the film to emerge, and also that the majority of those involved have done little else in that time. Perhaps the greatest crime here then is that when presented with the opportunity to make a feature film (and IMDb estimates a budget of $3 million, which we would doubt), Carvalho and his team have done such a terrible job. And if all involved have struggled to find further work in the industry then, quite frankly, it serves them right.

Do not be tempted by the so-bad-it-must-be-good theory either. Jonah Lives is just awful. Really, really awful.

JONAH LIVES / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: LUIS CARVALHO / STARRING: BRINKE STEVENS, JOCELYN PADILLA, RYAN BOUDREAU, NICOLE LASALA / RELEASE DATE: JULY 25TH

Produced at the height of the Swinging Sixties, Ken Loach’s first movie is a decidedly un-swinging affair, and all the better for it (give or take the odd beehive). Sticking to the course he set with his seminal BBC play ‘Cathy Come Home’, Poor Cow is an ultra-naturalistic, semi-improvised kick in the nutsack to orthodox drama.

Carol White, an actress whose personal descent into drink and drugs and early check-out at the age of 48 lends her strong performance here an added poignancy, is Joy, a young women of limited intelligence but laudable optimism in the face of some frankly terrible choices in men.  First off there’s Tom, played with palpable menace by John Bindon, a real-life hard-man who would shortly lend his cockney swagger to Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance, a film that shares a generous dosage of Poor Cow’s creative DNA. Not being the sharpest card in the pack, Tom promptly bungles a bank job and gets himself banged up. With casual inevitability, Joy moves swiftly on to handsome Dave, one of Tom’s fellow hoodlums, played by ‘60s icon Terrance Stamp. But if Dave represents a tiny ray of hope, think again, for Joy is something of a feather in the storm, her baby son the only constant in her life.

With the sleight of hand he’s shown many times since, Loach suckers us into caring for, rather than judging, someone we might otherwise dismiss as a gullible idiot best suited to The Jeremy Kyle Show.  We feel for poor Joy as she contemplates “going professional” while scratching a living working in a pub where she gets groped and leered at by the regulars. Oh yes, there’s some absolutely king leering in this movie; at one point Joy and her barmaid pal Beryl (Love They Neighbour’s Kate Williams) decide a spot of ‘modelling’ for the local “Photographic Society” might generate a few extra bob. Cue a phalanx of the most odious, sweaty losers ever to grace the silver screen, all steamed up glasses and drooling chins, relics of a bygone age when that room upstairs at the local pub was a haven for amateur David Baileys to get their sexually-retarded rocks off. The movie’s intrinsic voyeurism is reinforced by Loach’s penchant for secretly capturing shots of real people and integrating these into his narrative. Time and again his camera lingers on some poor unsuspecting 1960s fizzog on its way to the pub, the bookmaker or (hey, its 1967) the boutique. This culminates in a scene where Joy and Beryl indulge in a cathartic spot of revenge-leering at random passing geezers. You go, girls!

The semi-improvised dialogue is a wonder; people stutter, repeat themselves, talk over each other. You know, like we actually do in real life. It’s so bracingly naturalistic you’re left wondering just how these results were achieved (Terrance Stamp has attested to Loach whispering conflicting directions into his and White’s ears, deliberately catching them off-guard then letting them sink-or-swim). Loach also largely avoids a musical score, relying instead on the endlessly parping sound of the radio, its tinny melodies and moronic DJ banter a humorous counterpoint to the on-screen misery (although the less said about nominal soundtrack provider Donovan, the better).

Funny, sad and ultimately uplifting, Poor Cow is shining example of social realism cinema done right. Still compelling after nearly 50 years, it is The Jeremy Kyle Show you actually want to see. Forget the lie detector test; this one’s the Daddy.

POOR COW / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: KEN LOACH / SCREENPLAY: KEN LOACH, NELL DUNN (FROM HER PLAY) / STARRING: CAROL WHITE, TERRANCE STAMP, JOHN BINDON/ RELEASE DATE: JULY 25TH

Satan’s Blade from L. Scott Castillo Jr. has always carried a certain amount of intrigue and interest among horror fans. Likely due to its rarity rather than its quality, this is nonetheless a film sought after by many slasher film completists out there; if only due to the wearily formulaic nature of the narrative that establishes this as one of the weaker attempted cash-ins that litter the early 1980s. Friday The 13th, this isn’t!

There is, however, an interesting opening to Satan’s Blade. Initially ignoring the obvious, Castillo Jr.’s film starts out more like a heist movie than a slasher one, but quickly and disappointingly abandons this approach after just a few minutes to return to the boobs and blood the “auteur” clearly had at the top of his agenda.

For anyone who has viewed just one or two slasher films, everything is frustratingly familiar. There is an isolated mountain lodge, a group of horny, often scantily clad young women, and a mystery killer you never really see apart from a few murky shadows and the obligatory close up on the murder weapon of choice. There is no pattern to the deaths, no thought given to establishing a coherent narrative that would have given the film some much needed rhythm. What remains instead is a dull, incoherent mess of a film that fails to generate even the semblance of a titter as the women are systematically murdered in wholly uninteresting ways.

All that said, there is some faint fun to be found – just not as the filmmakers intended. The acting is so woefully awkward and clunky that we suspect none of the named cast ever worked again, or had ever worked before. If there was more than one draft of the script, and we suspect there wasn’t, little care or time went into the dialogue. What becomes clear is that these elements were never Castillo Jr.’s priority. On an interview included on the Blu-ray, he intimates he had a few crazy ideas in his head and fancied a crack at a horror film. We suspect the thought process went: Blood? Check. Nudity? Check. Plot? Well, let’s not worry about that.

Given that the filmmaker had a battle just to get the film made, and an even tougher one to get it distributed, it is perhaps a surprise that Satan’s Blade exists at all – if nothing else, this is a release of some historical merit. As a film it is poor example of the genre, but if you are that completist, or simply feel the inexplicable need to watch a bad slasher film, then Satan’s Blade could be for you.

Special Features: Audio commentary by podcast The Hysteria Continues / Interview with L. Scott Castillo Jr. / Collectors’ booklet

SATAN’S BLADE / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: L. SCOTT CASTILLO JR. / SCREENPLAY: THOMAS CUE / STARRING: TOM BONGIORNO, STEPHANIE LEIGH STEEL, THOMAS CUE, ELISA R. MALINOVITZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

The trailer asks ‘Is there Life on Mars?’ In answer, the red planet is shown to be teaming with all manner of exotic life and screams out in capitals: ‘Your eyes will see the wonders of a world, no eyes in this world have ever seen before!’ It promises all these wonders will be presented through the photographic miracle of ‘Cinemagic’.

As it transpires, Cinemagic makes everything red and solarised with objects getting a white outline, this effect combined with hand-drawn illustrations, animation and Paul Dunlop’s electronic music turns their adventure on the Martian surface into a poor man’s version of a psychedelic trip.

The story starts by the discovery that Mars Rocket 1 (MR1) is returning to Earth after being out of contact for 63 days. Using robotic controls they land it in the Nevada desert, where they find Dr Iris Ryan (Naura Hayden) in a shocked state and Col. Thomas O’Bannion (Gerald Mohr) unconscious with a green flesh-eating bug latched to his arm. The fate of the other two members of the crew is unknown.

What happened to the expedition is revealed in flashback through the eyes of Iris as she recovers from her ordeal in hospital. As it turns out the journey is pretty routine, Thomas flirts with Iris and insists on calling her ‘Irish’, Chief Warrant Officer Sam Jacobs (Jack Krushen) provides a bit of comic relief  and falls in love with his sonic rifle, which he names ‘Cleopatra’, and the remaining crew member is Professor Theodore Gettell (Les Tremayne) who chucks in a few ‘scientific’ titbits at appropriate moments. They suffer from having to eat tinned rations, but weightlessness does not effect this craft allowing the occupants to freely move around as if they are on Earth.

On landing, they see Mars is covered in vegetation and they speculate that it is home to small animals as well. On leaving the spaceship they encounter a carnivorous plant that looks as dangerous as a bouncy castle with tentacles, which promptly tries eating Iris. The crew speculates that the plants are controlled by a community mind and that it is watching them.

Through Cinemagic we see in the distance a futuristic Martian city; a vicious giant rat-faced crab-like creature and a giant amoeba that emerges from a lake and chases the crew back to their ship.

Worst of all there are ugly three-eyed humanoid types who lurk around and leave a message for humanity. They tell us they have been watching us since we emerged from the slime of existence, and have noted we have yet to stop being violent and war-like. Our lack of progress means that the Martians do not want us to visit them again, and if we do they’ll destroy us. Not very neighbourly, then again this was made in 1959 when the Space Race between the USA and USSR was at full tilt making a fantasy about aliens keeping us in order a powerful viewpoint.

Given its low budget and 10-day shooting schedule, this offers an entertaining insight into the unconscious fears about our place in the universe, and it is refreshing to see the story unfold from the viewpoint of Iris in the male-dominated world of sf of that period. She is portrayed as an independent and intelligent scientist, only let down by the fact that she screams and faints when encountering aliens and is helped by men in these situations. Nonetheless, she reassures them that: “I know you think I acted like a hysterical female there back at the ship, but I can assure you I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself!“ 

ANGRY RED PLANET (1959) / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: IB MELCHIOR / SCREENPLAY: IB MELCHOIR, SIDNEY PINK / STARRING: NAURA HAYDEN, GERALD MOHR, LES TREMAYNE, JACK KRUSCHEN /  RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

When you think about it, doesn’t the idea of adapting Shakespeare’s plays into silent films seem a bit like a fool’s errand? Surely the real power of Shakespeare lies in his dialogue, the language, and poetry, so if you can’t hear the words then what’s the point? Well, the BFI’s fascinating new Blu-ray compilation – a selection of scenes from two dozen of the rarest ‘Shakespeare silents’ (around 300 Shakespeare-inspired films had been produced by the end of the silent decade) – proves there definitely is a point, and that even without sound the Bard of Avon’s stories lose none of their ability to thrill, enchant, horrify, and make us laugh at grown men wearing ass’s heads. This collection really is something special.

It’s almost impossible to pick out favourite moments (there are way too many) but here are some of the highlights: in Vitagraph’s gorgeous A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which proved cinema’s superiority over theatre by incorporating some lovely woodland exteriors and in-camera effects), Puck literally flies around the globe to gather a magical herb for the Queen of the Fairies while other fairies pop in and out of frame so rapidly it would give the cast of Rentaghost a headache… King Lear with his Fool, cowering beneath animated lightning on a very surreal looking backdrop of Salisbury Plain… a terrific version of The Tempest with some ingenious special effects, especially a scene where Prospero watches from his stage-bound cave while a tiny model ship disappears beneath some realistic night-black waves… a beautiful colour-tinted excerpt from The Merchant of Venice… and John Gielgud’s first cinematic appearance, playing Romeo against Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies’ diminutive Juliet. Who knew that forty years later this nymph-like beauty would be terrifying audiences in Hammer’s The Witches and The Devil Rides Out?

But that’s only the beginning, and once you’ve enjoyed the main feature there’s a generous assortment of special features to dive into – longer versions of King Lear, The Winter’s Tale (which includes some shameless ‘reimagining’ of Shakespeare’s original – forget ‘exeunt pursued by a bear’ how about ‘exeunt tossed inside a volcano’? (who knew Michael Bay made silent movies? No, just kidding) and a 1911 Richard III that includes: hysterical violence (the best part is when Richard stands over a victim and repeatedly stabs him like he’s taking the temperature of a turkey), shameless over-the-top wooing of strange women at funerals, and a nifty dream sequence with some impressively seamless transitioning between the various ghosts. And there’s so much more, including an engrossing look at how the specially commissioned musical soundtrack was created, various commentaries, a chirpy 1925 era travelogue of Stratford-On-Avon and a very nicely illustrated booklet.

As Shakespeare once wrote ‘Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage’, which has got nothing to do with this Blu-ray but we wanted to end the review pretending to sound clever. But what would really be clever is if you don’t let this wonderful collection pass you by. ‘Tis highly recommended, verily and forsooth.

Extras: Introduction / Play On! Making the Music / commentaries by Judith Buchanan / Illustrated booklet

PLAY ON! SHAKESPEARE IN SILENT FILM / CERT: U / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: VARIOUS / RELEASE DATE: JULY 18TH

YouTube personalities turn superheroes in Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, an action comedy vehicle for online celebrities Grace Helbig and Hannah Hart. Not that we should really be encouraging the proliferation of YouTube fools pulling stupid faces and doing stupid voices outside of Snapchat or the ‘Tube, but Hollywood could do far worse than looking to the genuinely talented Helbig and Hart for its leading ladies.

A reboot of the 1970s cult TV series, the popular YouTubers play powerless but plucky superheroes Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, thrust into the big leagues when they’re picked up by a big bucks superhero franchising brand and its sinister publicist, and given fancy new outfits, gear and energy drinks to plug. Inevitably, this sudden career boost causes tension between the fame-hungry, immature Electra Woman and the more cautious, reserved Dyna Girl. A dramatic breakup is on the cards – and just in time for the rise of (actually superpowered) supervillain the Empress of Evil, no less.

The story is incredibly light and not deep, hitting all of the major notes one might expect, including the obligatory Batman & Robin team split and inevitable sidekick kidnap. So far, so predictable. But a plot twist few expected: Electra Woman and Dyna Girl is actually very funny. What could so easily have been packed to the hilt with Deadpool level smirk and snark thankfully has the good sense to rein it in a bit, letting the humour come from the characters rather than just sheer quippery (although there is still lots of quippery), like 2001’s much-loved The Tick sitcom. Helbig and Hart have awesome chemistry and strong comic instincts, and the movie serves them both well – it’s the best Booster Gold and Blue Beetle buddy comedy film DC never made.

There are inevitably a few gags that don’t quite stick the landing – particularly the too-long Uber bit; the most egregious product placement in a film since Adam Sandler’s Subway love – but, by and large, it’s laugh out loud funny (the final fight is particularly hilarious) and a lot of fun. Yes, even the Snapchat jokes. A kooky, lightweight charm, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl is a surprising, charming delight.

ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: CHRIS MARRS POLIERO / STARRING: HANNAH HART, GRACE HELBIG, TREVOR LERNER, MATREYA FEDOR, CHRISTOPHER COUTTS / RELEASE DATE: JULY 11TH

Vilified even before its release, Roland
Emmerich’s Stonewall was a huge critical and commercial failure, but now
that the accusations of tampering with history have quietened down, is there
a good film at its heart struggling desperately to come out?

Back
in late ’60s America, life was tough for LGBT citizens. They could be fired  from their jobs, denied basic rights and it was illegal even in NYC to
sell drinks to them. Gay bars were very discrete and were run by the Mafia.
Whilst police raids were common but carried out for corrupt reasons. One
such bar, Stonewall, became a focal point for a riot following one such raid,
a riot which helped lead to the first Gay Rights march in New York and
which kick started the civil rights movement which continues today.

It’s
important to know that, for LGBT people and anyone interested in civil rights,
Stonewall, the venue and historical moment, is an essential part of history,
an event which matters. And you’d think, being gay himself, that Mr
Emmerich would have wanted to portray what happened with accuracy.

But
the film isn’t accurate. Instead, it follows far too closely the coming out
story of a fictional character, Danny, a clean cut white boy from the mid-west,
rejected by his family and finding himself amongst the drag queens
and hustlers in Greenwich Village. We see how it feels for a nice middle
class boy to be rejected for being gay. We see how different and (horrible
term) ‘straight acting’ he is compared to those he falls in with. But
mainly we see how white he is and how male he is, when so many of the people
involved in the riots were either not white, not male and certainly not
fictional. 
So
the story has been made safe for mass audiences, the black, hispanic, lesbian,
transexual people who were real, sidelined to supporting roles. Danny
even gets to throw the first brick, something which got some of the LGBT
community raging during early screenings of the film and which resulted
in a call to boycott it.

All
of this said, somewhere inside, there’s a pretty good film hidden away. It
looks and sounds wonderful, the period detail and mood beautifully captured.
The performances are excellent, with particular plaudits going to some
of those sidelined characters who play up the reality of living on society’s
margins whilst still aiming for fabulousness exceptionally well. The
brutality of living as an LGBT person before any rights existed for those
communities is all there, and there’s a realistic portrayal of the type
of underground but vital Christopher Street community which existed, if
you read accounts from the period.

But
too much plot pushes the actual riots back to the last half hour of the film,
and the real ones lasted for four nights, not the single event shown here,
making Stonewall a film that’s not really about Stonewall at all. It condenses
a complex series of events into two hours whilst making it ‘acceptable’
for the mainstream, and appealing to, well, who?

Its
heart is certainly in the right place but it needed a history-knowing angry
drag queen to go through the script with her eye-liner pencil and make
some radical changes.

STONEWALL / DIRECTOR: ROLAND EMMERICH / SCREENPLAY: JON ROBIN BAITZ / STARRING: JEREMY IRVINE, JONNY BEAUCHAMP, JOEY KING, CALEB LANDRY JONES / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
 

Pat and Jim are the terribly well-to-do, rather spunky children of top rocket scientist Dr Ballantyne who accidentally end up on a mission to Venus, in this eight part serial from the Children’s Film Foundation, originally exhibited in Saturday morning cinema clubs back in 1962.

Inspired into production by Sydney Newman’s ATV Pathfinders serials, adapted from H.B. Gregory’s Boy’s Own short story, and appearing fourteen months before Doctor Who made its debut, Masters of Venus would no doubt have been awfully gripping for contemporary audiences, but its unsophisticated, Enid Blyton-esque characterisation and flukishly obvious plotting are unlikely to keep modern children engaged. As such, it’s perfect fare for the archive television buffs this BFI issue is surely aimed at, a curio that displays its 1950s sci-fi influences in plain sight, and that parallels Terry Nation’s first Dalek serial all too obviously.

When two six-fingered secret agents try to disrupt the launch of British rocket ship the Astarte, the spacecraft takes off with a crew of four rather than the expected two (luckily, the Astarte has four chairs in its cabin), bound for uninhabitable Venus on a mission of scientific discovery. Fortunately for the plot, our occasionally next nearest planet is actually home to a troglodytic society of disgruntled Atlanteans (no, really), whose society has evolved (sans women, pretty much) into a binary system involving “men of action” and “men of skill”, overseen by the Master of Venus – and with a plan to invade and conquer the Earth via some boxes of virus they keep in a cave.

Happily for Pat and Jim, help is at hand in the form of Imos, Master of Skill’s two rather fetching but six-fingered children (everyone on Venus wears gloves all the time), and what follows is a typically specious runaround, with lots of hiding in plain sight and functional, expositionary dialogue (including George Pastell’s glorious “Nothing can stop us now. Death to everyone on Earth!”).

The Pinewood Studios sets are generally quite handsome, the post-Quatermass score by Eric Rogers is suitably emphatic, and the camerawork is clean and sympathetic. Unhappily, the Venusian civilisation is so badly drawn it lacks any kind of credibility, and the racial casting (anything goes, as long as you’ve got a funny accent, it seems) simply wouldn’t be countenanced these days, while the science is more far-fetched than anything in the rest of the plot. The fifteen-minute instalments do keep things moving at quite a lick, though.

There’s a nice, crisp 16:9 transfer, although the restoration budget hasn’t stretched to removing the tram lines that blight several episodes or sundry minor picture blemishes elsewhere. Nevertheless, for screen sci-fi aficionados of a certain vintage, this release will be manna from heaven.

Special Features: TBC

MASTERS OF VENUS / CERT: U / DIRECTOR: ERNEST MORRIS / SCREENPLAY: MICHAEL BARNES, MARY CATHCART BORER, H.B. STEWART / STARRING: NORMAN WOOLAND, MANDY HARPER, ROBIN STEWART, ROBIN HUNTER, PATRICK KAVANAGH, FERDY MAYNE, GEORGE PASTELL, ARNOLD DIAMOND / RELEASE DATE: JULY 18TH