Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Oh, my… What would Jane Austen think after seeing this film? After the success of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, it seemed only logical for the other famous Seth-Grahame Smith novel to be adapted in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, with Burr Steers directing and writing the screenplay. Despite being based on a book, the film itself already faces an ambitiously hard task going in balancing Austen with the Zombie apocalypse. This is the kind of material that shouldn’t take itself too seriously and actually be intelligently self-aware of how ridiculous it is, as well as being a great action-adventure-romantic movie hybrid in its own right. When this was released, it was received to the most divisive reaction, as well as being a commercial flop, only earning just over half of what it cost to make ($16.4m out of a $28m budget). To some extent, it isn’t hard to see why, as what we have here is something of a mixed bag.

On the plus side, the film is held strong massively by fantastic performances all round with rising star Lilly James being brilliantly feisty and fiery as Lizzie Bennett, Sam Riley nailing the stoic dourness of Mr. Darcy, Sally Phillips wonderfully stubborn as Mrs Bennett, Charles Dance lending weight and gravitas to the role of Mr Bennett, and Matt Smith stealing the show and chewing the scenery by being hilariously playful, goofy and gormless as Parson Collins (you can tell Smith’s channelling a lot of the Eleventh Doctor in his performance). The zombie effects are fantastically creepy and gory, almost rivalling the high-quality effects levels of The Walking Dead, and the combination of the cinematography and the set/costume design goes hand-in-hand perfectly to create a gorgeous looking movie. Plus, the action choreography and fight sequences were handled solidly well.

However, despite having both the Jane Austen influence and the inclusion of ravenous zombies, this is a film that lacks the verve, the gusto, the panache, and, surprisingly, the bite to knock this film out of the park. It’s like as if Steers had a problem of balancing the horror and the Austen, resulting in a film that isn’t scary or shocking enough to be a horror movie, nor is it offering a fresh and unique spin on the Austen text. Also, this movie seems to grind to a halt on more than one occasion with the pacing feeling incredibly sloppy, and there were weird editing choices throughout that makes the filmmaking seem amateurish at times. Plus, its tone is all over the place, being romantic and dramatic one second, yet parodically humorous the next. If this is meant to be a seamless and fluid hybrid of romance/comedy/drama and horror, it certainly didn’t feel seamless or fluid in its execution, and as a result, it makes Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter seem like a better movie in retrospect, despite that movie not being critically well-received.

Overall, this is a film that, despite its ensemble of brilliant performances, occasional charming humour, and fantastic visuals, fails to deliver on its core concept and is somewhat disappointing as a result (though nowhere near as bitterly disappointing as Batman v Superman). It’s less fun and adventurous than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, yet it’s much superior and infinitely preferable to the lacklustre Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, even if that’s not saying much.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: BURR STEERS / STARRING: LILY JAMES, SAM RILEY, JACK HOUSTON, BELLA HEATHCOTE, MATT SMITH, LENA HEADEY, CHARLES DANCE / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 27TH

 

Some films are known mostly for their filmic gimmicks, whether it be an entirely first person viewpoint, a disordered chronology or being denounced by the Catholic Church. The long take is a technique that often appears in films but rarely do they last for the whole running time. Most recently, the Oscar winning Birdman was made to seem like one shot that lasted its entire two-hour running time, spanning several days in the course of the film’s story; in reality, several long shots were stitched together with editing trickery. Victoria’s entire two-hour-twenty-minute was shot in one long take without any editing. So does this huge achievement amount to anything more than a useful marketing technique? Thankfully, yes.

Victoria (Laia Costa), a young Spanish woman who has been living in Berlin for several months, meets a group of friends in a club in the early hours of the morning. Their burgeoning friendship and flirtations take a dark turn as the group is forced into committing an illegal act.

As the credits roll the first person listed is the cinematographer Sturla Brandth GrØvlen and he is most certainly the MVP of the film. The camera moves from lifts, upstairs, into cars and stays with the characters and action when they run around, cycle, dance, and dive about. That the camera keeps up with them is a testament to the skill and planning of the filmmakers; the fact that the shot is always focused, coherent and often wonderful looking is nothing short of a miracle. The camera makes you feel like another player in the story, making you complicit with everything that the group do which can make you even feel guilty.

Instead of writing a full script, Victoria consisted of a twelve-page story treatment. As a result, most of the dialogue was improvised, something which the cast have taken to with aplomb. None of the dialogue or scenes feel awkward or forced. The characters may have rough edges but you grow to feel empathetic towards them and are interested in their lives and their predicament as their backstories slowly unfold. Our eponymous protagonist Victoria, is a young woman who feels alone and isolated in a city where she knows nobody and we are happy to see her connect and make friends with people. One or two of her decisions feel a little like they are chosen just to progress the story, the only minor criticism I have of the film, but they don’t feel entirely outside of her character. The laddish group of guys that she falls in with, are enjoyable, well-rounded and human. The soundtrack, a first-time film soundtrack from composer Nils Frahm, is subtle and affecting, drifting in to lift and perfectly compliment certain scenes.

Technically astonishing, exciting, intense, well performed and entertaining; Victoria is quite simply one of the best films of the year.

VICTORIA / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: SEBASTIAN SCHIPPER / SCREENPLAY: SEBASTIAN SCHIPPER, OLIVIA NEERGAARD-HOLM, EIKE FREDERIK SCHULZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Taking its cue from Cube by way of Saw and with some 28 Days Later thrown in for no clear reason, Captive is obvious and improbable with so little ambition it even manages to squander what little promise and resources it has.

Twelve strangers wake up in a concrete room with no idea of how or why they have come to be there, save a series of phone calls informing them they have all been infected with a virus and only one will survive. They then undergo a series of token challenges – which might have evoked a more bloodthirsty Big Brother if the script had bothered to serve up actual contests and we had seen any evidence of participation; Dead Set this ain’t – as over the course of 24 hours the twelve are whittled down one by one.

The most glaring issue with Captive is that its dialogue was recorded entirely on location with remote microphones, such that much of what is said is almost entirely inaudible either by being too faint or too muffled by the echoing acoustics, but in fact this is a blessing given that the film doesn’t bother with having its dozen participants begin investigating the reason for their captivity until 22 hours have passed and all but three of them are dead.

Even more shocking is the utterly spurious motivation behind the “game”, an eleventh-hour revelation that makes a complete nonsense not only of the choice of contestants but also of the onscreen text updates that accompany each of their deaths. It’s as if someone took a neat idea for a film, Battle Royale for instance, and decided to mount their own production without understanding the original’s success, and with such appallingly scant means as to make the idea of economy an impossible aspiration. It is entirely possible to shoot a decent movie with no money whatsoever, but it doesn’t happen here.

What Captive really needed was a strong script and a director with a good sense of his requirements. With neither of these, the cast are despite their best efforts all at sea, and very soon the film begins to drift, even with a running time of 75 minutes. Nobody does or says anything remotely authentic, elements are thrown at the plot for no apparent reason, and what ought to have been a prevailing mystery is completely ignored until it’s time for the resolution to roll around. Even the soundtrack chooses inopportune moments to swell and ebb, as if it’s just as muddled as the rest of the production.

When a film begins with two men in gas masks and protective clothing but who haven’t bothered including gloves, and subsequently includes digital crash zooms into inconsequential dialogue exchanges, the lack of attention to detail and affinity for the material are all too apparent. The best thing you can say about Captive is that it makes a great advertisement for other, better-realised films.

Extras: Trailer / Anchor (unrelated short film)

CAPTIVE / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: STEPHEN PATRICK KENNY / SCREENPLAY: STEPHEN PATRICK KENNY / STARRING: MARK HUTCHINSON, MARTIN NOLAN, ROB CAPEL, BERNIE KAVANAGH, TOM WARD / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

From Welcome to Sarajevo to A Cock and Bull Story via 24 Hour Party People and Code 46, seemingly the only thing that defines Michael Winterbottom’s directorial career has been the coolness of his camerawork and the distancing effect of his quiet documentary-style approach to capturing his characters on film. The subject and tone of his output has otherwise been wildly at variance, and part of the reason for this has been his seven-film association with Frank Cottrell Boyce, now a noted children’s author and with a divisively atypical Doctor Who episode to his credit. Cottrell Boyce was responsible for the scripts of all of the above-named films, and he and Winterbottom seem to have cultivated a relationship based on variety and enthusiasm for new subjects.

Butterfly Kiss was their second collaboration; arriving two years after Kalifornia and four on from Thelma and Louise, it takes elements of each and combines them to create a more sincere and less pretentious Natural Born Killers – a serial-killing road trip set in the North West of England. Amanda Plummer is Eunice, a damaged woman whose mind is broken in ways the film only hints at, seeking love in petrol stations around the Greater Manchester area and in the form of the mysterious ‘Judith’. Prone to bouts of intense, and deadly, anger, Eunice is also capable of justifying herself when necessary – often in the form of religious allusion.

Soon after the story begins, Eunice encounters the hard-of-hearing Miriam, played by Saskia Reeves as someone whose physical disability has allowed her mental capability to stifle undeveloped, and when Eunice invites herself back to Miriam’s flat and sees the controlled relationship she exists in with her (grand)mother, the two girls fall into an uncomfortable relationship and effectively run away.

The entire film is shown in flashback, interspersed with Miriam’s direct-to-camera confession, which deliberately avoids illuminating the characters’ actions but does give Butterfly Kiss the trajectory of an approaching tragedy; it is Eunice’s sermonising that goes furthest to explaining her state of mind, that and the chains she imprisons her body in, both for the obvious metaphorical reason but also as a way of keeping herself disengaged from the world. As a study of two characters it’s an intense and at times incomprehensible experience, lacking much in the way of personal warmth and in the main surprisingly avoiding the kind of graphic violence you might expect.

One thing that does connect much of Winterbottom’s work, reaching its apotheosis in 9 Songs, is his penchant for indie music, and the Butterfly Kiss soundtrack is dominated by the likes of The Cranberries. It’s a very British serial killer thriller, opaque and low-rent but also beautifully stark and haunting.

BUTTERFLY KISS (1995) / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM / SCREENPLAY: FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE / STARRING: AMANDA PLUMMER, SASKIA REEVES, RICKY TOMLINSON / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

If you are already familiar with Warren Beatty’s 1978 Oscar-nominated film Heaven Can Wait, then you already have a sense of what the source material for Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) is, as both are adapted from the Harry Segall stage play, also called Heaven Can Wait.

This brand-new Blu-ray release has been put together courtesy of the long-established Criterion Collection, who was partly responsible for the resurrection of Blade Runner in the process that led to its re-release on the big screen in its Director’s Cut in 1992. It is another winner, as the transfer is a stunning 1.33:1 black-and-white remastering that captures the essence of this vintage war-time classic at its best.

Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) is a prize fighter en route to a key bout on his plane, against the wishes of his manager, Max ‘Pop’ Corkle (James Gleason). When a control cable severs, the plane crashes and Pendleton ends up in Heaven thanks to an overzealous angel (Edward Everett Horton) who after discussion with head angel Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains, in the role James Mason reprised in the Beatty remake), discovers he has been prematurely taken.

Things get complicated when, whilst trying to return Pendleton to Earth, the angel and Pendleton discover Corkle has cremated the body and is not due in Heaven for another 50 years. Mr. Jordan takes on the responsibility and after a long search comes upon a soon-to-be-murdered investor called Bruce Farnsworth and gives Joe the chance to use his body on the proviso he gets one more suited to his prize-fighting skills….

Here Comes Mr. Jordan belongs in the realm of other wartime classics like Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, Blithe Spirit, and A Guy Named Joe (the source for Steven Spielberg’s 1990 film Always) and is another gem that relies on great acting and directing to emphasize the fantasy over complex special effects, in this context very simple optical processes. Montgomery is excellent as the bemused lost soul and Rains holds the attention as the insightful Mr. Jordan.

The film endures after 75 years because of its universal story and characterization and makes you value your place in the world in the context of a very moral tale that also relies on a lack of profanity and explicit visuals to make a very effective statement about mortality and the spirituality of life. It may not have had the same visibility as the Capra classic and George Bailey’s predicament as touchingly rendered by James Stewart, but such films like this deserve the love and care as Columbia have put into this new home release.

We are sure that a certain legendary boxer who left us recently will appreciate the essence of what this film reveals to the audience and I am also sure that if he had the chance, he could relive his life through another soul. Here Comes Mr. Jordan is another classic movie that gets to the very heart of the matter and has much to offer a family audience in the process. The extras include the obligatory trailer, plus a couple of discussions on the film and a theatrical performance.

HERE COMES MR JORDAN (1941) / CERT: U / DIRECTOR: ALEXANDER HALL / SCREENPLAY: ROBERT MONTGOMERY, EVELYN KEYES, CLAUDE RAINS, RITA JOHNSON / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 20TH

 

How many words have we got?

Blood Bath is a somewhat notorious movie that’s probably best known for its ridiculously convoluted route to the screen. Here goes: Roger Corman took over the production of Yugoslavian spy-flick Operation Titian (1963) but he decided it was unreleasable and re-edited into a murder movie called Portrait in Terror (1965), which eventually made it to television. Even so, Corman asked Jack Hill if he could do anything with it. Hill filmed some extra bits in exotic locations to keep the Eastern European feel and turned it into Blood Bath, a movie about a mad sculptor who kills his models and turns them into sculptures. It also featured beatniks (including Sid Haig) but was never released as Corman still wasn’t satisfied. So then he gets Stephanie Rothman to have another go. The original mad artist (William Campbell – you know him from classic Trek’s Trouble with Tribbles and The Squire of Gothos) refused to have anything more to do with this (who can blame him?) so he’s replaced by someone who looks nothing like he does. The solution is simple: he’s now a vampire who can change his appearance (if only Ed Wood had thought of that). This one is finally put out as Blood Bath (1966) but we haven’t finished there: it was too short for television so even more additional material was added and it became Track of the Vampire (1966). So not only has it turned from an Eastern European spy movie into an American vampire yarn with beatniks, somewhere along the line Patrick Magee’s substantial part in the first movie is reduced to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance as a corpse in the final one.

With us? Don’t worry if you’re not because it obviously has stinker written all over it. Except, it isn’t. Out of the above mess, we actually get a not-too-bad B-movie. By some miracle the plot makes sense, there are some genuinely eerie dream sequences and the humour with the beatniks still manages to be quite funny. In fact, the whole artist/beatnik thing makes the film somewhat similar to Corman’s classic Bucket of Blood (1959), but with added creepiness and vampirism (and you need to see Bucket of Blood if you haven’t already).

But what we haven’t enough words to do is review Operation Titian, Portrait in Terror or Track of the Vampire because believe it or not, those heroic people at Arrow Video have included all four movies on two discs. Think that’s pretty much above and beyond. They’re worth a watch and there are some great extras.

How many words is that? Get in!

Extras: Operation Titian / Portrait in Terror and Track of the Vampire / visual essay by Tim Lucas / interview with Sid Haig / interview with Jack Hill / stills gallery / poster / booklet.

BLOOD BATH (1966) / DIRECTOR: JACK HILL, STEPHANIE ROTHMAN / SCREENPLAY: JACK HILL, STEPHANIE ROTHMAN / STARRING: WILLIAM CAMPBELL, MARISSA MATHES, LORI SAUNDERS, SANDRA KNIGHT, KARL SCHANZER, BIFF ELLIOT, SID HAIG / RELEASED: OUT NOW

 

Part One of Parasyte saw extraterrestrial parasites descend en masse and slide inside people’s ears to take over their brains. One of the few people opposing their gradual takeover and slaughter of humans for food is teenager Shin’ichi, whose parasite Miki ended up lodged in his right hand, the two of them forming a symbiotic relationship to survive.

Shin’ichi is now wanted as a serial killer of the parasite-infected and has become hunted by Goto, a psychotic and seemingly unstoppable death machine consisting of a symbiotic assortment of five separate parasites determined to kill Shinichi and Miki and bring an end to their opposition. Further conflict comes from the goals of the aliens having become divided; some of them believe humanity needs to be destroyed to save it from itself, while others are of the opinion that a path of coexistence will be more beneficial to both races. One of the latter is parasite leader Tamiya, who after becoming a mother and finds her priorities irrevocably shifted and begins to undergo an existential crisis.

Several of the dangling plot threads left at the end from the first film are continued, such as Shinichi’s girlfriend Satomi being left traumatised after witnessing her school friends being massacred and the police investigation into Shinichi’s murders, but the way they are handled forms part of the film’s main problem. Instead of being the second of a two-part story, this feels like the closing chapter of a trilogy, with the narrative-heavy expansion of the middle instalment having taken place during the time skipped over between these two films. This means that the story has leapt straight from setup to denouement without any of the required intervening development, thus robbing the various character arc zeniths of their deserved impact. Although this is unequivocally the story’s culmination, it feels like we’ve been cheated out of much of what we were promised.

Through its brazen violence, the story also manages to continue the streak of philosophising that began in the first movie, developing it further with how some of the aliens perceive the duality of consideration inherent in the human condition. Specifically, we plunder, pillage and otherwise ravage the planet upon which we live, but in spite of this can still display boundless levels of compassion for one another, and its through this that the story’s most meaningful observations about the importance of life are able to be made. 

The creature design is just as impressive, with the parasite-controlled people being essentially composed of individual parts that can detach and function autonomously, the morphing flesh looking like some hybrid of the Thing and the T-1000. The black humour of violence that such excessive body horror invokes occasionally relieves the grim tone, but for the most past it’s a bleak and brutal ride. Overall, Parasyte has decent ideas and portrays them in an engaging manner, but it would have been a lot more satisfying if we had actually been given something that felt like a complete story.

PARASYTE (PART 2) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: TAKASHI YAMAZAKI / SCREENPLAY: RYÔTA KOSAWA, TAKASHI YAMAZAKI / STARRING: SHÔTA SOMETANI, SADAO ABE, ERI FUKATSU, AI HASHIMOTO, ASANO TADANOBU, JUN KUNIMURA, NAO ÔMORI / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Ah remakes, one of the multiple backed beasts of modern cinema. It seems that not a year can go by without a plethora of them (or re-imaginings as some directors and studios now call them). However, aside from a rare few (Carpenter’s The Thing), we all know remakes hardly ever really better the original but some of them can be decent or enjoyable updates, even if the film they are remaking is an undisputed classic or much loved favourite. Still, there are some occasions where an announced remake is so preposterously uncalled for that you are challenged into not even giving the film a chance at all. Ericson Core’s remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s Swayze/Reeves 1991 crime caper Point Break would most definitely fall into that category.

Obviously we should never say never- after all is the year that Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book floored us all- but off the back of terrible reviews, a lack of audience enthusiasm and disappointing box office, Point Break was certainly not sailing the waves so smoothly. Still, is there something here worth your time? Well, not loads. This film sees former daredevil and extreme athlete Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) experience a devastating loss and seek out a career in the FBI. Aiming to prove himself, Utah comes to aid in a series of high-octane crimes by audacious risk taking criminals, who Utah believes are aiming to complete the Ozaki 8- a series of death defying trials, that are accomplished to honour nature. To prove his theory, Utah infiltrates the extreme sports community after a storm has drawn them to huge and rarely formed series of waves. There he meets a group of individuals led by the mysterious Bodhi (Édgar Ramírez), who Utah feels may have something to do with these crimes.

While being called Point Break, Ericson Core’s well-shot but utterly pointless film bares only slight similarities to Bigelow’s cult Thriller turned classic. True, a remake deviating from the original is not always a bad thing (Piranha 3D, The Italian Job) but this film fails to find a real purpose behind all its daring. The stunts and clear professionalism behind their construction are what really saves the film from utter disaster because this is a film that offers many a spectacular action sequence. In particular a free climbing scene that genuinely grips- no point intended. Sadly these isolated scenes are all that livens up a drab remake and are nowhere near enough to save it. Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay fails where W. Peter Iliff’s succeeded, in that the charisma, characters and plot are all entirely lacking here. Good stunts do not make a great film, you need substance behind the flash, see the recent Mission: Impossible films as an example, they have fantastic action and stunts but also a slick story and charming characters. If you rely on cool stunts alone, you might as well Google extreme sporting videos and in fact you would probably be better off doing so. Hell, they’d have better characters. 

Point Break has potential to actually tell a worthwhile story of eco warriors and environmental extremism but it only merely nudges any ideology before then coasting along blandly until the next big stunt, with the plot being practically non-existent and the actual reasoning being even thinner. The characters suffer from the undeveloped screenplay, as audiences will be pining for the kind of attraction offered by Swayze, Busey and even Reeves. Bracey never really works as Utah and his performance feels wooden and unlively. Ramírez fares better and is probably the standout of the cast as an obsessively spiritual Bodhi, though he is far less interesting than he should be thanks to the script giving him no real purpose. The rest of the “characters” are reserved to glaring looks or smiles (Clemens Schick’s Roach, Tobias Santelmann’s Chowder, and Matias Varela’s Grommet), chatting about the minimal plot points (Teresa Palmer’s Samsara) or just pretty much standing there (Ray Winstone’s Angelo Pappas does a lot of that). 

So, that is about all there is to say about this one. Point Break is not an absolute unmitigated disaster thanks only to some compelling stuntwork, made such by- not the tension of the film- but the work of the team behind, who are the only ones here that deserve top marks. Sadly any other potential is scuppered by a script that makes do with the superficial and forgets to inject any heart or even a main body to the movie. There is no point to Point Break and thus there is no point sitting through it. Wait for someone to upload the stunt-based action sequences to YouTube instead of sitting through the boring, often uneventful content that makes up the rest of the film.

Special Features: Deleted Scenes

POINT BREAK / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: ERICSON CORE / SCREENPLAY: KURT WIMMER / STARRING: ÉDGAR RAMÍREZ, LUKE BRACEY, TERESA PALMER, RAY WINSTONE / RELEASE DATE: 13TH JUNE

Expected Rating: 5/10

Actual Rating: