Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Arrow’s new Blu-ray release of 1990’s Hired To Kill, from schlocky Greek director Nico Mastorakis, comes in a nice box with a slick mustardy-hued artwork cover which, with its preponderance of helicopters, explosions, and bikini-clad lovelies makes the film look an undiscovered Bond classic. Interviewed in one of the 2-disc set’s special features, Mastorakis is talking about his film’s star – ‘actor’ Brian Thompson – and he briefly forgets his name; Thompson is married to his daughter and is the father of Mastorakis’ grandchildren. It’s an anecdote which provides blessed relief from the purgatory of watching this jaw-droppingly inept and witless film and in many ways made the whole tortuous experience – much of which was spent hiding behind a cushion cringing at the lousy script and far worse acting – very nearly tolerable.

Our hunky hero, mercenary Frank Ryan (Thompson) is lounging about in his pants on his boat and – just to prove his credentials as a real man –  he whips out his pistol (oo-er) and shoots his alarm clock when it has the temerity to… well, sound its alarm. Stupid alarm clock. You don’t mess with Frank Ryan. Ryan is recruited to infiltrate the island stronghold of a tyrannical South American despot (played by Oliver Reed who, by this point in his career, had become transformed entirely into alcohol) and free a rebel leader (José Ferrer, who has the good grace to look utterly baffled in the handful of scenes he appears). The obvious way to achieve these aims, of course, is for Ryan to pose as a gay photographer working with a posse of ass-kicking supermodels (in reality – or what passes for the film’s reality – tough old ex-flames of Ryan’s or else jailbirds looking for a spot of redemption). At one point, perhaps to convince Reed’s off-his-face Michael Bartos that he really is a gay photographer and not a tough-as-old-boots mercenary, Ryan and Bartos lock lips in perhaps the most passionless kiss in the history of cinema. Later on Ryan gets it on with a lady to the accompaniment of some magnificently-inappropriate panpipe music.

Hired to Kill is an absolute, horrendous mess. The script is woeful, the acting pretty much uniformly appalling. Thompson really hasn’t a clue; his eyes are dead and his face, which looks as if his mouth has been stuffed with tennis balls, brings a new meaning to the word  vacant. He’s truly an odd-looking fellow. But worst of all, Hired to Kill is just so damned boring. Pitched as an action movie it’s worryingly dialogue-heavy – and when the dialogue is of the quality on display here, then clearly no-one’s in for a good time. The film sputters into life in its last few minutes when there’s a gun battle for reasons which we’ve temporarily forgotten and the finale, with Reed aimlessly firing his rifle at a departing helicopter, is enlivened by the fact that Reed was apparently openly urinating whilst the scene was being filmed. As critiques go, that’s a tough one to beat so we won’t even try.

Extras: Booklet, 4K restoration / Commentary / director interview / Brian Thompson interview / trailer / stills gallery.

HIRED TO KILL (1990) / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: NICO MASTORAKIS / SCREENPLAY: NICO MASTERORAKIS, FRED C PERRY, KIRK ELLIS / STARRING: GEORGE KENNEDY, BRIAN THOMPSON, OLIVER REED / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Frances Austen (Sandy Dennis) lives in a privileged beige world. She has servants and rich elderly friends who descend on her apartment for dinner and indulge in superficial bourgeois chit-chat about the inclemency of the weather. But Frances is unable to forget the young man she saw sitting on the park bench, huddled against the cold. He is still there – she is watching him from the window – and now it’s raining. “Someone should ask him in,” she says, and her dinner guests mock her.

But as soon as her guests and servants are gone, Frances rescues The Boy (Michael Burns) and runs him a bath, serves him dinner, lets him stay the night in her guest room. The Boy complies, but refuses to talk. Maybe he can’t talk. When Frances asks him his name, The Boy only smiles.

After The Boy goes to bed, Frances locks him in the guest room. This is only the smallest foreshadowing of what is to come.

The Cold Day in The Park is a curious psycho-drama, a complex character study of a fragile and repressed young woman trapped inside a gilded cage, who tentatively reveals herself to this mysteriously handsome doe-eyed man and reacts in the most unexpectedly cruel way when her affections aren’t returned. Although it has a lot to recommend it, not least the fine central performances of Sandy Dennis and Michael Burns, it doesn’t quite work as a psychosexual horror story because, like Frances herself, the movie seems disconnected and unsure of what it wants to be. The tension is missing.

That’s not to say it is wholly unsuccessful – there’s a terrific midpoint scene when Frances leads The Boy in a game of Blind Man’s Buff and, with their shadows flickering across the walls and the intimation that something dark and twisted is to come, the movie briefly has promise – there’s also a sequence when The Boy’s sister slips into the house and threatens to tip the entire game over the edge – but, for the most part, the story loses all momentum when Dennis isn’t on screen. Thanks to weaknesses in Gillian Freeman’s screenplay, Frances’ final breakdown doesn’t really convince either. It seems too sudden, too shocking, and doesn’t entirely make sense in the context of her character. By the time the violence arrives, the film has sadly lost most of its power.

Still, as an example of Robert Altman’s fledgling work as a director (much of his signature style is already evident) and as a flawed examination of emotional obsession that is reminiscent of William Wyler’s (much better) The Collector (1965), the film is worthy of consideration. And Sandy Dennis, who was an unfairly underrated actress despite winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, is marvellous to behold.

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK (1969) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: ROBERT ALTMAN / SCREENPLAY: GILLIAN FREEMAN / STARRING: SANDY DENNIS, MICHAEL BURNS, SUSANNE BENTON, DAVID GARFIELD / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 20TH

 

Stephen (Spencer Banks) is a teenager growing up amidst the rural beauty of Pinvin, a picturesque village overshadowed by the Malvern Hills. He is an uptight young man, fervently nationalistic and deeply Christian, who resents anything that threatens the right-wing establishment – especially his nearest neighbours, the television writer and his wife, who defend striking workers, question what sinister plans the government might have for the local countryside, and – in Stephen’s view – must be abnormal, because they are unable to have children.

But, privately, Stephen is in turmoil. He is struggling with his sexuality and secretly beginning to question the world around him. His grip on reality is slipping away. His fascination with Edward Elgar’s orchestral work The Dream of Gerontius is inspiring nightmares of angels and demons and he wanders into a grove where men, women, and children smile serenely as their hands are severed on a chopping block. Before long, a chance meeting with the long-dead Elgar, a portentous hill-top encounter with King Penda – the last pagan King of England – and shocking revelations about his own genesis will threaten to shatter Stephen’s world completely.

Penda’s Fen caused a sensation when it was originally televised in 1974, and it is easy to see why. It is a powerful piece of filmmaking that defies categorisation. It is, by turns, surreal, political, mythological, magical and a multi-layered character study of a conflicted adolescent on the brink of sexual and ideological transformation. Some reviewers have called it a ‘folk horror’ and, because of its pagan elements and its subtle underlying thread of theological conflict, believe that Penda’s Fen shares some of its DNA with The Wicker Man. Given that Penda’s Fen was broadcast only four months after The Wicker Man was released, the comparisons are understandable, but don’t really hold up. The two films might touch briefly upon similar themes but they are very different animals, albeit equally disturbing and impressive.

Penda’s Fen is not only a landmark of British television. It is also a reminder of how great British television used to be, when writers and directors were allowed full unfettered rein to work their craft and the results, although sometimes challenging and uncomfortable to watch, were almost always intelligent, thought-provoking, and deeply personal leaps of the imagination. This is all that and more, and if you are serious about cinema the BFI’s fabulous new Blu-ray presentation is definitely not to be missed.

PENDA’S FEN / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: ALAN CLARKE / SCREENPLAY: DAVID RUDKIN / STARRING: SPENCER BANKS, JOHN ATKINSON, GEORGINE ANDERSON / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Spanning 382 minutes and totalling three volumes, Arabian Nights is director Miguel Gomes’ unconventional epic which explores austerity-stricken Portugal through a number of separate and often absurd tales. Each film (The Restless One, The Desolate One, and The Enchanted One) begins with an identical message declaring that this is not an adaptation of the book Arabian Nights, despite drawing on its structure. Instead, it’s based on events which took place between 2013 and 2014 when Portugal was ‘held hostage’ to a program of economic austerity enforced by a negligent, unjust government. In Arabian Nights, Gomes has crafted a perplexing, audacious collage of stories, blending documentary, fantasy, and satire to equally dazzling and befuddling effect.

A mischievous self-awareness runs throughout the work and within ten minutes of The Restless One, Gomes runs away from his own set after contemplating the impossibility of creating a film which is both fantastical and militant. But this is exactly what Gomes does, using the stories-within-stories structure of Arabian Nights to tell a number of bizarre tales which all respond to the contemporary hardships of Portugal. The very first story, The Men with Hard-ons, again encapsulates Gomes’ irreverent, playful spirit. The sequence follows a group of impotent, pro-austerity politicians who discover a cure for their erectile dysfunction – this is the trilogy’s most overtly humorous and allegorically simplistic passage. In contrast, The Restless One’s concluding tale, The Swim of the Magnificents, provides a naturalistic study of real people who’ve been tragically damaged by austerity measures in Portugal. Their heart-breaking testimonies provide a welcome sombreness amidst the rest of the madcap craziness.

The Desolate One provides two of the triptych’s strongest stories. In The Tears of a Judge, a strict magistrate is slowly broken down as her string of witnesses (including a deaf woman, a gang of masked demons and a talking cow) continually push the blame onto someone else for their own wrong-doings. It’s a brilliantly choreographed and darkly comical scene which portrays a real sense of helplessness and group culpability in the face of this ‘grotesque chain of evil, stupidity and despair’. Living up to its title The Desolate One’s final story The Owners of Dixie is the most poignant section of the trilogy. A stray dog called Dixie regularly switches owners inside a single tower block allowing the touching tribulations of a couple of drug addicts and an ailing elderly couple to become uncovered. These intimate, thought-provoking encounters tragically sketch how the social services have failed the most vulnerable people in Portugal and bring home the harsh reality of Portugal’s predicament.

The Enchanted One is by far the weakest of the three. Whereas on-screen intertitles are used sparingly in the previous instalments, here they are exhausted and Gomes’ reliance on them often feels lazy. This chapter isn’t tuned into the same political and darkly comical agenda of the previous two and the monotonous, over-long The Inebriating Chorus of the Chaffinches, which documents a working-class bird-trapping community, is a disappointing low-point on which to bow out on.

Arabian Nights’ erratic narrative, leisurely pacing and hefty run time will definitely test some film-goer’s patience, but if you succumb to its absurd delights you’ll be rewarded with an array of darkly humorous, sharply critical and genuinely heartfelt stories.

ARABIAN NIGHTS / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: MIGUEL GOMES / SCREENPLAY: TELMMO CHURRO, MIGUEL GOMES, MARIANA RICARDO / STARRING: CRISTA ALFAIATE, DINARTE BRANCO, CARLOTO COTTA, ADRIANO LUZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

No literary character has been made it onto film as many times as Sherlock Holmes. To be honest, we haven’t researched that at all so that might not actually be true. But you get the idea. He’s been in a lot of movies, TV series and even radio adaptations. But, while some will cite Brett, Cushing, Lee or even Cumberbatch as the definitive Holmes, to some of us it will always be Basil Rathbone with Nigel Bruce as the indomitable (and entirely inaccurate) Watson at his side.

Between 1939 and 1946 they made fourteen together but what is sometimes forgotten is that the first two were very different from the rest. They were made by 20th Century Fox with a decent budget and were actually set in the correct Victorian period. The rest were B-movies banged out by Universal and set in the (then) present day in order to join in with the (understandably) popular pastime of defeating the Nazis. Don’t get us wrong, they were still fun, but they lacked a bit of authenticity and were occasionally even set in America. But The Hound of the Baskervilles was the first and it’s about the only one to even stick vaguely to the original plot.

We’re not going to go into that plot though because we’re sure you know it. But if you’re familiar with the later ones, the first thing you notice here is the relatively stellar cast. Rathbone and Bruce don’t even top the bill as that goes to Richard Greene as the titular Sir Henry . And then, despite this being 20th Century Fox, we get the Universal stalwarts of Lionel Atwill and John Carradine. The Rathbone/Bruce dynamic that gave the series its popularity is quickly established with the “who would own a walking stick like this?” routine (Watson gets it all wrong) and a million Conon Doyle enthusiasts presumably all groaned at how this bumbling Watson was nothing like the character from the books. But Bruce’s Watson is so lovable (Bruce was a genuinely great comic actor) that he ended up exaggerating it for the rest of the series and many people still think of Watson that way even though he hasn’t been played like that since.

So what else? Wonderful atmosphere in both the London streets and on the pretty-well-done studio-bound Moors set; Rathbone doing his brilliant ‘master of disguise’ act (although he actually surpassed that in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes later the same year); lots of fog; a big dog and it’s on Blu-ray. Not much more we can say than that other than to bemoan the fact that we’re going to have to replace our old DVD boxset.

Extras: Interview with Sir Christopher Frayling / Interview with Basil Rathbone biographer Michael Druxman

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1939) / DIRECTOR: SIDNEYLANFIELD / SCREENPLAY: ERNEST PASCAL / STARRING: RICHARD GREENE, BASIL RATHBONE, NIGEL BRUCE, WENDY BARRIE, LIONEL ATWILL, JOHN CARRADINE / RELEASED: OUT NOW

 

Stunning landscapes, slow plots and brooding characters return in Celtic noir crime drama Hinterland (Y Gwyll in its native tongue) for a second series, bursting with dark drama set against bare yet wondrous cinematography. Hinterland follows the trials and tribulations of a Welsh police force, led by DCI Tom Mathias (portrayed by Richard Harrington), who spends much of Series 2 cursed by tragic events in Series 1, affecting his ability to function as a policeman.

There you have an unfortunate aspect of Hinterland – a sense of unoriginality. How many cop shows do you have to sift through exactly to find a rough, masculine, hard-done-by officer who struggles to separate his private life from his day job? Beneath all the cliché character stereotypes, Harrington delivers a tight, well-crafted performance that just about manages to be engrossing, even if the remainder of the series is only hooky when it wants to be.

Indeed, what it actually wants to be is up for debate. There’s an undeniable cinematic grandeur to the show’s appearance, but it’s underpinned by the dry monotony of its plot and characters, which themselves have these issues masked by a finely-tuned precision in the execution that’s difficult not to admire.

There’s such a lovely balance in everything here – the stories, the characters, the direction, the pacing, it’s all presented beautifully, with not a shot out of place or emotional beat missed. However, that professionalism seems to come at a price of individuality. Hinterland feels content with being a homage to its Nordic cousins and perfectly happy in its own limitations. When each episode stretches to 90 minutes in length, going down such routes results in a failure to maintain interest. Such running times only serve to remind you how Hinterland is occasionally smothered by its own pedestrian nature.

Nevertheless, for every scene where DCI Mathias throws a tantrum over his ruined family, unfortunately pointing out how comfortable Hinterland is with cherry-picking the dullest elements in police dramas, there’s an insanely perfect shot of Wales that’s enveloping in a way Hinterland’s plots never quite are. That’s perhaps the show’s biggest selling point – an ever-running theme of isolation that never loses steam. The landscape and the characters share a sense of detachment, loneliness, and bleakness that, when mixed with the cinematography, is most absorbing.

Hinterland still manages to be a rewarding watch. Its stately production values and top notch deliverance are quite satisfying to see unfold with each episode. It simply doesn’t have enough murder in its eyes to compliment the themes of isolation that run rampant, and ultimately is the noir crime drama equivalent of a cat without its claws.

HINTERLAND SEASON 2 / CERT: 15 / DIRECTORS: ED THOMAS, GARETH BRYN / SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: RICHARD HARRINGTON, MALI HARRIES, ALEX HARRIES, HANNAH DANIEL / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

If you watch Pandemic without any expectations, then you are not in for major disappointment. But you won’t be arriving at cinematic moksha either. The path of the zombie is so worn that little vegetation remains. Fresh takes on the genre are few and far between. Shot almost entirely from the first person perspective, Pandemic brandishes its stylised gimmick like a drunken clubber with a karaoke microphone. It’s fun for a while and provides some great spectacles, but then you wish they’d just let it go.

Being the new wave of zombie flick, Pandemic never mentions the ‘Z’ word. In five nasty stages, an infection is transforming the population into violent cannibals with goo dripping from every orifice. Set in Los Angeles, a CDC doctor – Lauren (Nichols) – is assigned to a small team tasked with saving a medical group. Under the news that New York has fallen, we gather that things are pretty glum in the U.S. of A.

Lauren embarks on the journey by bus with three other team members. The driver, known as ‘Wheeler’, is a short-tempered ex-con. It seems to be a step down for Alfie Allen, known for his role on Game of Thrones and as the irritating baddie in John Wick. A tough and grizzled ex-cop named ‘Gunner’ (Phifer) and a female navigator called Denise (Pyle) round out the crew. Of course, it wouldn’t be a film at all if there weren’t a few secret agendas and ulterior motives.

All of the biohazard suits that the team wear are fitted with cameras. What isn’t shot from this perspective is mostly captured by various CCTVs. It’s quickly apparent that the decision to field only four individuals with a handful of weapons is idiotic. Hence, we are treated to some great first-person carnage. The semi-cogent infected run fast and attack in numbers. The action is weighty and frantic. It’s in these moments that the film shines, and at the same time, stalls.

Watching a zombie aerially jiu-jitsued back to his buddies is great in the first person. So are the stabbings, slashings, bludgeonings, and impalings. The weapons are beefy with clicks and booms; the overall sound design is atmospheric and creepy. But the sparse plot simply exists to propel the characters toward the next dose of jostling violence. And within the jittery and frenzied perspective, we, the viewers, begin to feel dizzy. One could argue that the point is to place us in the driver’s seat of an apocalyptic hell hole. That’s all fair and well – but apart from the zombie kills of the week, you can’t help feeling a little confused.

Pandemic is not a bad film by any means. The scenes effectively convey a social collapse and devastated city. The claustrophobic atmosphere is gritty and tense, and the action is often outright entertaining. The actors don’t seem to have a great deal to work with but do a commendable job nonetheless. But it’s is simply a vehicle for the first-person camerawork, and it never seems to move beyond that. It’s worth watching late at night as an entertaining Z-flick, but once will probably be enough.

PANDEMIC / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: JOHN SUITS / SCREENPLAY: DUSTIN T. BENSON / STARRING: RACHEL NICHOLS, ALFIE ALLEN, MISSI PYLE, MEKHI PHIFER, PAT HEALY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Now, here’s a film that takes this writer back to my early cinema-going years in London and one that is up there with several cult action films from that period like Road House, Showdown In Little Tokyo, Rapid Fire and any of the early Steven Seagal actioners from Nico (Above The Law) to Out For Justice.

Historically, during the VHS era and in the early days of DVD, there would always be opportunities in desperation to pick up something for the sake of it when you couldn’t get the film that you wanted. Certainly (during the golden era 1982 – 1984, when corner shops, garages and video libraries thrived on the high street) if a big title like The Evil Dead or First Blood was out of the shop, you would turn to whatever else was on the shelves. The labels inside the covers saying something like ‘Video on Rental’, would grace numerous titles and you would be down to the dregs of whatever else was there. This sort of thinking led to the nadir of our VHS days as a teen, a double-bill of Bronx Warriors and Mardi Gras Massacre.

Anyway – Stone Cold was a film that didn’t get good reviews in 1991, but it was certainly lapped up by fans who watched it in its brief cinema run and subsequently on VHS and DVD. Like Rapid Fire, one of Brandon Lee’s best films in his sadly short-lived career until his death on the set of The Crow (1994), it may be short on plot and character, but it is a highly effective action thriller.

Stone Cold is a no-brainer of an action film, following a traditional template and with sufficient bang, clever editing and brutal violence to just carry it over the finish line. Former Seattle Seahawks linebacker Brian Bosworth made his acting début in the film, which tells the story of Alabama cop Joe Huff, who is recruited by the FBI to infiltrate a Mississippi biker gang called the Brotherhood, led by Chains (Lance Henrikson), who have designs on taking out a District Attorney for various objectionable reasons. Huff takes on the alter-ego of John Stone and handles himself pretty well in the circumstances, dealing with all manner of rivalries and succumbing to the charms of one of the ladies, Nancy (Arabella Holzbog). Inevitably duty calls and the action hots up towards a reasonably exciting climax at a City Hall.

Director Craig R. Baxley, who replaced first choice Bruce Malmuth (Nighthawks, Hard To Kill) is a savvy helm, given his background as stunt co-ordinator on Walter Hill films like The Warriors (1979) and at the time had made his directorial debut on the Carl Weathers/Joel Silver hit Action Jackson (1988), another cult actioner that did reasonable business, albeit not to the extent of a Die Hard or Lethal Weapon. The film is helped by a charismatic villain in Henriksen, who always lifts everything he does to a new level, whether it is Terminator or Aliens (or even Close Encounters of the Third Kind, back in cinemas in its Director’s Cut). Some online reports speculate that had Malmuth remained as director, the film would have had a more family-orientated subtext surrounding Huff.

At the end of the day, Stone Cold is what it is – a beer-and-curry Saturday night special when the rain hits hard and after 25 years remains a passably entertaining cult action flick.

STONE COLD (1991) / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: CRAIG R. BAXLEY / SCREENPLAY: WALTER DONIGER / STARRING: BRIAN BOSWORTH, LANCE HENRIKSEN, WILLIAM FORSYTHE, ARABELLA HOLZBOG / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 6TH

Cast your mind back to 1986. The first episodes of Casualty and Catchphrase aired on television. Europe, The Bangles, and Cutting Crew were in the charts. Steve Martin was still funny. Martin Short was getting actual starring roles. Chevy Chase had starred in some of his best films. Cheaper by the Dozen 2, Shelby: The Dog Who Saved Christmas and The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause weren’t even a twinkle in a cynical film producer’s eyes. It was also the year that ¡Three Amigos! Was released. It seems like a long time ago.

1913, The Mexican town of Santa Poco is under constant threat from the infamous El Guapo. After seeing them at a travelling cinema, Carmen (Patrice Martinez), writes to Hollywood to enlist the help of Lucky Day (Steve Martin), Dusty Bottoms (Chevy Chase) and Ned Nedelander (Martin Short) also known as the Three Amigos, to save the town. Unfortunately, the trio are out of work actors rather than the heroic heroes that Carmen believes them to be.

¡Three Amigos! is your typical fish out of water/gross misunderstanding comedy. It basically recreates the plot of The Magnificent Seven but with more jokes and slightly more dancing. Galaxy Quest would go on to use the same plot but in the science fiction genre and arguably better and more intelligently, thirteen years later. Martin, Short and Chase are a lot of fun as the three out of work actors, mining physical comedy, and one-liners for all their laughs. They stick out in the old west with their giant sombreros and -rhinestone-studded costumes. Their entertainment talent is well above their combined intelligence and they win you over with their camp rendition of My Little Buttercup and their strange and slightly inappropriate salute. It is a gleefully silly movie, although perhaps not quite as out there as films like The Man With Two Brains and The Jerk, and it’s difficult not to enjoy a film with lines like ‘We can take a walk and you can kiss me on the veranda.’ ‘Oh, the lips will be fine.’

We think that ¡Three Amigos! is remembered fondly rather than thought of as a classic. Its jokes are amusing but the film does lack a high gag rate that it should have. Also, at an hour and forty minutes, it is a bit longer than it really needs to be.

¡Three Amigos! Can’t rightly be considered anyone’s best work but it is a generally entertaining comedy which is a perfect light watch for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

¡THREE AMIGOS! / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: JOHN LANDIS / SCREENPLAY: STEVE MARTIN, LORNE MICHAELS, RANDY NEWMAN / STARRING: STEVE MARTIN, CHEVY CHASE, MARTIN SHORT, JON LOVITZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Like two pebbles hitting the water at opposite ends of a pond simultaneously, Visions is bookended by two dramatic incidents that ripple towards one another throughout the rest of the film, creating an interesting jigsaw puzzle that is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Isla Fisher, presumably sporting a portrait in her attic having barely aged a day since Home and Away two decades ago, plays Evey, the survivor of an horrific car accident that took the life of the baby travelling in the other vehicle. One year on, Evey’s husband David is buying a Californian vineyard in an attempt to kick-start a new career, but once the couple – now expecting a baby of their own – move in, Evey begins having visions suggesting a violent history for the property. The trouble is, while previous owners of the estate have also reported supernatural episodes, Evey can’t find any evidence of an event that would have been responsible for initiating the haunting. Both David and Doctor Mathison (Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory) suspect the visions are all in her head…

Kevin Greutert’s film presents a series of clues that ultimately make sense of the resolution, but while the resolution is itself satisfying in an entirely predictable way, the clues are never really identified as such – so although the element of mystery in Visions is satisfactory, the unravelling of it is not. Greutert (a veteran of the Saw series) does a reasonable job with the film’s look and feel, this being very much a Hollywood horror in tone with a score by Anton Sanko that echoes Jerry Goldsmith echoing Bernard Herrmann, but the spartan running time does it no favours. There’s no opportunity to acquaint the viewer with the community, and almost all the characters who return for the climax make just a single appearance earlier on, never engendering the familiarity necessary to make the final sequences mean anything. A number of subplots and subtexts are introduced but there’s little development of any of them, such that the mystery itself becomes increasingly linear as the plot progresses.

Even Evey and David make for a surprisingly colourless couple, exhibiting little chemistry and even less charisma; guest actors such as Eva Longoria and Blade Runner’s Joanna Cassidy turn up and disappear again without making an impression, despite the latter’s too obviously deliberately eccentric role. Gillian Jacobs as Sadie, the friend Evey makes at pre-natal yoga, instantly steals every scene she’s in, outperforming almost everybody by the end of the film.

This is far from a disaster, and the haunting sequences themselves are mostly very effective if overly clichéd, but a little more care and attention could have produced something much more memorable.

VISIONS / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: KEVIN GREUTERT / SCREENPLAY: L.D. GOFFIGAN, LUCAS SUSSMAN / STARRING: ISLA FISHER, ANSON MOUNT, GILLIAN JACOBS, JOANNA CASSIDY / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 20TH