Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Oh dear. On the disc’s sole and lonely-looking extra feature, Sir Roger Moore – charming and self-deprecating as always – hopes we enjoy the film and, if we don’t, please don’t tell anybody.

Which makes us feel bad, because we really like Roger Moore and we hate the idea of upsetting him so Sir Roger, if you’re reading, you’d better stop reading now.

Has he gone? Good.

Bullseye! is the most appalling tosh we have seen in a very long time.

It’s a supposed comedy about two con-men (Roger Moore and Michael Caine) who discover they are the spitting images of two shifty nuclear scientists who have just discovered how to solve the world’s energy crisis. Together with their ex-partner in crime (Sally Kirkland) they set about stealing the formula for themselves but their plan backfires. Suddenly they’re working undercover for British Intelligence, trying to stop the scientists from auctioning their invention off to dangerous foreign powers. There’s a lot of running around, unfunny one-liners, deeply unfunny slapstick, and everybody involved looks suitably embarrassed. And they should be. We’re embarrassed and we only watched it. In fact, as soon as this review’s over I’m going to sit on the naughty step and stay there for a fortnight, and then we’re going to check ourselves into a clinic for post-traumatic stress disorder because if a film could ever be so bad it would give the viewer PTSD, this film is it.

But it’s our own fault. You see, this is a Michael Winner film, so we really should have known what we were getting involved with. And Winner co-wrote the (and I’m using this word in the loosest terms) ‘screenplay’ as well, along with Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran (two of TV comedy’s most inexplicably successful scriptwriters – true, they wrote The New Statesman but they’re also responsible for the risible Birds of a Feather) and Leslie Bricusse, who had enjoyed a pretty impressive career as a songwriter and even wrote the lyrics for a couple of really good James Bond themes, so when he agreed to co-write this he must have been on some hugely strong medication, quite possibly with a gun at his head.

As usual, Winner took his crew to good-looking locations (including a scene set on a beach in Barbados that probably doesn’t even last five minutes) but somehow everything he pointed his camera at still looks dull and badly photographed (which is quite an impressive trick, when you think about it.) There are loads of shameless cameos too, including Jenny Seagrove (Winner’s then-girlfriend… what information did he have on her that she agreed to that relationship?) playing two blink-and-you’ll-miss-them characters, John Cleese (obviously enjoying a free trip to Barbados) and Doctor Who’s own Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Nicholas Courtney, who’s in there somewhere but we’re embarrassed to say we missed him and no, we’re not going back for a second look.

As for the DVD, this is also one of the worst presentations I’ve ever seen. The picture is flat, lifeless and fuzzy with the colour washed out. In fact, we’ve got thirty-year-old VHS tapes that look better than this. But the sound is good, which means you’ll hear all the hackneyed gags you won’t be laughing at with crystal clear clarity.

There is no other word to sum this fiasco up other than – Avoid. And the two marks are for Sir Roger’s special feature (which isn’t a double-entendre but if it was it would still be funnier than the film. Honest).

BULLSEYE! / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: MICHAEL WINNER / SCREENPLAY: LESLIE BRICUSSE, LAURENCE MARKS, MAURICE GRAN / STARRING: ROGER MOORE, MICHAEL CAINE, SALLY KIRKLAND, DEBORAH MOORE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

While staying at their deceased parents’ lakeside cabin, twins Isabelle and Malcolm survive a home invasion by a pair of masked killers. Both adversely affected, they come to terms with the attack in different ways, Isabelle by talking it out with a therapist and Malcolm by ceaselessly hacking into the ice of the frozen lake, searching for the mask dropped into it.

Have you even given much thought about what happens to the survivors of a slasher movie after the credits roll? And this doesn’t mean just checking in with them a couple of years later for the sequel when the terror begins anew, but actually giving measured consideration regarding how living through such a traumatic experience would psychologically affect a person.

This is exactly what The Horror does. The title is as purposefully ambiguous as it is generic, referring not only to the attack itself (which begins and ends in the span of a minute), but also the aftermath where the twins attempt to pick their lives back up and carry on, the mental scars of the fateful night still deep and raw.

As Isabelle’s talks with her therapist relate her growing acceptance of the hand life has dealt her, they also reveal her growing fears for Malcolm’s sanity, and after we eventually learn of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the twins’ parents, you wonder if he ever even had a chance. As Malcolm’s search becomes increasingly desperate, the bleak winter desolation practically becomes a visual representation of his mental state as his obsessive compulsion pushes him ever closer to his breaking point.

Unlike the histrionic slashers, The Horror psychologically deconstructs, there is no gleeful rationale given of why the invaders decided to put on creepy gas masks and attack people, nor seemingly any reason as to why Isabelle and Malcolm were the ones targeted. We never even learn who they were. Their presence was an aberration, something that could not have been predicted or planned for, but just reacted to. As well as there being no big twist or shocking revelation to be had, The Horror doesn’t even have any real resolution. And that is pretty much the whole point. For those still standing when a slasher movie ends life will go on, unalterably tainted forever. While they can certainly be said to have survived their ordeal, whether or not they will ever escape it is another matter entirely. 

THE HORROR / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: JERRY J WHITE III / SCREENPLAY: RAYMOND CREAMER, SARAH CARMAN, JERRY J WHITE III / STARRING: CALLIE OTT, RAYMOND CREAMER, SCHELL M PETERSON, CHRIS OLIVER, LEXI MOELLER / RELEASE DATE: VOD OUT NOW

TV reporter Annie Monroe (Valentina Kolaric) leads her camera crew into the ominous Classroom 6, a schoolroom that is rumoured to be a portal into Hell. A teacher and his student have recently disappeared (the teacher was lecturing ‘Witchcraft and Black Magic 101’ so maybe their disappearances shouldn’t be a surprise) and the Psychic Annie, who has been brought on board to help them investigate, is immediately nervous, prowling the school corridors and insisting, “Something bad happened here.” But what was it, and will Annie and her team make it through the evening alive?

Okay, first the good news. Even though this is yet another Blair Witch Project meets Paranormal Activity rip-off, it actually starts out pretty well. When the school principal tells Annie about the history of Classroom 6 it’s a genuinely effective build-up, and any school that is open-minded enough to have witchcraft and black magic on its curriculum is a place we’d like to go. Even the paint-by-numbers gibberish about mirrors reflecting off mirrors and creating pathways for ghosts sounds briefly engaging, and who doesn’t love a Psychic who falls back on the old ‘let’s make contact with tennis balls’ shtick? So, that’s the first ten minutes taken care of.

But then the story implodes like a giant Marshmallow man after a bad night out with the Ghostbusters. Nothing happens for a huge amount of time, apart from a video camera inexplicably tipping over onto its side (the camera apparently only works because the spirits want it to) and our heroine is spooked out by a weird whiny noise. The dialogue becomes even more ludicrous and portentous, Annie grows increasingly more hysterical and the cinematography (such as it is) becomes substantially more spinny and juddery. By the time Annie decides to leave an obituary on the camera and all the screaming starts, you’ll probably be checking your navel for pizza crumbs. If by any chance you’re still watching the film, you should win a prize. 

So, is all the climactic chaos worth staying awake for?

Sadly, not so much.

Other reviewers have called Classroom 6 “genuinely eerie” and “chilling, like ” but, personally speaking, this reviewer has watched episodes of Scooby Doo that induced the heebie-jeebs worse than this. All you’ll be left with after the final fade-out, is a nasty case of motion sickness and the nagging feeling you should have done something else with the last hour-and-a-bit, like grab some tennis balls and locate your very own portal to the darkside. Absolutely hellish (but not in a good way) this is yet another found-footage fail.

CLASSROOM 6 / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: JONAS ODENHEIMER / STARRING: VALENTINA KOLARIC, MAURICE MEJIA, VINCE MAJOR / RELEASE DATE: 6TH JUNE

Anna is an agoraphobic, a condition brought on by a childhood trauma. Ever since her parents died she has lived with her brother in their family home. Now her brother is dead and Anna’s illness is so severe that she can’t even muster the courage to leave the house and attend his funeral. But J.P., Perry and Vance don’t know that. Anna’s delivery boy has told them she has a lot of money stored in the house and, on the day of the funeral when they expect the house to be empty, they break in. But despite her illness Anna is not as vulnerable as she seems, and a deadly cat and mouse game begins. As the hunters become the hunted it is terrifyingly obvious that Anna and her house both have their secrets.

A combination of Wait Until Dark, Panic Room and – but only in a minor way – the original Saw, Intruders is a flawed film that could have been so much more.

Beth Riesgraf, as Anna, gives a fantastic performance. She really is director Adam Schindler’s secret weapon and she doesn’t let him down. The opening scenes are particularly well developed and her character is intricately fascinating. But the premise starts to unravel as soon as the thieves arrive and the movie becomes a generic scuttling-around-hidden- passageways thriller. Suddenly Anna becomes another cookie-cutter victim-who-fights-back and for quite a long stretch of time the film seems less interested in her and more interested in the raiders, which weakens it considerably. Maybe because we lose Anna’s point of view the story loses its tension, although the moment when she realises the men are coming to break in and her agoraphobia won’t allow her to escape the house is a great sequence that really delivers. As for the thieves themselves, they’re the usual crew – blandly swaggering from room to room, falling into Anna’s traps, and not as intimidating as they should be (even though Perry acts the hard-man with Anna’s budgie, which results in a pretty unpleasant decapitated budgie close-up).

In short, as soon as the men arrive we’re just waiting for them to die and the deaths themselves are understated but effective. If Schindler and his writers had kept the focus on Anna and resisted all the gimmicks, this might have been a compelling character study of a woman whose trauma is teetering on the edge of psychopathy. As it is, despite all the trappings (literally) of her booby-trapped home, and an third act revelation which, if hardly original, is quite well done and seems psychologically true, Anna never quite gets there as the revenging heroine.

With a little more script development and a little less Home Alone meets The Cabin in the Woods, Intruders could have been a very good film. As it is, it’s definitely worth a watch but not the must-see it might have been.

INTRUDERS / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: ADAM SCHINDLER / SCREENPLAY: T.J. CIMFEL, DAVID WHITE / STARRING: BETH RIESGRAF, RORY CULKIN, JACK KESY / RELEASE DATE: 6TH JUNE

Johnny Hawksworth’s jangly theme music, Bob Godfrey’s wobbly animation and the voice-over by Richard Briers, these are all the hallmarks of the Roobarb and Custard animation series that hit our TV screens in 1974. It was broadcast just before the BBC evening news – a slot that was previously inhabited by the surreal The Magic Roundabout stop-frame animation series. 

Roobarb is an inquisitive and inventive shaggy green coloured dog, and Custard is a pink cat that lives next door. Roobarb has a naive child-like view of things and his actions amuse the birds in the garden, and are sent-up by the cynical Custard.

Like a child, Roobarb is always interested in the effects of the weather and animal behaviour. In one of the 5-minute long episodes, he makes a balloon for the birds to transport them on their winter migration, and in others he builds equally unsuccessful gadgets. His whimsical adventures, over 30 episodes, are spiced with pranks and visual gags that usually conclude with a punning punch line.

Such is their enduring popularity; a new series of 39 episodes was made in 2005, and is still broadcast in the UK on Channel 5. This underlines the shame that, unless you have children, you are unlikely to encounter these charmingly eccentric cartoons.

Surprisingly enough, Roobarb and Custard was the first ever British cartoon series and its style contrasted with the half-hour long US animation series, that were mainly produced by Hana Barbera. The marker pen lined and inked wobbly animation suits the style of the stories and characters, and it also made them far more cost-effective to produce. Fortunately, even with the use of computer animation for the 2005 series, they maintained the hand drawn style as much as possible. 

For the first time all 69 episodes are now available on this 3-disc collection, so now you and (if you have any) your children can enjoy this much loved example of British animation at its quirky best.

ROOBARB AND CUSTARD / CERT: U / DIRECTOR (1974): BOB GODFREY / DIRECTOR (2005): JASON TAMMEMAGI / SCREENPLAY: GRANGE CALVELEY / STARRING: RICHARD BRIERS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Dark Signal, the debut feature from writer/director Edward Evers-Swindell (with Dog Soldiers’ Neil Marshall on executive producing duties), is a brooding, atmospheric slasher/ghost story hybrid, set in the wilderness of North Wales and, to its credit, it hits or at least attempts to hit the spot more often than it doesn’t, thanks to sprightly direction and a game cast. But its aspirations are somewhat hampered by a sluggish and often unfocussed script, a batch of tough-to-root-for characters and, fatally, its delivery of a bogeyman who appears to have no motivation for his boorish behaviour and who, as a consequence, is difficult to find especially interesting or scary.

In a nicely developed set up, North Wales is being terrorised by a murderer who likes to hack off his victims’ wedding ring finger. Two convergent storylines see low-rent radio DJ Lawrie (Morris) making her final broadcast with the help of her wide-eyed technician Ben (David-Lloyd) and, to spice up their last show, they’ve wheeled in plausible psychic Carla (Fulci/Argento icon Monreale) to attempt to commune with the dead. When Carla appears to make contact with a tortured soul from beyond the grave, it’s easy to understand why Ken Bruce never pulls similar stunts on his Radio 2 show. Elsewhere Kate (Ignaczewska) is acting as a getaway driver for her dodgy boyfriend Nick (Duncan Pow), as he tries to recover a wodge of cash he’s owed by a client. But she finds herself stranded in the middle of nowhere receiving visitations both earthly and unearthly.

In theory this is good meaty stuff, with plenty of dramatic potential but somewhere along the line the film loses its sense of direction and its sense of purpose and begins to drift alarmingly where it should be racketing up the tension and jangling our nerves. The two storylines take an age to come together and rely too often on cheesy clichéd jump scares – look, something snarling has sprung out of the darkness! – and moments of turn-away-from-the-screen violence which seem to have been flung into the mix just to keep our interest from flagging. Fortunately the last act, where everything finally comes together, makes sticking with Dark Signal worthwhile in the explosive and wincingly-brutal confrontation between the murdering psychopathic lunatic and his final potential victim.

Dark Signal benefits enormously from gutsy performances from its cast with Siwan Morris as the jaded, cynical crisp-obsessed Lawrie working well with Torchwood’s David-Lloyd’s keen-as-mustard Ben. Veteran star James Cosmo delivers a typically-bearish cameo (even though he might well have stepped straight from the set of the recent dark BBC2 drama Stag) but Ignaczewska struggles to evoke much sympathy as the beleaguered Kate, even when her circumstances take a turn for the worse. Tautly-directed and deftly exploiting its cold, remote, dark locations, Dark Signal will provide a few thrills and the odd spill but it’s not, in the end, one which will linger long in the memory.

DARK SIGNAL / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: EDWARD EVERS-SWINDELL / SCREENPLAY: EDWARD EVERS-SWINDELL, ANTONY JONES/STARRING SIWAN MORRIS, GARETH DAVID-LLOYD, JOANNA IGNACZEWSKA, CINZA MONREALE, JAMES COSMO / RELEASE DATE: 30TH MAY

Whether you appreciated Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice or not, the DC Animated Universe rarely fails to impress. Sure, there are a few blips in the road now and again, but the majority of the animated DC efforts can be quite stunning at times. So, is Justice League vs. Teen Titans a blip in the road or something worth hunting down? Let’s take a look.

Existing in the world that was technically created during the post-credits of Jay Oliva’s excellent Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox before being fleshed out in the likes of Justice League: War, Son of Batman and more recently Oliva’s impressive Batman: Bad Blood, the plot of Justice League vs. Teen Titans centres on, you guessed it, a butting of heads between some of DC’s biggest names and their young protégées.

Key to the action here is Damian Wayne (Stuart Allen). When his ‘Damian knows best’ mentality causes the Justice League to lose a major lead, Batman (Jason O’Mara) decides that its’s time for his son to spend some time with the Teen Titans. Whilst his arrogance and untrusting nature cause problems, this latest Robin finds himself having to adjust to the team dynamic and work with his fellow Titans as they are faced with the threat of a Trigon-influenced Justice League. Simply put, Trigon {Jon Bernthal) wants the Titans’ Raven (Taissa Farmiga), and he’s taken over the minds of Superman (Jerry O’Connell), Wonder Woman (Rosario Dawson), The Flash (Christopher Gorham) and Cyborg (Shemar Moore) in his attempts to get her. Batman? As ever, Bruce is one step ahead of the game.

It has to be said, Justice League vs. Teen Titans is without doubt a fun movie. Sure, considering that the dark and troubled Raven and Trigon are at the core of the story here, Sam Liu’s latest offering (he also directed the likes of Hulk Vs., Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, Batman: Year One, All-Star Superman, Justice League: Gods and Monsters, not to mention is helming the upcoming Batman: The Killing Joke) has its fairly grim and brooding moments, but the fantastic use of Damian Wayne/Robin means that there’s always something slightly lighter around the corner.

Since being brought in to this animated realm, Damian has been a breath of fresh air, and that is something that continues here, with his arrogant, cocksure nature a joy to see play out, particularly as this gets him in some pretty hot water with the already-established Teen Titans group. And on that front, it’s great to see characters such as Starfire (Kari Wahlgren), Beast Boy (Brandon Soo Hoo), Blue Beetle (Jake T. Austin) and, of course, Raven get their time in the spotlight.

Much like Jay Oliva’s recent Batman: Bad Blood saw a Batman movie shine by highlighting the other characters of the Batman world, Liu’s Justice League vs. Teen Titans manages to dazzle in how it’s a JL effort that does wonders when giving attention to its non-Justice League characters. In fact, bar the Caped Crusader, the film largely stutters and suffers when the Justice League are on screen.

Make no mistake about it, this is every bit the Titans’ movie, and it’s with these youngsters that the energy and camaraderie of the film really comes through. Trigon as the villain of the piece is decent enough, with his inclusion here lending itself to exploring Raven, a character so often fascinating in the comics but who has at times been simply depicted as the moody goth teen in other animated outings.

Justice League vs. Teen Titans is another win for the DC Animated Universe, and it’s a prime example of how the guys behind these offerings keep delivering fresh and engaging efforts that bring in casual viewers with their use of big name characters whilst also allowing some scope for some of the lesser-known DC faces to have their time in the sun. Added to this, the film itself looks stunning in its fluidity, making the action and explosiveness of certain moments stand out even more, yet also allowing for ample intrigue and low-key atmospherics for some of the movie’s more personable and sincere moments. This is certainly one that any DC fans should look to add to their collections, with casual fans also having plenty here to sink their teeth into.

Special Features: Three featurettes / Episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold / Episode of Teen Titans / Sneak peek at Batman: The Killing Joke / Robin figure

JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. TEEN TITANS / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: SAM LIU / SCREENPLAY: BRYAN Q. MILLER, ALAN BURNETT / STARRING: STUART ALLEN, JASON O’MARA, TAISSA FARMIGA, JON BERNTHAL, JAKE T. AUSTIN, KARI WAHLGREN, CHRISTOPHER GORHAM, ROSARIO DAWSON, JERRY O’CONNELL / RELEASE DATE: MAY 30TH