Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

There is really something to admire about Derek Mungor’s stalker / slasher horror You Are Not Alone. He has taken a familiar premise and through inventive and original direction and camera work, delivered a film far from the routine fare diluting the genre. Sadly, the thing that makes the film so different, is also, ultimately, it’s failing.

Returning to her hometown from college on the 4th July, Natalie (Dzialoszynski) is hoping for a fun weekend enjoying the celebrations with friends. What she didn’t expect was to be stalked by a deranged killer who just won’t give up.

Mungor has taken the brave choice of setting his film entirely from Natalie’s point of view, so much so that you never really see her face at all. Doing so gives the film a truly engaging and involving sense of realism, placing you right there with Natalie whether she’s pottering around her old neighbourhood and meeting friends, or running terrified from a knife-wielding sociopath. There is a natural energy to the early scenes and the original viewpoint creates a sense of foreboding and mystery in that you are only ever aware of what Natalie is herself.

Unhappily, this sensation just cannot be sustained for the entire film, and what was once so effective and intoxicating becomes irritating and tedious. As Natalie repeatedly flees from her attacker, the nature of the filming style demands that she constantly looks behind her; constantly needs to check where her foe is. This leads the film into one of the more common pitfalls of found footage films, with the screen filled with intolerably shaky images that will either irritate you intensely, or render you unhappily queasy. When Natalie should simply be concerned with running away as fast as possible, and looking where she’s going, the audience needs to see what’s behind her, and that cleverly generated realism dissipates.

On the whole, You Are Not Alone is a good example of what can be achieved on a low budget with some real imagination. The issue is in how to maintain that for a full 90 minutes, and disappointingly Mungor just hasn’t managed to overcome it. This is a film worth seeing, if only for the interesting premise, but be prepared for a difficult final act that will shakily lead you towards a conclusion that never feels quite thought through.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: DEREK MUNGOR / SCREENPLAY: DEREK MUNGOR, CHRIS O’BRIEN / STARRING: KRISTA DZIALOSZYNSKI, KEENAN CAMP, NIKKI PIERCE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

There is really something to admire about Derek Mungor’s stalker / slasher horror You Are Not Alone. He has taken a familiar premise and through inventive and original direction and camera work, delivered a film far from the routine fare diluting the genre. Sadly, the thing that makes the film so different, is also, ultimately, it’s failing.

Returning to her hometown from college on the 4th July, Natalie (Dzialoszynski) is hoping for a fun weekend enjoying the celebrations with friends. What she didn’t expect was to be stalked by a deranged killer who just won’t give up.

Mungor has taken the brave choice of setting his film entirely from Natalie’s point of view, so much so that you never really see her face at all. Doing so gives the film a truly engaging and involving sense of realism, placing you right there with Natalie whether she’s pottering around her old neighbourhood and meeting friends, or running terrified from a knife-wielding sociopath. There is a natural energy to the early scenes and the original viewpoint creates a sense of foreboding and mystery in that you are only ever aware of what Natalie is herself.

Unhappily, this sensation just cannot be sustained for the entire film, and what was once so effective and intoxicating becomes irritating and tedious. As Natalie repeatedly flees from her attacker, the nature of the filming style demands that she constantly looks behind her; constantly needs to check where her foe is. This leads the film into one of the more common pitfalls of found footage films, with the screen filled with intolerably shaky images that will either irritate you intensely, or render you unhappily queasy. When Natalie should simply be concerned with running away as fast as possible, and looking where she’s going, the audience needs to see what’s behind her, and that cleverly generated realism dissipates.

On the whole, You Are Not Alone is a good example of what can be achieved on a low budget with some real imagination. The issue is in how to maintain that for a full 90 minutes, and disappointingly Mungor just hasn’t managed to overcome it. This is a film worth seeing, if only for the interesting premise, but be prepared for a difficult final act that will shakily lead you towards a conclusion that never feels quite thought through.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: DEREK MUNGOR / SCREENPLAY: DEREK MUNGOR, CHRIS O’BRIEN / STARRING: KRISTA DZIALOSZYNSKI, KEENAN CAMP, NIKKI PIERCE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

An ex-con and the man who has taken up with his wife join forces to sell Christmas trees in the run-up to the festive period. All Dennis (Paul Giamatti) wants is to make enough money to buy his daughter a piano for Christmas. Standing in the way of that is his criminal record and his dense, too-laid back ex-pal Rene (Paul Rudd). Hijinks ensue.

Slow, heartfelt, Indie hijinks, that is. Phil Morrison’s Almost Christmas (not the original, superior title of All is Bright) could have gone raunchy and crude like last year’s The Night Before, or heartbreaking and… well, also crude, like Bad Santa, with the presence of Rudd and Giamatti boding well for either. Neither is quite the case though, instead this is a quieter character study of two troubled men just trying to get by at Christmas.

Go in expecting big laughs and typical Paul Rudd charisma and you may be sorely disappointed; Giamatti’s Dennis is the film’s leading man, and he plays it surprisingly serious and morose, like the villain from a Sam Raimi Spider-Man sequel. His anger and resentfulness aren’t particularly endearing, and we can see why his ex-wife might want nothing to do with him. It’s neither funny nor dark enough to make us care, instead leaving the audience almost as depressed as Dennis himself.

That’s a valid perspective though, Christmas being a perfectly miserable time for many people – far from the universal state of cheer and goodwill suggested by most Christmas movies or media. It’s just that Almost Christmas never commits to its conceit enough to say much about it, being largely uninspiring, unexciting and only fitfully amusing. Dennis’s friendship with a lonely house sitter named Olga (an underused Sally Hawkins) is sweet but goes nowhere, mulling over its time until the mildly predictable finale.

All that Almost Christmas really has going for it is its stars, most of who can do and have done better before. Teetering on the edge of being a good, bleaker-themed Christmas comedy, it’s almost there, but not quite.

ALMOST CHRISTMAS / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: PHIL MORRISON / SCREENPLAY: MELISSA JAMES GIBSON / STARRING: PAUL GIAMATTI, PAUL RUDD, SALLY HAWKINS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

After achieving cult success with surreal post-apocalyptic comedy Delicatessen, directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro got to work on fantasy epic The City of Lost Children, available now on Blu-ray.

The film’s most distinctive character is its villain – Krank, a scientist whose inability to dream has accelerated his aging. In order to save himself, he’s been kidnapping local children and stealing their dreams. And then he makes the clumsy mistake of taking the kid whose big brother is Ron Perlman. Perlman plays circus strongman One, who sets out on a quest to get his bro back, somehow teaming up with orphan Miette along the way.

The most striking thing about The City of Lost Children is how amazing it looks. Between Darius Khondji’s cinematography, Jean Rabasse’s production design, and Jean-Paul Gaultier’s costumes, Jeunet and Caro’s team have created an engrossing expressionist artwork. The winding, semi-futuristic, semi-Victorian city brings to mind Metropolis; the collection of odd characters, including ‘Uncle Irvin’, a brain in a tank who speaks through gramophones, resemble Terry Gilliam at his most off-the-wall; and the journey to Krank’s ocean lab, surrounded in vibrant green fog, is very much inspired by the imagination of Jules Verne.

Jeunet and Caro populate this stunning world with a dreamlike variety of weird and wonderful characters and whimsical goings-on. The gang of orphans are ordered around by a pair of conjoined twins called the Octopus, a sort of eight-limbed Fagin who runs a school to teach them how to thieve – but by the time we get to this point, nothing can come as a surprise any more. A real highlight, which shows off the film’s laid-back approach to storytelling, is One and Miette being saved from a near-death situation by a butterfly effect-esque series of events; a flying droplet startles a dog, which angers a tramp, causing a bird to fly off and poo on a car, which crashes into … and so on, until you end with an enormous boat crash. Throw away your need for things to make sense and there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had.

The problem is that, with everything so whimsical, the story feels rather slight. Whereas Gilliam, for example, uses surrealism to great satirical effect, Jeunet and Caro’s story is a simple fairy tale, and not much more, while One and Miette’s growing bond is not entirely convincing – it shows up far too often that these two heroes are the least interesting characters in the film.

So, The City of Lost Children may not have a particularly affecting narrative, but visually it’s a masterpiece. Let yourself get carried away by the whimsy and beauty of its world.

Special Features: Featurette / Interviews with Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Jean-Paul Gautier / Commentary / Trailers

THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET, MARC CARO / SCREENPLAY: GILLES ADRIEN, JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET, MARC CARO / STARRING: RON PERLMAN, DANIEL EMILFORK, JUDITH VITTET / RELEASE DATE: MARCH 14TH

In a bleak, claustrophobic apartment divided into many rooms, five characters collide violently against each other – both physically and psychologically. The rich older woman who owns the apartment (Hédi Temessy) is at odds with her son, who is only interested in her money. Meanwhile, the old woman’s live-in nurse (Erika Bodnaár), who is living here with her boyfriend, allows herself to be seduced by the new tenant, a dishevelled teacher called Tibor (Pal Hetenyi), who is struggling with money problems of his own and, when Tibor wins the old woman’s trust and steals a piece of her jewellery, it brings tensions to a head.

Locked into their seemingly endless cycle of emotional cruelty, the characters’ only common ground seems to be their inability to cope with life in the outside world, wallowing in their shattered dreams and a desperate passive-aggressive need to dominate and tear one another apart. When the story finally reaches its desolate climax, we are forced to remember the quote from Aleksandr Pushkin that opened the film: “…the devil is probably leading, going round and round in circles”, which leaves us wondering if this apartment might, in fact, be some banal seventh circle of Hell, and that, despite the uneasy resolution suggested by the closing scene, these characters will never escape the four walls and are doomed to repeat this ugliness forever.

Autumn Almanac is an uncomfortable film to watch, and feels more like a piece of experimental theatre than a movie, but it’s a hard film to turn away from. The performances – especially Hedi Temessy’s – are hypnotic, and although director / writer Béla Tarr loads his screenplay with some fairly unwieldy navel-gazing dialogue; it’s the atmosphere which really makes this something special. Before making Autumn Almanac, Tarr had been something of a realist whose films were closer to social commentaries. Autumn Almanac was a complete change to what he had done before and marked a turning point in Tarr’s career. It feels very formal and expressionistic, with all the performances very heavily choreographed. Along with Tarr’s subdued but heavily stylised lighting, his slowly prowling camerawork and a directorial style that doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall but definitely leans heavily against it (especially during a fight between Tibor and the nurse’s boyfriend, which is shot from underneath the actor’s feet and presumably required a ridiculously thick piece of glass and a lot of nerve from the performers), everything combines to make this simple, very intimate little drama extremely disquieting. On the face of it there is nothing supernatural or fantastical about Autumn Almanac, but in many ways it feels like a ghost story waiting to happen. And the uneasy sensation that last shot leaves you with, won’t quickly be forgotten.

AUTUMN ALMANAC (1984) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: BÉLA TARR / STARRING: HÉDI TEMESSY, ERIKA BODNÁR, PAL HETENYI, MIKLÓS B. SZÉKELY / RELEASE DATE: 14TH MARCH

In Ed Wood, something was upsetting the buffalo. In Night of the Wild, something is upsetting the dogs; a mysterious meteorite that has crashed into the Earth, having the effect of turning man’s best friend into canine carnivores.

Before you can say ‘who let the dogs out’, the pesky pooches are busy chomping on the local townspeople – a place where everyone seems to have a dog.

Reminiscent of the 1976 film Dogs that starred David (The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) McCallum, the script includes an assortment of video game cookie cutter inspired characters that soon succumb to the mangy mutts Ten Little Indians-style. Rosalyn (Mays) and her two obnoxious friends decide to go camping and encounter angry wolves devouring two of the three friends (the audience then rejoiced) before Mays goes all Rambo on them.

Rutherford turns in a fine performance as single mom, Sara, who battles the ravenous beasts while protecting her daughter. Soon Morrow shows up as hero Dave, trying to make heads or (wagging) tails of a situation in which the plucky group – including a woman who has her nose chewed off by her loveable cockapoo –  escape in a plane to the next town only to discover even more angry dogs. All within the confines of a place where the CGI perspective is so off some are as big as Volkswagens.

CGI gore is what it is when it comes to The Asylum’s films, but the big question is; how come nobody got rabies from these frothing furies?

Director Eric Red does the best he can with the silly script and keeps the pace moving.

What’s up next for The Asylum? Zoombie:  about zoo animals that turn into zombies. We’re waiting for CommaL about a man who’s caught in the middle of a sentence.

Overall, this movie ain’t nothing but a hound dog.

NIGHT OF THE WILD / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: ERIC RED / SCREENPLAY: DELONDRA WILLIAMS / STARRING: ROB MORROW, KELLY RUTHERFORD, TRISTIN MAYS / RELEASE DATE: VOD OUT NOW

Originally entitled ‘Fall Break’, this film has grown to have a major cult following. It is now known as The Mutilator and it’s been given a Blu-Ray release. They have collected an uncut version of the 35mm print.

Originally released in 1985, The Mutilator gained a fairly large following. It’s a slasher film and follows many of the conventions now seen in slasher horror movies. It focuses on a group of teenagers who take advantage of Ed Jr.’s father’s apartment becoming free for the holiday. They then set out on, what is intended to be, a quiet and relaxed holiday. However, things immediately take a turn for the worse, as members of their group are slowly disappearing one by one.

It is very much a standard slasher film and doesn’t offer anything at all new to the genre. The main advantage of this film over other films in the genre is the level of gore. Whilst many slasher films focus on jump scares, The Mutilator turns away from this and decides to take the level of gore to a new extreme in the slasher genre. Practical effects make it a very brutal and bloody film, with shocking deaths throughout. The highlights of the movie are the beginning and the ending. The start of the film is actually quite shocking, whilst the ending is one of the most sadistic and creepy endings to a slasher film.

This Blu-Ray edition comes with many bonus features. Firstly it’s given an introduction to the film; outlining the version they have put together on the Blu-Ray and how it’s the best version available. There are many other features, including an alternative opening. However, all of these bonuses do not justify buying a new copy of the film, unless the viewer is a keen fan of the franchise. Whilst the film does have its good moments with the gore, the film is flawed on almost every other aspect. The acting is quite wooden and the plot is very slow moving. However, this movie is for a specific target audience. The people interested in buying this movie will be people interested in this genre.

If you are a new viewer to this film. Don’t go expecting much in the way of plot of any character development at all. What you do get is some proper gory scenes, followed by some dialogue which you might feel tempted to skip. Although the ending is one of the best in the slasher genre, it’s still not a great film, so don’t go expecting much.

THE MUTILATOR / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: BUDDY COOPER / STARRING: MATT MITLER, BILL HITCHCOCK, RUTH MARTINEZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Great news, everyone! Following on from the overwhelming critical acclaim and resounding box office success that was skilfully avoided by Leprechaun: Origins and The Marine 4: Moving Target, the wrestling overlords at WWE have added yet another string to their movie division’s bow with 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown. They just can’t keep their hands off a sequel that doesn’t need to be made, especially if it’s got a colon in the title.

In the first two instalments of the 12 Rounds franchise, the title referred to a series of twelve tasks/clues/puzzles that had to be navigated by the main protagonist, in order to save their wives/girlfriends from insane criminal masterminds. This time, however, the plot is slightly different but no less predictable.

WWE Superstar Dean Ambrose is Detective John Shaw, recently returned to duty after dealing with the death of his partner and a bout of post-traumatic stress disorder. Immediately finding himself in the middle of a game of cat and mouse in a locked-down police station, centred around credit card-shaped flash drive containing super-important evidence of police corruption, probably wasn’t how he wanted his first week back at work to go, but that’s exactly the type of thing you have to deal with if you’re a cop in a dodgy action flick. It’s a standard action film premise that, unfortunately, about a million other films have had much more success with in the past.

12 Rounds 3 isn’t a badly made film, it’s just that the content is so utterly lame and inexcusably awful. If you look closely enough, you can occasionally see some of the cast member’s eyes glaze over, while they wish they were somewhere very, very far away. Every single plot point is so obviously signposted, that they might as well have flashed up some 1980’s style wrestling promos in one corner of the screen, where CGI versions of the WWF’s all-time greatest heroes bellow semi-coherent sentences at the viewer. “HE JUST LOOKED AT HIS GUN AND SAID THE WORDS “TWELVE ROUNDS” OUT LOUD. HE’S GOT TWELVE BULLETS. DID YOU GET THAT? TWELVE ROUNDS. BECAUSETHAT’STHENAMEOFTHEMOVIE”.

Do please excuse all of this facetiousness; it’s just that the only way you’re going to get any enjoyment out of 12 Rounds 3 is by taking the mickey out of it. Genuinely honestly, it took four attempts to get to the end of this movie without falling asleep. Four. That shouldn’t be a thing, should it? What that means is that instead of just watching this movie for 90 minutes and getting it over and done with, in total we’ve probably endured about four and a half hours of this nonsense. That definitely shouldn’t be a thing.

And the best news of all is that this is only the second part of what’s being called the “Action Six-Pack” series, a bunch of films that are to be co-produced by WWE Studios and distributors Lionsgate. The first part of the series was apparently called Vendetta, released in 2015 and starring former Superman Dean Cain. Who knew? Not us, that’s for sure. And we watch WWE Raw and subscribe to the Network and everything! Still, here’s to four more great adventures still to come!

We really can’t give 12 Rounds 3 a nine (ninety nine – Network “joke”), or even an Action-Packed six. It’s painfully average, which you’d think would be about a 5, but we’re going to have to knock another point off for the almost insultingly paper-thin “plot”. Sorry, 12 Rounds 3. May your fourth be much much better.

12 ROUNDS 3: LOCKDOWN / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: STEPHEN REYNOLDS / STARRING: DEAN AMBROSE, ROGER R. CROSS, DANIEL CUDMORE, LOCHLYN MUNRO, TY OLSSON / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Soon after relocating to the US, Japanese businessman Akira runs afoul of a group of gangsters, when he is falsely accused of stealing a valuable necklace from their stash house. Refusing to back down to the criminals, a battle of escalating encounters commences. And as Akira’s calm demeanour hides a shadowy and violent past, the lengths to which he can go to protect his family run far greater than those who threaten him could have suspected.

Probably best known as the nameless assassin in Blind Fury, Shô Kosugi made a name for himself with a steady string of ninja-themed movies throughout the 1980s, and while he may lack the range for a heavyweight dramatic role, Pray for Death’s requirements of him are balanced perfectly between the action of fight scenes and the emotion of family time. Despite ninjas not actually having existed for about 300 years, Akira belongs to a secretive sect where the practices of the feudal warriors have been continued for a reason that’s never mentioned, and in all honesty isn’t really that important. All that matters is that he is a force to be reckoned with.

Unlike many examples of the vengeance subgenre of action flicks that consist almost entirely of a single act of wanton violence met immediately with a ceaseless frenzy of awoken wrath, the film is quite slow-burning. While those hoping for an instant bloodbath of dismemberments may be a little disappointed, the steady pace of the script, by veteran British villain James Booth, lets us actually get to know the characters, and in the case of Akira’s wife and sons, allows us to see them as real people rather than plot devices merely there to be threatened and imperilled as required, while Akira himself comes under increasing strain to hold back the violent ninja longing to be released.

Booth is also a major player in front of the camera, grabbing the best role for himself as the sadistic mafia lieutenant Limehouse Willie. Utterly ruthless and possessed of a far greater cunning than the army of unthinking thugs under his command, he makes for a much more interesting antagonist than those seen in most of the decade’s revenge flicks, and the intensifying battle of wills between him and Akira more than fills the lulls between action sequences. As the film progresses their reciprocal reactions slowly escalate, every undertaking by each of them believed to be the last word in the matter, until finally, and quite late on in the film, Akira’s awaited rampage of blood-soaked sword and shuriken is finally unleashed, and it is everything we hoped for. While Pray for Death’s story is essentially a basic one, the depth of its substance results in an experience far more satisfying than many may have expected.

PRAY FOR DEATH (1985) / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: GORDON HESSLER / SCREENPLAY: JAMES BOOTH / STARRING: SHÔ KOSUGI, JAMES BOOTH, DONNA KEI BENZ, NORMAN BURTON, KANE KOSUGI, SHANE KOSUGI, MATTHEW FAISON / RELEASE DATE: 29TH FEBRUARY