Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Based on the bifurcated novel by Gillian Flynn (known for writing the excellent Gone Girl), Dark Places is about Libby Day, the sole survivor of a home invasion where she famously witnessed the death of her mother and sisters, and testified against her brother, Ben, who was sentenced to life in prison since she believed him to be the murderer. Twenty-five years later, Libby gets drafted into The Kill Club, a group run by true-crime enthusiasts, all of which convinces her to re-examine the events of that night. As new memories and old suspects flood back into her life, Libby begins to question her own testimony and sets out to discover the truth of her tragic past.

Whatever way you look at it, Gone Girl changed the face of psychological crime thrillers and was all the better for it, which makes all the more upsetting as Dark Places was a relative disappointment in comparison. Despite the fact that all the essential ingredients were there in order to make this a film worth talking about (serial killings, satanic cults, true-crime obsessives, and twisted family secrets), the mystery itself was convoluted, leaving you clueless as to which person was who, and the ultimate truth as to what really happened made no sense whatsoever and felt as utterly contrived as the ending of Broadchurch’s lacklustre second season. 

In the hands of lightweight director Gilles Paquet-Brenner, the end product looks surprisingly tame as a result. She lacks the hard-edged forensic-like approach that David Fincher brought to Flynn’s Gone Girl, plus her adapted screenplay lacks the cohesion and sophistication Flynn had when adapting her own novel into a screenplay. Also, by making everyone in the state of Kansas shifty or burdening a dark secret in order to create red herrings made it felt like Flynn or Paquet-Brenner were over-egging the pudding somewhat. It’s like as if the film was saying that everyone is damaged and broken in their own special ways.

That’s not to say that the film is not atmospheric or creepy, because whilst the story doesn’t completely work, it does a good job of creating dramatic atmosphere and tension, and that’s all down to DP Barry Ackroyd, who also shot both The Hurt Locker and Captain Phillips. Also, there are some strong performances from most the cast involved: after stealing the show in Mad Max: Fury Road as Imperator Furiosa, Charlize Theron once again plays a strong, yet damaged heroine with a dark past, and like in Mad Max, she dominates the screen with her steely determination and underpinning vulnerability to go with it. Likewise, Chloë Grace Moretz is also magnetic as the psychotically unhinged and manipulative teenage rebel, which goes to show that she has come a long way since her light and cheery days in Kick-Ass and Hugo all those years ago. Plus, Christina Hendricks always adds a touch of dramatic gravitas as the troubled mother who is desperately trying to give her children a good life.

In the end, despite its ambition to stand alongside Gone Girl as a worthy equal, Dark Places only ends up being a disappointingly average movie as a result with a lacklustre script and tame direction. It is fun in short bursts, has strong performances to boot and atmospheric cinematography, but this is just a missed opportunity that only deserves a rental or television viewing at best.

DARK PLACES / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: GILLES PAQUET-BRENNER / STARRING: CHARLIZE THERON, STERLING JERINS, NICHOLAS HOULT, CHRISTINA HENDRICKS / RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 22ND

 

His moniker may be in the title, but Victor Frankenstein barely figures in this modern take on the classic tale, helmed by Candyman director Bernard Rose. His monster takes top billing, more concerned with his rejection by his mother, Victor’s wife – a neat twist on the mommy issues found in Shelley’s original novel.

Modernity gets you a monster grown in Victor’s lab, mobile phones, police brutality and hookers, but the story’s heart and soul remains essentially faithful to the source material. It cherry picks elements from the book and subsequent adaptations, repurposing them for our times. “It’s alive!” Victor Frankenstein (Danny Huston) cheers in the film’s opening moments. From there, it’s not long before the experiment falls apart and Victor attempts to dispose of his creation like yesterday’s rubbish, strangling the poor kid (Xavier Samuel) out on a gurney while de facto mother Marie (Carrie-Anne Moss) watches reluctantly. But like a more depressed, thankfully silent Deadpool (give or take an engagingly loquacious narration), this monster possesses a mean healing factor, leaving him a very difficult man to kill.

The Monster’s befriending of a friendly stray dog is a portent for terrible things to come; Frankenstein is one of the most upsetting horror films ever made, sending poor Monster lurching from one awful tragedy to the next. Leave it to Bernard Rose to make the iconic little girl by the lake sequence even more traumatic than it already, inherently is. Next up on the Frankenstein’s Monster checklist is the blind old man, beautifully played by genre legend Tony Todd. It’s the erstwhile Candyman who takes Monster under his wing, teaching him how to speak and not to eat rats from the dumpster. He provides a little much-needed levity too, although one does spend the whole time waiting for the other boot to drop and for Monster to be hit with his next dose of inevitable heartbreak.

And heartbreak there is in spades. Frankenstein is an intensely violent and gory film, but it’s the emotion that’ll stick with you, thanks to a perfectly judged performance from Samuel. Moss and Huston do a lot with little screentime, hitting just the right notes of sympathetic and awful before it’s time for Monster’s escape. If it weren’t for Todd, Moss would steal the show – but he is indeed in it, and it’s his best role and performance since he first wore the hook and the bees all those years ago. It peters out somewhat by the end – where the relative fidelity to its source material finally starts to weigh the story down – but one can only be so angry and tortured for so long.

Frankenstein is a triumph – one of the best adaptations of the story ever made, one of the best Tony Todd performances ever seen, and a film as devastating as it is beautiful. And it is plenty beautiful. 

FRANKENSTEIN / CERT:18 / DIRECTOR: BERNARD ROSE / SCREENPLAY: BERNARD ROSE / STARRING: XAVIER SAMUEL, DANNY HUSTON, CARRIE-ANN MOSS, TONY TODD / RELEASE DATE: 22ND FEBRUARY

Jesse O’Brien’s debut feature is solid if unexceptional, remarkable chiefly for the fact that it was made for approximately £100,000 with all interiors shot in the cinematographer’s sister’s shed. The location work, filmed at Coober Pedy in South Australia, is crisp and gorgeous and the score is great, but ultimately Arrowhead suffers from several of the problems first-time low-budget directors face when producing their own projects.

Dan Mor is Kye Cortland, a prisoner turned mercenary who becomes stranded on a desert moon. There’s a political backdrop to his isolation in the shape of Tobias Hatch (Mark Redpath), and a female love interest in the form of Tarren Hollis (Aleisha Rose, with an impeccable American accent), and some peril-inducing sci-fi shenanigans thanks to the planetoid’s unique characteristics. O’Brien manages to pull a fairly satisfying, if formulaically achieved, resolution out of his bag, and there is nothing to offend the sensibilities of those looking for a bit of hard sf escapism.

But the problems are inescapable. Mor is solid and commendably earnest, but with very little light in his performance, and certainly nothing to encourage the viewer to identify with his dilemma. Rose is excellent, although it becomes increasingly hard to believe in her empathy with Cortland but for the nature of their co-seclusion. The film works better during the sequences when she is absent, and Cortland develops a Cast Away style relationship with his mobile computer (the Antipodean accented REEF is a little jarring at first, but soon emerges as the most charming thing in the movie). Again, there is nothing off-putting, but neither is there anything especially to engage with.

It is the writer/director’s influences and the sci-fi conceits that eventually prove conceptually confusing. While the action sequences are slightly clumsy in a way that is forgivable in such a low budgeted film- with a couple of poorly illustrated early imperilment sequences- and the just-about convincing creature designs similarly excusable, there’s a lack of focus on display, that’s a sign of a director too eager to cram in as many ideas as possible without sifting out the ones that are inconsistent with his overall design. The particular properties of the moon upon which most of the action takes place, for example, allow for some unpredictable developments, but largely they’re unexpected because they make little coherent sense. 

Arrowhead is by no means a disaster, being entertaining enough and more than competently produced, but it could perhaps have done with a little more modesty in its storytelling ambition. Nevertheless, O’Brien has marked himself out as someone worth watching, and with a little extra discernment, a sprinkling of humour and a soupcon more humanity, his future projects should be a huge improvement.

REVIEW: ARROWHEAD / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: JESSE O’BRIEN / SCREENPLAY: JESSE O’BRIEN / STARRING: DAN MOR, ALEISHA ROSE, CHRISTOPHER KIRBY, MARK REDPATH, SHAUN MICALLEF (Voice) / RELEASE DATE: 22ND FEBRUARY

When ten friends arrive at a remote lodge for a fun weekend they discover the entire area to be abandoned. More intriguingly there are no birds, animals or insects around either. Without enough fuel to leave they begin to investigate only for some of their number to disappear, seemingly into thin air.

Much of what works in Last Stop (or Don’t Blink depending on your preference) from writer and director Travis Oates is down to the interactions between the characters. Well-written and well-acted, this is a group that you believe know each other well; with throwaway lines and knowing nods indicating a history that adds rare depth to an ensemble cast of this size. When the first of the group, Tracy (headline name Mena Suvari), disappears early on you also realise that anyone is at risk and as such the formulaic rules of the traditional thriller are discarded, much to the film’s credit.

There are also some clever little horror tropes; “Help me” scrawled on the inside of a cupboard unseen by the group, “Don’t Blink” written in lipstick on a mirror, and the constant references to classics of the genre, of which some are even name checked both openly and subtly. There is also a brooding, melancholic soundtrack playing from the very beginning that both generates a portentous atmosphere and offers a grim forecast of what is to come.

The problems arise in continuing with the initial premise. With no discernible protagonist this is entirely a character piece, very much in the vein of a single location play, but this creates an issue. Any conflict must arise from within the group and while Zack Ward is impressive as the aggressive Alex, the quickness in his changing personality never really feels tangible. As their number diminishes it is understandable that relationships become strained but too often this feels like filler; the witty and naturalistic dialogue of the opening act giving way to overwrought exchanges that simply repeat what has already been said.

What Travis Oates has produced with Last Stop is a thriller that almost, almost works. The script and performances of the opening act create a promise that the remainder of the film sadly fails to deliver upon. There is simply too little beneath the surface of the single-premise mystery to sustain the film’s ninety minutes and this only leads to a disappointing finale.

LAST STOP / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: TRAVIS OATES / STARRING: MENA SUVARI, ZACK WARD, BRIAN AUSTIN GREEN / RELEASE DATE: 22ND FEBRUARY

With the odd exception, nowadays we tend to make war movies about conflicts that are actually over. Otherwise it tends to colour the movie a bit. Compare the slew of ‘80s Vietnam movies to John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) to see what we mean. But that hasn’t always been the case, as all those WWII movies from the ‘40s attest. You might think the change is just a post-war thing but don’t forget Korea. There’s a very good reason why it’s sometimes called “The Forgotten War”, although we suspect anyone who was there remembers it all too clearly. Which brings us to Fixed Bayonets!, an American movie about the Korean War, made when the conflict was only a year old.

It’s the first winter of the war and the division is going to have to withdraw. Like any military withdrawal, some poor sods are going to have to stay behind to do the unpleasant and dangerous business of conducting the rear-guard action. As there’s a handy chokepoint at a pass in the mountains, the general reckons he can leave even less men in harm’s way so it’s left to just a single platoon. Great if they can convince the enemy there’s actually more of them than there really is and also good for a movie, as we can actually get to know most of the soldiers (the same reason why Tom Hanks only had half a squad to find Matt Damon). And that’s pretty much the story. We’ve got some interesting characters and some pretty good sub-plots like Cpl. Denno (Richard Basehart  – yep, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) who is a soldier with plenty of guts but just can’t pull the trigger when he’s pointing his gun at someone. Awkward if you’re a soldier in an actual war. He’s also painfully aware that he’s fourth in command so it might only take three bullets to put him in charge and no matter how fearless he is of his own safety, he sure as hell doesn’t want to be responsible for everyone else’s. How do you think that one’s going to pan out?

In a sense, the fact that the Korean War was still on at the time has no bearing on the movie. There’s no politics or propaganda; this is just a soldier’s story and owes a lot to Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun (1945). The whole thing is clearly filmed in a studio and, in fact, much of it is set in a cave, but there is real drama here with a likable cast doing a splendid job of portraying the Poor Bloody Infantry in a tricky situation. From their looks of resignation as the rest of the division moves out to Richard Basehart’s attempted rescue of a sergeant from a minefield, there are loads of great moments in this movie. If you’re a war movie fan this is a must-see but even if you aren’t, we’d recommend this any day.

Our only concern is that surely it should have been called Fix Bayonets!? That has been bothering us for years. Oh, and see if you can spot (a then unheard of) James Dean in the ranks.

Special Features: Commentary, trailers, gallery, booklet.

FIXED BAYONETS! (1951) / DIRECTOR: SAM FULLER / SCREENPLAY: SAM FULLER / STARRING: RICHARD BASEHART, GENE EVANS, GENE EVANS, MICHAEL O’SHEA, RICHARD HILTON, CRAIG HILL, SKIP HOMEIER, JAMES DEAN / RELEASED: 15TH FEBRUARY

Hotel Transylvania 2 is a wacky animated adventure firmly aimed at the family market. The first movie took modern family and parenting ideas and laughed at them in a warm and friendly way, all the while spicing it up with slapstick humour and monster themed gags. The sequel is more of the same.

The premise of the Hotel Transylvania world is simple; monsters are real and they’ve gone commercial. Drac the vampire runs a hotel and he’s assisted by the usual pantheon of monsters; The Invisible Man, The Mummy, a werewolf and of course Frankenstein (short for Frankenstein’s Monster or just Frank if you know him well). In the previous movie, one of the human guests fell in love with Drac’s daughter Mavis, and in this one they get married and have a child. The rest of the plot is a Drac trying to raise a small child, whilst his parents try and come to terms with being parents. Really, the movie is simply a collection of gags they left out of the first feature with the sentiment layered on thick so you care about the characters.

The movie has a rather strong cast and crew, but despite this, it all feels rather generic. Take director Genndy Tartakovsky for example. He has created some truly remarkable pieces of animation in the past. He has under his belt the likes of Star Wars: Clone Wars and Samurai Jack. This means that Hotel Transylvania 2‘s action sequences are clever and amusing, with the monster’s special powers appearing simple and fun, but it lacks his trademark spark. Adam Sandler practically phones it in, despite being the main actor, and is only really saved by a strong performance from Selena Gomez as Mavis. Mel Brooks also puts in a star turn as a grumpy old vampire.

Despite its plastic Halloween decoration style storyline and characters, Hotel Transylvania 2 is an enjoyable piece of family fare, and perfect for getting little ones into the less scary side of all things spooky.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY / SCREENPLAY: ROBERT SMIGEL, ADAM SANDLER / STARRING: ADAM SANDLER, ANDY SAMBERG, KEVIN JAMES, SELINA GOMEZ, DAVID SPADE, STEVE BUSCEMI / RELEASE DATE: 15TH FEBRUARY

This five-disc box set features Godard’s best early feature films. They are À Bout De Souffle (Breathless, 1959), Une Femme est Une Femme (A Woman is a Woman, 1961), Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), Pierrot Le Fou (1965) and Alphaville (1965) along with six hours of extras that include trailers, documentaries and interviews with Anna Karina and Fritz Lang and a booklet with essays about his work is also thrown in for good measure.

Breathless lives up to its title by following the misadventures of small time crook Michel Poiccard (Jean Paul Belmondo), who races down the country lanes of France in his stolen US car cursing women drivers. Not surprisingly a police chase ensues with tragic consequences, and he returns to Paris to track down some money he’s owed.

Based on a treatment by François Truffaut, using real locations, handheld and tracking camera shots, and edited using jump cuts, it marked the beginning of French New Wave cinema that broke all the rules and themes of prevailing French cinema.

These techniques perfectly blend with the hustle and bustle of the Paris streets and the hectic comings and goings of Michel. Even though he is evading the law he finds time to pester Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) who is an on/off girlfriend. His is a world of petty criminality and casual sexual encounters. As in all Godard films, US culture, new technology, movies, literature, love and their meanings are featured, discussed and questioned.

Paris is the setting again for a love triangle in A Woman is a Woman. Angela (Anna Karina) is a stripper who is desperate to have a child, but her husband Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) isn’t keen on the idea. Bookseller Emile would rather go off cycling and is only willing to concede to her needs when she flirts with his best friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Whereas Breathless was a black and white tribute to the Poverty Row action and adventure films made by Monogram Pictures, A Woman is a Woman tilts its hat at US musical comedies and fittingly uses color and Cinemascope.

In Contempt, Godard shows his disdain for the many problems and issues involved in the production of a film. Using the story of Paul Javel (Michel Piccoli), a scriptwriter who is married to Camille (Brigitte Bardot), he is taken on by Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance), a flash American producer, to pump some life into his latest film.

Jeremiah is obviously a philistine as he wants to turn Fritz Lang’s (starring as himself) thoughtful film about Homer’s The Odyssey, into something with topless mermaids to bring in the punters. Making things even worse, Jeremiah lusts after Camille, so for the sake of money Paul has to prostitute himself artistically and his wife literally. This mirrors Godard’s own discontent with the filmmaking process in general and the behind-the-scenes battles with his producer Carlo Ponti and the American movie mogul Joseph E. Levine, and problems with his marriage to Anna Karina.

Alphaville takes us into the realms of science fiction, though it is still filmed in Paris rather than using studio set ups or specially created props. Private eye Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) heads to Alphaville in his Ford Galaxie car. He is a character from the earlier age of naive, simplistic, B-movie worlds that were inhabited by the likes of Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy. The question is can they help us now against the might of Von Braun (Howard Vernon), who rules the planet with technology and logic?

To succeed in Alphaville you have to be a master of technology. Von Braun tells Lemmy, if he joins his technological elite he will get “all the money and women you want”. Lemmy isn’t impressed. 

Alphaville, shows the war in the future between the cold, rational, controlling force of the Alpha 60 computer that minimalises ‘the unknowns’ and Lemmy who fights it because it would give him “nothing more than a physical and mental existence created and dictated by technology.”

Alpha 60 recognises that the unthinking allegiance to science and/or religion by the ordinary person has led inevitably to the conclusion that if they cannot take their destiny into their own hands then they “must be destroyed, which is to say, transformed”. Alpha 60 wants to relieve man of the burden of existence, whilst Lemmy wants to embrace poetry, human freedom and expression.

Pierrot Le Fou is a tale of escape and tragedy much like Breathless, but this time it is a bourgeois married man, Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who seeks escape in the French Riviera with his young babysitter Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina). They have a bohemian existence by the sea but Marianne gets bored with Ferdinand’s constant reading, writing and philosophy. On returning to Paris, Marianne much like Patricia at the end of Breathless, double-crosses him. The sad clown of a man ends the drama with a tragic series of actions that Alpha 60 would certainly never understand.

These are excellent, engaging, early examples of Godard’s adventurous exploration of film, fiction, reality and the nature of being human. FIN

JEAN-LUC GODARD: THE ESSENTIAL BLU-RAY COLLECTION / DIRECTOR: JEAN-LUC GODARD / SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: VARIOUS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

When Dario Argento made Deep Red in 1975, most horror fans got to see a cut down version, exported to the foreign market with hefty cuts to the characterisation. Now, forty years later, the film has been lovingly restored to its full running time of just over two hours, and a brand spanking new blu-ray release that allows us to look again, at what many consider to be the finest example of the Italian slasher genre known as ‘giallo’. So, is this intact version of Deep Red the great masterpiece of Italian horror many proclaim it to be?

David Hemmings plays an American living in Rome who witnesses the gruesome murder of his psychic neighbour (yes, she kind of did see it coming) and, convinced that there’s a clue locked away in his memory of the event, sets out to investigate what’s going on. Along the way, he has a relationship with a feisty journalist who is investigating the crime, watches the Italian police force do very little, and manages to be present as other characters meet grizzly ends. By the climax, the wandering plot comes to a conclusion. Of sorts.

Argento’s style takes some getting used to. Plot is secondary to technique, visuals and theatricality. Indeed the film astounds with its camera work, its jump cuts, its extreme close ups. Even the opening credits get interrupted for a brief prologue before resuming again, and he uses an almost imperceptible technique, which is very unnerving – the lights on a set going out just before we fade to black. It’s an odd touch but a genius one. Hence, some have suggested that Argento is a cinematic poet. But for every Milton there are a thousand crap limericks.

The pace feels uneven and there’s little sense of tension or fear. Partly it’s because of the bizarre music, much of it by the group Goblin, which comes across like outtakes from the soundtrack to The Italian Job, making a walk down a dark corridor as threatening as an episode of Loose Women. The film can be enormously atmospheric – Rome seems to be sparsely populated only by people who stand around like showroom dummies – but it’s ruined by scenes of almost farcical comedy and behaviour of huge horror film stupidity, for example when a woman finds sinister dolls hanging in the room she’s just stepped out of, she locks the door and stays inside where the killer clearly must still be rather than running like hell.

Argento’s usual themes of gender politics, male emasculation, female emancipation run throughout, bringing depth to a plot lacking in surprises, and sterling work by Carlo Rambaldi, who just a few years later would bring us CE3K’s Puck and the Alien, makes the not very frequent gore shocking. But Deep Red too seldom reaches the poetic heights it aspires to. For that, see Argento’s later Suspiria and see what a poet really can do.

DEEP RED / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: DARIO ARGENTO / SCREENPLAY: DARIO ARGENTO, BERNARDINO XAPPONI / STARRING: MACHA MERIL, DAVID HEMMINGS, DARIA NICOLODI / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW