Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Made in 1983 but only surfacing in 1987, Blood Rage – variously known in different incarnations as Nightmare in Shadow Wood and Slasher – has never received a UK home entertainment release before. But beware; if you allow this silly, badly-acted, poorly-directed, ludicrously-dated piece of old toot into your home, the likelihood is you’ll find it far from entertaining. Often regarded as an early video nasty, Blood Rage is nasty for all sorts of reasons but precious few of them are due to its blood and guts content.

We open at a drive-in in 1974 where two young boys – Todd and Terry – sneak out of the back of their parents’ car while Mum and Dad indulge in a spot of canoodling in the front seat. Terry decides to bury an axe in the face of another movie patron but makes it look as if Todd is the murdering lunatic. Ten years later and as the family gather together for a tasty Thanksgiving blow-out, news reaches them that Todd has escaped from the mental institution he’s been kept in for the last decade. Sure enough, Todd turns up in their midst and the blood starts to flow; but is Todd quite who everyone thinks he is and is the real killer actually closer to home?

Arrow have hurled a ton of extras and special features at this over-generous three-disc release (forgetting, it seems, that it’s scientifically impossible to polish a turd) but the one thing the film really needs is a laughter track. Blood Rage may have terrified a generation back in the 1980s (although we rather doubt it), but we’re made of sterner stuff today and it’s more likely to tickle a modern audience’s funny bone than send them shrieking for the safety of the back of the sofa. The violence is broad, cartoonish and deeply unscary and unconvincing, the whole thing is overlit where a few handy shadows might have helped its cause but the entire enterprise is scuppered by uniformly appalling acting by a cast who really should never have been allowed to step in front of a camera. Despite her fairly high TV profile at the time, Louise Lasseter is laughably bad as the boys’ hysterical mother Maddy, who often appears to be making up her own dialogue and the rest of the cast of unknown no-hopers are little better and often a bit worse. The only halfway decent performance comes from Mark Soper, who plays both of the older boys and occasionally convinces as a cold, arrogant, psychopathic killer.

Comedy value aside, there’s little to recommend here. Poor pacing renders a couple of potentially exciting cat-and-mouse sequences dull and redundant, and a frantic poolside shoot-out denouement lacks any tension because it’s so badly directed and performed. Worth a look for a few sniggers only (dig those crazy mullets and the rat-tat-tat 1980s synthesiser score), Blood Rage is a monumental misfire and no amount of name-changes can salvage anything of worth from this clumsy horror show of the very worst kind.

Special Features: Three versions of the film / Director commentary / Mark Soper interview / Marianne Kanter interview / Louise Lasser interview / FX supervisor interview / Ted Raimi interview / Locations feature / Alternate titles / Reversible sleeve / Subtitles / Collector’s booklet.

BLOOD RAGE / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: JOHN GRISSMER / SCREENPLAY: BRUCE RUBIN / STARRING: LOUISE LASSER, MARK SOPER, JULIE GORDON, JAMES FARRELL, MARIANNE KANTER / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

By the mid-to-late 1950s, both the career and reputation of legendary Hollywood heart-throb/swordsman (in every sense of the word) Errol Flynn were on the skids. His star, which shone most brightly in the iconic The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938 had long since waned and, as he stumbled through middle age, he became a pitiable figure reluctant to accept that his glory days were long behind him. He died in the arms of a much younger woman – star-struck dancer Beverly Aadland – and The Last of Robin Hood begins in the frenzied aftermath of the star’s death and then rewinds – courtesy of his mother Florence telling the ‘real story’ of her daughter’s shocking romance to a plausible journalist – to chronicle the larger-than-life star’s last couple of years.

In many ways, The Last of Robin Hood is the story of a different time and much of what’s depicted here appears both unsavoury and unpalatable to modern sensibilities. Beverly’s pushy mother Florence (Susan Sarandon) turns a blind eye to her daughter’s ‘friendship’ with Flynn (Kevin Kline) who has promised to give her a helping hand up the showbiz ladder. But Flynn and Beverly have become more than friends; in one unsettling scene, Flynn ‘seduces’ Beverly (only fifteen years old at the time) but what’s depicted is quite clearly rape and there’s the sense that Beverly knows it, even though she keeps it to herself and ultimately allows the penitent Flynn to wheedle his way back into her affections. Florence, meanwhile, initially scandalised by her daughter’s relationship with a man over three times her age, eventually learns to turn a blind eye when she realises what Beverly’s association with Flynn, still a charming smooth-talker, could mean for her and her daughter.

The Last of Robin Hood develops beyond its unsettling, queasy opening into a genuine love story between Flynn and his “Woodsy” (the nickname he gives Beverly as she reminds him of a ‘wood nymph’), and the two eventually become virtually inseparable. But somehow, despite their clear devotion to one another, we can never really shake off the slightly distasteful nature of the relationship and the fact that it began in a shocking act of violation and that Beverly’s mother quickly became complicit in Flynn’s lascivious behaviour. Yet it’s clear that Flynn and Beverly became the real deal and they stayed together even when the relationship became public knowledge and a genuine Hollywood scandal. The story of Flynn’s failure to restore his professional reputation and his sad death in 1959, addicted to pain-killers and obsessed with booze, is in itself, beyond his notorious inability to ‘keep it in his pants’, a salutary lesson in Hollywood excess.

The film, clearly a low budget effort despite the presence of its accomplished cast, has a determinedly TV movie air about it, and whilst it makes no moral judgements about Flynn or the Aadlands – this is the story, warts and all – it’s lifted out of the mundane by strong turns by the ever-reliable Sarandon and Dakota Fanning as the naive, starry-eyed Beverly. Kline’s Flynn is a little one-note, playing up to the gauche stereotype with little in the way of nuance or subtlety yet he passes muster if only because of his remarkable physical resemblance to the fallen idol.

The Last of Robin Hood is a mercifully largely unsalacious retelling of the fall of one of Hollywood’s most famous sons and it’s a story told with sensitivity and intelligence and, refreshingly in an age of outrage and offence, with no desire to pass judgement or wave a moralising cinematic finger. But you’ll still feel a little uneasy at the true story you’ve been told and feel relieved that things like this just don’t happen anymore. Do they?

THE LAST OF ROBIN HOOD / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: RICHARD GRATZER, WASH WESTMORELAND / STARRING: KEVIN KLINE, DAKOTA FANNING, SUSAN SARANDON / RELEASE DATE: DECEMBER 14TH

 

Being a reimagining of Masamune Shirow’s cyberpunk manga and, by extension, Mamoru Oshii’s anime adaption, Ghost in the Shell: Arise had the fiercely loyal fans and the weight of history to contend with. Fortunately for the former, the OVA series has been a success. Told across hour-long episodes known as borders, the series saw how Major Motoko Kusanagi earned her stripes and formed her crack team to fight cyber terrorists in Japan’s not too distant future.

In recalibrating the source material some twenty-five years after its publication, the end result has become that much more contemporary, sometimes uncomfortably so. With its fascination with terrorism, cyber or otherwise, Arise presents a much more pertinent and unsettling reality.

The third border, titled Ghost Tears, offers an unconventional case for the Major, though one that sits comfortably in the franchise. It weaves two stories, which inevitably clash together, where Motoko and Batou try and stop a terrorist organisation, while Togusa plays gumshoe on a murder case. The victim died in possession of a prosthetic leg which belonged to the dubiously-titled Mermaid’s Leg corporation. Written down, it’s perhaps not the most intriguing of set-ups, but in execution it’s a compelling blend of detective tropes and futurist touchstones.

The following border – Ghost Stands Alone – further teases out the overarching Fire Starter plot with Motoko and the recently minted Public Security Section 9 team, wherein cybernetic brains are being affected by a virus. This entry opts for a more action heavy approach, with less emphasis on the character development that marked out Ghost Tears. The socio-political undercurrents are complexly intertwined with the showy explosions and gun fights. Then there’s its own peculiar brand of weirdness, with the robots an uncanny suggestion of the immediate future.

Motoko, ever one of the most endearing creations of the sci-fi genre, is at her most human in Ghost Tears. That’s not to say that she’s shed the hardened aspects of her personality that defined her, but she’s much more rounded and compelling.

The music is made up of digital drones and beats that have a familiarity in construction but an alien allure in its syncopation. The animation style couples earthly warmth against the cold skyscraped landscape, and seeing the city lights through the snowfall before the credits roll on the fourth border is magnificent. Despite the considered edifice of each frame, the animation is wavering, playing out as a marked improvement over the first two instalments, but with some of the same inconsistencies coming through.

At under the hour mark, the borders do feel somewhat rushed. Each further the story of the enigmatic Fire Starter, with the details tantalisingly drip-fed, but the main event of each is promptly resolved. Taken as single episodes, it’s not an indictment of the franchise’s strengths, but the four parts co-existing is another essential story in the wider Ghost in the Shell property. The treasure trove of extras only adds to that standing.

With the steady allusions to modern life, it’s gone beyond the boundaries of its source material. That isn’t to stay it has surpassed Shirow’s manga thematically or stylistically, but its shed the cyberpunk parameters for something that can only be termed post-cyber punk and left at that.

GHOST IN THE SHELL ARISE: BORDERS 3 AND 4 / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: KAZUCHIKA KISE / SCREENPLAY: TOW UBUKATA / STARRING: KENICHIROU MATSUDA, MAAYA SAKAMOTO, TARUSUKE SHINGAKI, AI KAYANO / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Like Strike Witches before it, Infinite Stratos offers a similar take on the mech genre, or rather girls transforming bits of – if not their entire – anatomy into weapons. In this case, it’s a product of the Japanese military tinkering with armoured exoskeletons. The story goes that as women are the only ones capable of piloting an Infinite Stratos (or IS), they lord over the men. But this is a series where the girls are a doleful bunch stuck up in knots over dreary lead Ichika Orimura.

After accidentally touching an IS, Ichika is found to be the only man who can operate it. As such, he’s forced to enter into the pilot school with his gaggling harem to contend with. Punctured with increasingly questionable situations, there’s really nothing you have seen in umpteen other anime.

Based on Izuru Yumizuru’ light novel, Infinite Stratos is male fantasy and it’s most block-headed. As only an avatar for the viewer, it goes without saying that Ichika lacks any real depth or personality, but even still, he’s a sorry state of affairs. As adolescent guff, it isn’t half bad, but for anyone older than fourteen or after more depth, there are other options in the mech pool to draw from.

Director Kikuchi Yasuhito – of Comet Lucifer – brings his usual pleasant stylings and returns from the first series, popping with much of the same vibrancy. It might look the business, but the English dub is downright embarrassing. The German is particularly eye-watering, with the English and French a close second and third.

It might skirt around any real direction with stories to peddle figures and hug pillows, and dole out the archetypes with an unequivocally awful sense of humour, but as a step to better things, you could do far better than Infinite Stratos 2.

Special Features: Episode 1 broadcast version / Clean opening and closing / Disk credits / Also available

INFINITE STRATOS: SERIES 2 COLLECTION / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: KIKUCHI YASUHITO / SCREENPLAY: FUMIHIKO SHIMO / STARRING: KOKI UCHIYAMA, YOKO HIKASA, YUKANA, ASAMI SHIMODA / RELEASE DATE: DECEMBER 14TH

 

Released in 1952, The Quiet Man is a curious combination of John Wayne, John Ford and 1920s Ireland. Famous at the time for its use of Tecnicolor, and winner of two Academy Awards, The Quiet Man is now available on Blu-ray for the first time.

The plot is simple and allows plenty of space for the leads to perform. John Wayne plays Sean Thornton, an emigrant who grew up in Pittsburgh and now returns to Innisfree to reclaim his heritage in the form of the old family farm. This brings him into confrontation with local squire Will Danahan (Victor McLaglen) and he falls for Will’s sister Mary Kate (Maureen O’Hara). The story unfolds in a comfortable, Sunday afternoon way until the climactic fist fight and the inevitable happy ending.

On the way we get many tropes of a romanticised Ireland that never was and the film is never less than affectionate, even when at its most tongue in cheek. Wayne and Ford may have been far better known for many Westerns, but this films works very well and taps into many romantic myths of the Celtic diaspora and also acts as a fascinating look at Ireland as it was in the early 1950s when the film was made. The society presented is idealised and all religions and classes mix freely. This adds to the storytelling but does require a little suspension of belief.

The cinematography is a substantial part of the film’s appeal, and shot after shot are framed as moving postcards into a vision of Ireland that never was. With the transfer to Blu-ray everything looks gorgeous, even if the aspect ratio doesn’t suit a modern widescreen television.

Apart from the two hour main feature there are extras in the form of a video essay on John Ford, a making-of documentary, the original trailer, and various profiles of Wayne, Ford and cinematographer Winton C Hoch.

This is an adorable slice of nostalgia.

Special Features: Video essay on John Ford / Making-of / Profiles / Original trailer

THE QUIET MAN / CERT: U / DIRECTOR: JOHN FORD / SCREENPLAY: FRANK S. NUGENT / STARRING: JOHN WAYNE, MAUREEN O’HARA, BARRY FITZGERALD, VICTOR MCLAGLEN / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Dragons aren’t particularly well known for being festive creatures. Lizards, even magical ones, aren’t the sort of thing you expect to see in the snow-covered clichés of a Christmas kids’ movie. Arguably, being enormous winged metaphors for lust, wrath and greed, they’re probably a better analogy for Black Friday, but we digress. The Christmas Dragon is a low budget fantasy movie that brings together two entirely different sorts of magic to tell an overly-long story of Christmas, elves and fire-breathing flying lizards.

All the basic elements for a mindless live-action Christmas movie are present. We’ve a band of plucky orphans, distant land where the spirit of Christmas has been forgotten, some villainous children-hating slavers, a small horde of mooks, and, of course, Santa. The plot revolves around Adyen, a young girl who is orphaned in the first few minutes of the movie. The plucky youngster grows up still believing in magic and is firm in the knowledge that if you wish really, really hard, Santa will bring you the things you want. Provided you’re well behaved, of course.

The Christmas Dragon is an interesting mix of seasonal cliché and fantasy tropes, bundled together with Americans doing bad English accents whilst being dressed in the finest quality LARP kit. There’s also a peculiar amount of eyeliner on the faces of the cast, which is never well explained. Presumably cheap make-up is readily available in pseudo-European fantasy kingdoms. Still, the scary bits aren’t too scary and the peril is mild. This is a good thing – it’s a children’s movie and parents should be relatively confident that their children won’t have nightmares. The special effects are convincing enough, though they aren’t going to win any awards. To put it another way, the monsters will be suspiciously familiar to anyone who’s seen plenty of low-budget fantasy features.

As tools for distracting the young fantasy fan in your life go, The Christmas Dragon is a reasonable choice and makes for a nice change of pace. It’s not memorable or clever, but it is fun and certainly not boring. Reasonable low budget family fare for those fond of dragons and magical silliness.

THE CHRISTMAS DRAGON / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: JOHN LYDE / SCREENPLAY: DAVID ADDANTE, SHYLAH ADDANTE / STARRING: TALON G. ACKERMAN, HEATHER BEERS, DAVE BRESNAHAN, JACOB BUSTER, DAVID DEVILLIERS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

To say this is an odd film does it a disservice. Jeffrey St. Jules’ sci-fi musical has a lot going for it on a visual scale, but the remainder of its content is up for debate. There’s some lovely direction, fine performances, and an idiosyncratic atmosphere that keeps it entertaining, but the story itself feels half-realised and a little underwhelming.

Bang Bang Baby follows 1960s’ small-town girl Stepphy’s dreams of becoming a singing sensation. That dream comes achingly close to reality when she’s accepted into a talent competition, but her ill father forbids her to go. Her shattered dreams are then pieced back together when singing heartthrob Stepphy’s idol Bobby Shore turns up and the pair quickly fall in love. There’s just one snag – the whole town becomes plagued with a weird purple mist, turning the residents into mutants.

Bang Bang Baby employs an unusual mixture of styles and tones that work in making the film quite the original feature, but you may struggle to comprehend the logic behind it. Then again, Bang Bang Baby has more than enough charm to compensate for any lack of logic. It has more in common with The League of Gentlemen than Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, and is all the better for it. St. Jules creates an amusing pastiche of 1960s’ teenage romance that’s emphasised by the film’s star duo, Jane Levy as Stepphy and Justin Chatwin as Bobby. Neither of them deliver Oscar-winning performances necessarily, but there’s a well-slurred manner to Chatwin’s idiotic rocker, and Levy gives a performance that belittles her 20-something age in its maturity. She’s the tightly-wound knot in this delightfully mad jumble of a film that has strands waving about in all directions.

In lesser hands, the pacing, atmosphere, and overall feel of the film might come off as a squalid shambles, but St. Jules knows how to fuel Bang Bang Baby with a powerful sense of individuality. In this age of never-ending cinematic universes, this film can perhaps be taken as a violent and effective tonic to today’s movie trends.

Bang Bang Baby isn’t for the masses, and it’s proud in being such a film. The rough, trashy nature to the pacing may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it’s understandable if at first you’re wondering where exactly this film is going, as any sort of sci-fi hokum doesn’t kick in until almost thirty minutes into the film. However, its utter and complete weirdness never lets up, and the film ultimately remains a refreshingly odd cluster of genres. If Troma did a 12-rated musical, it might look something like Bang Bang Baby.

BANG BANG BABY / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: JEFFREY ST. JULES / STARRING: JUSTIN CHATWIN, JANE LEVY, CHLOE ROSE, PETER STORMARE / RELEASE DATE: VOD OUT NOW
 

Halo is slowly but surely making its mark as a franchise. What started out as a rather good video game has gently stretched into a full-on multi-media experience, with its own backstory and wide range of tabletop games, toys and live-action low budget movies. One of the limitations it has, however, is that its main hero, the Master Chief, is a blank slate. Great for first-person shooters, but rubbish for storytelling.

Halo: The Fall of Reach is an attempt to fix this, and is a prequel of sorts to the whole Halo series. Set before the invasion of The Covenant (Halo’s zealous and villainous aliens), it explores the origins of Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, aka the Master Chief himself. It also goes into the nature of the super-soldier Spartan programme that gave him his remarkable abilities, and gives us some insight into the nature of his fellow troopers, Blue Squad, who are similarly enhanced.

All of this is designed to tie-in with the novel of the same name, as well as foreshadow events in the recently released Halo 5. As a piece of perfectly moulded marketing, it’s great. As an animated piece of entertainment, however, it falls short. Like many origin stories, the problem is that we know the ending; John becomes Master Chief. The point of the exercise should be to add depth to the character, but sadly all we get is that John-117 was a bit sad that people died to make the Spartan super-soldiers. There’s no character development, and because this is CGI the acting is wooden and lacklustre.

The animation is not bad, but it’s nothing to write home about. Unlike the excellent live-action Halo movies, CGI is unforgiving of low budgets and, coupled with unremarkable voice acting, this makes for a less than stellar feature. With a bigger budget and a tighter script, Halo: The Fall of Reach could be a tense sci-fi thriller about the lengths mankind will go to in order to survive. Instead, the result is a wasted opportunity. Halo: The Fall of Reach is destined to become a footnote in an otherwise well-managed franchise. One for the hardcore fans only.

HALO: THE FALL OF REACH / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: IAN KIRBY / SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: JEN TAYLOR, STEVE DOWNES, MICHELLE LUKES, BRITTANY UOMOLEALE, TRAVIS WILLINGHAM / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW (VOD), DECEMBER 7TH (DVD/BLU-RAY)