Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

DVD REVIEW: THE LAST SURVIVORS (AKA THE WELL) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: THOMAS S. HAMMOCK / SCREENPLAY: JACOB FORMAN, THOMAS S. HAMMOCK / STARRING: HALEY LU RICHARDSON, BOOBOO STEWART, JOHN GRIES / RELEASE DATE: MAY 4TH

Essentially an attempt to relocate the current vogue for teen sci-fi into the post-apocalyptic landscape, The Last Survivors neither convinces us enough of its catastrophe to make us really believe in the situation, nor makes us care enough about its protagonists to mind terribly much whether they continue to survive. Which is a shame, as the basic premise should give us plenty to explore and the locations used are beautifully desolate.

Ten years after the last rain has fallen, we meet Kendal (Richardson), a young girl who dreams of escaping the drought-stricken valley in which she and three of her friends were left behind when humanity perished. As she struggles to find the last part that will make airborne the plane that is concealed at the hideaway of the very young and very independent Alby (Max Charles), we see her closest friend Dean’s (Stewart) kidneys failing, and before long Gabriel (Michael Welch) is co-opted into the militia of Carson (Gries), after the self-appointed tyrant puts the rest of Gabriel’s family to death. Things come to a head when the water in Kendal and Dean’s well runs dry. And that’s about it.

The Last Survivors takes the space inherent in its premise and setting very literally, and whereas most post-apocalyptic tales will tell a bigger story through metaphor, here we have very little beyond the notion that the rain has stopped falling and that the mountains (to which everyone seems to wish to escape, despite never actually doing so) are some kind of sanctuary. The action and dialogue sequences are separated by lengthy interludes that might have been less intrusive, had writer/director Hammock not decided to make Kendal’s confidante Dean bed-ridden and thus leave his principle character with no one to communicate for long sections of the story. The violence – while relatively graphic – is lacking in the consequence the film would like to have engendered. Sadly, it’s all too easy not to care who survives to the end credits.

The acting is respectable enough, if rather limited by the scope of the premise, and the camera work does an excellent job of creating a bleak and inescapably isolated landscape. But we are never given a sense of where the characters came from or how they came to be the ones to survive, and ultimately The Last Survivors seems like little more than an attempt to replicate some of the teenage future-shock of The Hunger Games, but without the resources or inspiration enough to properly embrace the melodrama that would have helped it succeed. Taking itself too seriously without providing enough reason for the audience to follow suit, this is ultimately an interesting and pretty but rather vacuous failure.

Special Features: B-Roll / Two commentaries / Two deleted scenes / Audition footage
 

DVD REVIEW: THE AMBITION OF ODA NOBUNA / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: YUJI KUMAZAWA / SCREENPLAY: MASASHI SUZUKI / STARRING: TAKUYA EGUCHI, KANAE ITO, HITOMI NABATAME, REI MATSUZAKI / RELEASE DATE: APRIL 13TH

Based on the series of light novels by Mikage Kasuga (illustrated by Miyama-Zero), The Ambition of Oda Nobuna is difficult series to place. Yes it’s a high school drama to an extent, it’s also alternate history and a romantic comedy, but mostly it’s a fantasy harem adventure.

Like 2011’s Battle Girls: Time Paradox, which saw schoolgirl Yoshino magicked away to an alternate feudal Japan, The Ambition of Oda Nobuna starts with high school student Yoshiharu Sagara mysteriously finding himself in an alternate Sengoku period. Having been saved on the battlefield by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (a hugely important general, samurai and politician of the time) at the cost of his life, Yoshiharu dramatically changes the course of history.

He’s determined to make things right and find a way home. Trouble is, he’s only clued up on the period because of the video game Nobunaga’s Ambition he’s obsessed with. He soon discovers that in this alternate past Nobunaga Oda doesn’t exist and, as with Battle Girls, real life figures have been gender swapped. Instead it’s the teenage woman Nobuna Oda who is serving as daimyo of Owari and striving for hegemony.

The series opener, Nobuna and Monkey, is all exposition, explaining each character, their motivations and relationships and positioning Yoshiharu as Nobuna’s ‘monkey’. Like many teen boys, he’s chest obsessed and this is his primary driving force for the early episodes. Part of the shows appeal is seeing him develop into a strategist and become an important part of Nobuna’s entourage. Even when you’d think his character had evolved, he’s still thinking with his dick and perving the place up.

The fault doesn’t just lie with the central character alone. There’s plenty of fan service, and this in itself doesn’t become a problem until towards the end of the series where the boob jiggling (and size) reach farcical extremes. But it’s the thinly veiled plot device to get the timid young strategist Hanbē out of her skivvies that makes for uncomfortable viewing. It’s a fleeting scene that veils the whole series in a creepy scuzz.

Despite the hugely unflattering elements, it does take a look at the many roles of women in wartime. Nobuna herself is a fascinating and dynamic character, determined to fulfil her dreams. Watching her relationship with Yoshiharu develop over the 12 episode arc is one of the series’ strengths. By the fifth episode, Recruiting a Genius Strategist!, it gets fantastical, and the Sengoku setting becomes more of a backdrop, but the political machinations of its warring characters remains. More of this would have been great, but the series juggles far too many characters, with many ending up looking the same or just impossible to care for.

The Ambition of Oda Nobuna sometimes subverts the harem sub-genre, but often falls prey to many of its slimy conventions. It’s problematic, yes, but if you can look past that it’s an entertaining, funny and well animated series.

Special Features: Trailers

 

BLU-RAY REVIEW: THE RELIC / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: PETER HYAMS / SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: PENELOPE ANN MILLER, TOM SIZEMORE, LINDA HUNT, JAMES WHITMORE / RELEASE DATE: MAY 18TH

What happened to the dumb but fun monster movies? They seemed to be everywhere for years, and then, after a heyday of sorts in the 1990s, they seemed to die out in favour of the more po-faced, Nolan-esque approach to movies. The mid-late ‘90s was full of them (most of which have found infamy by being the subject of a bunch of episodes of the How Did This Get Made podcast) and one of the standouts from the period was 1997’s The Relic.

Adapted from the book of the same name by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, the basic plot of the film sees a Chicago cop team up with an anthropologist to take on the lizard god monster that is killing people in the museum she works at (we all remember school trips to museums being like that). With that out of the way, the film is set up for a series of monster attack, deaths and misleading jumps (they’re all here; the cat jumping out of the dark, the killer hobo in the basement, the wheezy cleaning lady).

Despite all of the clichés and plot holes (at one point the creature seems to be attacking various groups of people in different parts of the museum at pretty much the same time), the film moves along at a brisk enough pace for you to not have time to think about them until after the credits have rolled. Part of this is down to the solid – but not spectacular – direction of Peter Hyams, part is down to some great lines in the script and the rest is down to the cast.

Both Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Sizemore are great in the leads, making the most of what are essentially walking stereotype characters (the spunky female scientist and haggard, gruff detective with an ex-wife and a custody battle) and giving them both a charm and wit that keeps you invested in them throughout.

Overall, The Relic is a flawed film that will divide people (with fans of the book taking a dislike to it in particular) at best. But if you’re looking for a dumb slice of ‘90s creature feature fun, you could do a lot worse than this, a film that is both dumb and fun in equal measure!

Sadly the bonus features on the disc seem to have been carried over from the ‘90s as well with just a trailer for the film as your lone bonus feature (although in the ‘90s they would have declared ‘Scene Selection’ and the menu a bonus feature as well). Sadly, it’s not even a good trailer! As such, the film is an 8 out of 10, but the extras deserve a pitiful 0.

Special Features: Trailer
 

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DVD REVIEW: P51 DRAGON FIGHTERS / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: MARK ATKINS / SCREENPLAY: MARK ATKINS / STARRING: SCOTT MARTIN, STEPHANIE BERAN, ROSS BROOKS, OZMAN SIRGOOD, ROBERT PIKE DANIEL / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Dragons! US World War 2 airplanes! Dragons fighting US World War 2 airplanes! How cool would that be?? Sadly we may never find out, because whilst there are some quite cool scenes in P51 Dragon Fighters, a budget so tiny it can only gaze up in awe at a shoestring turns a seriously neat concept into something laughably tacky and largely unconvincing in yet another wasted opportunity in the world of straight-to-DVD sci-fi.

First things first. Don’t be taken in by the DVD cover which depicts dragons and airplanes in a pitched dogfight above a London skyline; you’ll not be surprised to learn that this doesn’t happen in the film – nor does anything even remotely resembling it. Ostensibly set in North Africa at a point in World War 2 where the US are about to kick some serious Nazi ass, Hitler’s mob are about to fight back – big style – courtesy of their latest secret super-weapon. It appears that the Nazis have come into possession of a stack of eggs out of which have hatched an army of fire-breathing winged dragons controlled by a bunch of buxom, black-clad sorceresses. You’re glazing over, stay with us! The Nazis have set up a massive egg incubation chamber under the desert and, when the Allied Air Force is routed by a dragon attack, a crack troop of… err…. eight multinational pilots are put together to launch an assault on the incubation facility.

So where to start? Well, it says World War 2 on the tin but this looks resolutely twenty-first century; not for one moment does this film look as if it’s taking place seventy-odd years ago (just one of its anachronisms being that P51 fighters never saw action in the North African conflict). The film is loaded with terrible actors and terrible accents, a deeply unconvincing and weedy leading man, a feeble romantic subplot and some nonsense about our hero being grounded when he’s clearly the only man who can lead this ragtag bunch of pilots (and why there’s only eight of them is never explained or justified) to victory against Hitler’s dragon army.

Ah yes, Hitler’s dragon army! It’s the only reason you’d ever consider giving this silly movie the time of day and it’s the scenes with the dragons which save the film from the ‘1 out of 10’ dumper. The aerial scenes aren’t incredibly well done but they’re well done enough to just about work. The dragons – they have swastikas on their wings! – hurtle through the sky belching flame and blowing up aircraft (they blow up themselves when shot, for some reason) and even though the CGI is pretty bargain basement it still can’t help but look damned cool because… well, just because it’s dragons fighting US World War 2 airplanes. This is a bad movie, of course it is; but if you can’t resist dragons vs. US World War 2 airplanes (and we wouldn’t blame you if you can‘t) you’d be best advised to fast-forward through the bad acting, clumsy fights and rotten character stuff and just enjoy the bits with the dragons. And the US World War 2 airplanes. Because even here, in a film as poor as this, that’s just all sorts of cool.

Special Features: None
 

DVD REVIEW: LOG HORIZON PART 1 / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: VARIOUS / SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: TAKUMA TERASHIMA, EMIRI KATOU, TOMOAKI MAENO, YUMI HARA / RELEASE DATE: APRIL 11TH

Log Horizon is based on the series of light novels by Mamare Touno with art by Kazuhiro Hara, which were initially published via a user-generated content site, before making its way into print in 2011. Given the franchise found its footing online and underwent a collaborative metamorphosis, it makes sense that it’s a humanist series steeped in teamwork and friendship. They’re hardly the most original themes when it comes to anime, but Log Horizon is a pleasant surprise.

Like Sword Art Online and .hack before it, Log Horizon sees the players of an online role-playing game get trapped inside. This time the world is Elder Tales, a cross between EverQuest and Final Fantasy Online. .Hack may have opted for a darker approach which dealt with events outside of the game world, but Log Horizon focusses solely in-game as players claim the basic infrastructure and make a fully functional, democratic society. From the first episode, which deals with the fallout of getting trapped, an event players dubbed ‘the apocalypse’, it’s easy to dismiss the series as a knock off. But a few episodes in, the series begins to reveal itself and develop into a surprisingly nuanced study of character and the wild west of the web.

The character animation is one of its failings, with plenty looking like they were randomly generated. Given the story sees 30,000 players getting trapped, there’s bound to be some archetypes at play, and trust us, there’s plenty. But the main characters are a great bunch. There’s the devout ninja Akatsuki who first appears as a tall man, but uses a potion to change her sex and appearance to better resemble her real petite self. There’s ‘The Warrior of Panties’ Naotsugu, who makes up in heart what he loses with crude humour. There’s Shiroe, an awkward player who is at the centre in the story. And then there’s Nyanta, a debonair werecat, a swashbuckler and chef both, who on the Japanese dub has a suave enough voice, but in the English he’s straight out of a Blaxploitation flick.

There’s plenty of running gags where Akatsuki kicks Naotsugu in the face before he has a chance to say anything perverted. Or Akatsuki getting dressed up like moé mascot. But there’s also room for touching sub plots, the most poignant being the brother and sister Tohya and Minori. In real life Tohya is in a wheelchair, but in game he’s able to protect and care for his sister. It brings home just how liberating and important online games are for a lot of people.

But there is the thorny issue of just who the series is aimed at. While online gamers will get a kick out of its familiar mechanics at play, it’s often like MMO 101. As the series progresses, Shiroe’s voiceover develops into revealing the Elder Tales lore, whether it’s the monetary system or a certain beasty, it often feeds into that episode. It might have started with a few clunky episodes, but by the end of the first volume, you’ll be clawing for more.

Special Features: Opening

 

DVD REVIEW: THE PYRAMID / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: GREGORY LEVASSEUR / SCREENPLAY: DANIEL MEERSAND, NICK SIMON / STARRING: ASHLEY HINSHAW, DENIS O’HARE, JAMES BUCKLEY, DANIEL AKERMAN / RELEASE DATE: APRIL 13TH

The Pyramid isn’t, as you might have heard, an especially bad movie. It’s no stinker. It does its thing – team of archaeologists ill-advisedly invade a recently-excavated pyramid long-hidden under the Egyptian desert – with briskness and with absolutely no pretension. But by God we’ve seen all this before; you’ll be reminded of The Descent as our heroes wriggle and squeeze through tight spaces, and last year’s As Above, So Below told a very similar tale of explorers lost and terrorised in the hidden catacombs deep below the streets of Paris. Oh, and there’s that little matter of the easy-come, easy-go (more often gone) ‘found footage’ gimmick…

The Pyramid has a few aces up it sandy sleeve, though. Our team – and yes, that’s The Inbetweeners’ Jay in the cast list wielding the camera and making wisecracks – foolishly enter the newly-found pyramid despite the noxious gas it’s already emitted and the fact that they’ve been told to evacuate the area because of escalating tensions in nearby Giza. Of course they get lost almost immediately when the floor caves in beneath them, one of their number gets trapped under rubble, and there appear to be ferocious carnivorous feral cat-creatures roaming the gloomy tunnels. All fairly mundane stuff in the scheme of things – until the stalking, Jackal-like figure of Anubis turns up and the film at least makes an attempt at blending some genuine Egyptian mythology into what’s otherwise a routine if suitably claustrophobic pot-pourri of familiar ‘trapped underground’ clichés.

Inevitably the script’s not really big on character and emotional resonance. Violent deaths – and there are a few good ones here – are quickly forgotten or laughed off and the ‘found footage’ element of the film is often conveniently sidelined when the story needs to open up its sense of visual scale by throwing in a spooky shot of a mysterious shadowy creature approaching out of the dark or to heighten moments of dramatic tensions when the survivors are literally running for their lives and there’s no-one to point the camera at them.

But The Pyramid charges along in its own relentlessly derivative way and it’s not without its moments, especially as the group rush to escape a tunnel filling with sand, one character falls into a floor full of spikes and, pinned to the ground, is set upon by the cat-creatures and, until he’s revealed in all his glory (exposing the unfinished-looking CGI to merciless close-up) Anubis is a formidable-looking beast. Lively, energetic but scuppered by the over-familiarity of both its core narrative and the lazily and randomly-employed ‘found footage’ trope, The Pyramid is unashamedly B-Movie stuff and, if you don’t expect too much of it, we sphinx there’s a chance you’ll have a decent ninety minutes in its company (whew, think I got away with that one…).

Special Features: Featurettes / Extended ending

 

BLU-RAY REVIEW: JOHN CARPENTER’S VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED / CERT: 15 /DIRECTOR: JOHN CARPENTER / SCREENPLAY: DAVID HIMMELSTEIN / STARRING: CHRISTOPHER REEVE, KIRTSIE ALLEY, LINDA KOZLOWSKI, MICHAEL PARE, MARK HAMILL / RELEASE DATE: APRIL 27TH

Poorly received at the time of its release in 1995, John Carpenter’s reworking of the original British 1960 version of John Wyndham’s novel Midwich Cuckoos isn’t the best of Carpenter’s patchy body of work, but it’s a decent, atmospheric, low-key science-fiction thriller in its own right, suffering inevitably from the fact that it doesn’t really bring much new to the story and so can’t help feeling a bit unnecessary.

The Midwich of Wyndham’s novel (and the original film) has been transported from the sleepy English countryside to San Francisco’s Marin County. A mysterious shadow falls over the village accompanied by an eerie whispering voice – and the entire population falls briefly unconscious. Ten women simultaneously become pregnant, including a few who… y’know, haven’t done it… and nine months later (that’s how it works) ten babies are born but one is stillborn. But these are no ordinary gorgeous goo-goo charmers; it quickly becomes apparent that these nine nippers with their bleached hair, pale complexions and ferociously blue eyes are devoid of emotional response and possessed of extraordinary – and unearthly – abilities. The children work together to subvert the people of Midwich and wipe out those who stand in their way or try to impede the progress of their own mysterious agenda. But the group are at risk from one of their own; young David (Thomas Dekker) is in touch with his human side due to the death at birth of his intended ‘partner’. And it turns out that the children of Midwich aren’t unique…

The film’s greatest strength lies in the fact that Wyndham’s source material is classic edgy British sci-fi storytelling and even embellishments to the original – the hints of similar ‘colonies’ all over the world, an ambiguous finale, a bit of trendy violence and an increased horror content – do little to derail the intriguing narrative. The creepy, largely-mute children, walking in unison, mature beyond their years and coldly dispassionate, are as unsettling here as they were in the stiff-upper-lip British black-and-white original.

And yet it’s the original which remains the better film. Carpenter captures the atmosphere and sense of dread inherent in the story and yet there’s little energy in the production and after a gripping opening twenty minutes the film seems content to just trundle along ticking boxes and offering little to really justify revisiting a story already well-realised over three decades earlier. The performances are all decent – Christopher Reeve reminds us, as he often did, that there was so much more to him than Superman’s cape – but the whole enterprise never really comes alive because it never tries to surprise us or give familiar material a new spin and there’s little evidence of Carpenter’s quirky originality on show. It’s a thoroughly watchable but achingly routine remake which looks stunningly-sharp on its new Blu-ray transfer but in the end it’s really a bit more Village of the Dull than Village of the Damned.

Special Features: Trailer