Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Review: Scary Movie V / Director: Malcolm D. Lee / Screenplay: Pat Proft, David Zucker / Starring: Ashley Tisdale, Simon Rex, Erica Ash, Molly Shannon, Heather Locklear, J.P. Manoux, Jerry O’Connell, Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan / Release Date: Out Now

Idiocracy is coming. Mike Judge posits, in his criminally underrated dystopian comedy, that America’s number one television show will be a reality TV show called Ow My Balls. The top-grossing movie – a blockbuster called Ass. Ass meets Ow My Balls in Scary Movie V, which edges us ever closer to Idiocracy.

That there are now five Scary Movie movies is terrifying in itself. The first film, while crude and unintelligent at least offers a few laughs. With this fifth entry, the well seems to have dried. Anna Faris is finally gone (the series never deserved her anyway) leaving co-star Simon Rex and newcomer Ashley Tisdale to keep the Scary Movie boat afloat. Charlie Sheen is there too, briefly, but he’s gone within the first ten minutes. The actors are just gravy though. No one watches Scary Movie for the performances. With or without Charlie Sheen, this movie is nothing but a relentless procession of poo, pee and puke gags. There’s also people repeatedly falling over and being punched a lot. Sometimes they mix it up a bit by having these things all happen at the same time. It makes Ow My Balls look like Breaking Bad.

The one thing Scary Movie V does well is the quality of the references. It’s impressively up-to-date, with the majority of the story involving a Mama spoof, with bits of Paranormal Activity 4 and even Evil Dead thrown in for good measure. We never thought we’d see the day when a Movie movie spoofed Evil Dead, but here it is. It’s just a shame that it couldn’t be better. Opening with Snoop Dogg and a chum describing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Blair Witch Project as ‘cabin in the woods’ movies, the Scary Movie franchise is a series for people who know nothing about scary movies. 

Comedy, more so than any other genre, is incredibly subjective. One man’s Mrs. Brown’s Boys (ugh) is another man’s personal hell. That said, it’s hard to picture anyone really enjoying Scary Movie V. It’s like ninety minutes of Peter Griffin fighting that bloody chicken. A cameo from Tyler Perry’s execrable Madea character should tell you who Scary Movie V is aimed at, as it seems to be much the same audience. That said, with such a constant rate of fire, it’s inevitable that some of it will stick – in much the same way as chimp turds stick to the wall in the film’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes spoof. While repetitive and dumb, at least a couple of the slapstick gags work (Simon Rex makes a particularly good punching bag) and you’ll have to be a complete stick in the mud not to laugh at the motorised pool cleaner party, or the family dog’s Inception dream. The best joke? The revelation that Charlie Sheen’s cat is called ‘Emilio’ (as in Estevez, geddit). It also puts forward a surprisingly good casting suggestion in Jerry O’ Connell, playing Christian Grey in a Fifty Shades routine. Bonus points for Terry Crews too, who isn’t in the film for nearly enough.

Go in with suitably low expectations (somewhere around ankle height) and you may be pleasantly surprised. It’s the most tolerable spoof for a good while. That’s faint praise though. At this point, five entries into the Scary Movie franchise, the joke is very much on us. To quote Private Joe Bowers of Idiocracy, talking of a better world: “People wrote books and movies. Movies with stories, that made you care about whose ass it was, and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!” So please, harmless and occasionally amusing as it may be, we beg of you, give Scary Movie V the cold shoulder. You could save the world. You could prevent Idiocracy.

Extras: None

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Review: The Walking Dead – Season 3 / Cert: 18 / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Steven Yeun, Laurie Holden, David Morrissey / Release Date: September 30th

The third season of AMC’s The Walking Dead is a belter. Picking up after the decimation that we saw at the end of Season 2, we now find the main group of survivors, headed up by Rick Grimes (Lincoln), on the search for a new place to call home. Holing up in a seemingly abandoned prison complex, our stragglers do their best to get settled. Of course, all can’t remain well for too long, with the threat of zombies, convicts, their fellow man and the unknown lurking over their heads.

We, the viewer, are then introduced to another batch of survivors; a group who live a seemingly idyllic life in an isolated, walled-up town run by the apparently well-meaning Governor (Morrissey). It isn’t long before both camps have to learn to coexist in the walker-ridden world. As ever, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially when the mysterious, manipulative Governor is not quite all that he seems, leading to a tactical cock-fight of sorts between he and Rick.

As well as bringing us new characters, like the Governor and the katana-wielding badass known as Michonne (Gurira), this season also sees a few of the more familiar faces fall by the wayside. Yes, there are casualties, and plenty of them. When it comes to Season 3 of The Walking Dead, all bets are off. From the very first episode, when the increasingly broken-down Rick announces that he is now giving the orders, the shit is very much on. Bloody, brutal, heartwarming and heartbreaking, this is a show that most definitely does not pull any punches, be it on levels of violence or scenes of emotional complexity.

A masterclass in long-form television, literally every single episode of Season 3’s 16-episode run will have you on the edge of your seat. Old faces die, old faces reappear, new faces appear, and new faces die; it is a roller coaster ride that lulls you in. Just when you’re feeling safe and back in your comfort zone, the show doesn’t miss any chance to slap you in the face with a zombie-infested fish, shocking you awake at what you have just seen.

With the spate of fantastic TV recently, such as Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, it’s hard to convince an audience to invest their valuable time in your show these days. The Walking Dead has no worries on this front, as every minute of your time that is given up is richly rewarded down the line. With a slew of featurettes, not to mention the odd commentary track, the bursting-at-the-seams 5-disc release is quite simply a piece of must-own television for genre fans.

Extras: Eight featurettes / Deleted scenes / Audio commentaries on selected episodes

Review: Space Battleship Yamato / Cert: 12 / Director: Takashi Yamazaki / Screenplay: Shimako Sato / Starring: Takuya Kimura, Meisa Kuroki, Toshirô Yanagiba / Release Date: August 19th

Space Battleship Yamato is a glossy live-action version of a popular Japanese sci-fi show from the ’70s. The original series, also called Space Battleship Yamato (recut and rebranded as Starblazers in the US,) detailed the adventures of a lone super-sized starship, built into the husk of an old World War Two destroyer. Its crew were on a quest to save the human race, who had been driven below the surface of the Earth by a marauding alien race called the Gamillas. The movie follows the same plot, but cuts the 77-episode long drama down into a slightly over-long feature film.

The movie does its best to honour the legacy of the TV show, perhaps slightly to its detriment. All the unique elements are here; the ship’s main weapon is fired via a handgun-style interface, the uniforms have huge arrows on them, the ship’s captain looks like Captain Birdseye, right down to the bushy white beard, and the drama is laid on thick with very little actual substance. Most of the space combat action is superb, and fans of things going bang in space will be pleased with this. Space Battleship Yamato is glossy space opera at its finest, filled with action, explosions and a retro-chic that makes it unique. It’s also much longer than it needs to be.

It’s hard not draw a comparison with the rebooted Battlestar Galactica; after all, both stories are about a surviving sliver of humanity in a massively armed spaceship, up against a genocidal hive-mind which likes to talk a little too much about the morality of war. However, the two are only faintly similar; Yamato’s glossy sci-fi chic and style over substance is nothing like Ronald D Moore’s navel gazing epic. The characters from Battlestar Galactica certainly have more time to grow on the viewer, and this is perhaps Yamato’s biggest problem; the main protagonist, Susumu is pretty dull. Actor Takuya Kimura tries very hard to bring depth and meaning to this rebel without a clue, but ultimately it’s the writing, not the acting, that drags the overall quality of the feature down. However, as a live action adaptation of a fairly forgettable cartoon show, it’s very good for what it is.

Those looking for Starblazers nostalgia will be well served, and those looking for mindless sci-fi fun will find this kills a few hours for them. Those looking for anything more than that will not only be disappointed, but are also looking in the wrong place.

Extras: Behind-the-scenes and visual FX featurettes / Trailers

Review: Ikarie XB-1 / Cert 12 / Director: Jindrich Polak / Screenplay: Jindrich Polak, Pavel Juracek / Starring: Zdenek Stepanek, Radovan Lukavsky, Irena Kakircova / Release Date: September 23rd

Eastern Bloc science fiction has become one of the genre’s no-go zones, its forgotten dead ends. If you’re aware that such a thing exists at all, it will probably only be through the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanislaw Lem. And yet it would seem that it’s an area well worth exploring, if Ikarie XB-1 is anything to go by. This Czech film from 1963 – based on a book by Lem, and released in America in a dubbed and recut version as Voyage to the End of the Universe – is about a spacecraft, “a small cosmic town of 40 citizens”, setting forth to seek out life on the planets of the Alpha Centauri system 26,000 light years away. Boldly going where no man has been before – Soviet-style.

Which means taking the whole thing very seriously. There’s little or no frivolity in Eastern Bloc SF. So instead of some nonsense about alien princesses, you get a thoughtful script that deals in a sophisticated way with the issues that would beset a crew in that situation. The trip will take 15 years, but because of time dilation it’s only going to seem like about eighteen months for those on board. That’s long enough though, and a large part of the film is given over to the boredom and petty annoyances of space flight. The dialogue is mostly the kind of ultra-civilised chitchat you would expect to hear at a science symposium, and the acting is of a quality that wouldn’t be out of place in a classical drama. As for the trials which the crew face, don’t expect any little green men in bubble helmets: the dangers come primarily from humanity’s own past and from a bizarre new form of radiation which they encounter.

For anyone who has seen Tarkovsky’s stately SF epics, all this is, in a way, only to be expected. What will come as a pleasant surprise, though, is how briskly director Jindrich Polak moves everything along. His elliptical approach to characterisation and use of brief, fragmented scenes is reminiscent of early Roman Polanski. The film is shot in immaculate widescreen black-and-white, and Polak takes advantage of spacious, well-finished sets to experiment with wide-angled lenses, handheld cameras and zooms. You can’t help but suspect that the resulting look had a big influence on Kubrick, not just on 2001 but on the War Room scenes in Dr Strangelove.

Ikarie XB-1 is let down slightly by an episodic storyline and an abrupt ending, but otherwise it’s an absolute treat, offering all the kitsch pleasures of vintage SF while still bearing up remarkably well to modern scrutiny. Anyone brave enough to check it out will be very glad they did.

Extras: TBC

Review: Mad Max – Limited Edition Trilogy / Cert: 18 / Director: George Miller / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Tina Turner / Release Date: Out now

A mere 29 years after the release of Beyond Thunderdome, 2014 promises to bring us Fury Road, the much anticipated return of Mad Max, with Britain’s very own Tom Hardy stepping into Mel Gibson’s scuffed leather motorcycle boots as the titular road warrior. Exciting, we know; and while we’re waiting, here’s something to take the edge off the anticipation: the original trilogy in a spanking new Blu-ray box set.

Mad Max (1979) is where the myth and the mayhem begin. Within the first eight minutes, a police car goes crashing through a caravan, and we’re off. The movie was shot on the tightest of Ozploitation budgets, but this works in its favour, grounding it in an everyday, recognizable reality, albeit one where lawlessness on the roads is rife and the police go about their business with vigilante gusto. It’s a film that strips cinema back to a few key elements and its director, George Miller, brought a whole new dynamism to the depiction of vehicular carnage: he painted with petrol and diesel was his easel.

The sequel, The Road Warrior (1981), is widely regarded as the centrepiece of the trilogy. A dead kangaroo lying stretched across the road in the opening moments seems to hint that we’re about to see an Australian movie like none before, and so it proves. War and oil shortages have reduced the world to a new age of barbarism. Desperate for fuel for his beloved V8 Interceptor, Max becomes involved with a tiny oil refinery which is trying to fend off a tribe of motorized hoodlums. The film still retains the grittiness and subversiveness of the original, but a much bigger budget sees the introduction of rusty Heath Robinson contraptions galore and Norma Moriceau’s unforgettable fetish costumes, although are leather chaps and harnesses embellished with studs and feathers really the most appropriate garb for the desert? How do you cope with the chafing?

Finally, Max joins the MTV generation for Beyond Thunderdome (1985), which has him becoming Dad Max to a tribe of lost children and running into Tina Turner in a chainmail party frock. Okay, it wasn’t perhaps the capstone to the trilogy fans were hoping for, but the sets are epic, Moriceau’s costumes continue to startle and once everyone climbs on board that mammoth locomotive-truck hybrid for the final act, it’s a lot of gas-guzzling fun.

All three films, even the first, benefit from the step up to HD – a reflection of the stellar Aussie craftsmanship that went into them. And how about that petrol can packaging? Yes, it’s more or less the same one they used for Reservoir Dogs, but it’s just the kind of thing to make a road fiend gurn with glee.

Extras: Audio commentary by director and introduction by Leonard Maltin (The Road Warrior Only) / Trailers

Review: Smiley / Cert: 15 / Director: Michael J. Gallagher / Screenplay: Ezra Cooperstein, Michael J. Gallagher, Glasgow Phillips / Starring: Caitlin Gerard, Melanie Papalia, Shane Dawson, Roger Bart / Release Date: October 14th

Smiley is a horror film that looks to give the genre a new iconic killer with a modern-day twist. The titular Smiley is essentially a cyber-killer. Brought to life via online video-chat software, Smiley is summoned by a user typing the phrase “I did it for the lulz” three times. Upon doing this, Smiley appears behind the person on the opposite end of the chat, and proceeds to butcher them. After witnessing such a murder, naïve college girl Ashley (Gerard) believes she is being stalked by Smiley, but also fears that her mentally unstable past is coming back to haunt her. Still with us? We hope so.

Think Scream, but replace the “What’s your favourite scary movie?” line with text instead. Take Candyman, but replace the summoning through a mirror with summoning through video software. The thing is, those films were groundbreaking at the time of their release. Smiley just falls flat in that regard. Also, with the character only being summoned by somebody typing “I did it for the lulz” – what the deuce is a lul anyway? – you know exactly when to expect the killer, taking away any surprise element. Yes, you can throw a similar claim at Candyman, but Candyman is a film that had a charismatic lead character, delivered expertly by Tony Todd, and one that was fleshed out with flashbacks and backstory reveals. Smiley remains a faceless killer for the most part, with a mask that looks like a disregarded Scarecrow outfit from Batman Begins.

Whilst the story isn’t unbearably bad, it feels at least a decade or more too late – like an unused Kevin Williamson script that should have been made in the late ’90s or early 2000s. The film is a slasher-type horror, but it has safe scares that never threaten to do anything spectacular. In that way, it’s similar in style to the likes of I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, Valentine and Urban Legend. At least three of those films were relatively fresh at the time, but Smiley just feels like their left-behind, unwanted brother.

The performances are the usual fodder that you’d expect from such a film, boring, bland and clichéd. It’s only really Roger Bart who puts in an interesting turn, playing a seedy college professor, although a far-too-brief Keith David cameo threatens to steal the show. Full of throwaway characters, Smiley manages to rip off several films from previous years, whilst offering nothing new of its own. If this is the new face of horror, consider us offended.

Extras: TBC

Review: The Paranormal Diaries – Clophill / Cert: 15 /Director: Michael Bartlett, Kevin Gates / Screenplay: Kevin Gates/ Starring: Michael Bartlett, Kevin Gates, Craig Stovin, Criselda Cabitac / Release Date: October 14th

The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill is, extraordinarily, something entirely original in the world of horror movies. Created by the makers of the Zombie Diaries series (which in itself doesn‘t inspire a lot of confidence), Clophill takes the bare bones of the now-exhausted found footage genre and gives it a desperately needed new lease of life by crafting a movie which is part-genuine documentary, part horror fiction. The real thrill for the viewer is that Clophill is put together with such inventiveness that it blurs the line between what’s real and what’s imaginary and it’s hard to tell where the documentary ends and where the fiction starts.

Clophill is a typical, quiet English village nestling in the Bedfordshire countryside. In March 1963, a grisly black mass ritual was held at the forbidding ruins of the old St Mary’s Church just outside the village; tombs were looted and long-buried remains defiled. In the intervening years the area has become renowned for its ‘black magic’ activity and even now the locals of the village tell of mysterious dead-of-night goings on in and around the church ruins. In 2010 a team of documentary film-makers assembled at Clophill to speak to the villagers and carry out their own investigations into the various ghostly sightings and supernatural manifestations witnessed in and around the crumbling church.

The first hour or so of Clophill is real. The investigation team – they’re all real too, albeit one or two of them with genuine acting experience – travel to the village and gather up the stories of paranormal activity candidly offered by the village’s actual inhabitants. Some of those they speak to are genuinely unsettled by returning to the church ruins because of what they witnessed when they were there before. The genius of the film – and it really is a sort of genius – is the way the documentary narrative slowly turns into a very Blair Witch-style fiction in the last thirty minutes or so as the team spend their last night up amongst the ruins where they experience firsthand the hair-raising phenomena the area has become notorious for. What happens in the last half-hour is fiction – and it’s subtle, creepy stuff, nothing so explicit and extreme as to tear the audience out of the immaculately developed ’reality’ of the situation. We’re so immersed and invested in Clophill that the sights and sounds experienced by the team are as real as the genuine stories we’ve been told by the residents; we’re no longer able to tell what’s real and what’s fantasy and that, at least, is something thrilling and new in the horror genre.

Clophill is the first in a proposed series of Paranormal Diaries features, the next due out in a year or so. It’s likely that repetition of the formula will dilute its potency but Clophill at least is sure to be a big hit on the horror festival circuit this Autumn and it deserves all the kudos coming its way.

Extras: Two commentaries / Deleted scenes / Trailer

Review: The Initiation / Cert: 18 / Director: Larry Stewart / Screenplay: Charles Pratt Jr. / Starring: Daphne Zuniga, James Read, Vera Miles, Clu Gulager / Release Date: Out Now

The Initiation focuses on Kelly (Zuniga), a troubled college kid with a murky past. For as long as she can remember, she has had a recurring nightmare about a strange man burning alive. Added to this, she has just joined a college sorority and has to face up to the initiation task that is being asked of her – to break into her father’s department store. Seeking the help of kind, understanding professor-cum-dream expert Peter, Kelly decides to man-up and take on the stupid initiation. Only thing is, once inside the department store, her and her friends become stalked by a mysterious figure intent on bloodshed.

It’s safe to say The Initiation is most definitely a film of its time. Initially released in 1984, it has a constant vibe of the original Prom Night or one of John Carpenter’s earlier efforts – hell, there’s even a poster of Tom Selleck and his magnificent bastard of a moustache in one of the rooms. As with so many similar films of the day, The Initiation often finds itself relying on quick, juttery cuts when it comes to action scenes. This is both a charm and a hindrance; those who are fans of 1980s horror will appreciate it, whilst others may find it a tad off-putting. Hey, it worked for Hitchcock, right?

The quick cuts add to the frantic nature of the attacks, and they are accompanied by a typically ’80s score, again in the Carpenter-lite mould. Sadly, the score really doesn’t stand up so well, often taking away from the action as a result. Despite this, The Initiation still manages to keep your attention for the most part, with some gruesome-in-an-’80s way kills. Again, this is where the fast-paced, quickly cut scene placements come to fruition to make the scenes impactful and brutal.

The film is, for the most part, a well-paced, nicely developed little feature, with the token ’80s twist thrown in for good measure at the end. One slight gripe, though, is that it does seem to take a little while to actually get to the meaty point of the story. Not to worry too much, as there are still deaths aplenty throughout.

Surprisingly, the performances of all on show are very good for a film of this nature, with Zuniga (who would later go on to Spaceballs and Melrose Place) and Read particularly shining. And if you find that this film still doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, it’s worth checking out purely for the most fantastic penis fancy dress outfit that you will likely ever see. 

Extras: Trailer

Review: Hannibal – Season 1/ Cert: 18 / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, / Release Date: September 2nd

As there seem to be no further Hannibal Lecter books forthcoming on which to base more films, it was perhaps inevitable that the character would make his way to TV. There is a strange, hitherto unexplored grey area that we hear about at the start of Red Dragon where Hannibal Lecter – then a respected psychiatrist – was helping FBI profiler Will Graham with a number of cases. This is the area that showrunner Bryan Fuller has decided to focus on and the result is almost completely unexpected in terms of style and format.

Will Graham, as played by Hugh Dancy, is a borderline catatonic mess of a person. His talent for empathising with serial killers and getting into their heads is shown to be a form of psychosis which renders him almost insane. The FBI brings him on board to investigate a series of murders where the victims are impaled on deer horns and as a precaution they have him seeing Hannibal Lecter (Mikkelsen). This interpretation of the Lecter character is initially jarring but completely unlike any portrayal thus far. Mikkelsen is a tremendous actor with tons of presence and he plays Lecter as cold, detached and almost alien as he observes the world and those around him. From the start, though, the series makes no bones about the fact that Lecter is up to no good; he has been killing and consuming folk for a long time, and when he meets Graham he sees it as a chance to manipulate law enforcement as well as an opportunity to make a connection with a kindred spirit. The counterweight between these two characters is Laurence Fishburne (finally given a good role after years of misuse) as Graham’s boss Jack Crawford. Fishburne brings humanity, gravitas and is a solid rock grounding the show on amongst all the darkness.

Speaking of darkness, Hannibal is perhaps the darkest and most violent show ever made for network TV. Instead of focusing on the procedural and forensic aspects, we hone in on Graham and Lecter’s relationship and the dark paths that Graham wanders down. The show never spares you any of the grisly details of any of the murders that the FBI investigate and the full details of Lecter’s fondness for culinary ‘experimentation’ are shown in stomach-churning detail.

Hannibal is so far from the Dexter clone that we were expecting that it should run for a few solid years. The final four episodes are remarkably tense with some great guest slots from Gillian Anderson and Eddie Izzard. The show promises to get more interesting and even darker (if that’s possible) next season and we cannot wait.

Extras: Eat the Rude / First Look / Forensics 101

 

Review: Aftershock / Cert: 18 / Director: Nicolas Lopez / Screenplay: Nicolas Lopez, Eli Roth, Guillermo Amoedo / Starring: Eli Roth, Andrea Osvart, Ariel Levy / Release Date: August 19th

As far as we know the disaster movie has never been mixed with the exploitation movie before, unless you count the Final Destination films. This hasn’t stopped director Nicolas Lopez and co-writer and producer Eli Roth however, who have decided that the aftermath of an earthquake must be filled with tons of blood and rape.

The film starts the same way that most Eli Roth productions start, with a trio of mid-twenties horny douchebags travelling around Chile, drinking, hitting on women and going to vineyard’s (!?!). Roth plays the one American in the group who is friends with one of his two Chilean companions but not so good friends with the other. The guy’s holiday is about to get good as he meets two American sisters and one Russian supermodel and then wouldn’t ya know it, an earthquake hits in the middle of the night. Roth and his injured pals escape from a collapsed nightclub on to the streets where there is the threat of an imminent tsunami and a prison has collapsed unleashing dozens of bloodthirsty lunatics on to the ruined streets.

First of all, Aftershock has much more in the way of production values and scope than you might be expecting. You are never in any doubt that you are watching actual ruined streets in Chile. Second of all, and the most refreshing aspect of the film, is the fact that they pull the rug out from under you several times and it’s impossible to predict who is going to die and when. Astonishingly Eli Roth gives his best performance so far here, actually showing emotion and nuance.

But Aftershock is sadly fatally flawed by two things that let it down. It takes far too long for the earthquake to actually happen, with far too much time spent building up the characters for very little payoff. If they wanted to spend so long character-building then the film should have been 30 minutes longer on the back end to balance it out. Aftershock is also fairly immature and resorts to shock value when it didn’t need to. So here there are fairly disturbing rape scenes that serve little purpose and it seems like whenever the shock value flags, then Lopez will cut to a shot of a dead baby, unnecessarily. Earthquakes are terrifying events anyway and Lopez and Roth should have had more faith in their premise and concentrated on the characters’ journey rather than resorting to cheap shocks. It leaves a nasty aftertaste that taints all of the good work done in the first two acts of the film.

Aftershock is adequate entertainment for a late night one weekend but could have been so much better.

Extras: Interviews / Frightfest interview and Q&A / Trailer