Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Review: Daleks – Invasion Earth – 2150 AD / Cert: U / Director: Gordon Flemyng / Screenplay: Milton Subotsky, David Whitaker / Starring: Peter Cushing, Bernard Cribbins, Jill Curzon, Roberta Tovey, Andrew Keir, Ray Brooks, Phillip Madoc / Release Date: May 27th

The success of Dr Who and the Daleks in 1965 led to the almost immediate commissioning of a second full-length feature film which, it was hoped, would pull the same trick twice. Why change a winning formula? 1966’s Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD took its lead from Terry Nation’s second Dalek serial, broadcast in 1964, and the same creative team responsible for the earlier movie were called back to work their magic again. Peter Cushing returned as Dr Who, with Roberta Tovey as Susan, but Roy Castle and Jennie Linden were unavailable to reprise their roles as Ian and Barbara, so Dr Who found himself travelling with his niece Louise (Jill Curzon) and affable London copper Tom Campbell (Bernard Cribbins, forty-odd years before donning the comfy cardy and slippers of Donna Noble’s granddad Wilfred Mott in the Doctor Who TV series), who stumbles into the Police Box in the aftermath of a smash-and-grab bank raid.

The TARDIS arrives in a devastated London in the year 2150 (although it never looks anything other than 1966 on screen). The Daleks have invaded the Earth and have subjugated humanity, turning everyone into robotic slaves, and are planning to blow out the Earth’s core from a mine in Bedfordshire so they can pilot the planet around the Universe. Only Dr Who can save the day! Except he can’t because Peter Cushing was taken ill during the filming, necessitating hasty rewrites. But the end result is a leaner, slicker film than its predecessor, its bigger scale and lavish location filming giving the story room to breathe and allowing for some effective action sequences, such as the rebel attack on the impressive Dalek flying saucer. Director Gordon (father of Jason) Flemyng keeps the action racing along, and his photographing of the Daleks sometimes has an almost documentary feel to it, especially during the sequences inside the Dalek mining complex as the machines glide up and down ramps and sweep between their massive instrument panels. For a 1960s kid’s film it’s often surprisingly violent (the modern TV show probably couldn’t get away with the stabbings and mass slaughter shown here) and there are some decent performances especially from Ray Brooks as young freedom fighter David, Andrew Keir as the grizzled Wyler and Philip Madoc as deeply sinister self-serving smuggler Brockley who meets a nasty end courtesy of a circle of Daleks.

Despite its vibrant colour (the Daleks again impress, this time in their silver-and-blue livery) and non-stop action, Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD couldn’t replicate the success of Dr Who and the Daleks and the option on a third feature film was never taken up. Simple and largely unsophisticated it may be, but Daleks – Invasion Earth: 21050 AD, like its predecessor, deserves its place in the limelight again as the TV show which spawned it celebrates its fiftieth anniversary.

Extras: Restoration feature / Bernard Cribbins interview / Interview with Shepperton historian Gareth Owen / Trailer / Gallery

Review: The Wrong House / Cert: 15 / Director: Eric Hurt / Screenplay: Eric Hurt / Starring: Marc Singer, Art LaFleur, Hayley DuMond / Release Date: Out Now

Not quite the torture trash that the title and cover art may lead you to expect it to be, The Wrong House (not to be confused with the even lower budget horror film of the same name, which does indeed deliver on the ball gags and blood) is far more ambitious and, indeed, interesting than one might dare hope.

Not that it re-invents the wheel. But the cover (almost identical to another recent release, The Lodge) doesn’t give much of anything away beyond the house and a dodgy green Photoshop filter. Two bickering families converge upon an open house, far away from anywhere. On the road, and in the best Texas Chain Saw Massacre tradition, they encounter a traumatised, terrified girl – visibly battered, her tongue recently cut out. The families try to escape, but find that whichever way they turn, they wind up back at the (wrong) house. It’s like that scene in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, where the doomed kids find themselves unable to leave Springwood, or Freddy’s influence. A cheerful automated voice insists they go inside and have a look around. With the dads seemingly hallucinating visions of themselves in the woods, and the kids becoming increasingly aggressive, escape would be a good idea. Try as they might, they find themselves utterly unable to leave. No matter how far they drive, or walk, the (wrong) house is only just behind them.

A low-budget amalgamation of Groundhog Day, Lost and Cabin in the Woods (but not nearly as good as any of those), The Wrong House is a welcome break from what could have been. Cruel low-budget rapefests have been all to prevalent lately (see The Lodge, again – or don’t) so this is a nice change of pace (see also The Corridor and YellowBrickRoad). It won’t be to all tastes, and it’s definitely not perfect, but it is well made, compelling and interesting.

Extras: None

Review: The New Twilight Zone – The Complete Collection / Cert: 12 / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, Jenny Agutter, Frances McDormand, William Petersen / Release Date: April 29th

Sixty-odd years on, the original Twilight Zone remains an iconic show, what with its stark black-and-white cinematography, its lean frontman Rod Serling, and its stories – dark fables packed with social commentary – which are to horror fans what the Great American Songbook is to music lovers. The ’80s revival couldn’t hope to equal that impact, but its three seasons have much to recommend them, as this mighty 13-disc box set amply demonstrates.

Season 1 is bursting with talent. Wes Craven directs and Bruce Willis guest stars in Shatterday, based on a short story by Harlan Ellison, about a slimy PR man tormented by a do-gooder doppelgänger (“Why are you doing this to me?” “You got it all wrong, you did this to yourself.”). Frances McDormand and William Petersen team up for the Warehouse 13-like Need to Know, a Sidney Sheldon story about a slick FBI agent coming to a hick town where everyone is going crazy for no apparent reason. Ralph Bellamy plays a dying vampire, Martin Balsam an exhausted TV writer who sees demons, and, in case you get the impression that the Twilight Zone is a men-only affair, Helen Mirren crops up in a spunkily feminist remake of the classic Charles Beaumont story Dead Man’s Shoes. Beaumont’s Shadow Play, about a prisoner repeatedly going through his trial and execution, also gets a redo, with Peter Coyote taking on the lead role originally played by Dennis Weaver.

There are some good straight SF stories, most notably Chameleon, featuring an excellent performance from Terry O’Quinn as a Nasa scientist who realizes that he has a shapeshifting alien in his isolation tank; grisly horror, courtesy of William Friedkin’s Nightcrawlers (Friedkin being the only name director to really imprint his own visual style on an episode); and black comedy in Dealer’s Choice (with Morgan Freeman) in which a bunch of blue collar stiffs finds themselves playing cards with the devil (“What’s the devil doing in New Jersey?”).

Throughout Season 1, the real Twilight Zone is America itself, a country that has strayed from the path in its pursuit of a fast buck. With a message like that, it’s hardly surprising that the show got into trouble commercially, and Season 2 is decidedly less starry. It does, however, benefit from a whole string of brilliant episodes penned by George R.R. Martin. In The Once and Future King, an Elvis impersonator takes a trip back to 1954 and meets his idol, only to discover he’s a god-fearing momma’s boy who wants to sing country music. The Toys of Caliban is a domestic drama about a backward child who can teleport anything he sees a picture of into his presence, much to the anxiety of his exhausted parents; its pay-off is the shock horror highlight of the entire box set. And then there’s the thoughtful and literate The Road Less Travelled (directed by Wes Craven), in which a family man plagued with guilt about having dodged the Vietnam draft is visited by the “legless ghost” of an alternative, war-ravaged self.

The third and final season sees the show going back to basics with voice-over led morality tales, but it boasts fine performances from the likes of Bud Cort, Eddie Albert and Harry Morgan. Throughout its run, the ’80s Twilight Zone was home to some beautifully crafted TV writing, and this remastered set is the next best thing to losing yourself in another dimension.

Extras: Deleted scenes / Bumpers

Review: Konga / Cert: PG / Director: John Lemont / Screenplay: Herman Cohen, Aben Kandel / Starring: Michael Gough, Margo Johns, Jess Conrad, Claire Gordon / Release Date: May 13th

Fans of giant ape movies will go bananas at the arrival on DVD in the UK of Konga, one of the most inept and clumsy monster movies in the history of monkey men. Konga is so stupefying incompetent that even the back-handed ‘so bad it’s good’ compliment doesn’t even begin to do it injustice. The truth is that Konga is so bad it’s absolutely brilliant.

Deliciously deadpan Michael Gough plays Dr Charles Decker, returned to England following a year stranded in the jungle after an aeroplane crash and with a cute chimpanzee called Konga clasped to his breast. The former passionate botanist ruthlessly abandons his experiments with pretty plants and replaces them with quick growing – and embarrassing looking – carnivorous plants from which he extracts a remarkable new growth serum. Before long Konga is growing to enormous proportions! In fact, so remarkable is Decker’s serum that poor Konga turns from a cuddly chimpanzee into… er… a man in a threadbare gorilla costume. Explain that one, David Attenborough. Decker’s gone completely round the bend by now and is, in fact, half way back again. He uses Konga to bump off his enemies and love-rivals until his loyal assistant Margaret (Johns) gives Konga one injection too many after catching sight of Decker’s clumsy, if hilarious, romantic advances towards busty student Sandra (the dire Sandra Gordon). Konga rampages (slowly) around London before finally meeting his maker in front of a model of Big Ben after throwing a doll of Michael Gough to the ground in a tantrum.

Alongside special effects – said to have taken a year to complete – which are beyond appalling, acting which is generally atrocious (apart from the magnificent Gough who is gloriously sleazy as the demented Decker), there’s dialogue to cherish. “Even those few drops could have made Tabby swell up to huge proportions… the world’s not ready for a cat the size of a leopard wandering the streets of London,” says Decker just after shooting his cat which has lapped up a few drops of spilt serum. Later, an aghast police officer reports that, “There’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets!” Priceless.

You may have thought that King Kong or Mighty Joe Young were your favourite big screen killer gorillas but once you’ve fallen for the charms of this extraordinarily entertaining 1961 British creature feature, you’ll surely agree that Konga is your new preferred primate.  

Extras: Jess Conrad intro / Trailer / Gallery

Review: The Blood On Satan’s Claw / Cert: 18 / Director: Piers Haggard / Screenplay: Robert Wynne-Simmons, Piers Haggard / Starring: Patrick Wymark, Linda Hayden, Barry Andrews, Michele Dotrice / Release Date: Out Now

This British horror gem has gone from late night TV staple to revered classic, heralded by fans such as Mark Gatiss, and this hi-def release should be a welcome addition to any collection.

Set in rural England in the 17th Century, the story has farmhand Ralph (Andrews) discovering the remains of a creature in his freshly ploughed field. The local Judge (Wymark, at the top of his game) is sceptical of Ralph’s claims that it was a fiend rather than human or animal, but soon changes his mind when his nephew’s fiancée goes mad in the middle of the night and surfaces the next day with a hairy claw instead of a hand. The nephew also hacks his own hand off, convinced it is a claw. The local children, meanwhile are being led astray by Angel Blake (Hayden) after she finds a talon in the field. A series of rituals, sacrifices and some nasty hairy skin rashes lead the Judge to take action.

Although coming shortly after Witchfinder General (1968), which was also produced by Tony Tenser’s Tigon company (and also had Wymark in a small role), The Blood On Satan’s Claw couldn’t be more different tonally. Here, the threat is real, and the role of Judge, normally a persecutor, is instead that of hero and saviour. The level-headed Ralph clearly understands the ridiculousness of the standard witch test when he saves Margaret (Dotrice, the future wife of Edward Woodward) after she is thrown in a river by the locals. Despite its period setting, there’s a contemporary edge to the issues the film explores. Were it not for the costumes and Olde Worlde speech, this could easily be seen as a modern tale of the fears of puberty (sudden appearance of a patch of hair on our little angels, especially the girls). Fans of classic Doctor Who may want to look away when the adorable Wendy Padbury (second Doctor companion Zoe) is brutally raped and killed during one of the sacrifices. Looking better than it has ever looked on home video, the film is arguably more unsettling than the Hammer films of the period, largely due to its straight tone and natural, rural settings. The impact of the violence and nudity has not lessened with age either.  

The Blu-ray release does the film proud, not only in the picture/sound quality departments, but also in porting over the special features from the previous DVD releases, giving another good reason for a double dip.  

Extras: 2012 Interview with Director Piers Haggard / Audio Commentary with Piers Haggard, Linda Hayden and Robert Wynne-Simmons / Audio Commentary with Mark Gatiss, Jeremy Dyson and Reece Sheersmith / Touching the Devil – The Making Of The Blood on Satan’s Claw/ Linda Hayden: An Angel for Satan / Theatrical Trailer

Review: The Bigfoot Tapes / Cert: 15 / Director: Stephon Stewart / Screenplay: Stephon Stewart / Starring: Stephon Stewart, Davee Youngblood, Shy Pilgreen / Release Date: May 6th

Bigfoot has been pretty much left alone recently as far as horror films go. There is the odd movie here and there but mainly it seems that people are afraid to tackle him when there must be lots of material to mine into good scripts. So while we wait for Bobcat Goldthwaite’s forthcoming found footage Bigfoot movie, we have to put up with The Bigfoot Tapes.

It starts well with a young man and his brother and girlfriend being intrigued by a 911 call that made the news, with Bigfoot apparently killing a man’s dog. They travel to middle America and the county the call originated from with camera in hand and set about tracking the man down. When they find him, it’s not clear whether this deeply religious person is delusional or actually onto something. They head into the woods and the man’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and there are stories of marijuana farmers operating in the area. They can’t shake the noises that occur in the night, though, that sound less than human.

The Bigfoot Tapes begins promisingly and introduces a bunch of characters that, whilst not exactly likeable, are on the right side of authentic and are played by actors who give convincing performances. It’s once they get to the woods that the film falls apart. There are dozens of red herrings; you are never quite sure if the strange occurrences are the product of a homicidal maniac or the overzealous weed mafia operating in the woods. The film seems to want you to remain confused too and it doesn’t help that even for a found footage film, the framing in this is terrible. Tense and uncomfortable scenes will occur with the action taking place in the extreme corner of the frame as the camera has been put on the ground sideways or on a car seat. Once would be all right, but not every single damn time, seriously.

This isn’t the only thing that hampers the film; it also suffers from not really knowing what kind of movie it wants to be. The few glimpses of something with red eyes and possibly an excess of hair are welcome but they occur very seldom, and then out of blue at the climax you are shown a pretty nasty rape scene which seems as if it’s been inserted from another film entirely.

The actors give it their all and the backwoods Americans we see in the film have a physical appearance that is hard to fake. This authenticity is not backed up by enough directorial savviness, however. One day there will be a classic movie made about Bigfoot. This isn’t it.

Extras: None

Review: May I Kill U? / Cert: 15 / Director: Stuart Urban / Screenplay: Stuart Urban / Starring: Kevin Bishop, Jack Doolan, Frances Barber / Date of release: May 15th

TV comedian/impressionist Kevin Bishop’s first adult foray into the world of feature films isn’t exact a laugh-a-minute rib-tickler. Bishop, best-known for lampooning the absurdly famous in his various Channel Four comedy vehicles, has opted for this bleak, blackly comic tale which plays, somewhat unsubtly, with contemporary, generally Press-fuelled fears of uncontrollable street violence and our reliance and dependence upon social media in an increasingly cold and unfriendly world.

Bishop plays unremarkable bike-riding PC Barry ‘Baz’ Vartis who suffers a nasty bang to the head courtesy of a couple of neighbourhood scuzzballs. Baz is transformed into a lethal police vigilante, dispensing his own street justice – it involves smashing people over the head with giant plasma TVs or forcing them into wheely bins and strangling them to death – which he films and then uploads to his own blog. But Baz, who quickly becomes a cult hero, has the good grace to ask his generally out-of-it victims if he can take their lives before he dispatches them. Which is nice.

May I Kill U? is really just too dark for its own good and nothing like as funny as it thinks it is. Bishop is largely deadpan as Baz and any humour tends to come from supporting characters such as his dreadful, alcoholic ex-prostitute mother (Barber) and Jack Doolan’s clumsy, lumbering Seth who, we discover, is holding Baz prisoner in his own home and attempting to make him atone for his crimes. But the film’s more concerned with its obsession with Twitter and text messaging, and its own clumsy morality – basically all criminals, especially foreign ones, are evil and worthless and should be brutally killed – might win a round of applause from Daily Mail readers but those of a saner disposition and sounder temperament might find its relentless one-sided tub-thumping and desperately dour and dislikeable characters difficult, if not downright impossible, to warm to, much less care about. Writer/director Urban doesn’t seem entirely sure of his prime targets so his approach is relentlessly scattergun, his material and subject-matter half-hearted and undercooked. May I Kill U? might raise the occasional smile but this is a weak, forgettable and pretty pointless exercise in ill-considered social commentary. 

Extras: Audio commentary with Stuart Urban and Kevin Bishop / Making of / Interview with the director interview /Psychoanalysis feature/ Clips / Outtakes

Review: Stranded / Cert: 15 / Director: Roger Christian / Screenplay: Christian Piers Betley / Starring: Christian Slater, Brendan Fehr, Amy Matysio / Release Date: May 27th

“Take a welding kit! Seal off the airlock!” screams Colonel Gerard Brauchman (Slater). He’s in charge of a moonbase which has just been smashed to pieces by a meteor shower. Together, he and his crew shelter in the small section of it that isn’t reduced to rubble, but even so they have only 72 hours before they’ll exhaust their supplies of power and oxygen. The film is now taking place in moody (and cheap, this is direct-to-DVD) semi-darkness. The only splash of colour comes from the unidentified bright yellow spore attached to the meteorite sample which female crew-member Amy (Matysio) brings back from her foray into the damaged part of the base. Wouldn’t you know it, this turns out to be a deadly fungus. “It’s reproducing at an incredible rate,” the base doctor (Fehr) notices, prodding it with his finger.

One thing leads to another, and the spore manages to give Amy some kind of extra-terrestrial bun in the oven. “You have what appears to be a massively accelerated pregnancy,” observes the doctor, backing away from her impressive bump. He’s keeping her in quarantine – except he doesn’t really seem to understand the meaning of the word (this guy is the worst doctor ever, even by direct-to-DVD standards), and people wander in and out as they like, with the result that soon another crew member is infected and a slimy demon baby is scuttling around in the air ducts. Well, that’s what air ducts are for, aren’t they?

Lots of yelling into intercoms, lots of running down corridors, lots of footage of Christian Slater worrying about leakage (perils of middle age, mate). Stranded is cheap: to know that you only have to see the opening exterior shot of the base, which uses scale models – although give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe it’s a Gerry Anderson homage.  But that’s not the problem, or at least not the main one. The real problem is the dog-tiredness of the script, which wearily helps itself to plot beats and turns of phrase from every SF shocker you can mention.

To be fair, director Roger Christian hauls the whole thing towards its conclusion competently enough, but even so you can sense the cast going into out-of-body mode as they utter lines which they can’t believe ever got written. Presumably the intention was to create a claustrophobic thriller on the lines of John Carpenter’s The Thing, but the end product is so dreary, it’s more like being stuck in an overcrowded lift. As it is, you find yourself running out of patience long before they run out of air.

Extras: None

Review: The Echo / Cert: 15 / Director: Yam Laranas / Screenplay: Shintaro Shimosawa, Roy Iglesias, Yam Laranas, Eric Bernt / Starring: Jesse Bradford, Amelia Warner, Carlos Leon / Release Date: Out Now 

After serving time for manslaughter, Bobby (Bradford) is released on probation. He moves back to the old apartment complex where his mother lived (and died) while he was locked away. Finding a job as a mechanic in a local autorRepair shop, Bobby slowly sets about rebuilding his life. He doesn’t count on the ghosts (both literal and not) which also inhabit his apartment. 

Starring Jesse Bradford (Swimfan and Flags of Our Fathers, and not the guy who played the sexy gardener in Desperate Housewives, as I thought he was) and a remake of an obscure Filipino horror film, The Echo has been knocking about since 2008. An uninspired, unoriginal ghost story, it’s not hard to see why. I’m unfamiliar with the movie which it is based, but if it’s anything like this, I’m unsure why a remake was deemed necessary. It’s reminiscent of Dark Water and several other movies from the J-horror boom a few years ago. It even has a creepy little dark haired girl hanging about in the corridors of Bobby’s block. 

The only actor of any note amongst the cast is Kevin Durand, of Lost bit-part fame. He’s barely in the film, but playing an abusive violent police officer, the scenes in which he appears are by far the best. Bradford does what he can, but he’s neither charismatic nor sympathetic enough to carry the film. It’s barely above the level of Swimfan. How he got a job working for Clint is beyond us, although he does have a handsome, muscular, all-American look about him. His acting, like every single other thing in the film is just average. The Echo is one of the most consistently average movies you’ll ever see. It probably sat unreleased for five years because everybody involved simply forgot they ever made it.

Although there’s nothing particularly wrong with The Echo, it doesn’t do a single thing worth recommending it for either. It’s (predictable joke) merely an echo of other, better films.

Extras: None

Review: Scanners / Cert: 18 / Director: David Cronenberg / Screenplay: David Cronenberg / Starring: Stephen Lack, Patrick McGoohan, Michael Ironside, Jennifer O’Neill / Release Date: Out Now

Much talked about at the time, Scanners (1981) was Cronenberg’s move into the mainstream and out of the low-budget shocker genre that had so far served him so well. It was also his contribution to the cycle of psi thrillers that began with Carrie (1976), but, as you would expect with Cronenberg, there is a twist. Here the telepaths, or “scanners”, are a man-made phenomenon, the result of a mutation-inducing antenatal painkiller. They’re monsters not of the supernatural but of science.

One such telepath  is Cameron Vale (Lack) – a crusty hobo driven half-mad by his ability to read thoughts until he is taken under the wing of Dr Ruth (McGoohan), who doses up with a drug called Ephemerol and teaches how to control his powers. Ruth is running a research programme into scanners for ConSec, a large pharmaceutical company, but it is under siege from the murderous “scanner underground”, and Vale soon finds himself a key player in the battle.

The whole thing is presented in Cronenberg’s trademark early manner, with chilly visuals (ugly brutalist architecture, gloomy winter weather, neutral-toned outfits) and flat performances (the astonishingly monotone Lack and the fey Jennifer O’Neill). But it’s also galvanized with some truly iconic moments, such as the literally eye-popping scene where Darryl Revok (Ironside), the scanner underground’s messianic leader, makes his presence felt at a dull seminar. And then there’s that final, climactic duel. Even today, it stands up as a triumph of SFX, but it’s much more than that – enigmatic (what exactly is going on?), beautiful, part battle to the death, part sublime coming-together.

Less convincing, though, are the linking sequences, bits where the movie slumps to the level of your average thriller, delivering humdrum corruption subplots, sluggish car chases and lethargic gunplay (and by the way, why do scanners need gats?). And Lack really is a constantly jarring presence. True, he gives off a weird, born-yesterday vibe which suits the near-alien Cameron Vale, but apart from that it’s hard to know what Cronenberg saw in him.

Still, uncomfortable melange though it is, Scanners remains one of the most intelligent and provocative psi-fi movies around, and it’s a powerful commentary on a post-war epoch which thought pharmaceutics was science’s brave new world and a pill would be the answer to everything. Although it’s never going to win any beauty contests, Second Sight have done a marvellous job of cleaning up the print for this HD release, which comes with a brace of fascinating interviews including one with Mark Irwin, Cronenerg’s cinematographer throughout what was arguably his most fertile and inventive period. Also out on Blu-ray are the two trashy but fun direct-to-video sequels.

Extras: Interviews with star Stephen Lack, cinematographer Mark Irwin, executive producer Pierre David, makeup effects artist Stephen Dupuis and actor Lawrence Dane