Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

 

Review: Defying Gravity – the Complete Series / Cert: 15 / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Ron Livingston, Laura Harris, Ty Ollson, Christina Cox / Release Date: February 25th

It was mission aborted after only one season for this ambitious show, which is a shame because it at least tries to bring something different to telly sci-fi, albeit with mixed results. Some forty years in the future, a team of astronauts go on a grand tour of the Solar System – seven planets in six years. But what they don’t know initially is that a strange entity is hitching a ride in one of the storage pods and dictating their every move. When they do find out, you can bet it gives them pod for thought.

Defying Gravity comes from the same stable as Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, and it’s basically a soap in the sometimes wistful, sometimes comedic vein of those shows, but in space. Or at least partly in space. Because we also spend a fair bit of time on Earth, as a consequence of regular crosscutting to Mission Control and numerous flashbacks to the crew’s first year of training.

This latter device immediately identifies Defying Gravity as one of those shows that jumped on the Lost bandwagon just when audience enthusiasm for that whole flashbacky thing was starting to wane. It poses particular problems here. Primarily this is because the flashbacks themselves aren’t all that gripping, centring as they do on the crew’s romantic entanglements with one another – the sort of antics that are fine for the characters in 90210 but that seem beneath the dignity of highly trained spacemen and women (Desperate Astronauts?). But they also have the more insidious effect of undermining the sense of isolation, the separation from all things Earthly, that is kind of the point of a story of this nature. And – like red shift – the further into space we go, the longer the flashbacks seem to become.

On the bright side, the show looks stupendous on DVD, going for a chilly, 2001: A Space Odyssey-style aesthetic, all Teflon and touchscreens. There are some clever details (a rabbit foetus floating in zero gravity, one of the astronauts vlogging in Splanglish for the benefit of classrooms back on Earth), and later episodes take a darker, more sharply questioning tack as the mission seems doomed to failure and of more and more questionable validity (you get the impression morale was seriously low in the writer’s room by this stage). Heading the cast, Ron Livingston (Band of Brothers) brings bags of folksy charm to his role as Donner, a veteran haunted by a calamitous Mars landing, and the behind-the-lens talent includes Peter Howitt (Sliding Doors) on directorial duties. A worthy attempt, then, to do grown-up, emotionally rich, character-driven SF – but it ends up seeming like hard SF with a soft centre and not quite the real deal.

Extras: Mission Accomplished – a look at Defying Gravity / Photo slideshow / Deleted Scenes / Character profiles

Review: Midnight Son / Cert: 18 / Director: Scott Leberecht / Screenplay: Scott Leberecht / Starring: Zak Kilberg, Maya Parish, Jo D. Jonz, Arlen Escarpeta / Release Date: February 11th 2013

We love a good “vampire romance” here at Starburst HQ. But the teen delights of the Twilight saga… not so much. You’ll forgive us, then, for being somewhat trepidatious in approaching Midnight Son, with its moody promotional poster of a blood-flecked, starry-eyed dude and his pouting squeeze sporting prominent neck-puncture wounds. Fortunately Midnight Son is a vampire film with a bit more bite that your average Twilight flick because it’s not really a vampire film at all, more a drama-with-horror about a tragically sick man with an inhuman addiction.

Jacob (Kilberg, giving an intense and often mesmerising performance) is a hip twentysomething Californian with a growing appetite for raw red meat and, eventually, cups of cow blood which he procures from his strangely incurious local butcher. He also has a “skin disorder” which makes him a bit sensitive to bright sunlight. See where we’re going here? Jacob strikes up a passionate relationship with coked-up bartender Mary (Parish), who sticks by Jacob despite his eyes going weird in private moments and his increasingly scary, erratic behaviour. Meanwhile Jacob’s obsession with the claret is becoming ever more intense and he starts to take greater and greater risks to satisfy his cravings.

Midnight Son is unabashedly low-fi and low budget, giving it an intimacy and intensity better funded films inevitably sacrifice. To all intents and purposes Jacob is a vampire, but don’t expect stakes, garlic and holy water, or even much use of the word itself. Jacob’s condition is very much a metaphor for our very modern addiction to addictions and much more is, initially at least, implied than depicted. But the film loses some of its inventiveness as it spirals towards its garish blood-drenched finale. Jacob and Mary’s stuttering relationship develops the only way it can and Midnight Son, despite the compelling central performances which power it, can’t quite overcome some of its first-half longueurs nor avoid the inevitability of its climax. It’s heartening to welcome some new blood (ouch) into the surely-past-its-sell-by-date vampire genre, though, and we’d be willing to stake (ahh) good money that Leberecht is a director we’ll be hearing more from in years to come.

Extras: Trailer / Audio commentary with cast and crew / Deleted scenes / Cast and crew interviews

Review: Before Dawn /Cert: 18 /Director: Dominic Brunt / Screenplay: Mark Illis / Starring: Dominic Brunt, Joanne Mitchell, Eileen O’Brien, Nicky Evans / Release Date: February 25th

Self-confessed horror movie junkie Dominic Brunt, best known to British TV audiences as unlucky-in-love vet Paddy Kirk in Emmerdale, won’t be registering too highly on the radars of most Starburst readers – yet – and certainly his usual blue rinse fanbase would be mortified to see that nice Paddy chopping his way through a zombie apocalypse. But what we have here is another extraordinarily accomplished low-budget British horror movie which, against all reasonable expectations, is directed with real flair and urgency and a pinpoint understanding of how to depict real horror in a recognisable environment.

This is a tiny and intimate story, the end of the world writ small as troubled young couple Alex (Brunt) and Meg (Mitchell, Dominic Brunt’s real-life wife) leave their two young kids in the care of Meg’s mother before heading for the hills for a healing countryside weekend. But the couple can’t see beyond their own insecurities, and an awkward night just emphasises the gulf between them – he’s a dreamer and a drinker, recently out of work, she’s an ambitious high-flyer. Then Meg sets off for a before dawn (of the dead?) country run, whereupon she’s attacked by a ferocious, blood-drenched creature – with disastrous consequences when she finally manages to flee back to the couple’s holiday home. Before long Alex has to deal with horrors he can’t even begin to understand, and the arrival of a refugee from what’s left of the outside world only serves to make a bad situation a damn sight worse.

Before Dawn puts the fear factor back into the zombie. God knows we’re all used to the shuffling, groaning hordes which populate the tiresome grind of zombie titles out there and we’re surely all a bit bored with the reanimated undead by now. But the zombies of Before Dawn are ferocious, snarling rage machines – feral, rabid animals in human form. In one heart-in-mouth sequence Alex finds himself in a one-on-one struggle in an outhouse and Brunt’s camera ducks and dives, leaps and swerves, a pounding soundtrack accentuating the tirelessness of a monster which just won’t die, dragging Alex out from cover, and rising up to attack yet again even when it’s smashed in the head by a car jack. Brunt and writer Mark Illis instinctively know how to make zombies scary again and what seems like a convenient and unlikely story twist – the suggestion that once they’ve fed, the zombies ‘reset’ to their normal human state – only makes them even more monstrously unsettling. The last few minutes of Before Dawn are astonishingly powerful, bleakness taken to a whole new extreme and the end credits roll over a scene so hauntingly poignant you’ll most likely carry it with you for weeks.

Despite its minuscule budget, this is a stunningly assured piece of work characterised by a smart script, compellingly naturalistic performances from the two leads and Brunt’s confident, stylish direction which finds time for some gloriously subtle visual motifs. Before Dawn is film about people and relationships as much as it’s about zombies, and whilst there’s plenty of gore and viscera for the aficionado, there’s enough genuine human interest to guarantee that the time invested in these characters pays dividends in the final shattering few minutes. Haunting and yet beautiful, Before Dawn is a little modern masterpiece and possibly the most exciting British genre movie in a decade or more. Essential viewing.

Extras: None

 

Review: Ape Escape / Cert: U / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Annie Mumolo / Release Date: February 18th

Ape Escape started life as a videogame for the Playstation. For anyone who’s somehow missed out on this epochal franchise, the set-up is this: An ape has been transformed into an evil genius thanks to a special helmet. This high-tech hat also makes him look human, and said super-ape (called Specter) proceeds to enhance monkeys via similar technology. These monkeys then run amok, and a young boy called Spike has to clean up after them.

As you would expect, the cartoon version is aimed squarely at littluns, and what you get is a series of very short, very silly episodes in which dumb (yet cute) monkeys run round covering things in mess. These are shorts in the vein of Batfink. The gags are simple and repetitive, the animation is nice and bright, and all in all it presents no challenge to the viewer in any shape or form.

The wandering adult mind might suspect that there is a subtext here to do with iniquities in the funding of contemporary scientific research (after all, this is a world where the only available lab assistants are cybernetically altered chimps and young children,) but that would probably be reading too much in to it. Ape Escape has no layers. No complex narrative. Just silly monkeys going bananas.

Extras: None

 

Review: Batman – The Dark Knight Returns Part 2 / Cert: 15 / Director: Jay Oliva / Screenplay: Bob Goodman / Starring: Peter Weller, Michael Emerson, Mark Valley / Release Date: June 3rd

This is probably the most faithful attempt so far at bringing Frank Miller’s milestone graphic novel to the screen – a project so ambitious, it had to be spread over two movies. Where Part 1 covered issues 1 and 2 of the comic (i.e., the Mutants), Part 2 tackles issues 3 and 4, with Batman taking on The Joker and then Superman. The film chooses to leave out some of the grislier elements (no bodies of dead boy scouts here), but without making you feel like they’ve toned it down too much.

For the most part the film gets it right. The animation is great, moving more toward anime than DC’s usual cartoon fare. The casting is perfect with Peter (RoboCop) Weller’s Batman, Michael (Person of Interest) Emerson’s Joker and Mark (Human Target) Valley’s Superman being the obvious standouts. Emerson in particular brings Miller’s effeminate Joker to chilling life and ranks up there with the best of the screen Jokers so far.

Where the film falls short, slightly, is in the decision to leave out the Batman’s interior monologue. While you can understand the reason why, it does mean a lot of the great zingers from the comic are missing. It would almost be worth a double dip if they were to release both parts together as one movie, with a voiceover put in. The only other minor quibble is with the artwork on the case, which is just awful and feels like it’s for a different film.

Extras on the American release that we saw include a couple of short but interesting documentaries, one on Batman vs. Superman and the other looking at the Joker. There is also a longer feature on how they animated and adapted key scenes from the comic. As with all the DC Animated releases, the disc is rounded out with three episodes from various Batman cartoons (The Animated Series and Brave & The Bold) and a look at the next DC animated feature, Superman: Unbound. It’s short but whets the appetite for the film.

Extras: See above

 

Review: Children’s Film Foundation Collection – The Race is On / Cert: Uc / Director: Various/ Screenplay: Various / Starring: Michael Crawford, Denis Shaw, Spencer Shires, Liam Redmond, Reggie Winch, Richard Vernon / Release Date: February 18th 

Between 1950 and 1987, the UK Children’s Film Foundation dedicated itself to providing cheerful, low-budget entertainment for the country’s youngsters in the wake of escalating fears about the negative influence of the cheap American serials and cartoons which had been typical Saturday morning cinema fare following the end of the Second World War. This second volume in the collection presents three titles which are not only a wonderful exercise in charming nostalgia, they also provide valuable snapshots of the changing face of British culture and, more specifically, representations of British youth in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the decades from which these three short films hail.

The theme all three have in common is childhood’s abiding love of gimmicks, gadgets and the spirit of competition. In 1957’s Soapbox Derby, a young Michael Crawford plays the leader of the Battersea Bats, a gang of scruffy young herberts mucking about on the banks of the Thames in the shadow of the Power Station, designing and building a soapbox car for an upcoming local rally as their bitter enemies from rival group the Victoria Victors conspire to steal the Bats’ designs. Beautifully shot on location in a London just beginning to shake off its post-war austerity, Soapbox Derby is a sweetly innocent picture postcard of an era it’s now hard to believe ever existed, such is its blissful insouciance. 1967’s The Sky Bike is a much more middle-class affair as imaginative Tom Smith, from a fine upstanding working family (but with apparently only one sweater to his name), encounters batty inventor Mr. Lovejoy, who’s working on a flying bike which he hopes will win him £5,000 in a competition. But unscrupulous fellow competitors are on the scene and will stop at nothing to sabotage Lovejoy’s flamboyant creation.

We fast-forward to 1978 for Sammy’s Super T-Shirt and the world has changed. This is a multi-cultural London without a hint of received pronunciation and the story, in which sports-mad Sammy is given super powers – agility, strength, endurance – when his favourite tiger-motif T-shirt falls into the hands of a blundering scientist, is a more overtly comedic and slapstick affair, occasionally evoking the spirit of the worst episodes of TV’s The Tomorrow People which was popular at the time. Decent visual effects and a breathless storyline make for an energetic and amusing hour’s entertainment.

The Children’s Film Foundation ceased original film production in 1987, a victim of the success of Saturday morning kid’s TV and other forms of entertainment vying for the attention of the CFF’s once-captive audience. The Race Is On is an endearing and often fascinating document of a very special piece of British cinema history and we wouldn’t be averse to the BFI, who have compiled the DVD releases, exhuming a few more of these uniquely British treasures which have stood the test of time far better than we might have had any reason to expect.

Extras: Commemorative booklet

Review: Doctor Who – The Ark In Space (Special Edition) / Cert: PG / Director: Rodney Bennett / Screenplay: Robert Holmes / Starring: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen, Ian Marter / Release Date: February 18th

Tom Baker’s second serial was an abrupt change of pace for Doctor Who and a huge culture shock for viewers following Robot, which maintained the style and flavour of his predecessor, Jon Pertwee. The show’s new firebrand producer, Philip Hinchcliffe, was keen to move the series away from the plastic maggots, dinosaurs and spiders of yore into a darker, more serious direction, and The Ark In Space was the hugely successful result.

The TARDIS lands on a deserted space station thousands of years into the future, where the Doctor finds the remains of humanity in deep suspended animation following a solar flare cataclysm which has rendered the Earth uninhabitable. He discovers that the station’s operating systems have been compromised by invading space insects called the Wirrn who plan to lay claim to the now-habitable Earth by transforming their sleeping human hosts into bugs like themselves.

Despite its shoestring budget, The Ark in Space is a gold-plated Doctor Who classic, a base-under-siege story in the show’s grand style, with a group of humans trapped in an enclosed environment and threatened by a hostile alien force, but more realistic and urgent than any that went before. This time, the threat isn’t a bunch of stuntmen in big green monster suits. The Wirrn are space locusts and they come with all the creepy trappings of insect infestation; a vicious grub on the loose, slime trails across the floor and even some Doctor Who-style body horror as the station’s revived commander, Noah, is transmogrified into a Wirrn courtesy of lots and lots of bubble wrap and a can of green paint. It’s a taut, well-written tale – Robert Holmes at close to his best – and there’s a stifling sense of isolation and claustrophobia in Roger Murray-Leach’s brilliantly designed sets which actually manage to give a sense of scale and size to the Nerva Beacon despite the mere pennies available to realise them. Freed from the show’s Earth-bound storylines, Tom Baker flies out from under Pertwee’s shadow and his performance here sees him getting the balance absolutely right between the Doctor as the hero and the Doctor as the unpredictable, slightly dangerous alien.

The Ark in Space was the launchpad for a whole new style of Doctor Who in the ’70s, the UNIT soldiers and rubber monsters of the previous era quickly left behind as the series, for a while at least, became proper science fiction with slightly higher ambitions than just sending the kids scurrying behind the sofa. This brilliant new 2-disc set – the latest in the BBC’s current run of special editions – finally does justice to one of the very best stories in the show’s history.

Extras: Audio Commentary/ ‘Making of’ documentary/ History of Doctor Who books documentary / Interview with the set designer / Footage of Tom Baker visiting Northern Ireland in the 1970s / Silent footage from filming of Baker’s debut ‘Robot’ / Trailers

Review: Grave Encounters 2 / Cert: 15 / Director: John Poliquin / Screenplay: the Vicious Brothers / Starring: Richard Harmon, Shawn C. Philips, Jennica Fulton / Release Date: Out Now

Just under a year ago, Starburst reviewed Grave Encounters, a found footage horror movie which amassed 25 million views on YouTube just for its trailer alone. It was terrifying, funny and stood out from its counterparts in a genre that can become clichéd. Well, when you hit on something that unique, there’s only one thing to do: make a sequel.

Student filmmaker Alex (Harmon) becomes intrigued by the fate of the film’s original cast, particularly that of its ‘star’ Sean Rogerson, who has been reportedly missing since its release. With a mystery blogger, the ominously named DeathAwaits666, aiding him with titbits of info, his investigations eventually take him and his trusty camera crew to Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital. Time to get some ghouls on film.

Like Cabin In The Woods, Grave Encounters 2 has a nice line in self-referential jokiness – the first time we meet Alex, he’s giving the original Grave Encounters a damning one skull out of four online review, and there’s a lot of knowing humour about the cornier conventions of horror. The film also taps into the Internet as the new medium of choice for scares. But as well as the cleverness, there’s undeniable tension – caught on night vision camera, the cast exude squeaky-bottomed unease even before the demonic residents of Collingwood come out to play.

What lets the movie down is its tendency to overplay the whole studenty lifestyle thing (put away the bong, dudes). Plus, as so often in the found footage genre, there are some moments where you simply don’t believe that a camcorder would have been to hand. Still, rare is the film that can laugh at itself while also making you jump out of your seat, and you can go ahead and encounter it with confidence that you will be thoroughly entertained.

Extras: None

Review: House at the End of the Street /Cert: 15 / Director: Mark Tonderai / Screenplay: David Loucka, Jonathan Mostow / Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Shue, Max Thieriot, Gil Bellows / Release Date: Out Now

Recently divorced Sarah (Shue) and her 17 year-old daughter Elissa (Lawrence) attempt to start a new life in a smart new home, only to be troubled by the discovery that the house next door was the scene of a violent double murder four years previously, a disturbed young girl brutally slaying her parents during the night. The girl disappeared without trace and has long since been presumed dead, and the house is now occupied by Ryan (Thieriot), the girl’s morose and introverted brother. Elissa becomes fascinated by Ryan, who tells her that his sister Carrie-Ann suffered severe brain damage as a child and became violent and aggressive. Despite Sarah’s misgivings, Elissa and Ryan embark on an awkward relationship – but Elissa is unaware of the dark secret in Ryan’s basement…

Despite a snappy and inventive first hour, House at the End of the Street, directed by British former DJ and actor Mark Tonderai (whose first feature film credit was the promising Hush in 2009), loses its momentum, its ingenuity and, unfortunately, its way in its last half hour. It’s a story rich with unusually complex characters and relationships, and for a while it looks as if it might even be able to avoid the traditional clichés of the slasher genre. The audience’s expectations regarding the truth about Ryan’s savage cellar-dweller are neatly subverted, but once the secret’s out, there’s nowhere else to go. The movie runs out of steam and falls into the trap of making Elissa irrationally stupid just to manoeuvre her into a position where she can be chased around the basement with only a conveniently flickering torch for company. Even a half-decent final twist can’t quite save it from the damage done in its predictable last reel. Good performances and a few mild thrills make House at the End of the Street worth visiting, but it’s unlikely you’ll want to call in again.

Extras: Making of / Trailer