Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Review: Come Out and Play / Cert: Not rated / Director: Makinov / Screenplay: Makinov / Starring: Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Vinessa Shaw / Release Date: June 18th (US) (Available on US VOD now)

Remakes are a bad idea to begin with when there’s so much original material out there to pull from. It’s even worse when one person has full control over everything during prep, production and post and he has no one to answer to but himself. Such is the case with Come Out and Play, a remake of the cult horror classic Who Can Kill a Child? from 1976 (see our 10 More Obscure Halloween Treats feature).

The film is basically a Xeroxed copy of the original movie (an experiment that was tried on the colour, shot-for-shot remake of Psycho with disastrous results). The only difference is that the story now takes place on an island off Mexico instead of Spain.

Francis (Moss-Bachrach) and his pregnant wife Beth (Shaw) travel to this remote island on vacation, only to discover that it is devoid of adults and populated by children. The reason being that the children have turned into homicidal maniacs and killed them off. Now stranded on the island, the couple have to fight off these demon kiddies and make their escape before they become the next victims.

Makinov missed the boat here by not giving the children an underlying motive for their outrages. The kids are creepy and vicious enough, but what made them that way? Why are they so bent on death and revenge? As a result, Come Out and Play just becomes a paint-by-numbers shocker. Moss-Bachrach and Shaw turn in excellent performances for what they have to work with and there are some intense scenes with moderate gore, but Makinov just doesn’t deliver the goods in this film. In his first feature, he has clearly taken on too much responsibility and the movie suffers for it. He’s a competent director and if all the duties he assumed during filming had been delegated out to others, he could have had a winner. Our advice: watch the original.

Extras: None

Review: Black Sunday / Cert: 15 / Director: Mario Bava / Screenplay: Ennio De Concini, Mario Serandrai / Starring: Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrea Checchi, Arturo Dominici / Release Date: Out Now

Black Sunday (aka The Mask of Satan) was Italian maestro Mario Bava’s feature debut, and the film where he set out his stall of dazzling themes and imagery. It remains one of the great cinematic exercises in Gothic horror, and now it’s back in a release that will have mysterious hooded figures assembling at midnight in celebration.

In brief, it’s the tale of a 17th century Moldavian witch reeking revenge from beyond the grave upon the descendants of her own aristocratic family who brutally put her to death. Scream queen Barbara Steele plays the dual roles of the hateful Princess Asa and Katia, her 19th century lookalike who will be the vessel for her reincarnation, and the British actress’ eerie china doll looks were never put to better use.

What sticks in the mind, though, isn’t the plot or the performances, but a series of stunning tableau. The gruesome pre-titles sequence, in which a grotesque metal mask is nailed onto Asa’s face by a musclebound executioner with an oversized mallet. Then, two centuries on, Asa lying in the tomb of her ancestors, her eyeless face crawling with insects, her porcelain skin puckered with nail-holes. Or the moment when Javutitch (Dominici) (Asa’s consort, slain at the same time) rises from the grave, cobwebs trailing free as he rips the mask of Satan from his papery-white visage.

Bava was a master at painting with shadow and mist, but more than that, he was a genius at using his directorial flair to suggest morbid and disturbed psychological states. Witness the virtuoso sequence where the self-satisfied Dr Krujavan (Checchi) is escorted by Javutitch through a series of corridors which slowly grow more menacing and Escher-like – mirroring the inner state of a man soon to be lost morally and spiritually. And its these undercurrents of subtext that give his films such power to move and disturb.

Arrow Video have done Bava proud with this Blu-ray release. Not only do you get two versions of the film (the official European cut and the rarely seen Stateside edit, with an alternate score), there’s also an absolutely amazing extra in the form of I Vampiri (1956). This was the film that gave Bava – then a cinematographer – his big break when its temperamental director, Riccardo Freda, stormed off set never to return. It’s a classic in its own right and almost as good as Black Sunday. Throw in a hugely informative audio commentary from American critic and Bava expert Tim Lucas and a bunch of other stuff including a reel of delightfully lurid trailers for the maestro’s other films, and you have what amounts to an unmissable package for horror buffs and lovers of beautifully wrought cinema.

Extras: Two versions of the film / Audio commentary with Tim Lucas / Introduction by author and critic Alan Jones / Interview with Barbara Steele / Trailers / ‘I Vampiri’ (1956) / Trailer reel / Collector’s booklet

Review: Onibaba / Cert: 15 / Director: Kaneto Shindo / Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo / Starring: Nabuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Sato / Release Date: February 25th

In Seven Samurai, Toshiro Mifuni’s character describes how seemingly helpless peasants have a nasty habit of ganging up to kill any wounded samurai they come across. That’s the subject of this swelteringly claustrophobic Japanese movie which is the Patient Zero of J-horror.

It’s a period of civil war. Everyone is starving and desperate. Abandoned by her son, Kichi, who has been dragged off unwillingly to fight, a middle-aged mother (Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Yoshimura) are forced to fend for themselves by becoming murderers, ambushing the exhausted samurai who stray every now and then into the fields of towering susuki grass where they live, then tossing their bodies into a pit and trading their valuable armour for bags of millet.

Together, the duo are an unstoppable killing machine (and woe betide any wild dog who crosses their path, because they’ll be having it for dinner). But when Kichi’s friend Hachi (Sato) returns from the war, things change. Hachi claims that Kichi is dead. He’s an untrustworthy layabout, a permanent leer plastered across his face, but all the same the daughter-in-law believes him and starts to fall for his feckless charms. Fearful and jealous, the mother decides to take action…

Inspired by a Buddhist fable, Onibaba retains the raw simplicity and jolting abruptness of a folk tale, but it’s also a near-perfect piece of filmmaking. Kiyomi Kuroda’s deep focus cinematography makes great play with the endless vistas of grass, which seem to crackle and stir to the brewing drama, and sudden extreme close-ups where you can practically count the beads of sweat on the characters’ faces (and it’s never looked better than in this superb HD, 2.35:1 aspect ratio transfer).

The cast all give out of their skin performances. With staring eyes and a white streak in her hair, Otowa is as ferocious as an angry badger, and disturbingly sexual too (witness the bit where she humps a tree). Yoshimura is extraordinarily sensual and iconic as a girl who has reverted to a primitive, almost feral state, only for her womanhood to be reawakened by her romance with Hachi. And then there’s Hikaru Hayashi’s percussive score of tribal drums and primal shrieks to add a final touch of savagery to proceedings.

Onibaba was a huge hit on the international art house circuit when it was first released, partly because it gave young men a rare change to see bare breasts (in black and white! Who would have thunk?). Nearly 50 years on, it still makes for compulsive viewing – a film as lean and mean and unrelenting as its scary protagonists. This wonderful release comes bolstered with a whole array of top extras, including an entertaining introduction by Alex Cox, illuminating audio commentary with the venerable director and his stars, and a full forty minutes of fascinating behind-the-scenes footage.

Extras: Audio commentary by director Kaneto Shindo and actors Kei Sato and Jitsuko Yoshimura / Video introduction by Alex Cox / 8mm footage shot on location by Kei Sato / Theatrical trailer / Production stills and art gallery/ 36 page booklet

 

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