Review: My Ex 2 – Haunted Lover / Cert: 18 / Director: Piyapan Choopetch / Screenplay: Adirek Watleela, Piyapan Choopetch / Starring: Ratchawin Wongviriya, Atthama Chiwanitchapan, Thongpoom Siripipat, Marion Affolter / Release Date: February 4th

My Ex 2, you’ll not be too surprised to discover, is the follow-up to Thai shocker My Ex, both titles made back in 2010 with the latter released on DVD in the UK last autumn. The original didn’t float too many boats here at Starburst HQ but this sequel, whilst singing from the same horror hymn sheet as too many Eastern fright films, is a significant improvement even if the end result is something fairly unremarkable and pretty forgettable.

Aspiring young actress Cee (Wongviriya) is devastated when she sees her boyfriend Aof (Siripipat) out and about with Ying (Affolter). A confrontation leads to the other girl apparently throwing herself off the top of a Very Tall Building, whereupon Cee splits with the oafish Aof and heads off to an exotic island with some mates to make a horror film. But Cee is plagued by nightmarish visions of the dead girl – the usual white-faced, straggly-haired, claw-fingered wraith of most Japanese or Thai horror movies – who is clearly determined to destroy Cee and avenge her violent death.

My Ex 2, although barely deserving of its 18 rating, is intense and occasionally strong stuff, with a sense of creeping dread, some well-utilised tropical island locations and a director who shows a real affinity for the material. But it shoots itself in the foot with some fairly tame violence and blood-letting and an unimaginative and not very scary ghost. The vengeful Ying is too similar to the creatures in both The Grudge and The Ring, and this can’t help but remind us that they were much better pictures with a proper sense of gut-churning, visceral horror. By comparison, My Ex 2 has to settle for tame scares and a predictable, pedestrian storyline whose twists aren’t nearly surprising enough and whose characters aren’t sufficiently interesting for us to care what happens to any of them.

Although better than its predecessor, My Ex 2 is the sort of film that slips to the back of your memory as soon as the end credits roll. Good for a one-night stand but definitely not a keeper.

Extras: None

Review: Resident Evil – Retribution / Cert: 15 / Director: Paul W.S. Anderson / Screenplay: Paul W.S. Anderson / Starring: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez, Shawn Roberts / Release Date: January 28th

Like an undead monster than won’t stop until it’s eaten all of our brains, Resident Evil returns for a fifth instalment. This time round, Alice (Jovovich) finds herself imprisoned by the Umbrella Corp’s Red Queen in a vast underwater testing facility housed in old Soviet submarine pens somewhere along Russia’s frozen coastline. Luckily, in one of those the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-frenemy moves, her arch-nemesis Albert Wesker (Roberts) sends in a strike force to spring her. Out to put the kibosh on this is Alice’s erstwhile pal Jill (Guillory), now under the Red Queen’s mind control and clad in a skin-tight Aeon Flux-type outfit that’s hopefully warmer than it looks. And that’s about it for plot – can we interest you in some gats, a shiny black catsuit and a choice selection of T-virus muties?

The high gloss, horror theme park feel of Resident Evil: Afterlife, with its Frankenscript spliced together from various cinematic donors (Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from L.A.) becomes even more blatant in Retribution. Not only is the action splintered across several arenas mimicking real-life locales (Times Square, the Kremlin, etc), each swarming with its own breed of biohazard, but also characters and creatures from past films and video games pop up along the way in a manner contrived to stimulate fanboy salivary glands.

What results is a vacuum-packed ready meal of a movie that makes the earlier entries in the series seem like gory feasts by comparison. Waxwork dummy performances abound (with pouting cast members who look like they might be colleagues of Derek Zoolander), and the dialogue is dryly expository: “We need to cross two of the testing floors in order to escape via the blah blah blah…”

Still, there are some eye-catching highlights – a rumble in a fake Shibuya shopping district sees Alice do wire-work flips through a crowd of zombie Gothic Lolitas and salarymen, and a Rolls Royce is involved in a lively chase with undead Russian soldiers in machine-gun-mounted Jeeps. And it’s all extremely pretty in a slightly antiseptic way. Writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson doesn’t really do scary any more, but he does shiny very well. (Which is why common-or-garden walking dead take a back seat to fancier opponents these days – they’re too grungy and gnarly for his squeaky-clean visuals.) As for Jovovich, she may not know her Stanislavski but she knows her angles and is always good to watch.

The HD transfer looks and sounds pristine (the tomandandy score throbbing nicely through the speakers). Extras include half a dozen slick, well-crafted featurettes, plus commentaries – hours of goodies to keep you amused until the inevitable sixth instalment comes lurching (or winging, if the tease ending is anything to go by) into view.

Extras: Deleted and extended scenes / 6 Featurettes: ‘Maestro of Evil – Directing Resident Evil: Retribution’; ‘Evolving Alice’; ‘Resident Evil – Reunion’; ‘Design and Build – The World of Resident Evil: Retribution’; ‘Resident Stuntman’; ‘Code – Mika’ / Project Alice – the Interactive Database / Director and cast commentary / Director and producer commentary / Drop (Un)Dead – the Creatures of Retribution / Outtakes

Review: Sinister / Cert: 15 / Director: Scott Derrickson / Screenplay: Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill / Starring: Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance, James Ransone / Release Date: February 11th

First off, don’t panic. This is a movie about found footage, but thankfully not another found footage horror movie, if you get our drift. In the process of researching his latest book, true crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Hawke) moves his family into an old murder house in order to see how they react to the creepy atmos. Up in the attic, he finds a cache of snuff flicks on Super 8 (never mind The Evil Dead, these are real video nasties) and unwittingly unleashes a dark and terrible force. Still, could have been worse. Could’ve been a Paranormal Activity box set.

Sinister does some things very well, but this reviewer found himself utterly baffled by the popularity of the second-most over-hyped horror film of 2012 after Cabin in the Woods. It follows a similar template to 2010’s Insidious (down to the evocative one-word title) but feels less impressive. There’s an attempt to replicate that film’s villain, but nothing is as shocking or well done as the Red-Faced Demon’s reveal. Mr. Boogie feels, by comparison, like a lazy attempt to create an iconic villain without putting in any of the groundwork.

There are places, however, where Sinister does succeed in its aspirations. The snuff movie segments are extremely well done – by far the most chilling moments of the film, complete with an unsettling soundtrack and some truly grisly murder sequences. Ethan Hawke makes a touchingly down-to-earth foil for Mr. Boogie, falling out of attics, drinking heavily and wearing a dodgy cardie. His comedy cop sidekick is fun too, although the pair’s meddling in police evidence makes them hard to like. The film itself is slick, well-paced and occasionally quite tense, with a great atmosphere – but its flaws are all too evident on the small screen. It doesn’t stand up well to repeat viewing, since all it really has to hold viewer’s interest is some jump scares and a twist at the end that is horribly predictable, cynically leaving the door open for any number of sequels. Scott Derrickson’s confident direction and Ethan Hawke with his box of snuff films really are the only thing to commend Sinister for. Sinister is good, but it could have been so much better.

The word ‘sinister’ is a promise, or a threat, rather than something concrete or real. “Threatening or portending evil,” goes the dictionary definition. Sinister does that bit very well. But unfortunately it never really seems to go anywhere.

Extras: None

Review: Holy Motors / Cert: 18 / Director: Leos Carax / Screenplay: Leos Carax / Starring: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue / Release Date: January 28th

Once the golden boy of French cinema, Leos Carax hadn’t had a critical and commercial hit since the 1980s. However, he’s been propelled right to the top again by Holy Motors. Boasting more layers than a whole string of onions, not to mention stunning cameos from Kylie Minogue, Eva Mendes and a female contortionist in a skin-tight mo-cap suit, his first feature in 12 years has been collecting five star reviews the way a Left Bank cafe collects starving artists. And, funnily enough, its cryptic central character also has his ups and downs, going from riches to rags in the opening minutes. So maybe it’s autobiographical then? Cue Gallic shrug of shoulders.

Monsieur Oscar (Lavant) is driven around Paris in a white stretch limo to nine enigmatic appointments which see him taking on a diverse range of personae, including a wealthy banker, a hunchbacked beggar woman and a satyr-like creature (complete with curly hard-on) that abducts a supermodel from the Pere-Lachaide cemetery and takes her down into a seedy underworld. During the process, he seems to die at least three times. The upshot is as intricately chic, intermittently bizarre and occasionally shocking as a nine-course nouvelle cuisine extravaganza, but what does it all portend?

The first thing to note is that, while some critics have been dazzled by its originality and audacity, Holy Motors in fact fits quite comfortably into a form of French art movie that draws on the theatre for its inspiration – think of directors such as Marcel Carné, Alain Resnais and Jean Cocteau. Cocteau’s Orphée seems like a particular touchstone, with its supernaturals portrayed as smoothly efficient technocrats purring along in motorized cortèges, and there’s more than a whiff of Cirque du Soleil in the mo-cap girl sequence. As for what exactly is going on, it’s anyone’s guess. Maybe Oscar’s a jobbing actor hired to take part in these riddling vignettes. Or someone ensnared in a spell, more prisoner than client. Or maybe (a la Cocteau) a minor shapeshifting deity – after all, his limo’s licence plate contains the letters DXM (deus ex machina? The ‘machina’ being the holy motor of the title? Him being the ‘deus’?). Time for another Gallic shrug. 

Whatever the rationale, the film seems to be saying something about the nature of role-playing in the virtual environment we all now inhabit, the holy motor of the Internet, and about the soul-destroying properties of a world without consequences. It’s also a sampling of the pleasures of cinema, with each encounter touching on a different genre – sci-fi, fantasy, crime, melodrama, musical (yes, Kylie sings!). Quite how deep it really is remains moot, but it’s a stylish exercise in existential tristesse.

Extras: Deleted scenes / Interview with Leos Carax

Review: Hypothermia / Director: James Felix McKenney / Screenplay: James Felix McKenney / Starring: Michael Rooker, Blanche Baker, Amy Chang, Don Wood, Greg Finley, Benjamin Forster/ Release Date: VOD OUT NOW

 

 

Hypothermia starts off with an interesting premise, but falls apart during the second and third act. Ray Pelletier (Rooker) and his family (Baker, Chang, Forster) decide to spend a quiet weekend ice fishing on a local lake. However, they’re interrupted by an obnoxious father and son team (Don Wood and Greg Finley) who set up camp nearby. An uneasy truce is struck, but as they resume their chilly sport, they discover something below the waters. Something as big as a sturgeon (apparently that’s big). They set out to capture it, but OMG, it turns out to be a prehistoric creature bent on protecting its habitat.

 

 

Let’s get the obvious gripes out of the way first. If this thing’s been down there for that long, why hasn’t anyone spotted it before? (Prehistoric, big as a sturgeon – sounds pretty noticeable.) And when it starts killing people, why don’t they, you know, play the evolutionary trump and run away as fast as their legs will carry them? Also, the creature itself is silly – like a bad villain in a wetsuit from an Ultraman episode from the ’60s. On the upside, Rooker is always great to watch and Wood makes for an interesting antagonist. The rest of the characters, though, are pretty much by the numbers and only there to service the Ten Little Indians-style, who’ll-get-bumped-off-next plot.

 

 

McKenney is not without talent. He does a good job as a director in keeping the pace moving, and Hypothermia is a well shot film with several nice, wintry vistas and excellent, immersive sound. It’s his scripting that’s off, disintegrating by the second act into all sorts of fishy improbabilities and nonsense. The fact that this film was made in 2010 and has been kept on ice until now says it all. Sniff before investigating.

 

 

Extras: None

Review: American Mary / Cert: 18 / Director: Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska / Screenplay: Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska / Starring: Katharine Isabelle, Antonio Cupo, Tristan Risk / Release Date: January 21st 2013

If you missed American Mary at FrightFest, you’re in for a treat. The Soska Sisters’ sophomore effort is a real gem for fans of body horror as well as for those who appreciate alternative lifestyles.

The story centres on Mary Mason (Isabelle), a med student who is working hard to finance herself through her studies to become a surgeon. Broke and increasingly disillusioned, she attends an interview which turns bizarre as she is called on to save the life of a man in the basement of a club. She is paid $5,000 for her troubles and she thinks that’s the end of the matter. That is, until she starts receiving phone calls and an uninvited visit from Beatress (Risk), who has modelled her body and face on Betty Boop. She offers Mary another $10,000 to complete some under-the-table cosmetic surgery on a friend of hers.

When Mary is then invited to a surgeon’s party and is date raped, she exacts immediate revenge and leaves her old life behind, taking on clients who want something more extreme than a piercing, tattoo or liposuction and are prepared to pay accordingly. Rapidly, her improving skills gain her a reputation in body modding circles and she becomes known as Bloody Mary. However, Mary finds her past catching up with her as she tries to evade a police investigation. It all comes to a head in a brutal, gory denouement that sits well with the rest of the film.

There are so many strengths on show here. The central performance from Isabelle is fantastic – naïve before the party incident, cold-blooded thereafter, but always with a glint in her eye. Humour doesn’t come any darker than the black comedy that laces the Soska Sisters’ script. The grue is used well and in the right places, so you won’t feel weak-stomached during the operating scenes. A near-perfect soundtrack lurches from classical to industrial, with even the incidental songs spot-on. The inclusion of real people from the body mod lifestyle works well too, rather than relying on make-up effects. It’s nasty, dirty and oh so good.

Extras – Behind The Scenes / An American Mary in London (World Premiere at Film4 FrightFest, August 2012)

Review: The Woodsman and the Rain / Cert: 12 / Director: Shuichi Okita / Screenplay: Shuichi Okita, Fumio Moriya / Starring: Koji Yakusho, Shun Oguri, Tsutomu Yamazaki / Release Date: January 28th

If Ken Loach were ever to abandon the dear old UK for the tranquil mountaintops of Japan, this is probably the kind of film that would result. It’s the tale of Katsu (Yakusho), a 60 year-old lumberjack, a lonely figure roaming the woods in a beige boiler suit, hard hat and ear protectors. Recently widowed, he’s grumpy and distant with his son, colleagues and fellow mountain villagers. You’d think nothing could impinge on his splendid isolation. But then a film crew roll up intent on making a low-budget zombie movie, and guess who they turn to for help.

In short order, the taciturn woodsman finds himself roped into scouting for locations, then having a go at being a zombie extra – all against his better judgement. Before long, though, he catches the filmmaking bug, and also strikes up an unlikely friendship with Koichi (Ogun), the movie’s tyro director, a shaggy-haired, 25 year-old introvert who is crippled by the suspicion that he’s the least competent person on set.

Soon, following Katsu’s lead, more villagers get in on the action. What ensues is a gentle comedy of colliding cultures in the heartwarming vein of Local Hero, only with best boys and focus pullers replacing Texan oilmen. Director/co-writer Shuichi Okita is quickly gaining a rep as one of Japan’s rising talents, and his approach is low-key but accessibly brisk. His stock-in-trade is a kind of deadpan visual humour, slow-burning gags played against a static lens. Allied to this is a relaxed (very Loach-like) naturalism. He makes, for instance, no attempt to prettify or sentimentalize the rural setting. The village is a place of hard graft, where things (houses, trucks, people) tend to be functional and plain. The mountains are simply there. But for Western viewers who don’t think of Japan as having a countryside, it’s a backdrop of wonderful charm and novelty.

As the shoe-gazing Koichi, Ogun shows he’s more than just the pouting pretty boy of the Crows Zero films, and there are a number of well-played ensemble scenes (including a very funny sequence where a veteran actor is brought in for a day’s shooting, only to have his rousing cameo hampered by an excruciating case of piles). But it’s Yakusho (of 13 Assassins fame) who roots The Woodsman and the Rain in human emotion. His performance is flawless, and it’s a delight to watch this wintry tree of a character slowly thawing out and putting forth green shoots. True, the storyline is somewhat slight and fanciful, but it’s handled in such a refined way, you’re sure to be won over, and all in all this is a glowingly feelgood movie. With zombies.

Extras: Trailers/ Deleted scenes / Interviews with director, cast and crew

Review: Defenders of the Earth – The Complete Series / Cert: U / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Adam Carl, Ron Feinberg, Buster Jones / Release Date February 18th

The ’80s have come to be regarded as a golden age of cartoons. It was the decade of He-Man, She-Ra, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, The Real Ghostbusters, Thundercats, TMNT and The Transformers. But as superhero team-ups are currently box office gold, with their animated counterparts soaring high in the ratings, there has never been a better time to revisit Defenders of the Earth.

DC Comics has the Justice League, Marvel has the Avengers, and in response, King Features Syndicate brought together their most successful newspaper comic strip characters in a group for this 1986 series.

The Defenders are comprised as follows: Flash Gordon, saviour of the universe – need we say more? The Phantom – ‘the ghost who walks’, hero of the African jungle, able to summon the power of the jungle animals (though someone should tell him that tigers are indigenous to India, not Africa). (This is the 27th Phantom, by the way, as the title has been handed down from father to son for over 400 years – although you wonder what’s going to happen next, since the present incumbent has a daughter). The dapper Mandrake the Magician, resplendent in top hat, tails and opera cape is a master illusionist able somehow to hypnotise robots and establish a mental contact with computers. Rounding off the roster is Mandrake’s assistant, super-strong African American Lothar, along with their respective children who don’t really contribute much, except to get into trouble – often.

The gang come together in the opening episode where Flash, in the near future of 2015, escapes from the planet Mongo (in a departure from previous established continuity, now a frozen planet), but has to return to free his wife and son who are Ming the Merciless’ prisoners. Flash mounts a rescue mission with his new allies. Alas, Gordon’s wife is killed. However, her essence lives on in a crystal and is incorporated into the Defenders’ supercomputer, Dynak-X.

Plotting to conquer Earth for its resources, Ming builds a secret base in the Arctic, but as the episodes unfold, his master-plan soon take second place to his schemes to create global mischief and vanquish the Defenders – particularly his arch-nemisis, Flash Gordon. To this end, he enlists the help of all manner of villains, demons, monsters and aliens over 65 entertaining episodes.

Though aimed firmly at a juvenile audience in its day, there’s no doubt that this 7-disc set will attract the attention of nostalgic older viewers, the more observant of whom will notice names like The Big Bang Theory co-creator Chuck Lorre among the show’s writers. Speaking of writers – the theme song lyrics are credited to the supervising story editor, Stan Lee. For the sheer audacity of the maddeningly catchy lyrics, Stan should’ve won a Grammy that year.

All in all, wonderfully addictive – you can never watch just one episode.

Extras: None

Review: Vile / Cert: 18 / Director: Taylor Sheridan / Screenplay: Eric Jay Beck, Rob Kowsaluk / Starring: Eric Jay Beck, April Matson, Akeem Smith / Release Date: January 14th

It’s fair to say that the torture porn horror subgenre has had its day, replaced by found footage and never ending zombie films. Not that it was a complete loss. After all, it led to Hostel and the first two Saw films. All of which brings us neatly to Vile, a pretty solid late addition to the roster.

After a nice, relaxing day in the countryside, two couples stop at a petrol station, where they are drugged by an attractive hitchhiker. They awaken in a run-down house with five other strangers. All of them have weird pipes and devices stuck to the back of their head. A video informs them that they are there to provide certain chemicals from their brains that are produced when in pain for a new kind of designer drug. When the bar on the screen reaches 100%, they will be set free; if this does not happen within 24 hours, they will all die. The group have no choice but to pull each other’s fingernails out, burn each other and engage in other acts of terror. Some like it a little too much, some have secrets from the rest of the group and some go absolutely crazy from the stress of it all.

While it is certainly disturbing and bloody, Vile stops some way short of living up to its name. The story doesn’t bash you over the head with graphic gore; instead, things are allowed to build slowly. When events do boil over into violence, the camera has a habit of pulling away at the last moment, leaving your imagination to do the work. Crucially, this is a horror film with a diverse cast of characters ranging from likeable and to utterly hateful, and this makes the twists and turns all the more effective.

Vile is let down by some abysmal acting in some scenes as well as by a lapse into incoherence in the last twenty minutes. But that still leaves an hour and change of very decent entertainment, and you shouldn’t let the dodgy cover and subject matter put you off.

Extras: None

Review: U.F.O. / Cert: 15 / Director: Dominic Burns / Screenplay: Dominic Burns / Starring: Bianca Bree, Sean Brosnan, Simon Phillips, Sean Pertwee, Jean-Claude Van Damme/ Release Date: Out Now

Sadly not the long awaited feature film reboot of the late Gerry Anderson’s seminal live-action 1960s sci-fi series, but thankfully also not ‘comedian’ Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown’s 1993 feature film debut, this is a very British loose change alien invasion movie which inevitably doesn’t amount to much but is fizzing with equal amounts of enthusiasm and headache-inducing SHOUTING.

U.F.O. starts out fairly promisingly as a bunch of over-sexed party people in glamorous West Derby wake up after a night on the razz to find that there’s no power, no TV and radio, and – shriek! – no mobile phone coverage. But they don’t panic, they just get on with the business of sitting it out until normality is restored. Move on a couple of days, though, and a giant spaceship is hanging above the city and suddenly everyone’s running around shouting and fighting… and shouting some more. The film throws away its initial subtlety and sense of growing unease: the desperately limited budget makes showing the full effect of the invasion impossible – FX are kept to a minimum, which is just as well because they’re generally a bit ropey – and, as if to compensate, the characters all start to get hysterical. Unfortunately, as none of them is even remotely likeable, it’s hard to work up much of an interest in what happens to them, and before long you’re willing them to get bumped off asap just so we can all get on with our lives and do something else.

Jean-Claude Van Damme turns up for no apparent reason, and U.F.O. is punctuated by long, clumsy fight scenes (a tussle between one character and a policeman goes on forever) which appear to have been included just to pad things out and keep the action indoors. One scene filmed in pouring rain is unintelligible despite the cast yelling at the tops of their voices, and as the performances get more histrionic and the scenario less and less interesting you’ll be hoping the aliens will stop messing about and just nuke the lot of ‘em to spare us any more misery.

U.F.O. is a misfire which has neither the coherent script nor the budget to even begin to make it work. And that’s a shame, because we need a halfway decent UK alien invasion film after American duds like Skyline and The Darkest Hour. But writer/director Dominic Burns, whilst clearly an enthusiastic filmmaker, needs to scale his ambitions back a bit and learn his craft before embarking on another project as ambitious as this one.

Extras: None