Review: The Awakening (15) / Director: Nick Murphy / Screenplay: Stephen Volk, Nick Murphy / Starring: Rebecca Hall, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton / Release Date: 26th March

Florence Cathcart (Hall) doesn’t believe in ghosts. In fact, the thoroughly modern young woman makes a living from disproving them. Whether she’s raiding séances or writing books to disprove their existence, Cathcart has made it her mission to wake a grieving post-World-War-1 nation up to the reality that their loved ones are gone forever.

Appearing to challenge this theory is schoolmaster, Robert Mallory (West) who implores Florence to visit his school following the death of a young boy. When it is suggested that the cause of death was due to a ghostly apparition of a former pupil, Cathcart is sceptical to say the least. Nevertheless, she agrees to accompany him to the imposing boarding school known as Rookwood.

Needless to say, things don’t go well. On one hand, the events leading up to the death of the boy seem to be entirely explainable. But then again, Florence can’t shake the feeling that something else has a hand in the strange goings on in the former private residence. As time goes on, she becomes more and more absorbed as the ghosts of her past begin their own awakening within her.

Essentially, Florence Cathcart is the 1920s answer to Dana Scully, flatly opposed to the supernatural, believing instead that everything is explainable through science. As an audience, witnessing the shadows in the hallways and the strangely blurred apparition of a young boy, we become her Mulder counterpart, desperately urging her to see what’s really going on.

But this is far from simply a ghost story. What director Nick Murphy has crafted is a grounded narrative about grief and loss, which happens to manifest itself within the walls of a grand estate that has suffered its own fair share of tragedy. Yes, there are jump-in-your-seat moments and fleeting glimpses of the creepy young spectre, but the truly terrifying moments are born from pure unadulterated psychological horror.

This film is beautifully crafted, exceptionally acted and genuinely creepy in equal amounts. You’ll even forgive the ever-so-slightly contrived third act that boasts a somewhat familiar twist that somehow manages to creep up on you.

The Extras:

There’s a fantastic array of bonus features here that not only give you an insight into the story, but also the filmmaking process and the era the movie is grounded in.

Behind the Scenes gives you a well rounded look at the production, summing up director and co-writer Murphy’s unquestionable passion for the subtext of 1920s public grief that underpins the film. Interviews from cast and crew also permeate this and the subsequent features.

Anatomy of a Scene – Florence and the Lake really gives you an insight into the logistics of filmmaking. The scene in question was one of the most expensive shot, yet is seemingly one of the simplest. While the cast discuss the practicalities of wading in decades of rotting duck excrement, Murphy waxes lyrical about the need to be flexible as a filmmaker and how what is in your head at the beginning, is rarely what reality will give you on camera.

A Time for Ghosts uncovers the background of post-war Britain, deeply penetrating the nation’s sudden need to believe in the supernatural.

Deleted Scenes are relatively few, but each comes with very honest introductions by Murphy who also expounds on the need to cut even the best-acted scenes.

Interview with the Director covers the project from inception to completion, while Anatomy of a Scream allows the cast and crew to reveal their own supernatural experiences. It also tells us that you should never attend a children’s party at Dominic West’s house.

A BAFTA Q&A, in-depth Director’s Commentary and Trailer are also on offer.

Review: The Three Musketeers (12) / Director: Paul W. S. Anderson / Screenplay: Alex Litvak, Andrew Davies / Starring: Logan Lerman, Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson, Milla Jovovich / Release Date: Out Now

The Three Musketeers, as reimagined by Paul WS Anderson in his own unique way, was a huge box office floperoo this past Autumn. Whilst the film has flaws, it’s the first film I have seen made in the wake of Pirates of the Caribbean that actually seems to get what made us like that film in the first place. Considering this, it’s a surprise that this wasn’t a big hit. It’s definitely a film that has a certain camp quality to it but it has action scenes that take the breath away and is just a really good time at the flicks that has something for everyone.

The story deviates somewhat from the original stories by Alexander Dumas in that it reimagines the Musketeers as ninja like spies with cool weapons who work for the King of France. On one mission to Italy to steal some blueprints that Da Vinci created for the ultimate weapon, Athos (Matthew Macfayden) Porthos (Ray Stevenson) and Aramis (Luke Evans) are betrayed by Athos’ lover Milady (Mila Jovovich) and the blueprints are stolen by the dastardly Duke of Buckingham (an outrageous Orland Bloom). Back in France the Musketeers are disbanded by Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz) and spend their days drinking on the streets like any other peasant. This is where they encounter D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) whose spirit and vitality reinvigorate them to get back into the business of defending King and country and lead them to the discovery of Richelieu’s schemes to create a Royal scandal and thus lead to war with England. There are sword fights, there is romance and heartbreak and there are awesome battles scenes involving flying heavily armed airships.

Say what you will about Paul WS Anderson, but at least he can film a coherent action scene. What he may lack in subtlety and nuance he makes up for in creating exhilarating action scenes that you can actually follow on screen. Sadly this is a rarity with most directors preferring to shake the camera about like someone having a fit on top of a washing machine. Anderson pulls back and uses speed ramping almost as much as Zack Snyder to really highlight what is going on. The Three Musketeers has some cracking set pieces. It has the same level of excitement as the best moments from Pirates of the Caribbean and the recent The Adventures of Tin Tin.

Predictably the accents are all over the place in this film, the Musketeers are clearly English, Christoph Waltz and Mads Mikkelsen sound European and Logan Lerman is just an American. Nobody even attempts a French accent at all but it doesn’t matter when the film is as entertaining as it is. It would have been nice to have a little more development for the Musketeers themselves. When Athos and Milady’s torrid romance reaches its inevitable conclusion you don’t really feel the emotion the characters seem to be going through and D’Argtanan’s romance is a little wet. The script also goes through a bit of  a sag in the mid-section as the various schemes and allegiances shift all over the place but it comes together brilliantly with the airborne battle sequence and a cracking ending.

With The Three Musketeers, Paul Anderson has finally made a film that feels complete. All of his previous efforts looked very nice but lacked a satisfying final act and thus felt fatally flawed. The Three Musketeers is a film that manages to be a brash re-invention of an old story as well as a brilliant piece of Sunday afternoon entertainment.

Review: Camel Spiders (15) / Director: Jim Wynorski / Screenplay: Jim Wynorski, J. Brad Wilke / Starring: Brian Krause, C. Thomas Howell, GiGi Erneta/ Release Date: April 9th

Camel Spiders makes Manos: The Hands of Fate look like Citizen Kane.

The plot (if you can call it that) concerns a group of soldiers involved in an enemy firefight in Afghanistan when a swarm of camel spiders attack, devouring what’s left of the hostile force. One American soldier is killed during the skirmish and a baby camel spider crawls into his mouth thus creating the catalyst of the film. Captain Sturges (Brian Krause) and Private Reba (GiGi Erneta) are in charge of escorting the dead soldier’s body back to Arizona to be given a proper burial when an accident occurs in the truck they’re driving and the soldier’s coffin breaks open releasing hundreds of camel spiders into the desert. It’s not long before the spiders grow rapidly along with their voracious appetite attacking the local townspeople at a diner and hotel as Sheriff Beaumont (C. Thomas Howell), Sturges, Reba, a professor and his students band together taking refuge in an abandoned factory to prepare to make their final stand to face the onslaught of the creatures.

This movie fails on every level and is a total train wreck. Poorly directed by Jim Wynorski (gee, what a surprise there!) and terribly written with horrendous dialogue by J. Brad Wilke who obviously watched Arachnophobia, Eight Legged Freaks and Assault on Precinct 13 for inspiration the night before.

Filmed partially in Indiana and in the California desert (two areas which don’t even remotely look the same; so much for continuity!) on a budget of $500,000 (though it was rumored more like $175,000) the characters come off clichéd and weak. There’s no pathos to any of them and attempts to make them likeable fall flat, resulting in audiences not caring who dies next. Also, for fairly intelligent people, our heroes sure are stupid to be caught in their various situations when they die. The film soon becomes a bargain basement Ten Little Indians story with a weak payoff at the end. CGI FX are at least passable, but seemed rushed for what amount of money was spent on them.

Recently, it was announced that sleaze-meister Wynorski was going to film a remake of the 1957 cult flick, The Giant Gila Monster and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (both public domain films). I can see the pitch meeting now: “Hey, I have an idea! Let’s make a bad film from a bad film! The public will love it!”. One thing to be said about Wynorski – at least he’s consistent in creating these cinematic bowel movements.

Avoid this movie like you would a plague of camel spiders themselves.

Expected rating: 5 out of 10

Actual rating:

Review: Frankenhooker (18) / Director: Frank Henenlotter / Screenplay: Frank Henenlotter, Robert Martin / Starring: James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Joanne Ritchie / Release Date: Out Now

Frank Henenlotter seems to have had the career that Sam Raimi would have had if he hadn’t harboured a secret desire to be taken seriously and make films with wide appeal rather than a cult following. Since debuting with Basket Case in 1982, Henenlotter has stayed firmly in the low budget horror field, churning out more and more outrageous films before taking a long hiatus between Basket Case 3 in 1992 and the little seen Bad Biology from 2008. Arrow Video are currently doing a great job of re-releasing cult classics from the ’70s and ’80s, with unique covers that wouldn’t have been out of place in video shops at the time and they have just released Frankenhooker from 1990 made at the peak of Henenlotter’s productivity.

Frankenhooker is a low budget scuzzy riff on the Frankenstein myth and tells the story of Jeffery Franken (James Lorinz) who loses his fiancée Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) in a bizarre accident involving a remote control lawn mower. Jeffery has been tinkering with amateur science experiments and unable to deal with the loss of his beloved, he sets about bringing her back to life after stealing her head from her remains. After many weeks of research, he realises that he must create Elizabeth a body made up of several body parts. Therefore he goes on a search for hookers in a hellish Times Square (this was the late ’80s remember when NYC was generally thought of as a cess pool) he hooks up with about 8 or so prostitutes and examines them for their best parts. Due to an incident involving a ‘super crack’ that Jeffery has created, the hookers wind up exploding all over a seedy hotel room and Jeffery has all the parts that he needs. He returns to his lab and puts Elizabeth’s head back on to a body made up of various hooker limbs. During a lightning storm, Jeffery channels the electricity into the body and Elizabeth is brought back to life. Trouble is she has taken on more of the hooker traits than Elizabeth’s and has super strength. Ignoring Jeffery she heads back to the city to wreak some havoc.

For a film about bringing a dead lady back to life with dead hooker parts, Frankenhooker is played remarkably straight faced for the first half of the film. James Lorinz may not be the best actor in the world but he gives it his all, emoting where necessary and playing a driven man. Once he hits on the idea of using dead hookers as spare parts, the film shifts into full on silliness and Lorinz’s performance matches. Suddenly it is as if the actor realised that this was all a joke and starts to act really over the top. During the scenes with the ‘super crack’ (one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while) it’s not clear if Lorinz is just having a ball or if he really is this bad of an actor.

It seems silly to whine about performance and tone in a movie called Frankenhooker but I couldn’t help but be confused by the first half. The film delivers enough silly so that enjoyed with a few beers late on a Saturday it will do its job. However watching the film sober, you can’t help but think that the film didn’t go far enough in either its silliness or its gore content.

Frankenhooker is sleazy, silly fun and a document of a time when you could get away with this sort of thing in low budget films and still get a decent enough release, but there are better films in Arrow’s growing catalogue.

Extras: Reversible sleeve with original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphries; Double-sided fold-out artwork poster; Exclusive collector’s booklet featuring brand new writing on the film by Calum Waddell; Brand New High Definition Transfer of the film (1080p); UK exclusive audio commentary with director Frank Henenlotter and star James Lorinz; UK exclusive introduction to the film by actor James Lorinz; original trailer and five featurettes – Your Date’s on a Plate: The Making of Frankenhooker; A Salad That Was Once Named Elizabeth: Patty Mullen Remembers Frankenhooker;  A Stitch In Time: The Make-Up Effects Of Frankenhooker; Turning Tricks: Jennifer Delora Remembers Frankenhooker.

Review: Midnight in Paris (12) / Directed by: Woody Allen / Written by: Woody Allen / Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Adrien Brody, Michael Sheen, Carl Bruni / Release Date: Out Now

In which Woody Allen does sci-fi. Seriously. Well, sort of… With a budget of $17 million, Woody Allen’s charming romantic fantasy Midnight in Paris pulled in a whopping $150 million at the Box Office worldwide making it easily the writer/director/legend’s most successful film ever. Maybe Woody should take a walk on our wild side a bit more often…

Midnight in Paris is, in reality, very much ‘fantasy lite’, using a tried and trusted and convenient ‘time travel’ trope to tell a trademark Allen romance steeped in a nostalgic yearning for the past and an uncomfortable reluctance to embrace the trivia and pace of the modern world. Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a successful hack Hollywood screenwriter who is struggling to write his first novel. Holidaying with his fiance Inez (McAdams) and her family in Paris, Gil finds himself frustrated by Inez’z fascination with the pretentious Paul (Sheen). Gil is keen to relocate to Paris but Inez is having none of it. Crying off a night on the town with Inez and Paul, Gil finds himself lost amongst the alleyways of Paris when a Rolls Royce full of partygoers in 1920s attire pulls up at midnight and the occupants invite him to join in their decadent fun and games. They whisk him off to a bar where a bemused Gil finds himself rubbing shoulders with Cole Porter, the Fitzgeralds, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway and, ultimately, Gertrude Stein who offers to read Gil’s work-in-progress novel. But when Gil tries to return to his hotel to collect his manuscript, he finds himself back in the twenty-first century…

Considering his new coterie of like-minded friends it’s hardly surprising that Gil becomes obsessed with travelling back into ‘the past’ every midnight (even if he doesn’t waste much time questioning how and why it’s happening) and before longs he’s confiding in the likes of Salvador Dali and flirting with Pablo Picasso’s mistress Adriana (Cotillard). But eventually Gil realises that everyone, even his friends in the 1920s, has their very own imagined ‘Golden Age’ and that it’s in the nature of things that no-one’s ever really happy in whatever time they find themselves born in and will find themselves yearning for some romanticised earlier age. But he also discovers that he doesn’t have to play with all the cards he’s been dealt and that maybe Inez and her hectoring family aren’t right for him after all…

Midnight in Paris’s time travel conceit is, of course, just a handy construct around which Allen can fashion his leisurely, contemplative storyline. It’s clear that as Allen gets older he gets more reflective – Midnight in Paris is slyly wry rather than outright funny (even though Wilson is clearly channelling the familiar Allen persona from the director’s own performing days) – and this is a film which is a love letter to Paris itself as much as it’s a poignant and charming love story. The three-minute plus picture postcard montage which opens the film may seem a bit on the indulgent side but it absolutely serves to set the mood and the tone of the piece and, if nothing else, reminds those with a short-term memory where the action’s going to take place. Allen’s camera loves Paris, wandering through back alleys and past street cafes and flea markets, the perfect backdrop to Gil’s slowburn friendship with pretty antiques dealer Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux).

So Woody Allen does sci-fi. No rampaging robots from the future, no twisty-turny time paradoxes. But without even intending to make a genre piece Allen has crafted a light, pleasant romance full of rich atmosphere, period charm and evocative jazz music but with just a soupcon (as the French would say) of fantasy to add a little bit of spice and intrigue. It might not be Annie Hall, but it’s good to see that, at 77 years of age, Woody Allen’s still got his mojo and it’s still in full working order.

Special features: None. Woody Allen lets his films do the talking.

Review: Sometimes They Come Back (TBC) / Directed by: Tom McLaughlin / Screenplay by: Laurence Konner, Mark Rosenthal / Starring: Tim Matheson, Brooke Adams, Robert Russler, Chris Demetral, Robert Hy Gorman, William Sanderson /Release Date: 9^th April 2012

Based on a short story published in Stephen King’s 1978 anthology Night Shift, Sometimes They Come Back made its way to television in 1991 as this efficient, slightly cheesy US TV movie which only now sees the light of day on DVD in the UK.

Tom Matheson plays teacher Jim Norman whose quest for work forces him to return to his hometown nearly 30 years after the terrible tragedy of the death of his elder brother Wayne. Back in 1963 a gang of rock’n’roll teens confronted Jim and Wayne in a railway tunnel; Wayne was stabbed and the gang were killed when their car was demolished by an oncoming train. When Jim returns home he finds that the dead gang aren’t quite ready to lie down and that there’s still some unfinished business between them…

Although very clearly a made-for-TV effort and therefore not able to overdose on the gore, Sometimes They Come Back still manages to wrack up a few thrills here and there even if it’s never exactly hair-raising stuff. The story’s fairly typical, unsophisticated early King and whilst certain liberties have been taken with the original text (in which Jim’s wife is also killed and he’s forced to summon up a malevolent demon to help him see off his tormentors) the story’s themes of revenge from beyond the grave and family redemption power the film’s narrative. Jim reluctantly takes up his teaching post at his old school and is almost immediately wrong-footed by his unruly class. He’s suffering nightmarish dreams too, and his memories of the events of that terrible day nearly three decades earlier are as vivid as ever. His nightmares start to come true, however, when kids from his class begin to die in mysterious circumstances; for every pupil killed a replacement arrives, “transferred from Milford” – and each of those replacements is one of the gang killed in the railway tunnel.  Exactly how and why everyone can see the ‘ghosts’ as new pupils in the classroom and yet they’re invisible everywhere else is a plot point the script doesn’t try to concern itself with, though.

The violence and horror are as brutal as American Network TV in the early 1990s would allow so it’s fairly bloodless; one boy is forced off the road and over a bridge by the gang’s ghostly, fire-belching car, another is found hanged and, in what’s potentially the most gruesome sequence in the movie, a third is dismembered, body parts flung out of the car’s window by the cackling ghoulish gang. There’s some creeping tension in the scenes where Jim confronts the only survivor of the gang and tries to get him to reason with the ghosts in their graveyard hang-out and later on when Jim’s wife is attacked in their home (the make-up effects of the cadaverous incinerated oldies of the gang are still pretty decent) but the film loses whatever edge it might have had as it abandons its subtlety for more obvious stuff, the gang resurrected and overacting as they continue to terrify and terrorise Jim and his family.

The film finally plunges headlong into schmaltz as Jim conjurs up the restless spirit of his long-dead brother, history repeats itself in the railway tunnel and Jim gets the chance to say goodbye to Wayne with the promise that one day they’ll be together again forever. Awww….

Sometimes They Come Back is a harmless way to spend ninety minutes but it’s really only for the determined King completist. Anyone else might want to wait the three or four weeks until this one turns up in the bargain bin.

Review: Hybrid (15) / Director: Eric Valette / Screenplay: Benjamin Carr / Starring: Shannon Beckner, Oded Fehr, Ryan Kennedy, Melanie Papalia, Adrien Dorval / Release date: Out Now

John Carpenter recently said of his 1984 film Christine, that the problem with the film was he couldn’t figure out how to make the car scary. This is a valid point because it really is not scary unless it’s a big truck as evidenced by Duel and Jeepers Creepers. The makers of Hybrid address this issue to an extent by making it clear early on that there is some kind of tentacle Lovecraftian beast underneath the hood. Still apart from a couple of scenes, Hybrid never really goes full tilt into ridiculous fun the way it should.

The film starts with a mysterious driver-less car stalking the streets and consuming hapless pedestrians who happen to think they have found a free car and are then dissolved in the dark insides. This ferocious but somewhat stupid car can take whatever form it likes to appeal to whoever is passing by at the time. So theoretically if an 18 year old gangsta wannabe from South London wandered by it could turn into a Nova with alloys and a loud sound system. Whilst on the way back from another kill, instead of becoming a motorbike and weaving through traffic, the car gets involved in a collision and is impounded by the Police. We then spend the rest of the film in the multi storey parking garage that is used by the police amongst the company of the various grease monkeys, two token women and their hard-nosed pervy boss. For reasons never made entirely clear, the doors are all locked and escape is impossible as the car comes to life, switches models a few times and tries to consume all of the employees.

For such a stupid premise, Hybrid is played almost completely straight faced. It’s a film about a killer car, so why not take that silliness to its logical conclusion and go full tilt into over the top gore and carnage? Sadly director Eric Valette thinks he is making some kind of survival horror classic here but lacks the skill and the script to actually make that a reality. The film even had the good guys try and trap the car the way a Malaysian Tiger was trapped on TV, but even this is done without irony. When people are mown down by the car the film chooses to cut away instead of showing us a splattered mechanic on the concrete. After each murderous set piece there follows a confusing moment when the surviving mechanics stand around talking about their next step. For some reason during this time, the car never appears and just mows them all down and it’s not clear exactly what it’s doing, just watching perhaps. Maybe just a shot of the car driving away from the last dead body cackling, flashing its lights and beeping its horn would have made sense but the film is far too serious for all that.

All of the performances in this film are terribly stilted and unconvincing. There is very little attempt at character development and whoever cast Oded Fehr as a mechanic who is all business should never work again. Fehr’s performance is perhaps the worst I have ever seen in a straight to DVD horror film, and I have seen a few.

Hybrid is not the worst straight to DVD horror ever, it is moderately diverting and flirts with being entertaining. It just seems that the makers completely misjudged their audience and could have made something outrageous and fun instead of dour and serious.

Special Features: Anaglyph 3D version as well as 2D version.

Review: Vanishing on 7th Street (15) / Directed by: Brad Anderson / Screenplay by: Anthony Jaswinski / Starring: Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo, Jacob Latimore / Release date: Out Now

Brad Anderson started his career strong with the psychological thrillers Session 9 and The Machinist. He then went on to direct Transiberian which ended up going straight to DVD in the UK and has recently been working as a director on the superior TV show Fringe. His latest, Vanishing on 7th Street has also gone direct to DVD in the UK. Whilst it’s by no means a great film, it perhaps doesn’t deserve the critical mauling it got last year when it came out Stateside.

The plot is as simple as they come – one day, during a blackout, everyone vanishes leaving behind just their clothes. A few survivors wander around looking for other people and find that there is something living in the shadows, something that mimics the voices of others they have lost. As the days mysteriously get shorter, a small band of survivors hold up in a bar with the last remaining light sources they can find to try and avoid being consumed by the shadows.

Vanishing on 7th Street plays out like a feature length Twilight Zone episode and the lack of anything approaching a satisfying conclusion beyond the unique set-up makes me wonder if once upon a time this was a rejected script for an anthology TV show. The main problem is that for all of his stylish direction and ability to mount a creepy scene, Brad Anderson’s film has nowhere to go once the threat is defined. It’s almost like they had a great idea and were so excited by it they forgot to even make it into anything resembling a proper narrative structure. The actual ending feels like an afterthought and the kind of thing a film student would come up with for his thesis film because he thinks he is being arty and clever.

The film is notable for actually getting a decent performance out of Hayden Christensen though. He won’t win an Oscar for it, but he is less wooden than usual and does well portraying a desperate and frightened man who used to be a celebrity when the world was normal. Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo are also solid as his fellow survivors. Leguizamo in particlar is the most sympathetic figure and the one that you can identify with most if you happen to be unlucky in love. There is also something I felt whilst watching the film that I haven’t felt since watching Insidious a year or so ago, and that is a feeling of terror. Not run out of the room terror, where I never want to see these images again, but momentary feelings of panic. Anderson uses shadows brilliantly here; moments where dark figures emerge from the encroaching blanket of darkness are genuinely scary and will make you look that bit more carefully into the dark corners of your bedroom before you go to sleep.

I cant say that Vanishing on 7th Street is a great film but I can say that it’s a unique and well executed set up for a story that ultimately meanders and loses steam far sooner that it should. Brad Anderson is capable of so much more. If you are in the mood for a good scare it may well just give you that and sometimes that’s enough.

Review: Corman’s World (15) / Director: Alex Stapleton / Screenplay: Alex Stapleton, Gregory Locklear / Featuring: Roger Corman, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Eli Roth, Ron Howard, William Shatner, Traci Lords / Release date: March 26th

Whether you are a fan of Roger Corman’s work or not this is an engaging, fascinating and inspiring look at a prolific director and his legacy. Truly, a filmmaker ahead of his time whose focus was on producing and directing films for a specific audience. He launched such talents as Joe Dante, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorcese and Ron Howard whilst reeling out a slew of b-movies. The film features interviews with many of those who were schooled by Corman, including intimate, poignant moments that portray the great fondness modern Hollywood has for him and the great debt it owes him. Famous for his low budget flicks that are full of absurd moments of gore, humour, and whatever was available for shooting on the day. It charts Corman’s career from the start to the present day where he is still heavily involved and passionate about film; his thirst for filmmaking, although making hundreds of films, is still not quenched.

Jack Nicholson is candid about their relationship and tells stories of his experiences working with Corman doling out some great quotes “by mistake he actually made a good film once in a while” and explaining the haphazardness of The Terror “to this day no one knows the plot of it”. He provides an especially emotional moment of the film that shows the deep respect he has for the director. In fact, everyone who is interviewed has some sort of amusing tale to tell about their experience on the set of a Corman production. Pam Grier, who featured in many of his films puts this down to the fact that “he could persuade you to buy sand in a desert” , and would always challenge her by giving her increasingly extreme stunts to do.

Eli Roth explains the success behind Corman’s body of work in that he allowed an audience to feel like “you’re not stupid for loving Piranha and it’s ok to have fun at the movies”. For the most part Corman’s films did exactly this, but an explanation behind the making of a film called The Intruder (featuring William Shatner in one of his earliest roles) that highlighted the issues of segregation and integration shows that Corman’s political views were important in his work also. Considering these issues were at boiling point and Corman was making this film at the height of the racial riots shows his determination to make a political stand as impressively courageous. His simple reasoning behind it highlights a level of integrity “Somebody had to say STOP; this is not the American Way!”

There are great moments of pivotal film history, the dawning of the genre blockbuster in Jaws and Star Wars, that although great for the audience marked a negative impact on Corman’s filmmaking. His low budget genre flicks could not compete with the multi-million dollar efforts of Hollywood. Where most people would simply give up, Corman changed his strategy with a new company that championed foreign filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. This new company also allowed Corman even more freedom in his exploitation productions and a chance to harness new talent such as Robert De Niro and Jonathan Demme.

A director who should be cherished for his spirited filmmaking efforts; this is a long over-due love letter of sorts to everything Corman. His passion for film and anti-establishment philosophy makes him a legend in his field.

Review: The Hunters (18) / Directed by: Chris Briant / Screenplay by: Michael Lehmann / Starring: Steven Waddington, Chris Briant, Tony Becker, Diana Agron, Terence Knox, Jay Brown / Release date: Out Now

The Hunters makes great play of the facts that it “stars” Diana Agron (from TV’s Glee, apparently) and that it features music by Mark (X Files) Snow. But hold on there, put away your credit card…even Agron’s most fevered fans will be disappointed by what’s little more than a couple of blink-and-there-she-was-appearances by their musical heroine and let’s remember that Snow’s finest hour was the haunting theme to The X Files and that he spent the next nine years punctuating Mulder, Scully and co’s adventures with random irritating bits of tinkly piano background stuff. You might then, chose to take a chance on The Hunters because of its promise of a taut tale of tearaway teens being stalked around a forest by a terrifying predator – because that’s what the film’s publicity occasionally cheekily suggests is in store. Wrong again. What you get for your money is a dry, dreary and rather long-winded story about a group of disenfranchised middle aged men who trap and torture young people in an abandoned fortress in a forest in Luxemburg. And it’s not as much fun as it sounds.

The Hunters is entirely forgettable and for its first forty minutes or so it looks as if the plot has gone completely missing, replaced by a string of poorly-defined, desperately-uninteresting characters with little in the way of personality but a lot of traumatic psychological baggage which the sluggish script seems to think is enough to get by. Troubled Iraq War vet-turned-detective Le Saint (Briant) is concerned by the reports of a spate of disappearances and, despite the orders of his punchable shouty boss, carries out his own investigations which lead him to Fort Goben, a dilapidated old wartime fortress turned into a human game preserve by a bunch of disillusioned, downtrodden dead-enders.

Before Le Saint stumbles upon the secret of Fort Goben he bumps into the lovely Alice (Agron) and there are the first flickers of a romance. Unfortunately Alice scarcely appears in the film again and when she does there’s precious little connection between her and Le Saint. For reasons which strain credibility and coincidence to breaking point Alice and her pompous boyfriend end up at Fort Goben and become unwitting prey for the hunters. Fortunately Le Saint is already on the scene and has had a peculiar confrontation with one of the hunters but, with the others on the scene and determined to keep their secret lives undiscovered, Le Saint find himself trapped and hunted and fighting for his life.

If The Hunters is worth watching at all – and I’m not saying it is – then it’s for the last half an hour when something finally happens after forty-odd minutes of talking and walking about. The Fort Goben location is dripping with eerie atmosphere and serves as a wonderfully-effective stamping ground for the hunters and their prey but the film’s clumsy direction doesn’t manage to build on any of its potential for creating tension, the action scenes are poorly-handled and, with none of the characters having been depicted as particularly sympathetic, it’s really hard to care who lives or who dies or why the hunters have chosen such uncharacteristic and brutal behaviour just because they’re having a mid-life crisis.

Even by straight-to-DVD standards The Hunters, whilst it has decent production values and some acceptable performances, is just a waste of time as it takes far too long to get going and by the time it does your patience will have long since run out.

Special features: Standard fifteen-minute ‘making of’