Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

THE PRODIGY / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: NICHOLAS MCCARTHY / SCREENPLAY: JEFF BUHLER / STARRING: TAYLOR SCHILLING, JACKSON ROBERT SCOTT, PETER MOONEY, COLM FEORE / RELEASE DATE: 5TH JULY (VOD), 15TH JULY (DVD)

“There’s something wrong with Miles” – After reaching his Eighth birthday, a prodigy named Miles Blume begins to exude strange behaviour that quickly becomes violent and forces his parents into a moral dilemma on what to do with him.

Directed by Nicholas McCarthy (The Pact), The Prodigy is another addition to the “Evil Kid” subgenre of Horror that exhibits moments of promise but ultimately lacks the killer originality or unpredictability that could have made it great. The story centres around Miles (Jackson Robert Scott, IT) and his mother Sarah (Taylor Schilling, Orange is the New Black) and deals with the subject of reincarnation – which is a nice change from the usual possession by a demon storyline that is ripe within modern horror.

The main issue with the film is that its too predictable and at times extremely lazy. Within the opening act, the “jump-scares” come at the audience thick and fast which waters down their impact rather than heightening them. The only true moment where a jump-scare would have worked tremendously well was unfortunately spoilt in the film’s trailer, as is the case these days.

However, on the other hand, the ruling factor that saves the film from being a complete misfire are the central performances. Scott as Miles was a brilliant piece of casting – after his compelling role as Georgie in the remake of IT in 2017, he once again proves that he has ability beyond his years. One moment you are buying him as being a sweet, innocent child before quickly hitting you with a cold glare and creepy smile which sends a shiver down your spine. Couple that with Schilling’s performance as Sarah – her execution truly enhancing the otherwise lacklustre script into a compelling family drama at the heart of a loud “crashy-bashy” affair.

McCarthy’s keen eye for atmosphere building does shine through at moments including some brilliant use of natural light to mask characters in an unsettling glow – it just sadly fails to keep any momentum going for extended periods of time.

The Prodigy contains some solid ideas for a new spin on the “possession” sub-genre but lacks any unnerving longevity with a by-the-numbers plot. The films core narrative is saved by two stellar performances by Scott and Schilling whose chemistry is undeniable and allows the audience to easily buy into their relationship.

DIRECTORS: TOMMY WIKLUND, SONNY LAGUNA | SCREENPLAY: S. CRAIG ZAHLER | STARRING: THOMAS LENNON, KENNEDY SUMMERS. BARBARA CRAMPTON, UDO KIER | RELEASE DATE: JULY 8TH

Forget Avengers. Forget John Wick. The sequel the whole film world has been crying out for has arrived – Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich. This is the eleventh (!) entry in the series and a soft reboot. But what can the franchise really bring anymore? It’s only really remembered for being a slightly gory DTV original and having the first role for The Room’s Greg Sestero in one of its sequels. The ace up this version’s sleeve is that it’s scripted by S. Craig Zahler.

Zahler has made a career from drawing on the B-movie style and elevating them to films that actually have some cinematic value. He’s written and directed the brilliant western Bone Tomahawk, the Vince Vaughn car punching Brawl in Cell Block 99, and the indulgent Dragged Across Concrete, and throws the script fully into its B-movie style. It’s frequently funny, rarely misses a chance to expose a breast, features a glut of gory and over the top deaths, has a plot involving Nazis, and stars genre staples Barbara Crampton and Udo Kier, but it never reaches for more than its low hanging fruit.

After the breakup of his marriage, Edgar (Lennon) moves back in with his parents. Finding a puppet involved in a massacre in his deceased brother’s closet, he attends a convention all about the incident, which also has a puppet auction. Joined by his girlfriend Ashley (Jenny Pellicer) and coworker and friend Markowitz (Franklin), they soon find themselves wrapped up in another puppet massacre.

There’s not very much going on in The Littlest Reich, and with Zahler just on writing duties, it greatly misses his directorial skill. The cast is all game, and joined by the script with a penchant for witty lines, manage to raise a few laughs over the running time. But mostly, all the movie boils down to is a lot of deaths that are only occasionally inventive or entertaining, the standout of which will have new and soon to be parents squirming in their seats. If you’re a fan of the Puppet Master franchise, you might get a bit of a kick from this latest instalment, but most people will only find mild entertainment that soon falls from the memory.

This release has barely a puppet-sized handful of features, with a behind the scenes and making of covering much of the same ground, with the cast and production team telling you how much fun they’ve had and getting more excited about a Puppet Master film than anyone else has in a long time.

MAD DOG MORGAN (1976) / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: PHILIPPE MORA / STARRING: DENNIS HOPPER, JACK THOMPSON, DAVID GULPILIL / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW (AUSTRALIA)

This often overlooked seventies gem saw Dennis Hopper appear alongside seasoned Aussie actors as an infamous real-life outlaw is an often tragic but always compelling tale. Not only did it kick-start the Australian film industry for a worldwide audience (it was the first film distributed in the US), but it unflinchingly shows how the colony would have been.

Hopper plays Daniel Morgan, an Irishman hoping to strike it rich prospecting for gold down under in the 1850s. Sent to prison for 12 years for a desperate robbery, he is brutalised, sodomised, and eventually released on parole. He becomes a feared and wanted bushranger, but one not without some compassion and pathos. With his trusted aboriginal friend Billy (Gulpilil) by his side, he robs and burns his away across the Victoria countryside pursued all the while by the local police.
Making the most of the lush locations, Mad Dog Morgan is an interesting beast of a film. Apart from the indigenous people, there are no Aussies accents to be heard – the place was populated by the colonial British and hadn’t developed its identity that we know today. Several characters speak directly into the camera at points, which gives it a documentary quality and adds to the genuine feel of the piece. Hopper is outstanding as the anti-hero Morgan. Both sympathetic and terrifying in turns. For no matter how violent Mad Dog can be, his raison d’être is more to humiliate the rich landowners than to kill. It’s an accidental shooting that tips him over the edge. The most shocking acts come from the establishment and the intolerant racist public. The opening massacre of the Chinese brothel is particularly nasty.

The film moves along at a rollicking pace – almost too fast, in fact, as some scenes are mere moments but everything comes into place and it’s nothing less than enthralling. There is also a glorious display of facial hair – some more realistic than others. Mad Dog Morgan has previously mainly been available in horrible public domain versions, but this Umbrella Blu-ray release puts that right and looks stunning. Presented in full scope, it’s bright (perhaps a little too much in places) and definition is perfect. It’s also packed with some marvellous extra features, including some insightful interviews and archival material. The interview between director Mora and Hopper is particularly enlightening, showing a completely different side to the actor than is seen in the vintage on-set footage.

KRULL / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: PETER YATES / SCREENPLAY: STANFORD SHERMAN / STARRING: KEN MARSHALL, LYSETTE ANTHONY, FREDDIE JONES, FRANCESCA ANNIS  / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW (AUS)

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Krull is one of those films from the youth of those of a certain age – a certain age that is the key demographic for genre re-releases. In the thirty-six years since its release, and subsequent proliferation through the VHS boom of the mid-1980s, a warm glow has surrounded this and other films of its type. But let’s cut through the nostalgic fog: Krull is an awful movie.

At least until the emergence of The Asylum, Hollywood has always been slow to pick up on popular culture trends. So it is that the craze for sword and sorcery novels and comic books of the 1970s didn’t translate to the big screen until 1980’s Hawk the Slayer, which opened the floodgates for a slew of similar pictures, with Conan the Barbarian, Beastmaster and Deathstalker following quickly behind.

Krull was something of an oddity. Sold to Columbia pictures by the presumably artistically-focused Barclays Mercantile Industrial Finance production company, it featured an almost wholly British cast, and was shot at Pinewood Studios as well as on location in Italy. The production was fraught with issues – director Peter Yates apparently hated working on the film so much that he took a three week holiday in the Caribbean during filming – and it racked up a huge (for the time) cost of $30 million (the same year’s Return of the Jedi cost just $2.5 million more). On release, the movie took just $16.5 million, and was panned by the critics, with Siskel and Ebert giving it the much-unwanted two thumbs down.

Krull is the story of a prince and a princess who are to be married to unite the planet Krull against the alien invaders of the Beast. The Beast, however, has other plans, and uses his army of reptilian and insectoid Slayers to abduct the princess, leaving the prince gravely wounded. The appearance of Ynyr, the forgotten one, saves the prince and kicks off the search for the princess and the battle to rid Krull of the Beast.

This entails the protagonists being put through a number of action set-ups (including that old childhood fear, quicksand!) as they gather a merry band of ne’er-do-wells to take the fight to evil. Amongst the cast of heroes are veteran British actors Freddie Jones, John Welsh, David Battley, and Bernard Bresslaw, who can be relied on for performances that are at once both uninterested and overacted. The younger cast – with a pair of notable exceptions – are much better value, with Alun Armstrong’s Torquil one of the film’s few sympathetic characters, as the leader of a gang which also includes Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, and Todd Carty.

With so much weight in the supporting cast, Ken Marshall’s Prince Colwyn and Lisette Anthony’s Princess Lyssa shouldn’t have too much to do to win the audience over, yet they fail even at that, although Anthony suffered the indignity of being dubbed in post-production and can’t be held entirely to blame. Marshall, however, whose post-Krull highlight was a short run in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is rotten on his own terms, with no-one else to blame.

Krull is fondly remembered among people of a certain age, but the memory can play cruel tricks. Re-watching the movie, however lovely the transfer to Blu-ray may be, reveals a flimsy quest pic, full of wooden acting, laughable effects, and an almost complete lack of drama, both from the absence of peril and from a lack of sympathetic characters. It’s not a total waste of time, but that time could be spent much better in a thousand other places on a thousand other worlds.

EXTRAS: Journey To Krull featurette / Marvel Comics adaptation

ESCAPE ROOM (2019) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: ADAM ROBITEL / SCREENPLAY: BRAGI F. SCHUT, MARIA MELNIK  / STARRING: DEBORAH ANN WOLL, TYLER LABINE, TAYLOR RUSSELL, LOGAN MILLER, NIK DODANI, JAY ELLIS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

A group of six strangers are brought together by a mysterious invite to an Escape Room – but the group have to quickly put their petty differences aside in order to survive a seemingly innocent game that turns deadly.

Escape Rooms are all the rage nowadays – every city seems to have one and every year we seem to get a movie based on the group puzzle activity (this film is not to be confused with Escape Room (2017) which is on Netflix right now). With that being said in order to stand out from the plethora of copycats, one must bring something new and fresh to the table – however, this particular set of rooms does not accomplish that.

From the start, none of the characters are relatable and are incredibly stereotypical – the nerd, the jock, the old guy, the geek, the loser and the war veteran. The dialogue when this ragtag group first meet in the lobby of the Escape Room sets the unfortunately lazy tone of the movie including the jock character (whose name is as forgettable as the rest of the victims) insults the nerd by saying he has “sexual relations” with “real human women”. Essentially, the audience is rooting for the obviously evil corporation behind these twisted traps instead of the “protagonists” of the story.

The only true redeeming factor of the film is the design and implementation of the rooms themselves. Easily the best room takes place in an upside-down bar that requires our heroes to use their brains to solve puzzles whilst also using their physical abilities to prevent falling to their demise. This particular room is beautifully shot as well which demonstrates that Robitel and his DOP clearly have a keen eye for making an engaging movie – but this falls victim to a very weak script with a predictable twist and wooden characters.

After the lacklustre ending, we are presented with pure sequel bait which unfortunately is the norm in today’s modern horror landscape but does open the door for more interestingly designed rooms in a future instalment (the only positive to hang on too).

Escape Room (2019) fails to really add anything interesting to this twisted torture sub-genre of Horror but still manages to be watchable at best. The design and execution of a majority of the rooms which at least keeps the audience engaged for its runtime – something that the script fails to do in a major way.

Special Features:

The special features on the Blu-Ray disc version of the film are the generic extras that one would normally find for a film of this ilk and therefore add nothing to make it worth forking out money for the home disc release.

• GAME, SETS, MATCH [4:55] – A behind the scenes look the production design that went into creating Escape Room and how they approached making each room.
• THE LONE SURVIVORS [4:19] – Interviews with the Director, Producers and Cast about the characters that are presented in the movie.
• DELETED SCENES [19:02] – A selection of deleted scenes including an Alternate Opening and Ending.
• WILL YOU EVER [1:58] – Interviews with Cast and the Director about if they would do Escape Rooms after making the movie.