Review Category: Movie

FOUNDERS DAY

Amidst an increasingly vicious mayoral race, a masked serial killer stalks the streets of small-town America, terrorising its denizens with a rictus smile and a bloodied gavel. Traumatised when the killer chooses her girlfriend as the first victim, young Allison (Naomi Grace) attempts to survive the night – her hometown becoming a blood-drenched battleground in the battle of the mayors.

This political slasher film by director Erik Bloomquist and co-writer (plus brother) Carson Bloomquist brings a modern-day agenda to a story straight out of My Bloody Valentine or the Scream franchise. There’s a masked killer on the loose, picking off various victims in and around town… but whodunnit?

The political angle is interesting but disappointingly toothless, with very little separating mayoral candidates Blair Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves) and Harold Faulkner (Jayce Bartok) beyond the fact that one of them is a woman and the other looks a bit like Cary Elwes. Both sides suck, sure (how very South Park of you), but there’s not much reason to care about either.

With other members of the cast struggling to hold up their end (its lead’s shrieking quickly becomes a problem), it’s down to veterans Catherine Curtin and William Russ to man the fort, giving an air of respectability to the misjudged comedy and clunky social commentary.

Grisly kill sequences and effectively employed stalk-and-slash tropes give the final stretch a bit of a boost. However, this slasher twist isn’t quite twisted enough when it comes down to the final count.

FOUNDERS DAY is released on digital platforms on April 29th.

THE COFFEE TABLE

One man’s spite-purchase becomes a family’s downfall when the gaudy coffee table Jesús (David Pareja) buys to piss off his wife proves to be the ultimate pain in the neck.

Already going through a rough patch in their marriage, new parents Jesús and María (Estefanía de los Santos) find their life turned upside down after buying an allegedly ‘unbreakable’ table from a seedy furniture salesman. Such innocuous beginnings kick off this pitch-black farce from director Caye Casas and co-writer Cristina Borobia.

Not recommended for the faint of heart nor easily upset, The Coffee Table is a provocative, needling work of misery-porn – taking its instigating tragedy and steadfastly refusing to flinch from the ensuing agony. As the fallout settles and Jesús and María gather the family for lunch, Casas and Borobia dial up the discomfort, in a feverish anxiety nightmare which recalls both the work of the Safdie Brothers and that episode of Peep Show where they kill and eat the dog.

But for all the deliberate, gleeful cruelty, The Coffee Table’s core strength is its empathy – pinpointing exactly where it hurts and turning the screw, unleashing fresh heartbreak with every pointed comment or now bleakly appropriate sentiment. The writing and direction is well supported by the film’s performances, which find humanity in the darkness, no matter how unpleasant things become – nor darkly ridiculous the situation.

Deeply shocking and genuinely transgressive, The Coffee Table does not make for easy or pleasant viewing – but it is an impressive work of boundary-bashing trauma-baiting from filmmakers who both delight in and profoundly understand their victims’ pain. The ultimate in feel-bad cinema!

THE COFFEE TABLE is out on digital release from 20 May.

THE FIRST OMEN

The arrival of The First Omen, the prequel to 1976’s The Omen (one of the better post-Exorcist ‘demonic child’ horror movies) couldn’t have been more unfortunately-timed, appearing in cinemas alongside the (mother) superior Immaculate which treads very similar narrative ground. The First Omen may be of interest due to its connection to a ‘franchise’ launched nearly fifty years ago, but ultimately, this is the weaker, less interesting film even if Omen obsessives (we’re assuming there are such people if only to justify the existence of the film at all) will enjoy the threads that aim to bind it to the bigger picture(s) to come.

Rome, 1971 and novitiate Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free, excellent) arrives to take up her post at the Vizzardeli Orphanage and is warmly greeted by Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), Abbess Silvia (Sonia Braga), and fellow novitiate Luz (Maria Caballero). The two young nuns visit a disco, and Margaret dances with the charismatic Paolo (Andrea Arcangeli), but she blacks out and wakes the next morning with no memory of the night before. During an encounter with Father Brennan (played by Patrick Troughton in the 1976 film but here by Ralph Ineson in an ill-advised wig), Margaret is informed that radicals within the church are conspiring to bring the Antichrist to Earth in a bid to terrify people into returning to the church. Margaret’s own investigations uncover a terrible conspiracy that involves a cabal of nuns at the Orphanage and reaches to the highest levels of the church itself as well as back into Margaret’s own past.

It’s all very melodramatic and the film, directed powerfully by Arkasha Stevenson, fulfils its remit to serve as a predecessor to the 1976 original – this feels very much of the time it’s set in. But it’s a drab, beige affair that drags its heels and only really comes to life during a couple of audacious set pieces. Nods to the original are quite subtle – an early scene cleverly hints at the ultimate fate of Troughton’s older Brennan in The Omen, and there’s even a quick visual reference to Gregory Peck’s Robert Thorn. It’s inevitable that The First Omen feels old-fashioned even if by design, but its cliched cocktail of devious nuns, impregnating demons and ‘the mark of the beast’ (that’s 666 to you) ends this unnecessary exhuming of an old film series not with a bang but a wimple.

THE FIRST OMEN is in cinemas now

RIDDLE OF FIRE

Set in a semi-fantastical rural Wyoming that is instantly familiar and magical, golden, and sun saturated on Kodak film, Riddle of Fire is a distillation of all the child-centred fantasy and adventure films you got to watch when you were off school sick. It follows the adventures of a gang of three tearaway kids (Phoebe Ferro, Charlie Stover, and Skyler Peters) whose summer holiday plans – which initially resemble a magical realist junior Grand Theft Auto – hit a firewall that necessitates the baking of a near-mythical blueberry pie, setting off a spiralling series of side quests that lead to self-discovery, wild swimming, vomiting, and a concerning amount of child peril.

The debut of writer and star (as a bumbling henchman) Weston Razooli, Riddle of Fire is set in a surprisingly convincing alternative rural America, where a self-conscious fairy tale plotline with magic, princesses, charms, curses, woodsmen, and wicked witches (played by an authentically chilling Lio Tipton), fits naturally with monster trucks, all-night bars and tacky gas station knick-knacks. It also features adorably chaotic children at its centre, who are allowed to cuss, fight each other, and get incredibly filthy dirty, which we always find uplifting.

But for all its magic, the film crams too much too slowly to maintain the snappy side quest promise of the opening section. While the child stars are sweet and (mostly) very natural, they are most fun as their chaotic, criminal selves at the film’s opening, so their arc of learning to match their better angels feels almost disappointing. Nonetheless, if you are off poorly from school (or wish you were), Riddle of Fire will definitely deliver the fresh baked blueberry pie taste of nostalgia you need.

RIDDLE OF FIRE premieres exclusively on the Icon Film Channel from May 6th, and will then release in selected UK cinemas on June 7th

ABIGAIL

Imagine, if you will, it’s 1996. You go to see a new movie called From Dusk Till Dawn, knowing nothing about it other than it’s co-created by Tarantino. For the first half, it’s the usual mixture of gangsters, guns, and great dialogue. Then that twist hits you, and you’re screaming, “What the actual fuck?” at the screen.

This seems to be what directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett – collectively known as Radio Silence – are going for here, only to have had the twist snatched away from them by evil marketing types. For the first 45 minutes or so, it plays out like a crime thriller. An assorted bunch of criminal types (led by Melissa Barrera and Dan Stevens) are assembled by a shady underworld figure (Giancarlo Esposito), assigned code names, and given a crime to commit.

So far, so Tarantino. They kidnap a young girl (Alisha Weir, last seen singing up a storm in Matilda) and hold her for ransom in an abandoned mansion. Tensions rise among the group, then one of them loses their head. Literally. And – surprise – it turns out their abductee isn’t an innocent 12-year-old as they thought, but a vampire. Who does ballet. As fun as the twist is, it would have been far more effective if it hadn’t been front-and-centre of the marketing.

That aside, it’s a huge amount of bloody fun, although it doesn’t reach the heights of Radio Silence’s masterful Ready Or Not or their Scream movies. The cast – particularly the female members (Barrera, Kathryn Newton, and especially Weir) are excellent, and are clearly having a blast. There’s copious gore and laughs aplenty, but it’s a lot lighter on the scares than their previous work. But if it’s gory fun you’re after, you’re in for a blast.

ABIGAIL is in cinemas now.

HUNT HER, KILL HER

Working the graveyard shift in a furniture factory, janitor Karen (Natalie Terrazzino) finds herself facing a fight for her
life when a gang of masked intruders break in, apparently set on slicing her to bits.

Directed by Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen, Hunt Her, Kill Her (you see what they did there) boasts a simple
premise – Die Hard meets The Strangers in a perilous industrial warehouse. In Terrazzino, the film finds a strong lead,
and Swinson and Thiessen, put through a whole gauntlet of violence and abuse. Filmed in the Tennessee
hometown of The Evil Dead, this brutal action thriller shares DNA with the Sam Raimi classic (plus a brick borrowed
from the original cabin) – and this can be deeply felt in the directors’ treatment of their Ash, single mother factory
worker Karen.

The action beats and horrifying gore are perhaps surprising, given the shaky start it gets off to. Thankfully, Terrazzino
soon finds her feet, and once the would-be killers break-in, the film never lets up until its grisly, unpredictable end.

The budget may be low – evident in the unpleasant visuals and some grimace-worthy performances from Karen’s
attackers – but the action is well done. Employing gloopy practical effects and putting the many warehouse tools and environmental kills surrounding Karen to good use, Hunt Her, Kill Her is a particularly nasty genre work.

HUNT HER, KILL HER is out April 26th.

RESTORE POINT

The idea of save points and extra lives is an increasingly well-worn trope in cinema, to the point that a film called Restore Point summons Edge of Tomorrow meets Groundhog Day visions of endless action scenes of kill:die:repeat. However, what Robert Hloz’s film actually offers up is a terse and suspenseful, ice-cold Euro-cyberpunk noir detective film which manages to create the edge-of-the-seat tension even in a world where death is (at least theoretically) not fatal.

Introspective and brooding, Andrea Mohylová plays police detective Em Trochinowska, a troubled woman with a poor attitude to teamwork, who has to investigate both an anti-restoration terrorist group and the unusual ‘absolute murder’ of a couple (where neither motives nor murderer are quite what they seem). The plot itself is hardly groundbreaking, but the central performances are nuanced and filled with enough moral grey to sustain the suspense as the plot slowly unfolds.

What is most outstanding is the near future world-building, with a mix of brutal futurist architecture and holographic police tape, alongside subtle touches in everyday gadgetry that are immersively believable and practicable, rather than just flashy CGI and set design. This depth feels similar to Children of Men, but with a more clinically dystopian feel, where elegant middle European architecture is still preserved beneath towering glass ziggurats and wooded countryside survives between endless fields of solar cells and forests of oil derricks. Props for atmosphere should also go to Jan Sléska’s score that veers from elegant heart-breaking cello to pulsing sub bass electro.

Controlled, nuanced and tense, Restore Point is not what we expected but is an excellent take on cyberpunk from a middle-European perspective.

RESTORE POINT is out now to rent/buy digitally

GATEWAY

For the first thirty minutes or so of Gateway, you’ll probably find yourself wondering exactly what sort of film you’re watching. Superficially, it’s a grounded and gritty tale, set in Ireland, telling the story of Mike (Tim Creed), haunted by the recent death of his sister who took her own life, leaving Mike himself traumatised from having found her body. He owes money to the thuggish Cyril (Jimmy Smallhorne), and he and his low-grade mates take the opportunity to use a long-abandoned house as a cannabis-growing facility as a means of generating some much-needed hard cash. None of them are initially especially troubled by a door in the house that just won’t open…

Gateway initially presents as a routine low-budget crime caper, focusing on Mike and his crew and introducing us to their various financial and personal dilemmas. It’s slow, not hugely compelling and doesn’t seem likely to be heading anywhere particularly interesting. Fortunately, things start to pick up at the house, which possesses a strangely disquieting atmosphere. The ’door’ itself is nothing special, but when it opens, it starts to exert a strange influence on the group, and whatever is behind it begins to tear them and their uneasy friendship apart. Then there are the mysterious, black-clad, wordless strangers who drift into the house…

Gateway is nothing if not a slow-burn experience. It’s sparse and minimalist, with performances with unusual naturalism, but if you’re looking for eerie visuals or jump scares, you’ll need to take yourself off elsewhere. It’s a film about atmosphere and building a palpable sense of dread as there’s something going in in the house that’s unspeakable and unsettling and ultimately inexplicable and unexplained. Its sense of growing menace is underscored by an effective sound design characterised by creaks and rattles and discordant whispering combined with a quirky score from Tony Langlois.

Gateway is the dictionary definition of the sort of genre film that catches you unaware, sending you in one direction before quietly nudging you into somewhere deeper and darker. Some may find the film underdeveloped visually, but director Niall Owens has turned a low budget to his advantage by crafting a film that asks its audience to do a lot of the heavy lifting by soaking up the film’s slightly off-centre narrative and other-worldly atmosphere along with its cast of resolutely unstarry characters and actors. An intriguing first effort.

GATEWAY is out now on Shudder.

CADE: THE TORTURED CROSSING

Cade Altier (Neil Breen) funds the renovation of a dilapidated asylum and quickly discovers the building is a front for a government-funded human trafficking/gene harvesting operation. Cade hopes to put an end to the corruption by training the patients to become mystical warriors to overthrow their captors, but his twin brother, Cale, has other ideas…

Most of director Neil Breen’s hallmarks are present and correct. Nonsensical dialogue, strange things happening for no reason at all, footage being re-used multiple times, and shots lingering so long that they start to feel uncomfortable. However, the actors here all add their very own sparkle, too. Many pause mid-sentence as if they’re waiting for someone off-screen to change cue cards, lines are delivered in completely inappropriate tones, and others seem to be unaware of how conversations work. On the technical side of things, a complete reliance on green screen (or ‘Breen screen’) leads to a whole catalogue of unique visuals – a man drives a car while the scenery doesn’t move, still backgrounds don’t change between wide shots and close-ups, and awkwardly-composed shots often find the participants dwarfed by inanimate objects and, sometimes, each other.

Quirky eccentricities are par for the course with Neil Breen’s films, and those who have followed his output over the years will be right at home. As incomprehensible as ever, The Tortured Crossing is a four-star Breen film but would struggle to hit two by any other metric. Having said that, there’s more than enough passion, heart and authenticity to make it well worth seeking out if you’re a fan of outsider cinema.

CADE: THE TORTURED CROSSING is currently only available to buy on DVD from https://cade-crossing.com/

ARCADIAN

The world has ended (for unclear reasons), and life goes on (for all the usual human-motivated reasons) as Nic Cage raises two teenage boys on the verge of manhood. It’s a world where doors must be bolted and windows shuttered after sundown, no matter how powerful the romantic lures of the nearby Rose Farm are to Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) or how tiresome it all is to thoughtful genius Joseph (Jaeden Martell). Arcadian opens in a bleak apocalypse, which soon gives way to a kind of survivalist cosy catastrophe, but one with an ever-present lurking sense of threat, which feels all the more menacing for seeing the fragile human community which could be destroyed.

It’s nice to see Cage playing the kind, if strict, dad role, which seems to come naturally to him, although if you only want to see him in films where he is ‘doing a Nic Cage’ you will be disappointed. But really, this film belongs to the teen leads, who are engaging and likeable almost in spite of themselves since they spend a good chunk of the run time being… well, teenage boys (and we all know how annoying they can be).

Sadly, the slow build of tension and the unseen sense of menace is aggressively jettisoned out of the nearest window as soon as the menace is fully seen, and what was a slow burn contemplation of life after the end of everything becomes something a lot more akin to Tremors 2, but without the laughs (no shade on Tremors 2 intended, but they are very different films). In spite of the pivot, this is still a nice post-apocalypse to visit, but we definitely wouldn’t want to stay forever.