Review Category: Movie

Werewolves are real, and lycanthrope hunter Michael (Justin Hayward) passes down the last ever silver bullet to his son, Everett (John Black). When his father is killed on a hunt, Everett and his friend Connor (Stefan Chanyaem) must continue the fight, but as the only generation of hunters without the one thing that can kill the beast. They team up with troubled shapeshifter Maya (Charlotte Olivia), who’s looking to discover her place in the world following her mother’s disappearance. Maya’s friend Luke (Jathis Sivanesan) is a folklore blogger helping her on her quest and Everett and Connor are keen to learn how to deal with their hunt without their most potent tool.

Directed and co-written (alongside John Black) by Seb Cox, Are We Monsters is an interesting feature. Playing more as a coming-of-age tale than a horror film, it’s a dialogue-heavy movie that manages to hold the interest throughout. The woodland location adds an authentic feel and oozes atmosphere.

Are We Monsters is a very different entry into the werewolf genre and boldly, it features a unique creature design, something more nightmarish than anything we’ve seen before. A blend of folk tale inspirations, both classical and urban, it’s a memorable design that is seriously creepy. The CGI effects are impressive enough for a low-budget indie production so that it’s not let down in that aspect. There are also some nice animated sequences, which add an extra layer to the narrative and enhance the folk horror angle, while also saving the budget that elaborate creations would cost.

The cast excels with the lengthy dialogue and there are few humorous moments to lighten the mood, but it can get heavy going as it goes along. Using werewolves as a metaphor for growing up isn’t something new, but Are We Monsters does a decent job of portraying a young woman in turmoil. It even provides a whole new mythology to the Lycan curse.

This low budget indie film has a gritty realism thanks to its stretched purse strings.

Marjorie (Laura Montgomery Bennett) is a social worker who has just lost her latest case. The youngster, a drug addict, killed herself in front of her. The police have brought in a new child they found on the streets. Nathan (Lennon Leckey) isn’t a typical runaway, though. He was discovered hunched over a dog and covered in its blood. Marjorie takes Nathan to a safe house and vows to give him the best support possible. Unfortunately, Nathan’s tastes get the better of him…

Many of the actors in Boy #5 are performing on camera for the first time, but writer/director Eric Steele has lucked out as their seeming awkwardness gives their portrayals a naturalist feel. The film depicts the way the social system can struggle with the people put under their care. It’s an extreme premise, but Marjorie’s internal battle with her guilt over the death of her previous youngster. Her reluctance to seek available counselling is indicative of the culture of burying emotions and getting on with things. She finds it hard to fill in the case report of the dead child, deleting her words as if trying to turn back time. The fear of being forced to ‘talk to someone’ leads her to horrific actions as well as going too far to appease the bloodthirsty Nathan.

Ben Ripley’s moody cinematography brilliantly captures the grimy side of Manchester’s nightlife, from dolled-up clubbers to scurrying rats. This contrasts with the clean and ‘safe’ surroundings of the house he’s put in. For a first feature (for most involved), Boy #5 might be a little ragged around the edges, but it’s a compelling drama and mixes the fantastical with realism.

Lily (Tori Kostic) has run away from her abusive father with her boyfriend, Neil (Jarius Carey). She becomes separated from Neil when he heads off to find some water but doesn’t come back. The pair kept their phones turned off so they can’t be tracked, and he took Lily’s with him. She wanders about looking for him and stumbles on a house on the outskirts of the woods. When she asks to use the phone, the owner, Evan (William Kircher), reacts oddly. He is convinced Lily is his own renegade daughter, Katherine (Meghan Hanako). Evan is clearly not a well man. Over the following weeks, Evan’s overbearing ‘fathering’ includes forcing Lily to train on a treadmill and locking her in the cellar or her room. Does Evan have a more sinister agenda though?

Captive is a tense thriller that throws the viewer almost straight into the story. Writer/director Savvas Christou uses flashbacks to show us the different sorts of abuse Ivy and Katherine had to put up with their respective fathers. William Kircher is terrifyingly brilliant as Evan, the delusional father who is so distraught at his daughter leaving (and his wife dying in a car crash) that he convinces himself she is Lily. We’re never quite sure of the extent of Evan’s motives and how far the abuse will go, provoking some genuinely uncomfortable moments.

There’s a slow pace to the narrative, which works in the film’s favour as Ivy finds Katherine’s diary and begins to learn how to cope with the situation and perhaps formulate an escape. Our empathy shifts several times between both characters since Evan is clearly having mental health issues. Being mostly a two-hander, Kostic and Kircher have to be consistently good, so it’s great to be able to say that they are fantastic. The dynamic between the pair is electric and leads the way brilliantly to its startling climax.

Captive is a disturbing, claustrophobic thriller that packs a punch.

This outlandish Japanese film is mindbogglingly brilliant, shot in a single take on a smartphone (broken only for the title card).

Kato (Kazunari Tosa) is shutting up his café for the night and heads up to his apartment, leaving waitress Aya (Riko Fujitani) to finish the last bits of cleaning. Kato also plays the guitar and needs to practice for a gig he has booked in a bar but can’t find his plectrum. Suddenly, his computer monitor springs to life, and it’s Kato looking back at himself. He tells him not only where his plectrum is, but that the monitor and the TV in the café are connected, but with a two-minute delay. So he heads downstairs once more to have the exact same conversation, only from a different perspective. This baffling situation grows and gets increasingly convoluted when his friends turn up and plan bigger ways to test the phenomenon.

The debut feature from Junta Yamaguchi is fun and a meticulously executed spectacle. The concept alone is intriguing, but filming as one single shot takes some doing. As things progress and the wandering camera follows the characters through the situation, it feels increasingly like a finely-tuned stage farce. Brian Rix would have loved to do this, only with some trouser-dropping.

Naturally, as things progress and the characters turn both monitors on each other, creating what has become known as a ‘Droste effect’ with countless iterations of the future (and extending the two minutes), things get ever more complicated. Characters and props drift in and out of the narrative as in life, and each element becomes important to the outcome when things get out of hand.

Yamaguchi is clearly someone to watch as he expertly directs the actors with precision. Kudos must go to writer Makoto Ueda for coming up with such an astounding scenario. Sometimes cinema just has to be enjoyable, and that’s what Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is.

Things are not normal in a quiet suburban American town. People are behaving strangely. Casual acquaintances are trying to kiss people. Mac (Erik Bloomquist), his wife Jane (Carlee Avers), and family friend Kim (Clare Foley) have noticed and when their neighbour Bill (Tony Todd) turns up at the door and attacks Marc, they overpower him and tie him up in the basement. He tells them he’s been ‘changed’, made better and in a deep sense of serenity.

Written (with Matt Giannini) and directed by Michael Mongillo, The Changed takes the Body Snatchers premise to new regions. Instead of the fear of Communism, it appears the enemy here is individualism, something that is becoming increasingly rare in some places. There’s no time wasted getting into things as from the first scene, the characters have started noting that people are different. Things progress just as quick, with the action veering from Body Snatchers to the siege scenario of Night of the Living Dead.

The biggest problem with The Changed is the dialogue is so contrived that it loses all sense of drama and descends into parody. Which is a shame, as the players give it what they can. The legend that is Tony Todd delivers his lines with a hushed baritone manner and is the most effective part of the film. Unfortunately, despite all the talking, the film never really goes anywhere and the climax will likely elicit groans rather than cheers.

Before we start, we need to issue a massive warning for viewers of The Unburied that there’s a sequence set in a slaughterhouse that will genuinely cause upset. We won’t be describing it, however.

Struggling to pay his debts, Maxi (Demián Salomón) receives a call that his ‘father’ has died. He returns to his former home, a sprawling mansion where he and many other boys were brought up, to hopefully be in line for some inheritance. He finds that Aldo – his ‘papa’ – is still at the table where he choked to death. Being back in the old surroundings brings back troubling memories for Maxi, and the traditions of his family that need to be conducted are not something he is comfortable with.

Made in Argentina by writer/director Alejandro Cohen Arazi, The Unburied is a dense, multifaceted film. Playing as the prodigal son, Maxi has once tried to distance himself from the bizarre situation that he faces. His new life has allowed him to forget the rituals that caused him to flee in the first place, but the longer he is there, the more they come back to haunt him. Traditions can be a good thing, but we often see how damaging they can be, and the family rites that Maxi must face are the most destructive of all.

Despite looking fantastic and well played, it’s difficult to like The Unburied as there are no real characters that we want to root for.

It’s no surprise that the last 18 months or so has had an effect on people, and virus stories and lockdown films will probably appear more and more. Isolation is a collection of six shorts that were made under the restrictions we’ve been put under throughout the pandemic. They’ve been brought together in this anthology and, like many that have come before it, some sections are better than others.

The virus that links these films isn’t Covid, but something even more virulent, but the situations are instantly recognisable if exaggerated. The opening segment, written, directed by, and starring cult indie legend Larry Fessenden is also the most powerful. It opens with shots of a deserted New York – something that would never be possible in other circumstances. As he succumbs to fever, we’re treated to a stop-motion filming technique that’s really disorientating. It concludes with a heartbreakingly poignant moment.

Other subjects include the crackpot 5G theories (a short by Andrew Kasch, which at least has a fun payoff). Bobby Roe’s segment Pacific Northwest features some fantastic child acting from his children Sunny and Bodhi. London-based short It’s Inside covers more conspiracies and how they can alter the mindset of those who believe and propagate them. It’s also the goriest, with some genuinely horrific images.

There are some who will find Isolation heavy going and too emotional, particularly if they’ve lost someone to the virus. It could even be too soon to fully process the short stories included in the film, but they’re a reflection of what people have had to go through. It’s a grim, often disturbing watch and very well made. Approach with caution.

We all know people who join exclusive golf clubs tend to be self-centred idiots looking to status rather than real issues. The club at the centre of this high-class community has just installed a new fertiliser that allows the grass to be played on even when the rest of the town is full of thick Canadian snow. We all know where this is going, right? Young André (Iani Bédard) has been lumbered with his baby sister and must try to protect her when their mother comes home from work and turns into a rampaging flesh-eater. He teams up with a survival nut security guard Dan (Roy Dupuis) to escape the assault on the residents of Peacock Island.

A very different type of zombie film, this French-Canadian production has an eco-message but doesn’t get bogged down with it, preferring to get straight into the neck-munching. There is an alt-right radio DJ who gives the filmmakers more chance for some satire. Writer/director Julien Knafo opts for fast-moving zombies but gives them some algae growing on them. For the most part, it’s an amusing and well-made movie, but don’t be expecting a gore-filled romp.

There’s a lot of heart in the story, though. From André reluctantly looking after his sister, to Dan’s resistance at accepting his daughter is a zombie. Amusingly, he puts her head in a cage so she can’t bite anyone and when her arm falls off, they carry it around to open her mobile phone (the only one they have access to with that’s charged).

It might not be the all-out zombie film you want it to be, but Brain Freeze is fun and action-packed.

BRAIN FREEZE is released in the UK and Ireland on September 6th