Review Category: Movie

Written and directed by Fionn and Toby Watts, Playhouse is a brooding, captivating haunted house (well, castle) film that shows the great potential of the Watts brothers.

Jack Travis (William Holstead) is a playwright who has bought a grand old Scottish castle for him and his belligerent daughter, Bee (Grace Courtney). Jack is planning on using the castle to create an immersive walk-through play. What he doesn’t realise is that the castle has a morbid history that will soon take over his mindset. When neighbours Callum and Samantha (James Rottger and Julie Higginson) get involved, and things get much worse.

The Watts brothers make splendid use of the glorious location, and the castle itself – actually just a very large, impressive house – is suitably creepy, with brick-lined spiral staircases and stories of bricked-in bodies and tortured spirits. Andy Toovey’s cinematography adds plenty to the atmosphere, too, with some spectacular shots, particularly towards the climax.  The few visual effects on show may be a tad generic, but that – and some of the more histrionic acting – can be forgiven due to the low budget. That said, it’s certainly an engaging story and offers much for fans who like a haunted house film with a difference.

Playhouse is Fionn and Toby’s debut feature and certainly shows plenty of flair, we’ll certainly be interested to see what they come up with next.

“No film justifies hurting others, does it?” It’s a stark question that confronts a filmmaker fixated on murder poses in the pitch-black horror comedy I Blame Society. Gillian is a would-be cinematic auteur, pushing back against industry rejections and the ignorance of those that refuse to recognise her talents. She’s matter-of-fact about the obvious solution to her exclusion: she’ll combine her interest in making movies with her commitment to killing those in her life that deserve to die. When Gillian recognises that full-disclosure of her plans risks alarming those around her, she chooses a more secretive path. One that has the advantage of ensuring that both witnesses and critics are silenced.

I Blame Society is an evident labour of love for Gillian Wallace Horvat, who co-writes, directs and takes the kind of leading role which sees her character feature in every scene. Her on-screen representation of her filmmaker-self is unsparingly, delightfully spiteful. Her fictional equivalent is a bullying narcissist who’s devoid of empathy and blind to the needs of others. Some of those working in the real-world film industry might guess her character’s occupation based on that description alone,  but her shocking behaviour is as much a consequence of her frustration with being blocked at every turn as it is a reflection of any innate character flaws.

What makes the film’s macabre comedy work so well is that the character of Gillian is both guileless and completely devoid of moral integrity. The effect of this stark honesty is that everyone who is able to escape her attention runs for their lives, her boyfriend included. Gillian meanwhile ensures that her own life unfolds under the watchful gaze of the camera lens. She frames the intimacies of sex and of murder with the same attentive cinematographer’s eye, narrating the drama as it unfolds.

This is an inventive and highly unusual satire on the celebrity culture of screen media, voyeurism and the business of making movies. As well as having its moments of gore, brutality and callous gallows humour, the film is bursting with meta references to the craft of movie making and the tropes and travesties of horror cinema. “Going meta” can be a mood killer, but thankfully there’s wit and intelligence in the film’s caustic reflections on art and culture.

As the body count rises, Gillian relies on the nihilistic logic of the sociopath to justify her actions. If anything, or anyone, is to blame for the loss of life that her film requires, it’s clearly the obstacles to her success that other people erect. The tiny budget and the need to rely on authentic ‘selfie’ filming motifs, makes the movie feel small scale. But the social critique in I Blame Society is far more scathing, more perceptive and infinitely better crafted than the overwrought crassness of Natural Born Killers: a movie with which it shares many of the same preoccupations.

Release Date: April 19th

Chaos Walking is one of those painfully frustrating Hollywood films that takes an original premise, throws an obscene amount of money at it and then butchers it for approximately 120 minutes.

The premise in this case is supplied by Patrick Ness, author of The Knife of Never Letting Go, on which the film is based. A few hundred years into the future, humans have fled the now uninhabitable Earth and have settled on the aptly named New World, a planet rich with land and resources but with one slight hitch. On New World, the unfiltered thoughts of men are visible to all, swirling around their heads in the form of purple clouds known as The Noise.

We open on Prentisstown, an all-male New World settlement, ruled by the eponymous Mayor Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen in his signature villainous role). Here, we meet teenager and main protagonist Todd Hewitt (played by Tom Holland, who is perhaps the only thing worthy of praise here), who is struggling to embrace life in the all-male colony. The action begins when a spaceship crashes on the outskirts of town and Todd meets its sole survivor, a young woman by the name of Viola (Daisy Ridley). Mysteriously, Viola has no Noise and the men of Prentisstown are immediately suspicious. After a few intimidating conversations with Mikkelsen’s sinister Prentiss, Viola and Todd go on the run.

Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland try their hardest to give Chaos Walking some credibility but there is not much that can be done with the cliché-laden script to lift it above YA fan-fiction status. The film’s attempts to ride the post-Hunger Games wave of dystopian fiction are astoundingly blatant and if this were 2013, they might have worked, but now, such attempts feel staggeringly outdated. This obsoleteness is due, in part, to the film’s tumultuous production process. It began filming in 2017 but after poor test screenings in 2018 and a delay to accommodate Holland and Ridley’s other commitments, reshoots commenced in 2019. Cue a global pandemic, a change in director and umpteen script redrafts, Chaos Walking arrived approximately 2 years later than scheduled as something of a narrative mess.

Each character, story arc, and narrative beat feels derivative of another flick in the YA-dystopian genre. Even something as original as the Noise is engineered to feel cliched. What has the potential to generate a relevant commentary on the male psyche becomes a vehicle for Tom Holland’s character to mentally exclaim, ‘pretty girl!’ and ‘kiss her!’ every time he sees Ridley’s Viola. It’s bordering on infantile. What is perhaps most frustrating about Chaos Walking, though, is the undeniable potential it has. With such a stellar cast, unique premise, and eye-watering budget you cannot help but wonder how it all went so wrong. This could have been the beginning of an epic and original trilogy. Instead, we are left scratching our heads over a clumsy and derivative disappointment.

Chaos Walking is available for premium rental at home on all digital platforms from April 2nd .

Sam (Sawyer Spielberg – yes, his son) and Rylie (Malin Barr) have a weekend of camping planned, but are forced to move by the farmer upon whose property they pitched. Even more annoyingly, their car battery if flat so they have to trek through the woods to find civilisation or at least cell phone reception. They do find a nice big house, and the owner, Karen (Barbara Kingsley), despite being elderly and a little strange is very hospitable and offers to put them up for the night until a neighbour can give them a jumpstart. During the night, though, things take a turn for the sinister as Sam develops a craving for Karen’s steaks and the old woman’s son – an overweight, catatonic man who just sits watching vintage cartoons – starts behaving even more peculiarly.

The debut feature from writer/director Devereux Milburn, Honeydew is a disturbing and unsettling trip into backwoods horror that takes its time getting to the meat of the story, but is full of very uneasy moments. Karen, the old lady, could have come straight from Eraserhead with her odd behaviour, but that’s not to say that it’s derivative. The cinematography by Dan Kennedy (who co-wrote the original story) is superb, often incorporating split-screen to see two differing shots, and at times has a ‘70s grindhouse sheen to it.

What’s going on isn’t hard to guess, but fortunately, Milburn manages to keep a few surprises for the audience. Some setups work better than others, but on the whole, the twisted delights on offer will satisfy the hunger of a horror-savvy viewer.

Release Date: Out Now (Digital)