Review Category: Movie

The Control Group is a confusing film that aims high and falls some way short, entangled in a web of its own intricate making. Not only does it feel that way while watching as the multiple plot threads meander along, you also sense the cast themselves are somewhat baffled by the events they’re asked to portray.

 

Now, there is nothing wrong with a little mystery and ambiguity, and The Control Group certainly starts off confidently, withholding any information not absolutely necessary to the early scenes. With only the memory of a party the previous night, five college students wake up in an abandoned asylum that appears, initially at least, to be inescapable. As they explore each begins to hallucinate as masked, beaked figures pursue them relentlessly. All quite interesting. But then the film makes a strange side-step to reveal this is all part of some secret government conspiracy, with the group as the chosen guinea pigs.

 

What follows is an exposition heavy narrative that ties itself in knots trying to offer justification for what you’re watching on screen. The various department heads behind the experiment are at each other’s throats for the entirety as each strives for control over a situation that very quickly gets out of hand. This “scientific” approach sends The Control Group down a much more formulaic path as that initial interest peters out into a film more concerned with splattery violence as various nasties meet heavily armed military types.

 

Much of this excess and unnecessary padding detracts from what is essentially a decent horror movie. The performances are fine on the whole, with Brad Dourif turning on his most potent version of an unhinged doctor, and you do find yourself drawn into the character’s dramas. Aside from some occasionally ropey effects, the gore and violence are passable, being no more or less than what you tend to expect from low-budget horror such as this.

 

So, a decent little horror ruined by an obsession with over-complication? Well, yes. What could have been an enjoyable, if largely formulaic genre film becomes an increasingly frustrating and tiresome experience as it progresses. The asylum setting, and the need to escape it or die, is so well used you can’t blame the filmmakers for trying to invent new and ingenious storylines, but with The Control Group they have pushed the script one or two twists and turns too far.

 

Even a bloody nod to Dario Argento’s Suspiria can’t save The Control Group in its final moments.

 

THE CONTROL GROUP / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: PETER HURD / SCREENPLAY: LOGAN GION, PETER HURD / STARRING: BRAD DOURIF, ROSS DESTICHE, JENNA ENEMY / RELEASE DATE: UK RELEASE TBA

Ever wondered about those strange metallic noises you hear in the street? Ever been unsettled by some random, haunting shouting late at night? Ever pondered on the bizarreness of how a book comes to rest on a bus shelter roof? Wonder no more as the likely culprit is the Clanker Man; a strange, secretive role now revealed for the first time in Ben Steiner’s new mockumentary.

 

Terry is frustrated with his job. Trained only in the fundamentals of his role, and armed solely with his trademark clanker – a kind of shortened crow bar – he is being forced to operate entirely out of his comfort zone. Primarily responsible for banging and clanging of pipes and railings, cut backs have forced him into the mysterious world of “single glove on railings”, a job for a specialist, and Terry is at breaking point.

 

Eschewing the shock and visceral horror of previous works The Stomach and The Flea, Steiner has presented a witty, intelligently observed mini-drama in Clanker Man, and it is an enjoyable, if all to brief, insight into a world that, at some point, has affected us all. Wholly simple of premise, Clanker Man works due to its complete relatability – we’ve all heard those strange noises at night – and its absolute believability. You buy into Terry’s story, you sense his frustration, and you empathise with his desperation in trying to do a good job against the odds.

 

Most akin to a sketch from The Fast Show, Clanker Man demonstrates Steiner’s more approachable, playful side. The Stomach and The Flea showed his love of the surreal and the horrific, of his taste for the macabre and the gruesome. Clanker Man is Steiner simply having fun. If you hear a strange clanging noise on your lunch hour, or have a few minutes to wait for the next bus, seek out Clanker Man – you’ll be very glad you did.

 

CLANKER MAN / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: BEN STEINER / SCREENPLAY: BEN STEINER, ELI SILVERMAN / STARRING: ELI SILVERMAN, SIMON MEACOCK / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW

Renowned Cockney filmmaker and former Mr Madonna Guy Ritchie returns with his take on the classic oft-filmed English mythological tale. While the flashy visuals, fast cutting and idiosyncratic lads banter will appeal to some, the result is less impressive.

In the prologue, we’re shown how Uther Pendragon (Bana) defeats the mages, who are threatening the kingdom with their magic and giant elephants. There’s still a threat, though, and Uther sends his young child away to safety prior to being murdered, leaving his brother Vortigern (Law) as King. The young boy grows up in a brothel, learning to fend for himself while squirrelling away as much money as he can. That is until the waters in the lake subside suddenly revealing the king’s sword Excalibur stuck fast in a stone. Fearing the prophecy that whoever pulls the sword is the rightful heir to the throne, Vortigern rounds up all eligible males to have a good tug. This is where Arthur, as he has been christened by his prostitute family, comes in. Reluctantly, he takes his chance and the scimitar slips easily from its stone sheath. Sensing a revolution, Vortigern attempts to do away with his nephew and rival once and for all.

Following the classic tale fairly faithfully (giant elephants and other beasts notwithstanding), Ritchie’s version of the Arthurian origin is as hip and sassy as one would expect. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any good. Utilising his trademark moves of slow motion/sped-up fighting and cutting away to see a story play out between the dialogue – not to mention numerous laddish ‘quips’, it’s a frantic visual assault. It’s almost halfway through the film before we get to a scene that doesn’t appear to be purely montage.

Charlie Hunnam is a likeable Arthur, think a low-rent Tom Hardy (minus the mumbling) and Jude Law is a superb pantomime Vortigern, hardly looking a day older than his appearance in the prologue that takes place a considerable time earlier judging by how grown up Arthur has become. Sadly, the fast pace and lack of characterisation don’t give us much chance to form a true dislike for him, despite us seeing him kill members of his own family as a sacrifice to the slithery water creature living in the bowels of Camelot and pull a Reservoir Dogs moment on one of Arthur’s allies. He’s certainly no Joffrey. Which brings us to the obvious comparison, Ritchie’s legend owes more to HBO’s series than recognised mythology. We even get Littlefinger himself Aiden Gillen with his one-note delivery as Goosefat Bill. The less said about the trick casting of OK! Magazine cover star and former kickballer David Beckham the better.

While there’s plenty of magic and spectacular effects, Merlin himself is conspicuous by his absence (although he is given a reference early on), no doubt should the planned sequels come to fruition, both he and Lancelot will be making an appearance. Astrid Bergès-Frisbey is an enigmatic addition to the gang as the mage who aids Arthur and shows him his true path (which involves a traumatic visit to Skull Island – huh, we mean the Darklands). Her delivery is at odds with the rest of the fast-paced repartee but definitely adds a few infodumps. Best of the bunch is Djimon Hounsou’s Bedivere, who is commanding every moment he’s on screen.

The quick-witted quips and gags fall flat more than they hit, but will certainly keep an undemanding audience smiling. The zippy pace and overblown fight scenes (when you can actually work out what’s going on) are also enough to be entertaining, but ultimately, there’s something less than grand about the proceedings after you get past the giant elephants. As a reimagining of a story that’s so well known, it’s not a disaster, but the overuse of the same cinematic tricks Ritchie relies on to make it ‘cool’ becomes very tired; what worked for Holmes doesn’t necessarily translate to Arthur.

KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD / CERT: 12A / DIRECTOR: GUY RITCHIE / SCREENPLAY: JOBY HAROLD, GUY RITCHIE, LIONEL WIGRAM / STARRING: CHARLIE HUNNAM, JUDE LAW, DJIMON HOUNSOU, ERIC BANA, ASTRID BERGÈS-FRISBEY, AIDAN GILLEN / RELEASE DATE: MAY 19TH

Expected Rating: 7 out of 10
Actual Rating:

By reputation, Chinese science fiction cinema is best known for big-scale, set-piece, effects-heavy spectacle. But a new breed of filmmakers have come to focus on lower-budget, independent genre movies that prioritise high-concepts and immersive storytelling over monsters and explosions. In Ren Chao Wang’s debut feature The End of the Lonely Island, an exemplar of this new approach, the director crafts an enigmatic and captivating tale that unfolds in the dying days of planet Earth.

Opening with a downbeat, and colour de-saturated, sequence following scientist Lin Xia (Xi Liao) as she begins a race-against-time to reach an isolated island, following instructions provided by a disembodied voice in her earpiece. As the film flips back and forward in time, Xia recalls her previous trip to the island in the company of her lover Zhi Yuan (Duo Duo Tian). He was eager to join an interstellar space mission to the Centaurus planetary system, with the ‘Bi’an’ (“another shore”) project, and the Shenzhou 20 starship, overruling her objections. Back on the island many years after the launch, Xia is driven to complete a vital, final mission, before a black-clad SWAT team can hunt her down.

 

Over the course of the hour-long running time, Wang gradually fills in the blanks on his initially incomplete and disjointed storyline, including Xia’s work on the discredited TESS problem-solving AI and the events that appear to seal humanity’s fate on Earth, just as the Shenzhou spacecraft runs into trouble. For so brief a film, this comes with a meticulous and intricate plot.

 

Wang struggles to direct action scenes (the one fight sequence is clunky), but he has a sharp cinematographer’s eye, a confidence in handling non-linear storytelling, and is a clear adherent of the less-is-more school of oblique understatement. This is a movie infused with reflective melancholy. Wang’s script introduces a wide canvas of themes, including humanity’s perception of the risks of exploration, the place of Earth in the vast firmament of the universe, the essence of artificial intelligence, and the nature of fallibility and of culpability. There’s more going on here than can possibly be accommodated in an hour-long drama, but the sense of ambition is to be applauded and, despite the overcrowding of ideas, this still succeeds in being a movie of genuine substance.

 

Held together by a singularly, focused performance by Xi Liao as humanity’s steely, would-be saviour, The End of the Lonely Island is an exercise in extraordinary filmmaking, in every sense of the word.

 

THE END OF THE LONELY ISLAND / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENWRITER: REN CHAO WANG / STARRING: XI LIAO, DUO DUO TIAN, LEI LI, REN CHAO WANG / RELEASE DATE: UK RELEASE TBA

Described as a twisted “sci-fi noir” take on Alice in Wonderland, Keir Burrows’ Anti Matter is a thriller that draws on movie influences as diverse as The Fly, Memento and Flatliners to deliver an intriguing exploration of the themes of matter transference and of memory. Oxford PhD student Ana participates in an experiment to build an artificial wormhole, volunteering to pass through the prototype her small research team has built in the laboratory.

Ana is bemused when she wakes in her flat unable to remember how the transfer ended. She finds her colleagues (her will-we-won’t-we long-term friend Nathan, and acerbic goth geek Liv) are evasive and far from reassuring. To her growing disquiet, Ana finds herself unable to memorise new experiences and discovers that her life is sliding oddly out of kilter as she wrestles with a growing sense of disconnection from the world.

 

The first fifteen minutes of Anti Matter are a breathless sprint through technobabble, as Burrows sets up his premise and assembles the scientific trio. Little of this geeky gabble is important: even in low-budget, high-concept films part of the contract with the viewer is buying-in to an implausible conceit in order to enjoy the fun that follows. With the McGuffin let loose, Burrows slows the pace a little, allowing his character-driven drama room to breathe and skilfully building up an atmosphere of disquiet and disassociation.

 

Shooting in the early morning and late at night, Burrows makes good use of the underpopulated environments of the university for filming locations. He also inserts his cast and crew into a real-life political demonstration in the city to give his picture a sense of scale, for free. There’s also an unexpected, and quite impressive, chase sequence in which Ana pursues the mysterious figure who burgles her flat; an intruder who wears a creepy, bloodied monkey mask.

 

Much of the success of the film rests on Figueroa’s keenly judged performance as Ana, a high-flying researcher whose confidence disintegrates as she begins to doubt her sanity, and the honesty of those around her. As she struggles to uncover the truth, the audience share her experience of the break-up of linear time, of the blurring between dreaming and being awake, and of her unreliable recollections of the recent past. Carson is good too as the brilliant but blunt Liv (short for ‘Olivia’) who provides the technical inspiration and unsettles Ana further by ingratiating herself with her boyfriend-to-be. Yolanda Vazquez also delivers a sympathetic performance as Ana’s US-based mother, who worries, through a series of transatlantic phone calls, about her daughter’s disintegration.

 

Despite its daft premise, Anti Matter offers a cerebral and intelligent take on what is a genre perennial: something going amiss in a newly-developed matter transporter. There are plot strands that don’t really go anywhere (a GCHQ investigation into computer hijacking; video surveillance by weirdo police officers; animal rights conspirators), and the running time could do with a slight trim, but the core story delivers a well-rendered, slow-burn paranoia thriller, populated by recognisable characters, and with a strong concluding twist. All of that stuff works: and, in the end, that’s surely what matters.

 

ANTI MATTER / CERT:  TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENWRITER: KEIR BURROWS / STARRING: YAIZA FIGUEROA, PHILIPPA CARSON, TOM BARBER-DUFFY, NOAH MAXWELL CLARKE, JAMES FARRAR / RELEASE: UK RELEASE, TBC

Shooting Clerks is a partial biopic of director Kevin Smith, telling the story of his early years and his inspirations as a filmmaker, leading to the creation of his cult comedy Clerks and its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

 

The story takes a little while to engage with since the opening section is rather disjointed as it jumps through Smith’s childhood and touches upon the films he has loved since he was young, all of which culminates with his time at film school in Vancouver. However, once the preparation for making Clerks gets underway and its filming begins, everything the film is trying to convey becomes clear.

 

While principally a meticulously reconstructed tale of the creation of Smith’s debut feature, Shooting Clerks is also a love letter to independent filmmaking itself. Making movies is not specifically a career or a way to amass money or glory, but rather a calling. Those who undertake it do so to sate a burning need to produce something original, one that can only be satisfied by not just talking, thinking or planning, but simply getting out there and actually doing it. The drive to create and refusal to let anything stand in your way is a sentiment many can identify with, and one the film carries at its core. It also deals with the less romantic aspects of the process, such as problems caused by casting your friends and in particular the occasional necessity of bumping them to lesser roles if it will ultimately improve the finished product.

 

The largely British cast acquit themselves well in terms of mimicked accents, and while they don’t all much resemble the people they portray, the interactions keep it clear who is who and prevents things getting confusing. The film hides its limited resources well, craftily dismissing potential accusations of poor production values by mimicking the grainy monochrome of its subject, which also affords it a slightly surreal metafictional tone. The feeling is enhanced by a plethora of cameos such as Smith cohorts the Comic Book Men appearing as comic store employees, Marilyn Ghigliotti (Clerks’ Veronica) as a critic who first reviews the film, and even Smith himself as an overtly Canadian journalist. It even has Richard Linklater periodically crop up in recreated TV interviews like an indie overlord, acting as some electronic spirit guide espousing the wisdom that Smith needs at that particular moment. Additionally, numerous events pointedly echo moments from Smith’s films – such as his girlfriend dumping him by letter with a prominent use of ‘callow’ – reinforcing the autobiographical inspiration of Clerks’ genesis and just how much its creation was a happy coalescence of unlikely circumstances.

 

Once it gets going, Shooting Clerks is a funny and charming story that remains engaging even if you’re already familiar with parts of it. In watching the film, you get the impression that making it was as much a communal effort from a group of friends as Clerks itself was, and leaves you with the same sense of satisfaction at what lo-fi filmmaking can achieve.

 

SHOOTING CLERKS / CERT: TBA / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: CHRISTOPHER DOWNIE / STARRING: MARK FROST, HARRY MITCHELL, JAY BOOTON, KIT ALEXANDER, TOM SULLIVAN, CHRIS BAIN, ASHLEY GRAZIANO, STEPHANIE PRICE, MATTHEW POSTLETHWAITE, BRETT MURRAY / RELEASE DATE: JULY 19TH

After the beautiful but unsatisfying Prometheus, director Ridley Scott serves up a new company of victims for the Alien he unleashed upon the universe back in 1979.

 

After an accident wakes the crew of the colony ship Covenant from hibernation, they discover a mysterious signal featuring a blurry, but clearly human form, from a region of space where no humans should be. Investigating, they find a planet that appears even more suitable for colonization than their original destination. Led by Oram (Crudup) and Daniels (Katherine Waterson) they explore the planet only to find a lot more than they bargained for, including new, horrifying evolutions of the Xenomorph’s lifecycle and clues to the fates of the survivors of the Prometheus; Dr Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and the severed head of the synthetic David (Michael Fassbender).

 

As you would expected, Scott expertly reveals the horrors that await the Covenant crew with practiced skill, ratcheting up the tension as the audience knows full well the nightmares in wait for the crew. That’s not to say that they are helpless, or at least not as helpless as a the crew of the Prometheus ended up. There’s a lot less maddeningly stupid decisions made this time around, making the group a lot more relatable and likeable. For the most part, the group (all couples) are well sketched too, with more time obviously being spent with those who last the longest (we won’t say who). One of the nicest surprises is Danny McBride’s solid performance in a serious role as the Covenant’s pilot. Waterson makes for an engaging heroine, proactive but in a different enough way from Ripley.  Fassbender delights as the android Walter, with a different accent and demeanor from David, and forms the core of the movie. Without going into spoilers we can say that he gets to stretch himself quite a bit acting wise.

 

The technology and vistas presented by Scott are fantastic, the crew are a way more likeable bunch than the dysfunctional dimwits of the Prometheus, and the film avoids most of the mistakes of the previous movie but when all is said and done Covenant is almost, but not quite as unsatisfying as Prometheus but for entirely different reasons. While he explores the origins of the Xenomorphs as we know them, their creation is linked to humanity in a way that removes some of their mystery. It also avoids answering, many of the lingering questions from Prometheus. Who were the engineers? Why did they create, and then want to wipe out, humanity? What was the original purpose of the black goo? There’s plenty of material to theorise about but details remain infuriatingly absent.

 

Covenant is a tense, and sometimes delightfully gross, sci-fi thriller that has a great look, a solid cast, and for the most part addresses the mistakes of Prometheus. Somehow though, it doesn’t quite add up to more than the sum of its parts. Of all the philosophical questions posed by the film, the biggest one you may be left with is “Was that it?”.

ALIEN COVENANT / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: RIDLEY SCOTT / SCREENPLAY: JOHN LOGAN,DANTE HARPER / STARRING: MICHAEL FASSBENDER, KATHERINE WATERSTON, BILLY CRUDUP, DANNY MCBRIDE, DEMIÁN BICHIR, CARMEN EJOGO, JUSSIE SMOLLETT / RELEASE DATE: MAY 12TH

EXPECTED:  8 out of 10

 

ACTUAL:

There’s a creepy and unsettling photograph that haunts the drama of Flora, and anticipates the movies own most striking visuals. It’s a black-and-white print showing a huge assembly of young Soviet pioneers gathered in a Russian forest in 1937, all of them wearing gas masks and staring directly into the camera. Originally intended as a striking image for Stalin’s propaganda machine, the snapshot’s meaning has long since changed: it’s now a skin-crawling juxtaposition of the natural world with the looming threat of industrial-scale gas and chemical warfare in a wholly dehumanised landscape. 

It’s an image that clearly inspired writer and director Sasha Louis Vukovic when penning Flora, an inventive and intelligent fantasy thriller that premiered at the 2017 Sci-Fi London film festival. Set in the summer of 1929, the film follows the unravelling of a botanical field trip by a group of talented young Ivy League scientists charged with documenting the flora and fauna of a little-explored forest on the North American frontier. Played by a talented young ensemble, they are a well-balanced team, comprising of a cartographer, an illustrator and a cataloguer, as well as a botanist, who are all supported in their endeavours by a nurse and a cook. 

Together they make for a well-drawn group of characters. The film’s namesake (Doran) is a considered and thoughtful artist (who sketches adventure comics in her free time, stories in which she is the heroine). She soon learns that she must demonstrate heroism in the real world too. Writer and director Vukovic has a clear interest in ensuring that his team become more than ciphers, but there’s precious little time to explore their backstories, or the challenges facing their “breakthrough” generation in inter-War America, before the forest consumes its first victim. What the botanists quickly discover is that something in the woods sees their presence as a threat to its ecosystem that must be eradicated.

Vukovic gets huge value from the lush, verdant forest locations, its brooks and rivers, its dense and open spaces and an abandoned mill (evidence of nature’s ability to erode and reclaim the space occupied by the temporary structures of human beings). He resists the obvious temptation to flood the picture with endless aerial drone shots; instead opting to track his protagonists’ plight at ground level, relying on hand-held footage of their worsening plight. Rendering a period piece in a woodland setting (rather than in downtown Ottawa) certainly helps an indie filmmaking team balance a tight budget, but the abandoned artefacts and personal belongings at the mysteriously empty campsite do reinforce the growing sense of otherworldly unease. 

As their escapade shifts from light-hearted jaunt to life-threatening flight, the character interplay of Flora works really well. This is a group of over-confident young adults who find themselves in circumstances where the arrogance of youth is ripped from them. As the survivors prepare for a long march to safety through the forest, the haunting image from that infamous photograph again looms large: white coveralls and gas masks transform the humans into alien intruders in a silent woodland that wants them dead. In fact, Flora is at its most successful in making the brightly lit, summer time setting of a forest feel like a threatening and unnerving place. It does so without relying on the familiar beats of a spooky soundtrack or the use of predictable jump scares. 

Viewers hoping for a Triffid-style monster “reveal” are going be disappointed by Flora. The horror here remains for the most part an idea: a threat, carried on intoxicating air, that poisons all of the animals it touches. The brilliant conceit is that the group have to negotiate through woodlands in which the risk is manifest but invisible, making for some fantastic “running from something unseen” moments.  This is an original and engaging story that gets under the skin (if not, thankfully, into the lungs). Told with a huge sense of self-belief, Flora is a more than creditable entry in the “if you go down to the woods today” film genre.

FLORA / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & PRODUCER & SCREENWRITER: SASHA LOUIS VUKOVIC / STARRING: TERESA MARIE DORAN, DAN LIN, CALEB NOEL, SARI MERCER, WILL AARON, MILES G. JACKSON / RELEASE DATE: UK RELEASE TBA

The premise of contemporary thriller Immigration Game is chilling. Inside a fortress Europe that has closed its borders to outsiders, Germany is the one country that still accepts refugees. But the price of securing German citizenship is appallingly high. New arrivals must compete in the titular reality TV show, a race for survival in which participants must cross from one side of Berlin to the other, evading the efforts of the city’s Hunters to capture and kill them. When Berlin resident and father-to-be Joe intervenes in the game to help an injured Runner, and defends himself from attack by a group of Hunters, he is convicted of murder. He has only two options: accept a life sentence, or join in the Game himself. 

From the first few seconds of the film’s opening sequence, which depicts a merciless gang killing amidst a pulsing urban nightscape, the “dystopian action-thriller” Immigration Game establishes its unflinching tone. Clearly influenced by genre movies such as The Warriors, Escape from New York and 16 Blocks, Zlatnik adds to his chase flick the additional frisson that he is extrapolating disturbing developments found in today’s news headlines. “It is very worrying that our film is already so close to reality,” the writer/director told the German media magazine DWDL. 

As Joe’s partner Karin and friends try without success to help him, he is forced to join a group of refugees released in a new round of the game. As the camera drones of the TV show track their movements (and record the deaths of many of their fellow competitors), Joe is saved by young Syrian refugee Faizah. Once the pair agrees to co-operate, they battle their way together towards the Fernsehturm TV tower in Alexanderplatz and to sanctuary. Shot on the streets of Berlin in just two weeks, Immigration Game gets great value from its real world locations, and the whole film is brimming with the nervous tension that comes from the hunters’ pursuit of the hunted. Throughout, it conjures up a sense of “the city” as a threatening and alien place. 

The film opts for a very naturalistic style, relying on shaky handheld camera footage and partially improvised dialogue to reinforce the cinéma-vérité feel. The film’s frequent violent scenes, as rival gangs The Darks, The Combats and The Swags close in on their prey, are also fairly brutal. Despite an ill-fitting side plot, and some odd tonal shifts, direction and pacing remain energetic as the storyline unfolds and the inevitable final confrontations are set in motion. To Zlatnik’s credit, viewers are left guessing as to how the story might play out.

There are fleeting moments of satire along the way, although the moral blankness of voyeuristic reality TV is a fairly well mined theme. What’s missing is much in the way of appreciation of the predicament or the motivation of either the refugees (who are risking everything – again – in the hope of a better life) or of the Hunters (who are willing to use deadly force to stop them). Sadly, the film slides off the rails in the last twenty minutes, losing any sense of internal logic or believability. The final ‘chat show’ segment is simply excruciating to watch (and not in a good way), propelling the movie into the realms of implausible fantasy, with dialogue that recalls all of the suspect moral sophistication of Starship Troopers. 

A film set in a distant alien world can use metaphor to reflect on themes with a contemporary resonance to the human condition with a great deal of artistic freedom, from afar. But when a movie set in near-future Berlin extrapolates its story from one of the most contentious issues in present day Europe, and does so by imagining bloody street clashes in which citizens attack “non-citizens”, it is precisely its “closeness to reality” that compels its creators to exhibit a more self-aware sense of social responsibility. And against this measurement, Immigration Game comes up short.

Until everything goes bonkers in the finale, this is a serviceable, if sometimes gruesome, urban chase flick. The problem is this film’s pretensions to be something more than that. Ultimately, Immigration Game reveals itself to be nowhere near as insightful or subversive as it would like to think it is. The real-world news stories that the film appropriates as dramatic source material are incredibly potent and powerful. So much so that filmmakers who “play” with those issues without sufficient care, or who fail to consider how audiences might read their intentions, need to seriously rethink their game. 

IMMIGRATION GAME / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENWRITER: KRYSTOF ZLATNIK / STARRING: MATHIS LANDWEHR, KATHARINA SPORRER, SIMSON BUBBEL, ESKINDIR TESFAY, HORST-GÜNTER MARX / RELEASE DATE: UK RELEASE TBA 

This documentary by Jose Prendes bravely uses a host of ‘talking heads’ to tell us that Plan 9 From Outer Space directed by Ed Wood, generally acknowledged as the worst film ever made, is an underrated work of genius.

The voice-over is weird and melodramatic and the ‘experts’ it wheels out are from cult filmmakers like Joe Dante, Mick Garish, Brian Yuzna and Fred Olen Ray to madcap actors posing as experts. 

In Paranoia magazine, no. 64, February 2017, director Prendes tells how he put the film together by ringing up five ‘experts’ on the phone, and then after many rejections he had what he called, ‘my Hollywood contingent, and “my truth-telling doc was officially underway”.

Using secret codes to avoid harassment, he flew in the experts to an abandoned warehouse, and after a month of filming they were released to hide out before the film was made public. 

As the film was in the pre-release stage, Prendres stated emphatically that he and his family had no intention of “committing suicide or disappearing off the radar”, and if this happened it was down to ‘them’. 

Like the documentary itself, this is a self-knowingly camp and paranoid description of how the film came to life, which is very much in the mode of Ed Wood and his cinematic legacy. 

What this production plays with is the hidden meanings of the movie. Horror screenwriter and director Tom Holland tells us that Ed Wood was compelled to do Plan 9 because he had been visited by aliens and experienced UFOs and needed to warn us of our impending danger.

The ‘experts’ read into every element of the movie, from the credits to little details in the scenes, which symbolise their own obsessions. These range from references to Eskimo history, the number 6, phallic imagery, the undead, hysterical women, homosexuality, feminism, the illuminati, zombies, orgies, gang bangs, monsters, dinosaurs, time travel, government conspiracies, atomic warfare and Jesus. 

Sprinkled in are a few fascinating facts about the movie, for example, Dante tells us Vampira (Maila Nurmi) had a waist reduction for the role but after falling out with Ed Wood he cut out her speaking parts. Bela Lugosi’s scenes were filmed in 1955 and since he died in 1956, Wood used Tom Mason for additional scenes, who was a fitter and better actor. 

You finally see the alien mothership, where the humanoid aliens decide on Plan 9 to resurrect the dead. Even screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are puzzled to know what Plans 1 to 8 might have been! 

Ed Wood was weirdly enthusiastic yet had little money and had lots of set backs, but he was still able to expose the TRUTH in Plan 9. Now this documentary experience honors his visionary movie for new generations, and hilariously gets to the bottom of the shocking and unspeakable horrors that await anyone who watches it.

UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS: THE PLAN 9 CONSPIRACY / DIRECTOR & WRITER & CINEMATOGRAPHY: JOSE PRENDES / STARRING: JOSTON THENEY, MARIA OLSEN, BUZ WALLICK, ARIELLE BRACHFELD, GRAHAM DENMAN, JOSHUA LOU FRIEDMAN / PRODUCERS: JESSICA AND JOSE PRENDRES / MUSIC: CHRIS LOTT / EDITOR: JESSICA PRENDES / SOUND: ROBERT REIDER / VISUAL EFFECTS: ADAM LIMA / RELEASE DATE: UK RELEASE TBA