Review Category: Movie

After desecrating your Facebook auntie’s favourite cartoon teddy bear with last year’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, director Rhys Frake-Waterfield returns to 100 Acre Wood to violate silly old Pooh afresh.

A scrappy, low-budget work of Poohsploitation, the original Blood and Honey was about as good as anyone had any right to expect: impressively brutal but marred by bad performances and distastefully misogynistic violence. This sequel feels like Frake-Waterfield’s attempt to re-do the things that didn’t work the first time – with the original Blood and Honey existing in-universe as a cinematic adaptation of events experienced by Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers).

Now reviled by a community who believe him responsible for Pooh’s killing spree, Christopher lives at home with his parents (Alec Newman and Nicola Wright) and little sister (Thea Evans). Attempting to come to terms with his trauma, Christopher’s therapy sessions begin to unearth a dark secret from his past… and one which may reveal the origins of Pooh, too.

Blood and Honey II is an improvement over its predecessor by every conceivable benchmark, from the surprisingly decent performances to the moody cinematography and creative violence. The film does away with the original Pooh’s more cartoonish features, re-imagining the beast as something leaner and far meaner than before. Pooh (Ryan Oliva) comes accompanied by chums Piglet, Owl, and Tigger, each given the same edgelord makeover. With Piglet the Leatherface to Pooh’s Victor Crowley, that leaves Owl as a Jeepers Creepers-esque figure of flying menace, and Tigger a fairly obvious Freddy Krueger stand-in (stripes; claws; says ‘bitch’ a lot). The villains are all fairly one-note, but the dynamic is a fresh one for slasher cinema, giving four monsters for the price of one.

Where its predecessor was content to coast on the novelty of Winnie-the-Pooh: horror monster, Blood and Honey II feels like an actual film, with surprising depth to its lore. Chugging along at a breezy 93 minutes, it nips from one gory set piece to the next, rarely pausing to deflate the inherent silliness. All that, and Simon Callow too, whose brief appearance lends the film a sense of legitimacy that the first one was sorely lacking.

Those same problems are there at its core – cynical pandering for the memes, a preponderance of misogynistic violence – but Blood and Honey II at least has the good grace and budget to have fun this time.

WINNIE-THE-POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY II is on limited release in UK cinemas now.

Based on A.M. Shine’s creepy folk horror novel The Watchers (which has its own sequel out later this year), The Watched  (as it’s been retitled for UK and Northern Ireland) is the debut feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of the prodigious, but erratic, M. Night. It’s an intriguing choice of first project, certainly one that doesn’t betray the family preponderance for dark, twisty horror tales designed to second-guess the audience. The Watched doesn’t always hit the spot as it occasionally runs out of energy, but it’s an impressive calling card that allows the director to demonstrate that she’s as at home with building a sense of dread and creeping menace as she is at delivering strategic jump scares and images of stark, striking horror.

Shine’s novel was an occasionally sluggish, overwrought affair. Shyamalan (who also wrote the script) has stripped away a lot of the narrative flab and focused on the core story of Mina (Dakota Fanning), an American living in Ireland who is still coping with the trauma of causing the death of her mother when she was a child. She works in a pet shop and is tasked by her boss with delivering a valuable bird to a customer across the country. Her car breaks down in a supernaturally huge forest. The car seems to disappear, and she encounters Madeleine (Olwen Fouere), an old woman watching her from nearby. With night falling, Mina takes refuge in a bunker-like building called ’The Coop’ alongside Madeleine and two other occupants. They explain that they are trapped in the bunker, observed at night by nocturnal creatures called ‘Watchers.’ Mina soon finds out that that’s no way out of the forest and that the Watchers, who are afraid of the light, will kill anyone outside the Coop at night. Days, months and seasons pass, and the four remain trapped in the Coop, turning on one another and becoming increasingly suspicious of one another. But in time, they discover the secrets of both the Coop and the Watchers and work to find a way out of the forest forever,

Despite the chamber-piece nature of its central conceit, The Watched is an ambitious and unusual piece of storytelling. Shyamalan clearly revels in evoking a sense of claustrophobia both inside the Coop and outside in the endless forest, and the Watchers themselves, wisely kept off-screen for much of the film, are an ever-present, terrifying threat that is all the better for being kept in the shadows and the darkness. The balance of the film seems uneven as both tone and locale shift in the last act, but that’s as much an issue with the original novel as it is with Shyamalan’s screenplay, which manages to make the nature and origins of the Watchers clearer and more plausible than in the novel.

With its nimble running time (just 100 minutes), The Watched is long enough to do what it needs to do without testing the audience’s patience. It allows Shyamalan to build on the tricks she’s clearly learned from her father while suggesting that she has a pretty firm grasp on the genre and how to draw the best out of what is, here, a potentially tricky and uninvolving story. It also suggests that she has a very bright future in the world of the dark and mysterious.

THE WATCHED is in UK cinemas now

 

This Canadian-Pakistani co-production, which has been garnering a great deal of praise on the festival circuit, is as much a work of social commentary as it is a ghost-themed horror. In Flames explores the efforts of a mother and daughter to challenge the restricted life choices available to them as working-class women (albeit from different generations) living in modern-day Karachi.

Young medical student Miriam finds her home life turned upside down following the death of her grandfather – the paternal head of the family. Her mother, the widowed Fariha, is soon facing eviction from their flat after her uncle-in-law tricks her into signing over her inheritance. A frustrated Miriam finds comfort in the attention of Asad, a young man attracted to the strength and independence that she radiates. But when the pair’s secret motorcycle trip to the coast ends in calamity, Miriam is once again confronted by the ugly realities of her marginalised social status.

Writer-director Zarrar Kahn evokes the hectic, crowded life of the city and the emptiness of the countryside and coast with an unromantic sense of realism. The idea that Mariam is being haunted by threatening spectres from her past becomes more prominent only once the real-world predicament of the two women has been fully established. Some of the film’s domestic and familial scenes might feel inconsequential when viewed in isolation. But the absence of freedom of choice revealed in these moments cumulatively ratchets up the tension that’s eventually released in the film’s cathartic finale. The true horrors glimpsed in In Flames are not the vengeful spirits of the dead but the obstacles these women face in struggling to secure agency over their own lives.

IN FLAMES is on limited theatrical release in the UK