Review Category: Movie

In 1995 Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for his performance as the legendary Ray Charles in the 1994 biopic Ray. It’s a fair bet that the Academy won’t come calling again for his role in “Netflix Original Movie” Day Shift, J.J. Perry’s directorial debut. It’s quite likely, however, that home audiences will have a lot of fun with this light-hearted, action-packed horror comedy that offers a few new spins on traditional vampire lore even if tends to come across as a slightly lighter, blunter Blade.

Foxx, clad in a succession of increasingly-lurid Hawaiian shirts, plays Bud Jablonski, a pool cleaner in sunny Los Angeles who works undercover as a vampire slayer, hunting and killing the undead during the day and selling the much sought-after fangs of older vampires – Elders – to raise cash. When he discovers that his ex-wife Jocelyn (Megan Good) is planning to move to Florida with his daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax) Bud is forced to turn to his ex-employers at the Vampire Hunting Union for help as he needs to raise some quick extra cash to help pay for his daughter’s school fees. But Bud has fallen foul of the Union in the past and they team him up with timid desk jockey Seth (Dave Franco) in an effort to curb his code-violating tendencies, unaware that Bud and his family are being targeted by malevolent vampire Audrey (Karla Souza) and her undead hordes.

Packed with energetic and bloody action sequences – vampires are routinely sliced, diced and decapitated – Day Shift is far more fun than it ought to be. Foxx’s Bud is a fearless vampire killer,  Dave Franco delivers the comic goods as the hapless and terrified Seth (with his unfortunate habit of losing control of his bladder in times of peril) and Snoop Dogg oozes cool as the charismatic, unflappable respected vampire hunter Big John Elliott. It’s not particularly big or clever, but then it doesn’t really need to be; it’s a brash, bright, breezy burst of action and comedy. It’s bloody good fun.

Day Shift is streaming now on Netflix

Glorious is almost certainly the strangest, most bizarre, and surreal movie you’ll watch in 2022, a year which has already given us the divisive but hugely-acclaimed Everything Everywhere All At Once. Glorious is on another level entirely. Undoubtedly filmed on a tiny budget with a minimum of location filming and largely on one set Glorious is as ferociously imaginative as it’s mind-bending and thought-provoking. It’s a film that’s open to any number of interpretations; it’s about guilt, sin, redemption, humanity, religion, sanity and, fundamentally, a mysterious deity driven out of his ethereal state by his demonic father and who will cause the destruction of the Earth when he attains corporeality. This largely takes place, incidentally, in a filthy, grungy graffiti-daubed restroom at an isolated rest stop in the middle of nowhere.

Ryan Kwanten (True Blood, Them) plays Wes. Sweaty, anxious, and clearly troubled, Wes leaves pleading voicemail messages for a young girl whose photo he desperately clutches. He’s in emotional turmoil. Pulling into the rest stop, he sets off on a one-man bender, drowning himself in booze and waking up face down in the dirt having burned most of his possessions, including his own trousers. He stumbles into the restroom and strikes up a conversation with an anonymous voice emanating from one of the toilet stalls. It’s the unmistakable and striking tones of JK Simmons (who doesn’t actually appear in the film physically) and their initial chat is as awkward as you might expect in the circumstances. But Wes, already half-dazed from the previous night’s excesses and confused and disorientated, finds himself locked in the restroom as the disembodied voice, to the accompaniment of glowing lights radiating out from under the wall, tells him that he is the harbinger of doom for the planet and that Wes may be the only person who can save the Earth from destruction… but at a cost. Meanwhile, the voice’s malevolent father has tracked him down and is approaching fast…

Glorious (the name appears to be a pun based on the ‘glory hole’ between the two toilet stalls that Wes initially tries to resist looking through) is quite an extraordinary achievement by director Rebekah McKendry, who really exploits the limitations of the story’s central setting and turns it to the film’s advantage by making it a stifling, oppressive, and horribly threatening place that we are as keen to escape from as Wes. The conversation between Wes and ‘the being’ is often deeply philosophical and metaphysical – perhaps we can’t even be really sure that the situation even exists, it may be some fever dream brought on by Wes’s condition and the trauma that’s haunting him. A last reel twist takes the film into ever-weirder territory as we find out a little bit more about Wes and his relationship with his girlfriend (there are a couple of flashbacks that fill in the detail about how they met and the path their relationship took that seem to jar with the tone of the rest of the film) and the climax itself has an unreal, fantastical element that leaves us with more questions than answers. Was the whole experience a psychological result of what we eventually find out about Wes , a nightmare brought about by his own situation and his attempts to drown his own past… or did he really have a close encounter with strange beings from some unnameable reality? Glorious invites us to make our own choices, and come to our own conclusions.

Glorious doesn’t outstay its welcome, running to just under 80 minutes as if it recognises that its scenario and its claustrophobic setting is likely to try the patience of its audience. But in the end, it’s as long as it needs to be and no more and that’s both a relief and a refreshing change in an era of bloated blockbusters.  Puzzling, perplexing, sometimes archly funny but never less than utterly absorbing, Glorious is one of the under-the-radar film experiences of 2022 that deserves to find favour with an audience that likes its genre movies ambiguous and intellectually-challenging.

Glorious is available on Shudder from August 18th

A curious mix of domestic thriller and folk horror, the creators of Where’s Rose attempt to blend familial dread and bucolic unease in a mysterious tale of identity and impersonation. Writer-director John Mathis tries to balance the disparate strands of his story, but the lifeless way in which the plot unfolds continually undermines his ambitions.

On the cusp of leaving home to enrol at a prestigious college, Eric Daniels is put on babysitting duties for his young sister Rose. At the end of a fateful night, Rose goes missing without a trace. When the youngster is found in the woods, her parents’ relief is palpable. But Eric is convinced that the entity living among them is not his returned sibling. As family tensions rise, and his own childhood friend is hospitalised, Eric begins to struggle with his own hidden secrets.

Most of the action of Where’s Rose unfolds in a sprawling wood-framed homestead deep in the forest. That should give any filmmaker goosebumps about the rich potential for atmospheric and disturbing visuals. Yet most of the film is framed like a small-screen family drama. When the camera moves outside, cinematographer Eric Gesualdo simply points his lens at the woods, or rigs a drone to fly above the treeline. There’s no sense of malevolence, mystery or magic in these images. And there are so few night-time exteriors that it seems like the crew were reluctant to work after sundown. The closing scenes of Where’s Rose do deliver some powerful revelations. Yet there’s a nastiness to those narrative twists that feel out of kilter with the film’s otherwise bland tone, while the muddled folklore falls flat.

WHERE’S ROSE is available on VOD in the US from August 30th 

The Predator franchise has finally bore a worthy successor to John McTiernan’s original. Set three hundred years ago in the North American Great Plains, Prey tells the tale of highly skilled Comanche warrior Naru (Amber Midthunder), who’s frustrated by never getting taken seriously by the male members of her tribe. But when a predator with advanced weapons lands nearby, Naru sets out to hunt and kill the beast to save the tribe and prove her prowess.

Patrick Aison’s script simmers with subtle drama, teasing the predator via camouflaged shots during intense animal battles. We’re then introduced to some unruly musket-brandishing colonisers who capture Naru’s crew but are forced to unite and battle the beast in an electrifying showdown that escalates and intensifies while charging towards its finale.

Director Dan Trachtenberg fashions heart-pounding set-pieces adorned by stunningly captured settings and vistas making Prey feel prestige (think Jane Campion and Werner Herzog directing Cannibal Holocaust). However, it isn’t afraid to get dirt under its nails as Trachtenberg embellishes franchise characteristics with film-making savvy, making Prey a far cry from the sequels that preceded it.

Prey is the mature, fresh, enthralling franchise revitaliser that fans have been craving, and Trachtenberg’s a director worth keeping an eye on. Aside from some flat supporting characters and occasional stale dialogue, the saddest fact about Prey is it’s perfect big screen viewing that’s bypassing cinemas. But despite that, it is still great to see such an iconic monster so lovingly reinvented, for Trachtenberg’s Predator is gnarly, commanding, and by far the scariest yet.

Prey is available on Disney+ from August 5th.