Final Destination 5 [15]

DIR: Steven Quale

Reviewing the previous entry in this franchise, the confusingly named The Final Destination, I declared the then nine year old franchise dead. I spoke too soon, and two years later, here we are again with the same idea; Attractive twentysomethings cheat death in a disaster (a bridge collapse this time out), then are picked off by death in a series of Rube Goldberg inspired lethal coincidences.

Here a group of work colleagues are their way to a weekend business retreat, when one of them (Sam, played by Nicholas D'Agosto) has a vision of the bridge they are on collapsing, and manages to get his ex-girlfriend (Emma Bell), some of their friends and their boss (David Kochener) to follow him off the bus to safety. Soon after, as ever, splashy violence ensues as Death rebalances the books.

I know, as do you, that at this point character isn't the most important thing in a Final Destination movie, but surely it would be nice, and asking only a little, to have characters that you could tell apart. I didn't even remember most of these people's names as I was watching the movie - though IMDB reveals that, yes, they have names, and the franchise tradition of invoking horror directors names continues with the likes of Peter Friedkin (Miles Fisher), Candice Hooper (Ellen Wroe) and Oivia Castle (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood). Again it's the leads who come off worst, some of the others have a trait (Peter is angry, Candice is nice, and likes gymnastics, Olivia is hot but - oh no - wears glasses). but Sam and Molly (Emma Bell's character) are voids, I nothing them, so it's hard to care much whether they live or die.

Another issue is that, while the build up to the death scenes, the series of coincidences that leads to each, tends to be excellent, there is often a rather listless, 'oh, that'll do' feeling to the actual deaths. The gym sequence is maybe the best example; an expertly shot and paced build up, using the space and the elements to build real tension as to what's going to happen, followed by an underwhelming, and, even by the standards of this franchise, credulity straining outcome. Another death that produces an 'oh', rather than an 'arrgghh' begins with a nightmarish medical procedure, but ends in a deeply anticlimactic fall.

This said, Final Destination 5 is largely fun. The 3D is gimmicky, but Steven Quale sees it for what it is and embraces, even revels in, the gimmick. Guts are thrust out of the screen at us on a regular basis, glass repeatedly shatters in our faces during the opening credit sequence (and how nice it is to see one of those these days) and the depth perception is used effectively - for this extreme vertigo sufferer anyway - in the inventively gory bridge sequence.

The performances are proficient, as is the direction, with Quale building up each death scene brilliantly, even if Eric Heisserrer's often tin-eared screenplay sometimes fumbles the final moments. Nothing rivals the OH SHIT impact of the first film's bus, or the sequel's fence, but the gore is as OTT and as guiltily funny as ever. What really makes Final Destination 5 stand out a bit though is its ending. There are clues (largely relating to technology) throughout the film, but a clever twist genuinely took me by surprise in the film's last ten minutes. It does mean that this really needs to be where the franchise ends, but it's a great nod to the fans, and quite a clever (and, when you stop and consider it, chilling) beat in its own right.

Final Destination 5 delivers what it promises on the label; it's dumb fun. Go with a girl who'll jump at all the right moments and consequently grab on to you, or go with a group of franchise fans, either way, though it won't change your world, you'll come out entertained.

World War Z: Eyewitness Report

Our new horror correspondent (horrorspondent?) Steve Chandler has had an interesting week. Just outside his workplace in Glasgow the new zombie movie World War Z has been shooting key scenes. Here are some of Steve's impressions of what he's seen, and some EXCLUSIVE behind the scenes images (which you'll find at the end of this article).



Hollywood came to Glasgow this week with the arrival of Brad Pitt, Marc Forster and the entire World War Z crew to shoot the $80m adaptation of Max Brooks’ acclaimed zombie novel. Matters kicked off on Monday as Glasgow’s George Square and some of the surrounding streets were transformed into the streets of Philadelphia. It seems that Philadelphia proved to be a prohibitively expensive city to shoot in. So when money talks with the powers that be in the US fell apart a decision was made to approach Glasgow City Council to seek permission to shoot the movie around the streets that some area of Philadelphia was apparently modelled on. George Square became a hive of activity as up went US style traffic lights and the streets were populated by dozens of US vehicles (cars, ambulances, military vehicles, huge garbage trucks etc.) With filming due to start the next day I started to get very excited indeed, but I could not have envisaged how close I was going to get to the action.

Hilarity ensued on the Tuesday when, late in the day, a Brad Pitt lookalike was spotted just outside my office window and mistaken for the real thing, cue much wetting of knickers amongst my female colleagues. I was briefly convinced that I was in fact looking at the a-list Hollywood star but after heading outside for a closer look I soon realised that, hair aside, fakeBrad looked nothing like the real deal.

A similar scene ensued on Wednesday morning with my colleagues debating whether or not fakeBrad was really realBrad. This debate was suddenly abandoned when we realised that the real deal had been standing less than ten feet away with his back to us. He turned around and prompted much screaming and squeaking from the females in the room and more knicker wetting, the latter in earnest this time. The effect that realBrad has on women is markedly more intense than that of fakeBrad (who shall henceforth not be mentioned allowing me to drop the “real” from realBrad before it gets annoying).

Soon the filming began and it suddenly became practically impossible to concentrate on work. They spent much of Wednesday shooting scenes involving a lot of extras running along the street in a state of panic in the face of what is presumably some kind of zombie related threat. Brad spent most of the day in the car with his wife and kids (not Angelina and their semi-adopted brood but his movie family). Inhabiting the role of Brad’s character’s wife is Mireille Enos who has had a significant role in US series Big Love and more recently the lead female role in AMC’s adaptation of the hit Danish crime drama The Killing.

Things got a lot more exciting on the Thursday with them repeatedly shooting a scene where Brad gets out of his car after a motorcycle cop knocks off his side mirror. He strolls in a very Brad Pittlike manner a little way down the street, picks up the broken side mirror, has a brief conversation with another driver then gets back in his vehicle before being yelled at to “Remain in your vehicle!!!” by the very same cop who damaged his car. They must have shot this scene about dozen or more times in stops and starts but being that I live in Glasgow and have never been anywhere near a big Hollywood set as they shoot a movie the entire event was very absorbing. They also kept firing a double barrel shotgun loaded with blanks about two maybe three feet away from my office window and every time I came damn close to either making a mess in my pants or dropping dead of a heart attack.

Next day there was no sign of Brad or Marc Forster as the second unit film crew set about preparing a major shot involving an enormous garbage vehicle, which had a massive metal plough attached to the front, tearing down the middle of the street knocking vehicles out of the way and causing extras and stunt people to scatter. After a short while filming the cop yelling at Brad Pitt’s character (who had been replaced by a dummy) and a few dry runs where they drove the garbage truck fairly slowly down the street until it stopped about five yards behind the motorcycle they replaced the real cop with a dummy and got down to shooting the money shot. My colleagues and I were asked to step well back from the windows, possibly for health and safety reasons, but more likely because we were in shot. I had set a camera up just inside the window to record the scene but someone in the production crew spotted it and I was asked to remove it because the flash would be visible in the shot. I didn’t honestly think it was worth trying to argue that I wasn’t intending to take a photograph but was actually planning to record the scene in hi-definition. I really didn’t think that would fly. So I smiled, kept my mouth shut, and removed the camera.

Even though I kind of knew what to expect from the crash scene they were about to shoot NOTHING could possibly have prepared me for how cool it actually was. Travelling at speed the garbage truck came racing down the street, hit the motorcycle sending the dummy flying through the air to come to rest on the roof of a car then proceeded down the street knocking cars out of the way as it went. When I say it knocked cars out of the way that doesn’t really paint a vivid enough picture of what in actuality happened. Cars went flying into the air. Stunt people were diving for cover. The sound of metal being ripped and crushed was enormous. One of the cars ended up lying on it’s roof. It was amazing. I didn’t have as good a view as I would have liked owing to us having been asked to stand back from the windows, nonetheless I was left with my mouth hanging open in complete awe of what I had just witnessed.

It seems that come Monday the filming will have moved to another street so it’s unlikely I’ll see much more of the production. But this has been a very exciting week. When I read that they would be shooting the movie in Glasgow around George Square I never anticipated having a window seat. Being that I’m such a huge fan of horror cinema and the zombie genre in particular I can only hope that I am afforded an opportunity to see some undead related mayhem. That would be very cool indeed.

Rammbock: Berlin Undead

Here's a new review from Horror correspondent Steve Chandler. Enjoy.

DIR: Marvin Kren.

Clocking in at a little more than an hour including end credits I hesitate to call Rammbock: Berlin Undead a movie. It is to the feature length horror flick what the novella is to the full length novel. What we have here is a lean, mean calling card that has been stripped clean of anything that could be described as extraneous. In fact it has more substance in it’s short running time than most of what passes for horror cinema these days. As a piece of entertainment it provides substantial reason to mark director Marvin Kren as one to watch. I truly believe this could be his Mulberry Street. Back in 2006 at the Dead By Dawn film festival in Edinburgh I saw Mulberry Street and left the screening thinking “this director is going someplace”. The director in question was Jim Mickle who I recently found guilty of helming one of the best horror movies of 2011; the Zombieland meets The Road genre gem that is Stake Land. Rammbock has me feeling the same flavour of anticipation. I believe that given the opportunity Mr. Kren has a future classic up his sleeve and Rammbock will hopefully catch the eye of someone in the position to give him the opportunity to prove me right.

Rammbock shares a lot of it’s DNA with Mickle’s Mulberry Street. The focus is on a small cast of characters who live in an apartment complex somewhere in Berlin. They find themselves at the mercy of ever growing mob of ravening, bloodthirsty walking dead; victims of a virus that can be transmitted via contact with the bodily fluids of one of the infected. The movie opens with main character Michael (Michael Fuith) arriving unannounced in Berlin to return a set of house keys to the girlfriend from whom he has recently split. It’s obvious from the off that he still has feelings for his ex, Gabi (Anna Graczyk), as he rehearses a halting, ill prepared speech to the taxi driver who has just dropped him off. Michael is pretty far removed from your typical hero. I would place him in his mid to late thirties, with thinning hair and the physique of someone who is less inclined to hit the gym for a workout than he is the couch for a pizza and a few beers. The rest of the characters that inhabit this movie are, likewise, normal everyday people who, when faced with the virus outbreak and the resultant disintegration of society, react in a mostly believable fashion. Some rise to the occasion. Some go to pieces and make stupid mistakes that cost them and sometimes those around them their lives. Some are selfless and given to sudden moments of heroism. Some are revealed as base cowards who look out for no-one but themselves. But most importantly...they feel real.

I should also mention that Rammbock isn’t an zombie movie in the classic Romero sense. The undead here don’t shamble and moan. Instead they attack with the ferocity of a pack of bloodcrazed, wild beasts; emitting terrifying shrieks as they overwhelm any unfortunate soul that crosses their path. They have far more in common with the rage virus casualties of 28 Days Later or the victims of the demonic plague that breaks loose in the REC movies. The writer has also gone to some effort to put his own stamp on the nature of the virus. Once infected the virus lies dormant until activated by the first surge of post infection adrenalin. Once infected, if the virus continues to lie dormant for an undisclosed period the body’s immune system will fight back resulting in a complete recovery. In the event of the world going to hell in a handcart how easy would it be, when faced by such a terrifying situation, to maintain the necessary composure to combat the onset of the full blown virus? It’s this element of the movie more than any other that generates no small amount of suspense.

I mentioned that I don’t consider Rammbock to be a movie because of it’s length. That’s not to say that I think it should be longer. Many other directors would have shoehorned an extra thirty minutes worth of scenes into a story that simply doesn’t require it, in an effort to bring it up to feature length, resulting in an excess of flab. At no point does Rammbock outstay it’s welcome. It moves at just the right pace. Slowing down where necessary for moments of character development then hurtling at breakneck speed during the various set pieces where the survivors come under attack.

Alongside Michael there’s one other main character, a young maintenance worker by the name of Harper (Theo Trebs). They get trapped together in Gabi’s apartment minutes into the movie when all hell breaks loose. Both characters are fleshed out enough that I cared about them when the story placed them in jeopardy. Other characters are set up in a more economical fashion but skilfully enough that I understood who they were and gave a shit whether they lived or died. These are two tricks that many modern horror movies fail to accomplish. I’ve seen far too many horror movies that sacrifice character development on the altar of gore. None of the actors here are especially experienced but each and every one of them acquit themselves well.

Likewise, the direction is solid throughout. There was none of the shakycam nonsense that crops up so often these days to put a dent in my enjoyment. There was nothing showy about the camerawork but I welcomed the fact that I at no point lost track of what was going on.
So what we have here is an fantastic example of low budget horror movie making done right. Rammbock was produced by a group of talented individuals who have clearly seen a lot of similar movies and have succeeded in making something that doesn’t look like an uninspired hack job in comparison. A trap countless straight to DVD abominations all too easily fall into. I will admit that I’m predisposed to enjoy horror movies that stray into apocalyptic territory. I even got through the excremental Nightmare City, a movie that would insult the intelligence of a cabbage, without putting my size ten boot through the TV screen. Regardless of my infatuation with this genre this is an impressive début and I look forward to seeing what Marvin Kren has in store next. There’s nothing here to suggest that given a larger budget he won’t give us horror junkies something to really sink our teeth into. Something similar but on a grander scale would be very sweet indeed.

24FPS Top 100: No. 54

54: GREMLINS [1984]
DIR: Joe Dante

Why is it on the list?
Honestly? Why is Gremlins on my top 100 films? I think any self respecting movie fan is likely to tell you that's like asking what's so great about pizza. It's Gremlins, it's awesome.

The thing that rather stuns me about this film is how well it mixes tones; it's a sweet, genuinely christmassy, movie with endearing characters and a lot of big laughs, but it's also dark, sharp edged and satirical, and occasionally properly scary. The thing that is really shocking about that is that Chris Columbus, you know, the bean counting rentahack who brought us such vomit inducing whimsy as Bicentennial Man (oh God, even 8 years on it haunts my nightmares) wrote Gremlins.

The fact that it works so beautifully is, then, perhaps more down to director Joe Dante, and to be fair this is very identifiably a Joe Dante film; a film shot through with its director's obsessions, particularly his pet cast members and his abiding love of cinema, and especially of schlock. Tonally it's also very much Dante's film, he mixed comedy and horror in Piranha and The Howling, but Gremlins is really where he perfected the recipe, having great fun dropping his vindictive little monsters into the middle off an idyllic It's a Wonderful Life kind of town (albeit one with a similarly dark underbelly).

Before letting the monsters loose though, Columbus and Dante draw us in to the Peltzer family as mad inventor dad Rand (Hoyt Axton, for whom the word avuncular was surely coined) brings home an exotic pet for his son Billy (Zach Galligan), Gizmo the mogwai (given impossibly cute presence by Chris Walas' stunning animatronics and equally adorable voice by Howie Mandel) is a great pet, but when Billy accidentally spills water on him he multiples, and ultimately the new mogwai become monsters, multiply further and terrorise the town in a series of riotously entertaining set pieces. Yes, that old story.

Dante mounts some great horror scenes (the Gremlin attacking Billy's old High School science teacher, with the monster shown largely in shadow, is genuinely creepy), but always laces them with a rich layer of humour. A knife wielding Gremlin attacks Billy's mother from inside their Christmas tree, and it's a scary scene because it is pretty violent, but it's also absurdly funny because the overriding image is one of a woman being attacked by a Christmas tree. Other set pieces tend more towards comedy, notably a scene where the bar Phoebe Cates (as Galligan's love interest) is working at is overtaken by Gremlins, all of whom have begun to take one their own persona, allowing Dante to riff on both terrible customers and cliché movie character types in a single manic scene. The effects are outstanding, with Walas' puppets having real physical weight and presence, and an incredible level of mobility and personality, heightening both the scares and the laughs.

However, Dante also knows how to slow down and build the characters, and he's aided by strong performances from Galligan, Cates, and Judge Reinhold; slimy as Billy's immediate boss. Despite an overriding impression that guy so dorky wouldn't have a ghost of a chance with her, Galligan and Cates actually have decent chemistry and establish a sweet relationship, and it's also worth noting that Galligan works brilliantly with the Gizmo puppet, really helping bring it life and make it feel like there is a personality and a connection there.

All in all, Gremlins is just a flat out good time. It's witty, it's scary, it's sometimes even a little moving (Cates' Santa speech - admit it, you get misty there too). It's a Christmas classic shot through with quality (I didn't even get to mention Dante's mascot Dick Miller as Mr Futterman), and it's good enough that you can enjoy it all year round. If you don't love Gremlins you probably also hate Christmas, and puppies, and babies, and all the other nice things in the world.


Standout Scenes





Memorable Lines
Chinese Boy: Look Mister, there are some rules that you've got to follow.
Rand Peltzer: Yeah, what kind of rules?
Chinese Boy: First of all, keep him out of the light, he hates bright light, especially sunlight, it'll kill him. Second, don't give him any water, not even to drink. But the most important rule, the rule you can never forget, no matter how much he cries, no matter how much he begs, never feed him after midnight.

Ruby Deagle: Mrs Harris, what are you trying to tell me?
Mrs. Joe Harris: I'm afraid none of us can pay for two weeks. Couldn't you just get Mr.Corben to just give us a little more time?
Ruby Deagle: Mrs Harris, the bank and I have the same purpose in life - to make money. Not to support a lot of... deadbeats!
Mrs. Joe Harris: Mrs Deagle! It's Christmas!
Ruby Deagle: Well, now you know what to ask Santa for, don't you?

Kate: Now I have another reason to hate Christmas.
Billy Peltzer: What are you talking about?
Kate: The worst thing that ever happened to me was on Christmas. Oh, God. It was so horrible. It was Christmas Eve. I was 9 years old. Me and Mom were decorating the tree, waiting for Dad to come home from work. A couple hours went by. Dad wasn't home. So Mom called the office. No answer. Christmas Day came and went, and still nothing. So the police began a search. Four or five days went by. Neither one of us could eat or sleep. Everything was falling apart. It was snowing outside. The house was freezing, so I went to try to light up the fire. That's when I noticed the smell. The firemen came and broke through the chimney top. And me and Mom were expecting them to pull out a dead cat or a bird. And instead they pulled out my father. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. He'd been climbing down the chimney... his arms loaded with presents. He was gonna surprise us. He slipped and broke his neck. He died instantly. And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus.

Nightmare City [18]

DIR: Umberto Lenzi

Please join me in welcoming to 24FPS, Steve Chandler. Some of you might know Steve as Psychocandy from the Joblo forums. As well as being a massive music geek Steve's a discerning fan of cinema, and particularly of horror, so he'll be chiming in from time to time with some genre reviews. Enjoy.

I’ve seen my unfair share of Italian zombie flicks. Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue and Zombie Creeping Flesh to name a few. But Nightmare City has something none of these movies have. These zombies aren’t the slow, shambling undead that were the norm back in the heyday of Italian gut munchers. Oh no. Director Umberto Lenzi obviously felt that would be far too boring. Instead we have a gun toting, knife wielding, axe swinging breed of undead who have been brought back to life after being subjected to a serious dose of radiation and move like Linford Christie being chased by a doctor requesting a drug test. They are also somewhat obsessed with female breasts. Yup...second only to shooting, stabbing and chopping their victims to death they love the boobies. And if they can combine the shooting, stabbing and chopping to death of their victims with some boob related action... so much the better.
Something Nightmare City certainly does share with most Italian zombie “epics” is an almost complete disregard for anything vaguely resembling logic. Most of the characters make choices that seem to be custom built by some insane higher power (i’m looking at you Lenzi) in an effort to place them in a situation that will most likely end with their demise. Certainly there’s plenty of death and destruction on display (including one thrown TV that inexplicably explodes in mid air taking out a couple of our undead friends as effectively as a molotov cocktail). However, the effects are so ineffectual that the movie doesn’t even work as an exercise in gore.

The zombie makeup is perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s not even consistent. Some of the zombies bear a close resemblance to the lead character from Troma’s Toxic Avenger series whilst some look almost human. Others look like they’ve had their heads dipped once in glue then twice in a barrel of oatmeal. The movie also has an odd tendency to shy away from some gory scenes just when they are about to pay off. This could perhaps indicate the actions of a censor but I think it’s more likely that some of the gore effects looked so bad Lenzi decided to excise them from the movie of his own accord. If the latter is the case I can’t help but think it would have been for the best if he’d exercised the same caution with every other aspect of the movie. This is one inept piece of film making. There’s a scene near the end of the movie in which one of the main characters has to put a bullet in the head of his wife. His first bullet hits her right in the middle of the forehead. A nice clean shot leaving a dime sized hole oozing fake looking blood. Then the second shot takes her head clean off her shoulders. Her body slumps to the ground and what follows is a shot of her corpse that reveals that her head has mysteriously reattached itself to her body and she once again sports a neat little hole in the middle of her forehead. I actually stopped the movie and rewound it three times because I was convinced I couldn’t possibly have seen what I saw.

So what works? Well nothing really. The acting ranges from appalling to barely adequate with all the actors, even the English speaking ones, having been subjected to an inept dubbing after the fact so that the words don’t quite match their lip movements throughout. Our hero looks like a geography teacher (he’s actually a reporter) and is almost as charismatic as your average geography teacher. Most of the female characters exist for no reason other than to provide the quite remarkable number of tit shots that frequently liven the movie up. Yes...it’s so boring that the numerous sightings of breasts really were the closest the movie came to making this reviewer sit up and take notice.

What about the script? Let me tell you about the script. You could restock the shelves of a hundred cheese shops with the dialogue of this movie. Most of the words that spill like a torrent of nonsense flavoured toilet water from the lips of these characters would shame a slack jawed fool if he’d written them. Now i’ve watched a lot of entertaining horror movies with risible dialogue. But when you couple the risible dialogue with the aforementioned lack of logic, an aesthetic sensibility that scream “I am inept” at the top of it’s lungs and makeup/gore scenes that look like they were cobbled together on a budget of monopoly money. Well... it’s not looking good is it?

Then comes the final kick in the nuts. The ending. I would normally stay well away from providing spoilers but the ending here is so cack handed that it beggars belief and if by revealing it I can somehow persuade even one person not to inflict this movie upon their person...well my job will have been done.

It’s all a dream.
Or a nightmare if you like.

In a movie almost totally devoid of anything resembling inspiration (machine gun toting, titty loving, olympic athelete zombies notwithstanding) this is the final insult. Mr. Geography Teacher wakes up in bed next to his wife (who in the closing moments of the nightmare fell to her doom from a rope hanging from a rescue helicopter only to suddenly transform into a woefully unconvincing dummy that proceeded to flop and flip in a most unhumanbeinglike manner as it bounced off the support frame of the rollercoaster below). We are then treated to the opening three minutes of the movie again as events in real life identically follow the opening events of the nightmare. Just before the end credits begin to role the following words scroll up the screen. “THE NIGHTMARE BECOMES REALITY...” My worst bad dream would be having to sit through another movie as bad as Nightmare City in the near future. Shame on you Mr. Lenzi. Shame on you.

24FPS Top 100: No. 56

56: RE-ANIMATOR [1985]
DIR: Stuart Gordon

Why is it on the list?
Re-Animator isn't, I'll admit, many people's idea of a great movie; it's a schlocky 80's horror flick with broad performances and loads of gore. Okay, it's not Schindler's List, but it's not trying to be, and on its own unpretentious terms Re-Animator is a storming, hilarious, success.

After many years as a theatre director, Stuart Gordon broke into cinema with this, his directorial debut. Gordon's experience with long rehearsal periods and with theatre's actor focused approach may go some way to explaining why Re-Animator, though it is 'just' a low budget horror film, actually boasts a set of strong performances and a surprisingly solid, and often very witty screenplay. The cast is led by the reliably eccentric Jeffrey Combs, as Herbert West, Re-Animator (the title of HP Lovecraft's orginal story, on which Dennis Paoli, William Norris and Gordon's screenplay is -apparently very loosely - based). Combs plays West as a man consumed with his scientific breakthrough to the point of madness, but also as something of a kid in a candy store. When things (the cat, people, whatever) are dying around him West is like an excited kid with his first chemistry set, who never stops to consider whether what he's putting in his test tubes is about to explode. Wests pomposity is often very funny, but so is his mad pursuit of his goals, and the fascination with his results (especially funny is the moment he starts taking notes when the decapitated head of a rival comes back to life).

Around the charismatic Combs is a strong cast with no big names in it. David Gale seems sometimes to disdain the project, which, ironically, only makes his performance as West's teacher more perfect. However, when Gale lets himself off the leash and really becomes the film's (reanimated) villain, he seems to start enjoying himself (who wouldn't, given one particular scene)? In the other major supporting roles Bruce Abbott does his best to ground the madness as West's housemate and reluctant assistant, while Barbara Crampton, though probably hired for her beauty and willingness to be very naked, contributes a performance that does actually add up to bit more than the usual naked imperilled plot device.

However, Re-Animator isn't really a film you go to for great acting. It's one you go to for good gory fun, and on that level it delivers in, and indeed with, spades. The gore scenes, which escalate from the reanimation of a cat, through the infamous 'head' scene (details below), to the creation of a morgue full of zombies, required 25 gallons of fake blood, and the effects still hold up 26 years later. Gordon keeps things quite credible (a good idea for a film set in a medical school), resulting in not the slightly discoloured zombies of George Romero but corpses that reflect the manner of their death be it a heat attack or a shotgun to the face.

After all the madness and all the silliness, Gordon even manages to find a legitimately haunting, and character driven, note to go out on, rounding off with an excellent cliffhanger which actually deals in both horror and a surprising degree of moral complexity. It's an unusual close to an unusual gore movie, and just one more thing that makes Re-Animator stand out.


Standout Scenes [Once again these scenes were not available to embed from youtube]
Opening Titles: Largely for Richard Band's score, which riffs on Psycho to brilliant effect

Cat: Herbert West proves to his flatmate that he has indeed cracked the secret of life and death, by reanimating his dead cat. Twice.

Head: Here's something you don't see every day; a decapitated head, which has been reanimated, giving head to a naked student doctor.

Memorable Lines
Dan Cain: [Dan's cat has died and been found in Herbert's refrigerator] You can call, or write a note.
Herbert West: I was busy pushing bodies around as you well know and what would a note say, Dan? "Cat dead, details later"?

Herbert West: I must say, Dr. Hill, I'm VERY disappointed in you. You steal the secret of life and death, and here you are trysting with a bubble-headed coed. You're not even a second-rate scientist!

Dr. Carl Hill: [Dr. Hill's head has just *awakened*] Wesssssssssst...
Herbert West: Yes, Doctor, it's Herbert West. What are you thinking? How do you feel?
Dr. Carl Hill: [wheezing] Youuuuuuuuuu...
Herbert West: [eagerly taking notes] "You..."
Dr. Carl Hill: Bassssstaaaaaarrrrrd!

[Re-re-animating the dead cat in the basement]
Herbert West: Don't expect it to tango; it has a broken back.

DVD review: Lake Mungo [15]

DIR: Joel Anderson

THE FILM
At first glance, Lake Mungo looks to be just one more in the recent glut of found footage horror films, specifically a close cousin to Paranormal Activity (though the two films were made at roughly the same time). However, as the film's 87 minutes tick by, something a bit different, and altogether more interesting, reveals itself.

In 2005 in the small Australian town of Ararat, Alice Palmer (Talia Zucker) drowns while swimming at the local dam. After her death her parents (Rosie Traynor, David Pledger) and her brother (Martin Sharpe) begin to sense a presence in the house, and see what appears to be Alice's ghost in photographs and video footage they have taken. This leads them to look deeper into the circumstances of the time surrounding Alice's death, and they discover some disturbing things.

Writer/director Joel Anderson makes a creditable debut here, crafting a film that is convincing in its documentary construction, from the use of interviews and found footage, down to the occasional creepy recreated shot illustrating a piece of expository dialogue, the whole film feels very much like a modern documentary. Where it really convinces though is with the acting. The perennial problem of the mock doc is that many fall into the trap of feeling acted. Lake Mungo never does. I'm not sure whether Anderson had his cast improvise their dialogue from his guidance, but however he achieved there is a tremendous sense of reality in these performances. The Palmer family feels like a family, they all react differently, but convincingly, to their grief and everything they say in the interviews feels like they are relating a story they lived through, and re-experiencing the emotions. This is true from top to bottom of the cast list, there's not a weak link here.

Anderson doesn't go for empty style here, but his shots are well designed, always preserving the verisimilitude of the film, but also creeping you out at the pivotal moments. The images of a ghostly Alice are haunting, and the grainy nature and slowly revealed complexity of them allows Anderson to draw you in to every frame, studying, hunting the clues. Some may not warm to the film's slow burn pace, but for me it worked perfectly (certainly this is a much better paced film than Paranormal Activity, and its 80 minutes waiting/30 seconds payoff ratio). Lake Mungo doles out small revelations on a regular basis, and always manages to surprise us by dwelling in the details (the ones you'll miss first time round). Ultimately it takes us briefly down several different roads regarding what, exactly, happened to Alice, and there is a refreshing openness to the ending, a sense that posing questions and positing ideas is enough, that the answers are what we make them.

Lake Mungo makes for an interesting companion piece to the more visceral horror films that have lately been coming from Australia. This creepy little film may not be for gorehounds, but it sneaks up and gets under your skin. I also suspect that it will reward multiple viewings, as you challenge yourself to see things before they are revealed, and perhaps to divine the truth of what happened to Alice. This comes highly recommended.


THE UK DVD
The picture quality is as good as you could hope for, given the mix of sources. There is film footage here, camcorder footage, degraded video and mobile phone footage, all of it is appropriately rendered and in the professional looking material colours, blacks and edges all hold up.

Unfortunately there are no extras on the DVD and, in an inexcusable oversight, my copy lacked any sort of subtitles. In this day and age not subtitling dialogue so deaf film lovers can enjoy your film is unforgivable. If you can hear though, this is a decent disc if you can get it for a good price.


If you would like to buy the film (UK release July 25th), and help out 24FPS at the same time, please use the links below. Thanks.


Thanks to Debbie at DDA for the screener.

Mother's Day [2011] [18]

DIR: Darren Lynn Bousman

It's easy (and often fun, I won't deny it) to be sniffy about the recent trend for horror remakes. Horror may always have been the genre that ate itself, but lately it seems to have chowed down with almost disturbing zeal, and regurgitated a lot of foul smelling rubbish into cinemas. And that makesit all the more puzzling to me that most of the reviews I've seen for Mother's Day have been one star pannings, because this – while no classic – is one of the best remakes to come along in some time, and a pretty entertaining horror film in its own right.

The setup is pretty straightforward home invasion horror. A band of brothers (Patrick Flueger, Warren Kole and Matt O'Leary) who have just robbed a bank, one of them getting shot in the process, roll up to their Mother's house, but soon discover that she has moved, and that the new owners (Jaime King and Frank Grillo) are having a party in the basement. Desperate to find the money they have been sending their mother, so they have a fee to enable themselves to cross into Mexico, they take the party goers hostage, and call their Mother (Rebecca DeMornay) and Sister (Deborah Ann Woll) to the house.

So far, so standard then, but there are a couple of elements at work here that enable Mother's Day to stand out. Chief among them is Rebecca DeMornay's performance as the titular criminal matriarch. It has been years since she did anything of note, and she's little short of revelatory here, ungodly beautiful at 51, and giving a complex and engaging performance that powers every scene she's in. While there is always an undertone of threat in DeMornay's performance it is the outward friendliness with which she greets her son's hostages, and the way she seems to want them to be comfortable – without doing anything to help them – that is most disturbing. In many ways she's like the perverted nightmare vision of a perfect sitcom mom, even making a cake for the hostages. DeMornay takes the character credibly through several stages, from the outwardly friendly parent who just wants to get her boys out of these nice people's way to a brutal monster who will do just about anything if she is crossed, it's chilling and layered work, and makes Mother's Day worth seeing all by itself.

However, that's not the only interesting thing in the film. The rest of the bad guy performances are all pretty good, with Flueger, Cole and O'Leary giving each of the boys their own distinct personalities, and making each of them a different kind of threat, and True Blood's Deborah Ann Woll giving a performance that almost matches DeMornay's in its subtle complexities. The screenplay also works quite well, okay some of the dialogue is rather perfunctory, but the characters are well developed and there is an impressively uncompromising tone, a bleakness that gives the film a bit more punch than your average horror picture. This is especially true of the film's emphasis on punishment, which reaches its ultimate expression in a very tough scene in which two innocents are given the chance to live if they will pick up a knife and stab the other to death.

Darren Lynn Bousman does a solid, if not massively personal feeling, job behind the camera. There's a nice, John Carpenteresque, cold open, and a tendency to keep much of the worst violence just off screen, or just out of focus, which allows the imagination to go to work, but overall it's not as distinctive as the barmy and underrated Repo: The Genetic Opera.

On the downside, 112 minutes is long - too long - for a pretty basic home invasion horror, and outside of Shawn Ashmore as the Doctor trying help the injured bank robber the performances from the films good guys (especially the wooden Jaime King) are less impressive than those of the bad guys. The film does slip into standard slasher silliness towards the end (a moment with a nailgun is laughable), but finds its feet again in the last moments with a great coda. On the whole, Mother's Day isn't perfect, but it's much better than I expected it to be, much better than it really has any right to be, and if you're looking to see a nasty little horror movie, it's well worth a look.

24FPS Top 100: No. 59

59: THE DESCENT (2005)
DIR: Neil Marshall

Why is it on the List?
For horror fans, Neil Marshall's second movie (after soldiers vs werewolves debut Dog Soldiers) offers fantastic value for money. It is essentially two knuckle whitening horror movies for the price of one, served up in just 95 minutes of your time.

After twenty minutes of setup, acquainting us with the all female cast of characters, with whom we are about to spend the next hour in the dark of an unexplored system of caves, the first of these horror movies begins in earnest; a tense journey through the caves, during which Marshall continually raises the stakes with claustrophobic scare sequences, injuries and the revelation that the girls are not in the cave system they thought they were in.

After about 40 minutes of that, the film explodes into high gear as it becomes a terrifying and brutal monster movie, featuring truly scary creature design, splashy violence and some truly iconic final girl imagery. Okay, so it's not the most original horror film you'll ever see, but Marshall arranges the elements so well that the jump scares work every time (even on subsequent viewings). In fact, one scare in this film, for me, is just about as good a jump scare as there has ever been in a movie. It happens the first time you really see a 'crawler', and it makes me have to catch my breath even now (you can see it below in Standout Scenes).

However, The Descent isn't just a scare machine. The characters are broadly written, but well played by Marshall's all female cast, with Shauna MacDonald standing out as the initially nervous and frightened woman who finds unexpected reserves of strength (and gets a final girl shot so cool it deserves to rank with Sissy Spacek covered in pigs blood, in a film we'll discuss later in this list), but while the performances are good, it is the photography that really impresses here.

The Descent was shot on a set, but Marshall and DP Sam McCurdy make the environment feel very real (and very threatening) through their use of camera and lighting. There is little cheating the light here, most of the cave sequences are lit with torches, infra red cameras, lighters, glowsticks or some other available source of light. Obviously as well as adding to the verisimilitude, this allows Marshall to have his monsters use the shadows effectively, and means that the dark itself, even when there's nothing in it, becomes scary.

It's not the smartest film on this list, but The Descent is a fun, frightening ride, with something for every horror fan from creepy 'what's that in the background' moments to unbelievable tension (the collapsing tunnel) to good old fashioned ultraviolence. What's not to like?


Standout Scenes
"What the Fuck was that?"
Our first proper look at a 'crawler', and it's fucking scary.

The Tunnel
I'm claustrophobic, so this sequence in which a tunnel collapses, threatening to trap one of the girls inside, is one of my worst nightmares.


If you would like to buy The Descent, and help 24FPS out at the same time, please use the link below. Thanks.

Cannibal Holocaust (2011 Cut) [18]

DIR: Ruggero Deodato

In 1984 the Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK drew up a list of movies that would become known as the video nasties. Films so repellent, so brutal, that their release made their publishers liable to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. Ironically, for the most part, the DPP ended up granting a now nearly 30 year long spotlight to these films, films which otherwise would mostly have drifted into well deserved obscurity.

However, it has also preserved a handful of good films, and even a couple of classics. Cannibal Holocaust, perhaps the most transgressive of the nasties, falls into that last category. Far from being a simple exploitation film, Deodato's magnum opus is a film of ideas and which plays with form in ways that provoke revulsion, fear, and most importantly thought, in its audience.

Last night I was finally able to see this groundbreaking film at the cinema (the last screening I had wanted to attend was pulled by Police). However, this was still not quite the original film, rather it is Deodato's 2011 edit, cut to get around some of the problems that the British Board of Film Classification have historically had with the film (largely its extensive unsimulateed animal cruelty). This is the version which will be released on Blu Ray later this year by the exceptional Grindhouse company Shameless.

Rather than cutting the contentious moments Deodato has generally chosen to obscure them with what are ostensibly flaws in the film. This is well thought out; an artful way to make the edits, in keeping with the form of the film (the second half of which puports to consist of documentary footage left in poor conditions in the jungle for months), and it doesn't take much away from the film, only the early killing of a muskrat is entirely deleted.

These considerations aside, Cannibal Holocaust remains a brilliant film. The performances are really only serviceable, but even that's quite high praise for Italian exploitation movies, but Deodato's direction is what really transforms this film from a simple gorefest into something genuinely interesting. The first half of the film is pretty straightforward narrative cinema, following a rescue operation to attempt to recover four missing filmmakers and their footage, and here Deodato reveals a genuinely artistic eye, developing many memorable shots and set pieces. The second half is even more striking; Deodato develops the faux documentary styling brilliantly, using them to draw us in in a much more visceral way than if we had been able to sit at one remove from the film, and manipulating technical 'flaws' to make the verisimilitude ever more, and thus ever more disturbing.

The film's moral questions are simplistically phrased (summed up in a final line of voiceover), but they remain troubling, and can be extended into far less extreme situations with equally troubling implications. Cannibal Holocaust may have begun (as Deodato said before the film) as a reaction against explicit violence in news footage, but today it could easily be seen as being about war reporting, or even the morals of any reporting.

It may not quite be complete, but this is as good a version of Cannibal Holocaust as the UK is ever likely to see, and it was a treat (an odd term i know) to feel the full force of its impact on a big screen. It's an essential film, and a genuinely great and interesting one at that.

Julia's Eyes [15]

DIR: Guillem Morales

I'm not the guy who talks to the characters in the cinema (you know the guy, the one who yells "Don't go in there" at the Nightmare on Elm Street remake), in fact I think there should be severe punishment for that guy. However, I did shout at Julia's Eyes. Let me explain myself... For the better pert of two hours I had watched Julia's Eyes lurch from being a deeply uninspired noises off horror, with unconvincing supernatural overtones, to become a dull, stupid and derivative serial killer film. Then came the final shot, which managed at once to be head slappingly obvious, mawkishly sentimental and insultingly stupid, and I could not contain myself, the words just sort of rolled out at the screen "Oh, do fuck off".

This is a terrible shame, because Belen Rueda, who took the lead in earlier Spanish horror hit The Orphanage and here returns to the genre, deserves considerably better. Her performance exceeds the film at every turn, and if you believe in a single frame of Julia's Eyes it will be entirely thanks to her nuanced performance, remarkable in a film so hackneyed.

The fault lies, unquestionably, with director Guillem Morales, who makes a series of irritating, film hobbling, choices. First of all there are the many threads which Morales sets up, but never pays off (a group of blind women who seem to have almost supernatural senses, a creepy neighbor for Rueda's Julia, why the hell nobody thinks to tell Julia that a: Her twin sister (whose suicide opens the film) had an operation to correct her blindness and b: That that operation failed), these are just some of the half complete threads. The screenplay also gives us little sense of most of the characters motivations, notably those of its ultimate villain, which are 'explained' in a garbled and hilariously nonsensical speech.

However, the big issue is Morales' consistently awkward direction, which knows only three qualities; cliche, theft and pathetically obvious metaphor. At times Julia's Eyes resembles a horror cliche museum; you've got the creaking floorboards, the lights going on or off suddenly, loud inappropriate music, the obvious dream sequence, the chase through a thunderstorm (complete with thunder as a score track cueing the scares), a score that essentially bellows 'are you scared yet? HUH?' at you for two hours, and even a 'CAT!' moment, and that's, again, an incomplete list. Theft is also prevalent, horror films like The Eye and The Orphanage loom large, one sequence is an all but direct lift from The Silence of the Lambs (but not scary) and the last shot may as well be from Contact.

The visual metaphor was what got to me most though, especially during a roughly twenty minute sequence after Julia (who has gone blind) has had a cornea transplant and has to wear a bandage over her eyes. During this sequence we never see anyone's face except Julia's. Several problems here; first it's just awkward, and forces Morales into a lot of odd compositions and unnatural lighting, second WE GET IT, she doesn't know what people look like, stop punching us in the face with the visual metaphor and thirdly, most problematically, it makes it screamingly obvious who the villain is, it's basically a Scooby Doo technique,and frankly Hanna Barbera got more surprises out of it.

This is an irritating film, as it went on I had an ever deepening desire to slap the director, and it can't be rescued either by the best efforts of Belen Rueda or by the occasional creepy image. I've got no idea what someone as talented and as original as Guillermo Del Toro is doing putting his name to this boring, derivative, amateur night tosh.

Blu Ray Review: The Beyond [18]

DIR: Lucio Fulci

The Film
The Beyond is the third of Lucio Fulci's four zombie films, which have become the most popular and enduring films on what is an extensive and wide ranging CV. While his previous film, The City of the Living Dead, had strayed somewhat into the surreal (notably with that infamously abrupt ending), The Beyond sees Fulci step into a world that never seems less than dreamlike, and blur the bounds of real and surreal and the leading character's sanity or madness, throughout.

The story is notably difficult to get a handle on, but in basic terms it concerns Liza (played by Catriona MacColl, in the second of her three films for Fulci), who has inherited a hotel in New Orleans, but as she's doing it up discovers that legend says it is built over one of the seven gates to Hell and that when that gate opens - as it appears to have done - the dead will walk the Earth. It's a loose tale, and just about provides a framework for MacColl and David Warbeck (as the local doctor who comes to Liza's aid) to be menaced by some of make up artist Gianetto DiRossi's nastier creations. However, Fulci's out and out horror films were never famous for their narrative cohesion, and nor does a lack of it take away from the experience of them, indeed in this case it may add to the experience.

At the time it was released, this film and others like it were dismissed as the work of hacks, but The Beyond reveals Fulci as a master visual stylist. From the outset he lends the film a subtle surreal atmosphere with the use of smoke to give every scene (even the first in the hospital morgue, which should really be a cold, clinical, place) a slightly otherworldly feel. Fulci is also an auteur, and many of his visual obsessions are on full display here. Most notable is the clear fascination with eyes, there is an implicit suggestion in the film that those who have looked into 'The Beyond' go blind, and this is accentuated with frequent close ups on the eyes of Cinzia Monreale's character Emily; an ethereal presence who may or may not be real, but seems to seek out Liza at key moments in the film. Fulci is also fascinated by the idea of trauma to eyes, which is the focus of many of the gore scenes in the film; eyes are gouged, put out with nails and eaten by spiders.

These and all the other gore effects are brilliantly realised by the great Gianetto DiRossi and his team, whose work also graced Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters, City of the Living Dead and New York Ripper among many others. DiRossi's ingenious work allows Fulci to really get close in on the gore effects, to dwell on them, and while there are a few rough edges, the work is generally incredibly impressive. Fulci also knows how to use the effects, in an extended scene in which a woman's face is melted off with acid he certainly indulges in the gore, but he doesn't sacrifice menace on the altar of sensation, repeatedly cutting back to an increasing pool of acidic blood as it advances on the unfortunate victim's young daughter.

The two most notable effects in The Beyond are, respectively, perhaps the single best and the single worst DiRossi and Fulci ever accomplished as a team. The spectacular one is a relatively simple exploding head, but for me it's among the best effects of its kind ever filmed; the nastiest and most shocking (yeah, including Scanners). On the other hand the sequence in which a man is, essentially, spidered to death is pretty terrible. The mechanical spiders look awful, and really undermine some otherwise fine effects. That said, this was a sequence that stuck in a future filmmaker's mind; Sam Raimi used a shot from this sequence in his first Spider-Man film.

For all its spectacular gore and lack of narrative cohesion, it would be a mistake to think that The Beyond has nothing to offer apart from splashy violence. The performances are proficient, given the limitations (lines like: "You have carte blanche, but not a blank cheque" and a lack of on set dialogue recording), and the central trio of MacColl, Warbeck and Monreale all do solid work. Monreale is perhaps especially good, turning in an ethereal performance as Emily. What really sets the film apart though is that haunting sense of otherworldiness. Some of it; the lack of any characters outside the central drama, the seeming dislocation in the story and the abrupt nature of many scenes may be down to the budget and English language skills that gave us things like the sign in the hospital that says 'Do Not Entry', but there also clear elements designed into both the narrative and the visuals. You can't look at the tightly constructed and edited scene in which Liza and Emily first meet (on a deserted road which seems to stretch into forever) and not come away with the impression that Fulci is at least suggesting that this is some sort of alternate reality.

Even if I'm not convinced it's his best film, The Beyond may contain Fulci's best ending. He seems here to want to revisit the doomy and surreal feeling of the ending of City of the Living Dead (where it didn't really come off, to be frank), and this time he nails it perfectly. After 85 minutes of relentless violence and gore, the film pulls back, and has the courage to end on a note that is truly downbeat and haunting.

The Beyond has its weaknesses, largely in the screenplay, in which individual moments seldom join up (which, while it adds to the strange feeling of the film, can also make it a challenge to watch). One set piece falls flat, some of the dialogue and acting is comical, and there is the odd flaw with the editing (notably the take that goes on JUST long enough to show Catriona MacColl begin to break out laughing in the midst of a zombie attack. However, it is visually stunning, and sweeps you up irresistibly in a very particular world. If you haven't seen it you really can't call yourself a horror fan.

The Extras
This is one of Arrow Video's most prestigious titles, and they have gone all out on the extras package. On the first disc there are two audio commentaries; the classic laserdisc track with stars Catriona MacColl and David Warbeck, and a new recording with Fulci's daughter Antonella. I have only sampled the new track, which sounds like a fond reminiscence of Fulci, but the older track is one of my favourites; it was recorded just before Warbeck's death, and is a warm, funny track marked by the continuing chemistry between the stars, who are clearly fond of each other.

Across the two discs there is also a selection of newly filmed and substantial interviews. MacColl - who always seems a little baffled by the affection these films are held in - contributes heavily, in both a new interview and a post-screening Q and A. Cinzia Monreale, credited in The Beyond as Sarah Keller, is animated and enthusiastic in her interview, and seems to have different memories of Fulci than you might expect, given what has been said about him over the years.

From behind the scenes there are interviews with genius make up artist Gianetto DiRossi, who reveals a few of his secrets (all of which are simpler than you might expect) and with The Beyond's original US distributor, who gives an interesting insight into the grindhouse scene of the 70's and 80's.

As a whole package, this is pretty exceptional.

The Disc
The picture is absolutely stunning. The team at Arrow Video have, again, put together a brilliant restoration of the film. As much as the previous DVD releases (mine is a Region 1 version) looked great, this is light years ahead of them. There is detail in the frame that you just wouldn't have expected would ever be visible. The best thing about the transfer, however, is that it manages to uncover this detail without losing the grain that gives the film its texture, without giving it that slightly artificial, overly perfect, feel that HD can have. As far as I can tell this is a perfect transfer.

The only problem with the copy of the film I currently have is that the pre-credits sequence of the film is in black and white, rather than the original sepia tones. Happily, Arrow are running an exchange programme so you can get a corrected print.

Menus are well designed and laid out, and operations are fluid and run without animated sequences between menus, which tend to be cool once and then annoy.

The Package
From the artwork (which allows you to display one of four covers) ,to the newly commissioned booklet, to the outstanding transfer, to the extras both old and new, Arrow have here surely come up with the definitive release of this exploitation classic. It's an absolute essential for Fulci fans.


This edition of The Beyond is out now on 2 Disc Blu Ray and DVD. To buy it, and help out 24FPS at the same time, please use the links below. Thanks.

Blu Ray review: And Soon the Darkness [18]

DIR: Marcos Efron

The Film
As a big horror fan I get really annoyed when people dismiss the genre as merely an endless cycle of dumb movies about stupid people getting chased and brutalised. I hate it even more when filmmakers appear to go out of their way to make those people's case for them.

Music video director Marcus Efron here makes his feature length bow with yet another horror remake (this time of a near unknown British film of the same name from 1970), and sadly this one has to go on the ever increasing pile of piss poor reboots. If you've never seen a horror film before then there is perhaps some hope that you'll be entertained by And Soon the Darkness, but if you've experienced more than... oh let's be generous and say three other horror films, then this one will hold no surprises and no thrills in its 91 minutes. To give Efron his dues, he's clearly learned how to make his pictures look pretty. He's immeasurably aided by the Argentinian scenery amid which And Soon the Darkness is set; there are some really beautiful images here, notably in the film's last half hour, which is set in a deserted town which looks bombed out. Unfortunately everything else is a total disaster.

First there's the story, which concerns two girls (Amber Heard as goody two shoes Steph and Odette Yustman as party girl Ellie) who miss their bus on the last day of their cycling holiday in Argentina, go out into the countryside, argue, separate, and then one of them goes missing. It's pretty much the definition of generic, and if you give it even 30 seconds thought then you'll know how Karl Urban's 'mysterious' English speaking stranger and local law enforcement figure in the plot, and pretty much everything that happens to Yustman and Heard. Nothing is unexpected. The Plot O Matic 3000 clanks relentlessly away, the cogs groaning with every hackneyed scene (a coincidence really, since I did the same).

Then there's the acting. You can't fault Yustman's energy or effort, but she's seriously let down by the character, who is insufferable, which really doesn't help you care when she goes missing - point of fact it's a blessed relief. You can, however, fault Karl Urban's energy and effort. He shows up for perhaps ten minutes, and 'acts' as though the message we (and director Efron) are supposed to take away is 'look mate, you paid for my time, I never said I was going to betray an emotion or have an expression'. Performance wise, co-producer Amber Heard's major contribution is to speak intelligibly and look pretty. You could have put just about any actress her age in this part and have got something as good or better. This too is a major problem in getting the film to engage, because Heard never exhibits enough spunk to be an interesting or formidable final girl; there's no sense that what this character goes through has much effect on her at all.

Despite running a scant 85 minutes before the credits roll, And Soon the Darkness is long, drawn out and boring. Nearly an hour passes after a (very) brief teaser before anything remotely thrilling or scary happens, and when the film finally decides to ramp up in the last twenty odd minutes it does so in a way that feels like a sigh of contractual obligation, rather than out of any desire to scare, appall or engage the audience. Even at the basest level the film fails; it's not even violent enough to be engaging at a visceral level.

And Soon the Darkness is a shrug of a movie; a brief distraction for all concerned, now almost certainly forgotten, and best left that way.

The Extras
The check disc I was sent boasted only the trailer and six minutes of deleted scenes. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to whether they're worth watching?

The Disc
And Soon the Darkness may be crap, but it is beautifully presented crap. The 1080p transfer is brilliant; looking at the scenery is almost like looking out a window. It's just a shame that so much effort has gone in to the presentation of a film that does so little to warrant it (it is, however, a bonus in the scene where Yustman and Heard strip down to bikinis).

24FPS Top 100: No. 64

Click the title below for the trailer.

64: WITCHFINDER GENERAL [1968]
DIR: Michael Reeves


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
Michael Reeves was the wunderkind of low budget British cinema in the 60's. This, his third and final film, was also considered the one that really marked him out as a talent to watch for the future. He was 24 when Witchfinder General (known in the US by the odd title The Conqueror Worm) was made, and 25 when he died of a drug overdose, during pre-production for his next film.

If Witchfinder General became Reeves' epitaph he could hardly have asked for a better one; a focused, frightening and disturbing horror film, groundbreaking for its time in its depiction of violence and containing the finest performance of genre legend Vincent Price.

The film is based on the real life figure of Matthew Hopkins, self described 'Witchfinder General' of England during the civil war. His activities were actually quite short lived (1645-47) and ended not as the film does but in retirement from the post. It was clearly a reign of terror, if estimates are to be believed Hopkins and his assistant John Stearne may have been responsible for 40% of the executions for witchcraft ever carried out in England. He was also a great deal younger than Vincent Price plays him, perhaps as young as 25 at his death. The film may not be wedded to the facts, but that almost certainly helps it find its propulsive plot, which has Hopkins and Stearne pursued by a young captain in Cromwell's army (played by Ian Ogilvy, who was in all of Reeves' films) who is seeking revenge for the rape of his fiancé and the hanging as a witch of her uncle, a priest.

Vincent Price and Michael Reeves apparently hated each other. Reeves didn't want Price (he was after Donald Pleasance), but the star was forced on him by production company Tigon, and Price knew this. Price was also apparently incensed by Reeves' constant demands that he 'do less' and 'stop acting'. It may have made Witchfinder General hell to make but even Price, once he saw the film, agreed that this was his finest performance. Instead of being camp, as he often was, Price oozes cruelty and menace in a tightly wound, thin lipped, performance. His Hopkins is vile, clearly aware of his own evil, and yet insistent that his is 'the lord's work'. This is a chillingly corrupt psychopath, allowed by timing and superstition to run amock, killing and often raping as he pleases and being paid for his trouble.

Reeves doesn't indulge in the violence as much the directors of his generation who would make their first cinematic bows in the next few years; Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg among them, but what Witchfinder General lacks in explicitness it makes up many fold in impact. Much of the torture and killing in the film is played on the reaction of spectators, the screams of the victims telling the story that British censorship at the time stopped the images from relating. In many way this is more disturbing; gore effects of this time often look silly now, but Reeves allows our imaginations to go to work, and that's always going to produce a more disturbing image in the circumstances.

This is not to say that the violence of the film lacks either credibility or impact, indeed the execution scenes are done with chilling realism and indeed chilling nonchalance. From the opening hanging to the climactic burning of a young woman in a Suffolk town square, the images of violence are confrontational and upsetting.

If the other performances don't quite come up to Price's level that's okay (though Ogilvy makes for a solid hero), few apart from Hilary Dwyer (beautiful, but no great shakes in the acting department) have much to do, and there are no real embarrassments among the cast. Price commands the screen, and his performance is mesmerising, as is the film as a whole. Witchfinder General is a disturbing experience as a film, but it's even more so when you take a step back and consider that, at least in broad strokes, it's true.

STANDOUT SCENES
Ducking: We've all heard about this practice to 'discover' whether an accused person was a witch, but to see it so graphically depicted is genuinely disturbing.

Burn the witch: Reeves spares no detail in this scene of Hopkins' most horrifying method of execution.

MEMORABLE LINES
[Hopkins and his men throw three securely-bound people into the moat as a witchcraft test]
Matthew Hopkins: They swim... the mark of Satan is upon them. They must hang.

[a tied-up woman Hopkins has thrown into the moat to test for witchcraft drowns]
Matthew Hopkins: She was innocent

Matthew Hopkins: Men sometimes have strange motives for the things they do.


To buy the film and help out 24FPS at the same time, please use the links below. Thanks.

24FPS Top 100: No. 67

67: CANDYMAN [1992]
DIR: Bernard Rose

Why is it on the list?
It would have been very easy for Candyman to be just one more stupid horror film with an imposing bogeyman slicing random victims up, but actually this adaptation of a Clive Barker short story is much more intelligent, and much more artistic, than that. The film centres on a graduate student (played, in one of her first really good roles, by Virginia Madsen) writing a thesis on urban legends, who is told the story of the Candyman. Apparently if you say his name five times, while looking in the mirror, the hook handed monster will appear and wreak havoc. Guess what happens.

What’s really interesting about Candyman is how unlike a horror film it often seems. Though the bogeyman is given flesh - and, courtesy of Tony Todd, a voice that seems to be the product of a lifetime diet of cigarettes, sandpaper and gravel – for most of the film there is a real ambiguity about how real he is, about whether the murders we see Candyman commit are actually perpetrated by Virginia Madsen’s character, Helen. British writer/director Bernard Rose keeps a firm grip on this part of the story, making the film feel more psychological than visceral, and both the design of the film (the nightmarish graffiti visions seen around Cabrini Green for example) and Madsen’s excellent performance help keep this film from becoming just one more movie about people being sliced up with a big hook.

That said, Candyman is a horror film, and it’s often a damn scary one. Partly that’s thanks to the ever present sense of foreboding created by both Rose’s direction and the beautifully creepy choral score by Philip Glass but it’s also down to Tony Todd, who is instantly iconic as Candyman; elevated to the pantheon of great horror monsters within seconds of his first appearance, but it’s more than just his physicality, Todd’s a fine actor (see his non horror role in Le Secret for further proof) and he invests Candyman with more than just menace; there’s a seductive air about him, you can see how Helen might be sucked in by this monster.

The images are often stunning, as Rose renders both fantasy (the justly famous image of Candyman attempting to kiss Helen, his mouth filled with bees and yes, that’s Tony Todd, and those are real bees) and reality (the many times when Helen wakes to find herself covered in blood) with equal assurance and imagination. He also blends the two brilliantly, especially in Candyman’s first appearance, in which he uses flash frames of graffiti of Candyman and other nightmarish imagery (more bees) to make it unclear whther Candyman is real, or Helen is going crazy. There are relatively few onscreen kills, but those we see are rendered brilliantly; the violence brutal and bloody, but generally swift enough to shocking rather than rubbing the audience’s face in the gore.

After Carrie it became rather an overworked horror cliché to have a shock epilogue on a horror film, many have done it very badly indeed, but Candyman’s gives you a real jump, and is more than shocking; it’s themeatically interesting too, and brings all the questions the film has spent 95 minutes asking back round full circle. I rather like the first sequel; Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, but I really wish there had been a film playing off the ending of this one.

Overall, for me this is one of the best, and most underrated, horror films of the 90’s, there’s more thought in these 95 minutes than in 100 dead teenager movies, and more scares too.

Standout Scenes
Hanging Around
A spectacular kill, but one that preserves the film's essential ambiguity.

Kiss me
One of the nastiest, creepiest, images in 90's cinema, all the more so because it's not fake.

Helen... Helen... Helen...
I won't spoil it, other than to say AARRRGGGHHH!!!


Memorable Lines
Candyman: I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom! Without these things, I am nothing. So now, I must shed innocent blood. COME WITH ME!

Candyman: The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite. As for our deaths, there is nothing to fear. Our names will be written on a thousand walls. Our crimes told and retold by our faithful believers. We shall die together in front of their very eyes and give them something to be haunted by. Come with me and be immortal.

Helen Lyle: What's the matter, Trevor? Scared of something?

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EARLY REVIEW: I Spit On Your Grave [18]

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE opens on January 11th 2011. You can see the UK trailer HERE

DIR: Steven R. Monroe
CAST: Sarah Butler, Andrew Howard, Jeff Branson,
Daniel Franzese, Chad Lindberg, Rodney Eastman

It’s not the most censored, though 32 years later you still can’t see it uncut, but of all the video nasties the original I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, which was made for peanuts by Mier Zarchi, is perhaps the most infamous, and not only because of its spectacularly lurid title. It’s perhaps one of the most difficult and distressing films I’ve ever seen and, for all its many flaws, it gets under your skin to the point that after watching it you feel like you need a shower to get it off you. It is, then, an odd choice for a remake, because what more can you do, how much more extreme can you be?

Steven R. Monroe’s film is, in general shape, very faithful to Zarchi’s blueprint. Jennifer Hills (Butler) is still a young novelist who arrives at a remote cabin to work on her second book. After a few nights some local men come calling, they break into the cabin and ultimately rape and beat Jennifer almost to death. A few weeks later Jennifer, physically recovered, enacts a systematic and terrible revenge on the men who attacked her. It is, essentially, the same blueprint as every rape/revenge movie from THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE to THE BRAVE ONE. Where Monroe’s film differs from Zarchi’s is in the amount of detail it provides. Where Zarchi’s film seemed most interested in the horror of the acts it depicted, Monroe’s takes more time to build its characters (especially those of the group of men that attack Jennifer), with the characters of the rapists this is pretty effective; they are cartoons in the original, and if anything giving them more background serves to drop them from an even greater height.

In many ways this I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is a better film than the original, and yet that’s also what sometimes undermines it. Though it was made for just $1.5 million, the 2010 film looks outstanding. The images are crisp and cinematic, and that’s exactly the problem. This sheen about the film (which continues with the casting, Butler in particular being rather too Hollywood pretty for her role) is a little distancing when compared to the down and dirty feel of Zarchi’s film which, whatever you feel about the morals of this choice, really did put you right in amongst what was happening, and created at times the deeply unnerving feel that what you were seeing just could be real. Put simply you watch this film, but you survive the 1978 version.

To give credit where it’s due, most of the performances here are considerably better than those of the 1978 version. Along with being given more character traits and being much more fully developed we now have some capable actors playing Jennifer’s attackers, with Andrew Howard turning an especially impressive performance as a sadistic sheriff who is also a family man (in the film’s most striking, and in some ways most horrific, scene he takes a phone call from his young daughter while the other men rape Jennifer just a few feet away) and Chad Lindberg much more convincing as a retarded adult than the original’s Matthew. On the whole the first half of the film, documenting Jennifer’s arrival at the cabin and the series of attacks and rapes she is subjected to, works very well. It may look prettier, but the events are still just as nasty, brutal and horrendous as they were in the original film. It’s when we reach the revenge section that I begin to have real problems with this I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE.

For me the original I Spit… is a film about the degradation of violence. Jennifer’s vengeance is short and brutal; an act of purging, driven, it seems, as much by a need for closure as for vengeance. It’s also surprisingly underplayed, with the gore much more implied than it is shown. This, however, is the age of SAW and thus here the vengeance is played up to a ludicrous degree. The problem is that I think we’re supposed to enjoy it, and that’s a real sticking point for me. There is an interesting question about the second half of this story, which the film never quite addresses, which is whether Jennifer actually lived through her ordeal. Butler’s performance is ambiguous, but there are definite hints here that Jennifer may be little more than a spirit of vengeance, and I think I prefer that idea to the perhaps more persuasive alternative, which has her dealing with her ordeal through complex tortures meted out to her attackers, each capped off by some meaningful detail or wisecrack to get us to embrace and applaud this extreme vigilantism. The violence here is much more explicit and dwelled on much longer than in the 1978 film, to such a degree of extremity that I began to question exactly how justified Jennifer’s actions were (especially in relation to the Sheriff). It’s unpleasant, sure, but feels more like a carrot for the audience than anything else.

This is a difficult film to review. From a technical standpoint, especially given the budget, it’s excellent and Monroe certainly shows that he knows how to discomfort an audience (a skill that will serve him well in this genre) but it’s so bound up with another film, and though the 1978 film is not, by most traditional measures (excepting Camille Keaton’s remarkable, haunted, performance, which Butler completely fails to match) as ‘good’ as this one it is for me undeniably the more effective film. I guess it comes down to what you want out of a movie. If you want the catharsis of cheering at Jennifer’s vengeance then this is the version for you, but if you really want the full impact of this story then stick with the 1978 version. Neither is an easy watch, but neither is uninteresting.

A Serbian Film: BBFC Cut version [18]

DIR: Srdjan Spasojevic
CAST: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic

You really can’t separate A SERBIAN FILM from the hype that has surrounded it since it was first seen in January. Horror cinema has lately been going through another of those periodic patches in which it is becoming notably more extreme, with each release seeming to aim for a new high (or low, depending on your point of view) watermark in how testing an experience it can be for its audience, and it seems that for many people A SERBIAN FILM is that latest high (or low) point – that said I’ve since heard that another Serbian film; THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A PORNO GANG, is even more extreme. Certainly this film has attracted more criticism for its violence than almost any in recent memory, with mere descriptions of scenes, especially the now infamous ‘newborn porn’ scene, serving for some as an indictment of how far the horror genre will stoop to excite its audience. It is perhaps this infamy, rather than the film’s content as such, which has resulted in the BBFC demanding 49 separate cuts – a total of four minutes and twelve seconds – to the version of the film I’m now reviewing.

This hype was one of two things I carried with me into the screening. The other was an awareness of director Srdjan Spasojevic’s repeated claims that his film, far from being a mere exercise in prurient violence, is in fact an allegorical tale about how Serbia has been mistreated by the political class. On the surface, at least, the film is about Milos (Todorovic), a former porn star who is lured out of family life with a big payday to work for a director (Trifunovic) who says that he wants to make a hardcore art film, and tells Milos that he’s to know nothing more about the project. As the film becomes more and more depraved, with violent sex scenes, often performed with young children watching, Milos decides that he wants to leave, but when he tries he is drugged and forced to continue with ever more depraved scenes for the film.

Whatever A SERBIAN FILM is, subtle it is not. Once you are made aware of the fact that the filmmakers claim that it is an allegory that fact is obvious in almost every scene, in fact it’s an incredibly simplistic message, casting Serbia as a rape victim and ‘porno artist’ Vukmir as the corrupt political class beating it and fucking it, if only from a distance. This is never more nakedly expressed than in the ‘newborn porn’ scene. Perhaps if I knew more about Serbian society and politics this would seem insightful and clever, but to be frank I just felt like someone was shouting an unconvincing argument at me. For all its heavy-handed attempts at bringing this message to bear on the film, I found it an empty experience. Even in this cut version it is relentlessly (often boringly) brutal, and I found little of the intelligence and weight that lifted films like MARTYRS and ANTICHRIST out of the torture porn ghetto.

I can’t deny that A SERBIAN FILM is well made. The gore effects are brilliantly handled, with a decapitation towards the end of the film being especially nasty and convincing, and Srdjan Spasojevic definitely shows promise as a director, as the level of craft that he’s put into the design of his shots here (especially during the shooting of Vukmir’s film) is diverting. This is when it’s a real shame that the film is so heavily cut, because there is obviously real thought behind the film’s visuals and its editing (it’s notable that there is actually relatively little really explicit gore here, much of the worst violence is cleverly shot to hide some of the detail without losing the impact). There is also an almost surreal quality to the film within the film, and that sense of Milos’ entering another world when he steps on to set is heightened by the stark and stylised lighting choices and the strange, structure free, dialogue of the porn film. The acting is also largely impressive (though Sergej Trifunovic does push the boat out too far towards the end, becoming a cartoonish embodiment of the already bludgeoned in message), but whatever the level of craft there was just something missing here for me.

A SERBIAN FILM wants to shock you. It probably will, but personally I need to be really involved in a film to be affected by it in that way, and I just wasn’t with this one. The message was so front and centre that it really got in the way, for me, of engaging with the characters on a purely human level, to me everything in this film ends up feeling like a piece of Spasojevic’s personal allegorical jigsaw. There also came a point at which the film was pushing the boat out so ridiculously far in its violence and transgression that I began guessing at the most fucked up thing they could do next, and ended up guessing much of the content of the last quarter of an hour. The one moment I didn’t see coming, by the way, is so utterly ridiculous that it too undermined any shock value of the scene.

As unconvinced and as disappointed as I am by A SERBIAN FILM as a whole, there is enough going on here to interest me in Srdjan Spasojevic’s next film, providing that he elects to tell a story rather than provide a blood drenched and unconvincing lecture. There is, of course, the possibility that restoring the missing four minutes and twelve seconds will transform the film into the masterpiece that some have claimed it to be, but somehow I doubt it.

24FPS Top 100: No. 68

68: THE MUMMY [1932]
DIR: Karl Freund

Why is it on the list?
Much though I love James Whale’s Frankenstein films, this, for me, is the crowning glory of the justly celebrated cycle of Universal’s monster films. THE MUMMY was the first (and arguably the only really notable) directorial effort of Karl Freund, who had, in his native Germany had been one of the people most instrumental in creating the look of the German expressionist films (most notably as the cinematographer for Fritz Lang on METROPOLIS and for FW Murnau on DIE LETZE MANN.) It was an obvious piece of directorial casting; the Universal horror films all owed a great debt to Freund’s work anyway. It pays off brilliantly in the film, which is always wonderful to look at; devoid of the stagy feel that could often afflict films of the early 30’s, as they adjusted to the technical demands of sound. The film is also packed with evocative shots that, though they may have lost their ability to shock, retain nearly 80 years on the capacity to chill.

The story was obviously influenced by that of the so called curse of Tutankhamun, which had captured the public imagination in the few years since his tomb had been uncovered by Howard Carter’s team. The film sees Boris Karloff (billed on the film’s poster as Karloff the Uncanny) as the ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep, wakened from his cursed burial when archaeologists find his tomb. Ten years later Karloff (now posing as Egyptologist Ardeth Bey) believes he has found his long lost love, the reincarnation of the Princess Anacksunamon (played by the lovely Zita Johann). It’s not the most original tale, but it’s lifted by the telling.

‘Karloff the Uncanny’ may just sound like so much marketing crap, but it’s actually rather apt for his performance here. The film’s opening sequence, with Karloff wrapped in bandages (a painstaking Jack Pierce make up), is striking, but he’s much more creepy as Ardeth Bey. Pierce’s beautifully subtle aging make up for Karloff as Bey gives the suggestion of a mummy without constantly swathing the star in bandages, and along with the wonderful performance that Karloff gives; fragile, but alert, contributes much to the film’s very particular and very creepy atmosphere. Bey is an atypical monster; Karloff plays him with his own natural, soft, lisping voice (which makes the hypnotism sequences very convincing), it is Freund’s framing, and his expert use of light and shadow, that really brings out the monster in this Mummy, never so memorably as when we first see him in close up; Freund’s deep shadows making the wrinkles in Pierce’s make up stand out and Karloff’s face appear almost like a bare skull.

A few of the other performances are a little theatrical, but Zita Johann is effective - and radiant - as the object of Imhotep’s desire. At just 70 minutes THE MUMMY is pacy but unhurried, finding time for a brilliant flashback sequence detailing, in lurid pre-code detail, how Imhotep came to be entombed alive. This is one of the few early horror films that really retains its power to frighten, and that alone makes it one that deserves to be much more recognised than it is as, sadly, it is still often seen as the lesser cousin of the Frankenstein films.

Standout Scenes
Back to life
Some overacting here, but Freund’s sparing use f the Mummy is brilliant, and the moment that Karloff’s hand twitches still sends shiver down the spine.

The curse
Replicated almost shot for shot in Stephen Sommers’ (remarkably not terrible) remake, the original remains the best version.

Ardeth Bey
Karloff’s chilling entrance, and one of the high points of a great performance.



Memorable lines
Sir Joseph Whemple: [translating inscription on box] "Death... eternal punishment... for... anyone... who... opens... this... casket. In the name... of Amon-Ra... the king of the gods." Good heavens, what a terrible curse!
Ralph Norton: [eagerly] Well, let's see what's inside!

Im-ho-tep, alias Ardeth Bey: You will not remember what I show you now, and yet I shall awaken memories of love... and crime... and death...

Frank Whemple: Surely you read about the princess?
Helen Grosvenor/The Princess: So you did that.
Frank Whemple: Yes. The fourteen steps down and the unbroken seals were thrilling. But when we came to handle all her clothes and her jewels and her toilet things - you know they buried everything with them that they used in life? - well, when we came to unwrap the girl herself...
Helen Grosvenor/The Princess: How could you do that?
Frank Whemple: Had to! Science, you know. Well after we'd worked among her things, I felt as if I'd known her. But when we got the wrappings off, and I saw her face... you'll think me silly, but I sort of fell in love with her.
Helen Grosvenor/The Princess: Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love with?

Im-ho-tep, alias Ardeth Bey: Excuse me... I dislike being touched... an Eastern prejudice.

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