24FPS at LFF: Day 1

ENTER THE VOID
DIR: Gaspar Noe
CAST: Nathaniel Brown, Paz De La Huerta,
Cyril Roy, Olly Alexander


Gaspar Noe’s last feature film, IRREVERSIBLE, was a shock to the system; a caustic masterpiece that was, despite its brilliance, impossible to recommend. Enter the Void is a desperate, grasping, attempt to make something equally shocking and controversial.

Enter the Void, Noe told us before the screening, is about life, about death. Well, yes, that’s what it wants to be about, but in striving for profundity Noe finds only pretension. The film is seen almost entirely through the eyes of Oscar (Brown), a young American living in Tokyo and working as a small time drug dealer. Early in the film Oscar is shot and killed by Police, and for the rest of the epic running time he floats freely through the world, watching his life pass before his eyes and looking on as the lives of his sister (De La Huerta) and friends (Roy, Alexander) go on. There is actually an interesting central idea at the centre of Enter the Void, a film about the process of death, and the out of body experience that may go with it, is genuinely intriguing but it is an idea that belongs to a short film. Enter the Void lasts 160 unbelievably long and tedious minutes.

I can’t deny that Enter the Void is, visually speaking, the work of a master filmmaker. It looks quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, and the POV construction is realistic even down to the fact that the camera regularly ‘blinks’. For the first 20 minutes I was dazzled by the visuals, but then you start to realise that there is nothing but dazzle, that this construction really has no purpose. Noe’s shot selection gets really irritating after Oscar is dead. For the next 140 minutes half your time is spent at ceiling level, looking down at people and the other half is spent just behind Oscar’s head. Add to that more neon than you’ll find in 20 Joel Schmacher Batman films, a constantly moving camera and enough strobe lighting to induce epilepsy in a previously healthy person and you’ve got a film that can be genuinely challenging to watch. I’m not against that on the whole, but there has to be a point. Noe’s visuals end up feeling like a very talented film student showing off. Just like the film’s thematic content the visuals seem to bellow, “look at me, look at me”.

Noe’s screenplay is thin, and his characters are all impossible to care about because we never really get to know much about any of them (even Oscar, whose whole life we see through his eyes) and even if we did they are all such terrible people that there is no reason to care about them anyway. The acting also happens to be pretty awful. The worst offender, just as he was in the absolutely appalling Tormented, is Olly Alexander, who can’t even say, “I’m sorry” in a way that sounds vaguely human. He honestly sounds so unnatural that I find it hard to believe that he understands the words he’s saying.

Cyril Roy may actually not understand some of his dialogue, and his thickly accented English lacks any emotion. The only exceptions to each of these complaints are the two actresses playing Oscar’s sister Linda. As an adult Paz De La Huerta gives her a moving pathos and makes her search for connection in an unfamiliar city, especially after the death of her brother, a really genuine quality. However she, and everyone else in the film, is outshone by Emily Alyn Lind, whose work as the young Linda gets to places of deep, searing emotion that seem so real they are almost uncomfortable to see in a child.

With IRREVERSIBLE Gaspar Noe offended and shocked a lot of his audience. I’ve seen people walk out of films before, but when I saw IRREVERSIBLE several ran out of the cinema. Enter the Void is almost goading its audience, begging us to find it offensive and extreme. I didn’t, I just found it tiresome and adolescent. At times Enter the Void feels like a film by a teenager who has just discovered girls. How else to explain the repeated shots of naked women - Linda, both in her job as a stripper and just sitting around naked; Oscar’s mother, who is often seen breastfeeding him or Linda; Oscar’s older lover (a terrible Sara Stockbridge), who seems to exist purely to be a topless plot device. This impression is only reinforced by the utterly pointless explicitness of the film’s last 20 minutes. We drift through the hotel love, watching an endless succession of couples having sex, much of it very evidently hardcore.  This sequence culminates with Linda and Alex (Roy), whose sex scene ends in a close up, from the inside of Linda’s vagina, of Alex fucking her. Never mind that the final result of this sequence was already done in, of all things, the opening sequence of Look Who’s Talking, it’s completely pointless. It doesn’t tell us anything except that Gaspar Noe has a desperate need to shock.

Initially intriguing and technically dazzling though it may be, Enter the Void is a huge step backwards for a man who had previously threatened to become cinema’s foremost provocateur. This is a pretentious, pointless, masturbatory film, that smacks of desperation at every turn.


KYNODONTAS
[DOGTOOTH]
DIR: Yorgos Lanthimos
CAST: Hristos Passalis, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni,
Christos Stergioglou, Anna Kalaitzidou, Michelle Valley



The one problem with seeing as many movies as I do? I’m almost never surprised. Well, Dogtooth took care of that for me. I really have never seen anything quite like it.

Not everyone is going to warm to Yorgos Lanthimos’ third film. There are only two types of review on IMDB; those that dismiss it as a total waste of time, and those proclaiming it a masterpiece. Dogtooth is rather standard in form. In fact it is almost textbook, if minimalist, filmmaking. What really makes this film so strange, and as a result so beguiling, is its story and the way it creates an entirely believable world all of its own. The film centres on a family; Mother and Father (Valley and Stergioglou), and three children who all appear to be between mid teens and mid twenties. Only the father is ever allowed to leave the house. The parents have forced their children to live in a hermetically sealed world, which stops at the large fence surrounding their property. The only person allowed into their world from the outside is Christina (Kalaitzidou), a security guard from the father’s workplace, who he has engaged to teach his son (Passalis) about sex, practically.

From this odd starting point Dogtooth builds a truly strange world. It’s a slightly formless film, with little narrative drive and no exposition - we discover this family’s way of life by being plunged headlong into it. In the absence of an overarching story what we have is a series of scenes that almost seem like vignettes, but which build piece by piece into a compelling whole. Because the children (who, like their parents, are never named) never go outside they spend much of their time playing. The games are truly bizarre, and always competitive. At one point the elder daughter (Papoulia), who appears to be the family doctor, even though all her information about the body is wrong, announces that she’s got a new anaesthetic, and proposes that she and her younger sister (Tsoni) both take some and the first to wake up ‘wins’. Like much of the film this scene has a truly disquieting undertone, and because events play out so against the grain of social norms you never know where Dogtooth is going to go next. In an age of movies that you can predict almost every beat of by just looking at the poster, this is truly refreshing.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ direction is formal, chilly, and somewhat distant. Shots are often very composed, even theatrical at times. Yet, because of the peculiar atmosphere in which his film takes place, this approach seems entirely natural, and a perfect fit for the material. Another thing that might be off putting is the acting. The performances of the actors playing the children are very stilted and unnatural; their tones have an unnatural evenness, an almost robotic air. You have to remember, though, what it is they are playing. When you accept that these are people who have never been outside the grounds of their home, only ever seen one person from the outside, know little of film, TV or music and have spent a lifetime being deliberately misinformed by their parents, the performance style too seems completely appropriate, and it begins to dawn that these are in fact three brilliant pieces of acting. The forced way in which the children relate to each other, and especially to Christina, the confusion with which they greet the unfamiliar (see an horrific scene with a cat) and the slightly robotic way they do certain things (a truly odd dance scene, for example), all these things and more combine to make up a compellingly realistic portrayal of these rather unique people.

The only concession to standard plotting comes rather late in the day, with the revelation that when the children lose their ‘dogtooth’ (the first incisor) they will be judged mature enough to leave the nest. This information comes back around in a viscerally painful ending, which is perfectly executed by Lanthimos. He demonstrates an admirable willingness to leave us with questions, leave us wanting to know more, and yet the film isn’t unsatisfying. Dogtooth is a strange and haunting piece of work, one that you’ll be going over in your head long after its abrupt finish.

Review Post 51: Up

UP [3D]
DIR: Pete Docter
CAST: Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai,
Christopher Plummer, Bob Peterson



After I saw Up I called my mother. I told her that the three of us; me, her and my step-dad, had to go and see Pixar’s wonderful latest, and I informed her that if she didn’t cry at least twice, I no longer wished to know her.

I was lucky enough to discover Pixar just a little before everyone else. I went to a preview screening of Toy Story, about five days before it opened, and was absolutely blown away by it. I believe I spent most of the next school week talking it up to friends. Since then I’ve seen everything the company has put out, and been charmed and awed by much of it. Lately though, I’ve felt like they’ve been going through a rough patch. Beginning with the colossally overlong and often rather unengaging Cars, Pixar had stopped, for me at least, being as great as once they were. Last year’s WALL . E was progress - half a masterpiece - but I had held out little hope for Up. I didn’t really love the trailers, the story didn’t seem massively enticing and, as you may by now have noticed, I haven’t exactly warmed to 3D. It is, then, an unreserved joy to report that Up not only sees Pixar back on truly winning form, but it is a masterpiece, an instant classic, and the single best thing they have produced besides Toy Story 2.

Up has, as is the case with most of Pixar’s work, a rather simple story. 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen (Asner) has just lost his wife, and he’s about to be evicted from his house and placed in an old people’s home. So Carl uses hundreds of thousands of helium balloons to float his home free of its foundations and off on the adventure he and his wife Ellie always meant to have. Along for the ride is Russell, a young ‘Wilderness Explorer’ desperate to gain his assisting the elderly badge. The best part of Up happens before that story begins. The film’s opening quarter of an hour documents, first in a sweet and funny, but very straightforward sequence and then in a silent montage, Carl and Ellie’s seventy years together. The montage is perhaps the best single sequence that Pixar have ever produced, and five of the most moving minutes in cinema. It boils down to just a few images all the tenderness, the joy, and the pain of a shared life. By the end of that sequence I was in floods of tears (actually, I’m getting emotional thinking about it now). Though it isn’t really part of the main story that sequence is the keystone around which everything else is built, and the way it resonates throughout the film is really extraordinary. Ellie never has a voice as an adult, and yet her presence (or the lack of it) is the driving force of this film. Up is a brilliant film as whole, but that opening is a truly awesome achievement.

Thereafter Up becomes slightly more traditional. That’s not a slight by any means, because few do this better than Pixar. The film becomes a hilariously funny mismatched buddy movie as Carl and Russell, along with a female bird named Kevin and a talking dog called Dug (a brilliant vocal performance by co-writer/co-director Peterson), attempt to float Carl’s home to the place where Ellie always wanted to live while also trying to avoid an adventurer (Plummer) who has spent his life trying to capture Kevin. The gags come thick and fast, but they are always rooted strongly in character. This is something Pixar have always done well; they create truly three-dimensional characters. Carl, in particular, is a complex and layered character. Many jokes come from the fact that he’s old and cantankerous, but there’s also warmth there, and real motivation for how disengaged he’s become. Though the film is just 96 minutes long director and co-writer Docter takes his time, he allows the characters and their relationship to grow organically and realistically. As much as it is due to Docter and Peterson’s screenplay, the fact that Up, and the central relationship between Carl and Russell in particular, works so well is also down to the sensitive performances.


No voice actor has ever been Oscar nominated for their work. Ed Asner ought to become the first. His characterisation of Carl is as deep and detailed as any that has been seen on screen this year. He’s extremely funny, but also wrings every drop of emotion out of the moments when Carl talks to his late wife and out of his growing fondness for Russell, without ever overplaying a moment. As Russell, 9-year-old Jordan Nagai is also splendid. His dialogue is that of an 8-year-old; complete with all the complaining, all the over excitement, and all the moments that he can’t quite edit himself, that you might expect. Nagai plays Russell with an openness and innocence that is hard not to warm to and, like Asner’s, his performance never feels acted. You identify with these people, despite the fact that all they are is a collection of pixels, and much of that is thanks to Asner and Nagai. Credit is also particularly due three more members of Up’s vocal cast. Christopher Plummer lends his authoritative tones to the film’s villain, making him pretty chilling. Bob Peterson gives a pair of hilarious performances as ‘talking’ dogs Dug and Alpha. Dug comes close to stealing the show at times, and is easily the funniest thing in what is a very funny film. Elie Docter has only a small role, but it is in some ways the most important in the film, as she voices the young Ellie, and it is her sweet, slightly lisping, infectiously energetic performance that gives Ellie the personality and warmth that then powers the film.

Of course those voices are only half the acting job of an animated film, and Pixar’s team of animators have, once again, outdone themselves. It’s not just the technical mastery - the photo real backgrounds of Paradise Falls, the realistic stubble on Carl’s face, the fur on the many, many dogs - it’s the fact that the animation is so fluid and real that even though the characters are stylised, and not really remotely like real humans, that you never question the reality of the film. There’s such mobility, such subtlety of expression, in all the character models that Pixar often don’t need their voices to make you laugh or make you cry.

The 3D is technically perfect, and for the first time I didn’t find that the process took me out of the film. However, I’m still not convinced that there’s any point, beyond a commercial and anti-piracy one, to using 3D. There’s not a single shot in Up that suggests that it needs to be in 3D. Yes, the depth illusion works well, but it isn’t as if 2D has ever had a problem in portraying depth (the trailer for Man on Wire gave me vertigo just as effectively as some of the flying sequences towards the end of Up did). 3D is a gimmick, plain and simple, it’s a gimmick that, sadly, darkens the very specific colour palette that Docter and Peterson have used for this film, and thus I can’t really see the 3D version as the proper version of the film. However, in this case, 3D is a gimmick that Up is simply too good to be messed up by.

Up divides quite neatly into three acts, and if there is any downside at all to this film then it is that the second act, in which Carl and Russell begin their adventure, is perhaps not as stunningly brilliant as the rest of the film. It suffers from a slight lack of momentum. But this is no more than hair splitting. Even in these sequences Up is better than almost any other film released this year, it just isn’t quite soaring to the heights achieved by the rest of the movie. The finale really picks up, with a series of genuinely perilous looking and exciting action sequences. Even here though Pixar never forget to bring the funny, with a particularly gut busting joke during a ‘swordfight’ between Carl and Christopher Plummer’s Charles Muntz.

Up is genuinely stunning cinema. What I really want from a movie is to be affected, and in that respect Up delivers over and over. I laughed over and over and I cried three times. I honestly don’t see how you could remain unmoved by this brilliant film. See it in 2D, see in 3D, just make sure that you see it.

24FPS at LFF: Timetable

My London Film Festival starts tomorrow, so here's my final programme of screenings, along with dates that reviews will be posted. With 9 films this will be far and away the busiest year I've had at LFF. Hope you enjoy the coverage.


16/10
ENTER THE VOID (Gaspar Noe)
DOGTOOTH (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Reviews: 17/10

19/10
LIFE DURING WARTIME (Todd Solondz)
Review: 21/10

20/10
MORPHIA (Alexei Balabanov)
Review: 21/10

23/10
MOTHER (Bong Joon-ho)
CHLOE (Atom Egoyan)
LEAVING (Catherine Corsini)
Reviews: 24/10


25/10
AIR DOLL (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Review: 26/10

27/10
THE DISAPPEARENCE OF ALICE CREED (J. Blakeson)
Review: 28/10

The Long Halloween: Fuck you, Rob Zombie

HALLOWEEN II (2009)
DIR: Rob Zombie
CAST: Tyler Mane, Scout Taylor-Compton,
Malcolm McDowell, Brad Dourif



Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween was, make no mistake, awful, bad enough that to call it his ‘best’ film would be to insult things that are actually good, it was his least worst film though. He’s regressed.

There are, of course, plenty of horror films worse than Halloween II, endless amounts of shitty horror films made on a camcorder in someone’s back yard have inexplicably found their way to a video release, but that’s not what Halloween II is. This film cost $15 million, it has a writer/director who has made three successful horror films before, it is produced by a major Hollywood studio. It may not be worst horror film ever made, but Halloween II is certainly one of the worst studio horror films in a very long time.

Zombie’s story sees Michael Myers returning to Haddonfield (why? Because, that’s why) after apparently wandering around America knifing people for a year, while growing a mountain man beard that makes him look like a 7-foot, dirt encrusted, member of ZZ Top. Anyway, he comes back and sticks his knife in a bunch of teenagers and other minor characters. It’s the same ‘story’ as every other bad slasher. To be fair Zombie does try to inject a little depth into the film, unfortunately what he comes up with a series of jaw-droppingly pretentious dream sequences involving Young Michael (now played by a slightly less freaky, but still completely charisma and talent deficient child actor) his Mother (The beautiful, but entirely wooden Sheri Moon-Zombie) and, for some reason, explained on an opening title card and yet still utterly obscure, a white horse. He also tries to establish a connection between Myers and Scout Taylor Compton’s Laurie Strode, but does so using little more than graphics and editing techniques that look like they were lifted from a bad music video by a terrible metal band in 1995.

The story is one thing, but what is truly abominable is the screenplay. If you counted every ‘fuck’ in this film I believe the total would be higher than the total amount of words that aren’t ‘fuck’. I mention this not because I’m offended by bad language (I actually don’t believe in bad language), but because it demonstrates beautifully just how tedious Zombie’s writing is. He has an absolute inability to create individual voices for his characters, so they all spout the exact same profanity riddled invective. The characterisation of Laurie Strode is a particular problem. In the original films she is a perfectly average, even slightly mild-mannered, teenager. Here every second word out of her mouth is fuck, she’s hostile and unlikable, and there’s a toughness about her, which undermines the sequences where she’s supposed to be threatened because, little though she is, there’s a sense that this girl can really look after herself. Even this is inconsistent though, given that Laurie is also prone to nightmares and endless fits of crying. In a better film this would pass for layered characterisation, a character hiding her vulnerability behind outward toughness. Unforunately neither Zombie nor Taylor-Compton have the ability to pull this off, and so it just seems confused and inconsistent. This seriously undermines what are supposed to be the scares, because not only do you not get the sense that there is any real threat but you also don’t care if there is. Personally I would have liked Michael to put a knife straight through Laurie’s head and have done with it.

The same problem exists with all the characters. I could believe that Zombie just wrote a few lines and then had the actors pick their dialogue out of a hat, in fact I have trouble believing that such personality free, identical sounding, cardboard cut outs could be created any other way. Perhaps Zombie’s worst offence when it comes to the characters is in his depiction of Loomis. Loomis was always brittle, but here he’s just an utter prick, the kind of man you want to punch in the face the second he speaks. When he was Donald Pleasance Loomis at least exuded some expertise and insight into Michael, there’s none of that here. Indeed the character is completely pointless in the context of the film, serving only to swan around like an arsehole, being rude to all and sundry, before yelling some useless psych 101 crap at Michael to no real purpose.


So we’ve established that writer/director Rob Zombie can’t write. He also can’t direct. He certainly can’t direct actors. When I say that Brad Dourif gives the ‘best’ performance in Halloween II I mean it much the same way as when I said that Halloween was Rob Zombie’s ‘best’ film. It’s not good (check out the hilariously poor scene in which Doruif’s Sheriff Brackett brings home a pizza for his, Annie’s (Danielle Harris) and Laurie’s supper) it is, however, slightly preferable to spending the same amount of time stabbing yourself in the leg with a pair of compasses. The same cannot be said of the rest of the… I hesitate to call it acting, but for want of a better word. Scout Taylor-Compton, for example, baffles me. She’s got a girl next door prettiness in real life, which would work for Laurie, but here Zombie has her looking raddled and ugly, and however good a physical fit she may or may not be, Compton lacks any sort of acting ability. If Zombie had cast a Speak n’ Spell machine as Laurie he couldn’t have got a performance that was any less expressive and emotional. How, when there are huge amounts of talent out there, does someone as staggeringly awful as Taylor-Compton get even extra work, let alone a lead in a studio film? Malcolm McDowell should also be in contention for next year’s Razzies for his scenery chomping work as Loomis. However, nobody really had much of a shot at being good in this movie, given the material.

In previous films Rob Zombie has demonstrated that he’s a bit of a magpie, stealing shots left, right and centre from other films, but he’s usually managed to make a film that looked at least okay. Until now; Halloween II is a horrible, horrible mess to look at. First of all most of the film takes place in near total darkness, meaning that during a great deal of the film we can’t see what’s going on (ah, small mercies), and are essentially sitting squinting at a black screen for minutes on end. At other times there is light, and it is as ineptly handled as the darkness. During one scene on a deserted road there is a brilliant white light throughout the scene, which serves to silhouette Michael. Where’s the light coming from? Who cares, it looks ‘cool’, right? In fact it looks more like a UFO from The X-Files is about to land behind Michael and is amateurish in the extreme. Then there are the music video moments, in which Zombie tries to pummel us into submission with cuts upon cuts upon cuts of ‘symbolism’ that only a 12 year old could see as profound or cool. The biggest fuck you though, is reserved for the film’s very last shot, which is a direct steal of the last shot of Psycho. I swear, even over the music, I could hear Hitchcock begin to rotate in his grave. If I ever meet Rob Zombie I’m going to punch him in the face for that shot.

I’ve now written 1200 words about a Halloween movie without discussing Michael Myers. Part of that is down to how unimportant Michael is to this film, and part of it to how unlike Michael he seems. I was always against Tyler Mane as Michael, because it makes the threat he poses so different. The original Michael was a threat mainly through tenacity (and, yes, a supernatural inability to die, but why split hairs), rather than power. Mane’s Michael is just a hulk. Yet by demystifying Michael, Zombie has also removed another of the things that made him truly scary, the point behind that blank mask is that who Michael is doesn’t matter, what his name is doesn’t even matter (remember that in John Carpenter’s original he was ‘The Shape’), Michael isn’t a person, he’s living, breathing evil. That’s scary, a big tramp with a mask isn’t. Michael’s kills are extremely boring, and all executed in a very similar manner. Zombie loves to dwell on overkill (another thing that Michael never really engaged in), and so we get scenes where Michael stabs a victim repeatedly for about 20 seconds, pauses, then keeps right on stabbing. Annoyingly for gorehounds, though Halloween II is very bloody, we actually get to see very little of the violence. Blows usually land off screen, or in such pitch darkness that we can’t make them out, and the violent scenes appear to have been shot and cut by an epileptic on crack.

The dream sequences that recur throughout the film are absolutely awful. The imagery is so cliché that it’s just hilarious, and the acting by Sheri Moon-Zombie and new Young Michael Chase Vanek is torturously stilted. They are also hugely pretentious, it makes me laugh that people have lately accused films like Antichrist and Martyrs of being pretentious. Those people clearly haven’t seen this movie. Oh, how I envy them. Perhaps the thing that most irritated me in this film though is the reveal of the first dream sequence, at which I actually sat up in my seat and said, “you’ve got to be fucking kidding”.

I really hate the trend for remakes in mainstream horror. Hopefully this staggeringly inept entry in the cycle brings us at least close to its absolute nadir (though Zombie’s next is a version of The Blob, God help us). Halloween II is an inexcusably awful film, by a filmmaker who has said that this excremental production represents his vision. That being the case he should get his eyes tested and have his DGA card taken away. If you have even a passing interest in good horror movies, skip this one and get your fix with Thirst on October 16th.

Movie(s) of the week: Long Halloween double bill 2

A Wes Craven double bill for Shocktober.

The Last House on the Left (1972)

Craven's first film is not his best, but though it is uneven Last House has some chilling performances, deeply horrifying scenes and one of the most intense and difficult murder sequences on film. Not for the squeamish.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

I'll be reviewing the complete Nightmare on Elm Street series this week, so I thought I'd post what I consider the series' highlight for you to watch. This is, for my money, something of an unsung classic, and perhaps the first postmodern horror film. It's a smart, funny and scary film.

Enjoy.

The Long Halloween: Part 1

One of the pictures in this post contains nudity. If you're going to be offended by that, please read another post. Thanks.

THE MUMMY ['32]
DIR: Karl Freund
Reviewed here.

MARTYRS
DIR: Pascal Laugier


I’ve now seen Martyrs three times, and each time I become more convinced that Pascal Laugier’s second film is a true masterpiece of the horror genre. Point of fact I think it may well be the single finest horror film of the past decade. Martyrs isn’t for everyone, it is brutal beyond belief, and deeply difficult and upsetting but what lifts it out of the ordinary is the fact that brutality is not what the film is about. Laugier’s expert direction and the astounding performances of Morjana Alaoui and Mylene Jampanoi ensure that this is a film with ideas, a film that asks questions, a film that demands engagement from an audience. You can read my full review of Martyrs here.

THIRST
Reviewed here.

THE HOWLING
DIR: Joe Dante
I want to like The Howling, it is by one of my favourite directors; the witty, talented, and much underrated Joe Dante, and it is generally seen as something of a classic of 80’s horror. Unfortunately I found it extremely boring. It takes forever to get going, and as you wait for the werewolf based fun to start there’s really nothing to hold the attention, other than spotting the usual Joe Dante company (Dick Miller, Robert Picardo etc). Rob Bottin’s transformation effects are well realised, but this film lacks the sense of fun that is present in its director’s other work, and is considerably less engaging for that.


FROM BEYOND
DIR: Stuart Gordon
After making the classic Re-Animator, Gordon reunited Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton for another gooey, gory, Lovecraft adaptation. He adds genre legend Ken Foree to the mix, which is fun, though I could do with a little less of him walking around in nothing but orange Y-Fronts. Overall though, this just doesn’t stack up to Re-Animator. Even at 81 minutes the story, which sees Combs help invent a machine that taps into people’s pineal glands, somehow making latex monsters appear, is very slight. It also doesn’t help that Crampton - stunningly beautiful though she is - makes for one of the three least convincing ‘brilliant scientists’ in movie history. Still, there’s much to enjoy: John Carl Beuechler’s creatures, Crampton in revealing leather and Combs’ overating. Overall, From Beyond is dumb fun for horror nuts.


MASTERS OF HORROR

DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE
DIR: Stuart Gordon
More Lovecraft from Gordon, this time as a rather average episode of Mick Garris’ hit and miss anthology series. The story is fun enough - a witch appears to be attempting to get a grad student (from, of course, Miskatonic University) to sacrifice his attractive neighbour’s baby - and Gordon handles the imagery of the dreams well. Sadly he’s let down by some poor performances and a rather creaky script, still, it’s fun to look at.



CHOCOLATE
DIR: Mick Garris
Easily the worst of the MOH episodes I’ve seen. Garris’ tale of possession is incredibly boring and padded with many completely superfluous scenes. It also happens to suffer from some truly awful acting, in which everyone appears to be in a different film. Henry Thomas is doing intense psychological work, really, really badly. Matt Frewer is in an awful comedy and Lucie Laurier, well, I’m not sure she’s even alive, so little expression does she register. The only positive here is Garris’ very apparent fondness for naked women with fantastic breasts.

DEER WOMAN
DIR: John Landis
From the worst of MOH to the best. I wish Deer Woman had been a feature. It is stupid as all hell, but the movie knows it, the characters know it, and Landis pokes fun at the entire enterprise in almost every scene. There’s an excellent leading performance by Brian Benben, as a cop who can’t quite believe where his latest case is going (the scene where he thinks through possible scenarios is a classic). This is, quite simply, what all comedy horror should be like; each feeds into and complements the other (another great scene is an hysterical play on the cliché of a person hearing footsteps following them). Landis' direction is strong, but the real star here is his son Max, who wrote the fantastic, hugely funny, screenplay. One to seek out.


THE STEPFATHER ['87]
DIR: Joseph Ruben
The horror film, and even the slasher, does command more critical respect today than it used to, but even now, though it is well rated by those who have seen it, The Stepfather is a film that exists under the radar. That’s a real shame, because Joseph Ruben’s film is a minor genre classic. It’s a simple setup; ‘Jerry Blake’ (Terry O’Quinn) is obsessed with finding the perfect family, and whenever the family he is with disappoints him, he kills them off and starts over. This time his new step-daughter (Jill Schoelen) begins to suspect him. Ruben’s camera work is excellent, with particularly stylish use of shadow at the film’s climax.
What really makes The Stepfather great though, unusually for the genre, is the acting. Schoelen was 23 at the time of shooting, but looks like a convincing teenager, and gives a strong, sympathetic performance. It’s a real shame that this pretty, talented actress has been almost completely absent from screens since 1996. However, this is Terry O’Quinn’s film, and he eats up the title role, giving it a depth and a reality that comes as a truly welcome surprise. He’s genuinely scary, especially in the film’s brilliant opening scene. The Stepfather is a great film, make sure you see it before the remake pollutes a cinema near you next month.

BBFC Update 3

Vanishing of the Bees [very mild language]


Toy Story [3D] [mild violence, scary scenes and some dangerous behaviour]
Fantastic Mr. Fox [mild violence and scary scenes]
Fame [mild language and sex references]
Seraphine [infrequent mild sex references and scenes of emotional distress]
Where the Wild Things Are [mild threat and brief violence]
A Christmas Carol [2D and 3D Versions] [mild threat, scary scenes and mild language]



Driving Aphrodite [moderate sex references]
Cold Souls [one use of strong language and moderate sexualised nudity]
Glorious 39 [strong language and one gory image]
All About Steve [moderate sex references0
Departures [emotionally intense scenes of bereavement]
The Boys are Back [one crude sex reference and implied strong language]
Gentlemen Broncos [infrequent crude humour]
2012 [sustained moderate threat and one use of strong language]


A Serious Man [strong language and soft drug use]
Ip Man [moderate martial arts violence and bloody injury]
Monty Python: Almost the Truth - The Lawyer's Cut [strong language]
Johnny Mad Dog [strong violence, sexual violence, sex and frequent strong language]
Pandorum [strong language and bloody violence]
Surviving Evil [strong violence and language]
Goodbye Solo [strong language]
Ong Bak - The Beginning [frequent strong violence]
Love the Beast [strong language]
L'Enfer 'Henri-Georges Clouzot [sexualised nudity]
Pontypool [strong language, threat and menace]
Dead Man Running [strong language and drug use]
The White Ribbon [child abuse references]
Dark Nature [strong bloody violence]
Carriers [moderate horror]
Humpday [strong language, sex, sex references and soft drug use]
Leaving [strong sex and language]
Couples Retreat [moderate sex references]


Colin [strong bloody violence and horror]
Vinyan [strong sex]
Ninja Assassin [frequent strong bloody violence]
Halloween II [very strong bloody violence]
Saw VI [strong bloody violence]