Month: October 2019

Cats Kill

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★★
“Dead cat bounce.”

It’s quite a feat for a film which runs a crisp 67 ½ minutes to outstay its welcome, so… Well done? The problem is mostly that far too much time is wasted on the set-up, introducing us – in quite excruciating detail – to characters in whom we have little or no interest. These would be the friends who decide to spend a weekend in upstate New York, unaware they are about to cross paths with a pair of bored locals who have decided to alleviate the tedium by going on a killing spree. When one of them gets cold feet, however, it’s left up to Cat (Rafferty) to follow through on the original plan, which she does with some enthusiasm. Just a pity this doesn’t happen until roughly the final twenty minutes.

Up until that point, the film makes the mistake of concentrating on the victims. They are, by and large, not people with whom you would want to spend more than five minutes. To the movie’s credit, this does appear to be deliberate, yet it renders every moment an increasingly aggravating experience. That’s especially the case, when contrasted with the lack of motive provided for Cat and her partner, who simply choose to become murderers in virtually the first scene, with little or no justification. More time spent building towards that decision, and less watching the Big Apple pals swapping tedious banter, would certainly have been a wise move. Heck, hanging out with the New Yorkers for a bit first would surely convince anyone about the wisdom of murder as a moral imperative. No jury in the land would convict.

Indeed, the whole spree-killing couple angle is given such short shrift, I was left wondering why the directors bothered. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as when it’s just Cat operating by herself, things get done at a considerably brisker clip, which is certainly to the film’s benefit. [I’m not certain the likes of Milton Bradley, Victoria’s Secret and John Deere will be quite as enamored by the name-checks their products receive over the course of proceedings here – particularly the last] After capturing and disposing of a set of victims, it ends with Cat going up against final girl Alana (Loren), and it’s then that the film is at its bes… uh, least underwhelming.

Definitely a case of too little, too late however, even with the final twist, which I’ll admit gave me a dark chuckle. The makers here claim they were going for something giallo-esque. I know giallo. And this is no giallo. Given the complete lack of style shown, it’s more like a bad eighties straight-to-video slasher pic, with all the lack of gore, shortage of tension and terrible pacing that implies. Rafferty gets a full pass and Loren a partial, with their more energetic performances something the rest of the cast would have benefited from following. Otherwise, it’s hardly catnip for horror fans.

Dir: Alexander Cherney, Gregory Casino
Star: Alanah Rafferty, Kay Marie Loren, Daniel J. O’Connor, Will Scarlett

Eye of the Colossus, by Nicole Grotepas

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Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

This probably picked up half a star in the final couple of chapters, because up until the end, the plot seemed to have some huge deficiencies. While most of these were certainly addressed by the final resolution, it still left a rather questionable taste in my literary mouth [if you see what I mean!]. The heroine is Holly Drake, who has been unjustly sent to prison after killing her abusive husband. Unfortunately, he was a police officer, and some of his dubious colleagues helped ensure Holly went to jail for it. On release, her previous career as a teacher is no longer an option, and she’s largely thrown on to the charity of her sister, Meg, also a cop.

It’s Meg who gives Holly a lead to potential employment, albeit of a shady nature. But Holly has few options, and has to accept the job, which involves retrieving a necklace which has been stolen from its rightful owner, before it can be whisked away. To complete the task, she needs to put together a team with the various skills necessary, and also acquire a piece of tech called the Skelty Key, which is needed to defuse the security around their target. For someone with no background in the underworld, all of this poses a significant challenge, even discounting entirely the actual job itself. [Why she was hired at all is one of the eventually explained plot deficiencies]

This is nominally science-fiction, taking place in a six-moon system around Ixion, a gas giant. There are several different races, in addition to expat Earthlings like Holly, and the relationship between them is occasionally fractious. However, I never got any particular sense of “alienness”: you could rewrite this to be on Earth with almost no SF elements. There’s also not much in the way of an antagonist here. Early on, the “Shadow Coalition” appear to be trying to stop Holly from carrying out her mission; this aspect seems to peter out, as if the opposition got bored and drifted away. This combination perhaps turns it into more of a “crime procedural” than SF; that’s less criticism than an observation.

What is my main criticism is its sluggish pacing. You’re more than 90% of the way through before you get to the heist which is the book’s focus, and it’s a bit of a drag to reach that point. While self-contained enough overall, it’s clearly a set-up for future volumes, and I must confess, these are somewhat intriguing. There’s some stuff which happens to Holly late on, toughening up her character from the rather whiny one she has been to that point, and we also discover the harrowing circumstances leading to her incarceration. I just can’t help feeling we could have got to the same place considerably more economically, in about one-third of the page-count, and we would all have been considerably better off.

Author: Nicole Grotepas
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Holly Drake Job series.

Crawl

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★★★★
“The shark was otherwise engaged, torturing Blake Lively…”

I have to say, I’m neither an expert on that strange sub-genre of “animal horror,” nor am I a particular fan of it. I’m mainly looking for a movie that can give me a suspenseful time in the cinemas. This is becoming more and more difficult. Partly because in by my time of live, I have has seen quite a lot of movies, of all sorts; but also because I feel modern film makers have forgotten how to create real suspense and a feeling of slowly rising and constant terror in movies.

Mostly we are left with nonsensical pictures of man-killing animals that seem to have supernatural abilities. Usually it’s played for laughs because of all the silliness that comes with these kind of movies. That’s a pity. Sure, as a cinema-goer you can’t expect the greatness of classics like Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) or Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) an ymore. But is it really that difficult? Create a modicum of interest for the main characters; introduce the predator; put the future victims in an isolated spot with the animals; and play with the ambiguity of the question as to whether said territory is safe at the moment – or not! That’s not rocket science, folks!

But for that you have to take the movie and the characters of your story seriously and the timing of every scene is essential: You’ve got to know where you set up your “beats”. How long can you ratchet up suspense before you’ve got to deliver? Where do you put the shocks, without which you can’t do a good horror movie? Do you put in a little bit of humor and to what degree? When is it time to give some relief to the audience, e. g. with character or relationship moments which seem obligatory background for these kind of stories? Whom do you kill? Whom do you have survive? And should you kill off the family dog or not? 😉

Alexandre Aja is a French film-maker who has got to show his talents across very different horror movies. His great High Tension, a psycho-thriller produced by Luc Besson, was followed by a The Hills Have Eyes remake, the good but not great Kiefer Sutherland vehicle Mirrors and later the (consciously) ridiculous Piranha 3-D. After a good start, in recent years it seemed as if he had lost “it” a bit. So, the offer from producer Sam Raimi to film an original story by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen came at the right time.

While the script has a few humorous moments (if you’re looking for them), it plays its story straight and Aja also focuses on creating genuine suspense and danger. Yet he also delivers in the important categories of shock and gore – something not really that evident from the trailers. That makes sense: you won’t show your climaxes in a trailer of an action movie. I’ve to say my expectations were pretty low when going into the movie. As a fan you know the score, so can a film still get you? To my surprise and delight, this was not only able to do that but also surpassed my expectations by far. But let’s start with some background info on what I want in such a movie.

Though you never expect a character study, I’m always happy if the characters get enough backstory or character traits, that they don’t appear as totally bland, two-dimensional audience stand-ins. That’s definitively true for Crawl‘s main actors Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper. Neither had that much luck with past roles: Scodelario, I remember from the Maze Runner movies but hardly seemed to register anywhere else much. I think I saw Pepper last with a supporting villain role in the True Grit remake (2010). I also need predators I like and respect. Some animals won’t really work for me, e. g. bears are simply too sympathetic. But for my money reptiles of all sizes always deliver the goods. And I’ve got an enormous respect for crocodiles or alligators.

Next, the simple but effective story in a nutshell. Florida, hurricane time. Swimmer Haley Keller (Scodelario), who just failed in a swimming competition, receives a phone call from her sister She’s worried because she couldn’t reach their dad. Neither sister has had much contact with him, since their mother and father divorced; he was Haley’s former trainer, leaving their relationship no on the best of terms. The streets are beiing closed due to the dangers of the approaching hurricane and the rising water levels.

After finding her father’s house abandoned, save for his dog, Haley drives on to their former family house which he was renovating. Following the sound of a radio, she descends into the derelict cellar where she finds Dave, her wounded father (Pepper), who tells her that two alligators have entered the cellar through the drain. While they have some sanctuary in the cellar, they have to make an escape, due to the rising water that is coming up through openings in the cellar floor…

This may sound maybe a bit dry (pun not intended). But, believe me, the screenwriters and Aja have used every trick in the book to push and pull us, the audience, emotionally through our seats, in the same way the alligators push and pull the two likable yet imperfect protagonists through their surroundings. I was very pleasantly surprised about the high level of suspense and tension here. But also how the important ingredients mentioned above were perfectly blended together. The movie really creates suspense and grisly anticipation – yet also doesn’t forget that audiences need moments of relaxation so they can breathe a little, before the next furious attack or moment of extreme danger arrive. It’s a very well-written and executed entertainment, showcasing a kind of story-telling we don’t see much any more.

That said, the movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if the Rasmussens saw two other recent animal horror movies with female leads: Burning Bright (2010) told the story of a young woman, locked together with her autistic brother in a house with a wild tiger by her evil uncle during a hurricane. And, of course The Shallows (2016, is it really already that long ago? It feels as if I saw the film just a couple of weeks ago…), which showed us Blake Lively on a rock in the rising water off an unknown beach while a blood-thirsty shark circles. As a matter of fact, both of these movies would make for a good triple-bill with this. And once Crawl comes out on DVD, it will find its place directly next to them on my shelves!

What is it about all those young women fighting predators with large pointy teeth? I’m no psycho-analyst but I guess it has something to do with the re-integration of certain character traits into the female psyche. Whatever these may be. I do remember an early trailer when The Shallows came out that had a voice-over of what sounded like a life coach trainer, encouraging the Blake Lively character. I wonder if the idea of the father who trained his daughter to extraordinary achievements was inspired by that trailer?

Actually, this movie goes a different way from some recent action-heroine movies, that looked to discredit father figures or put them in a negative light. Haley may have felt betrayed by her parents divorce and her father “abandoning” her. Yet during the course of the story, she finds out that her parents were not as happy as she thought and that her dad, who always loved her and believed in her, is just a normal guy. [Though I must credit him for absolutely convincing me how every household needs a utility belt for hand tools!] Having to survive and fight for what is left of her family, with the support of her father makes Haley overcome her own anxieties, through facing more than one deadly situation. Certainly, crawling through the drain by which the reptiles came into the house evokes quite distressing birth trauma… That’s a very positive message. After so many negative portrayals of father figures and “family values”, I found this a highly sympathetic and, for 2019, unusually traditional depiction.

But it only has to work – and it does that very well. We are not immediately tossed into shock-infested seas, there’s a nice build-up, so when the gators appear they evoke the desired audience reaction.Haley and her father have enough back story that you are on their side and want them to survive, while at the same time worrying if they will make it. Despite being just that just 90 minutes, the movie is full of ideas of how the imprisoned father-daughter couple could get help from outside (which leads to an unpleasant looter-reptile encounter) or escape the cellar and the house. It really plays with giving you hope, just to take it away again. One of my favourite moments is when Haley and Dave make it to an escape boat outside, when the levees break and a wave of water throws them back into their house – only one floor higher. Well-timed elements of humor, such as Haley’s reaction when normal house spiders fall on her face, help make for very satisfying entertainment.

A fascinating side-fact is that the movie was shot in Belgrade, Serbia, which doubles for Florida perfectly. And a little “tidbit”: Scodelario’s and Pepper’s family name in the movie is “Keller”. For German cinema-goers that’s extremely funny as “Keller” is the German word for “cellar”. But one last question: will the dog survive? Watch the movie to find out! It gets four well-earned stars from me. Your mileage may vary, but honestly I think it’s on the same level as The Shallows, which also scored highly with me. So, if you enjoyed that, this should be right up your (flooded) street.

Dir: Alexandre Aja
Star:  Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper