Author: Jim McLennan

Doomsday

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★★★½
“McResident Evil”

Basically every review I read of this has started off by stating it’s a cross between…well, perm any three from Mad Max, Escape From New York, Aliens, I am Legend, 28 Days Later and Resident Evil, depending on how well-informed the writer is about the action and horror genres. That’s fair enough: there’s no denying that Marshall has chosen here to create a film that is as much as compilation of influences as anything, and this therefore falls short of his previous work, The Descent, which went places few recent horror films have gone. However, most reviews sniffily stop there or, worse still, engage in petty cinematic snobbery: witness Jeff Otto of ReelzChannel.com – I’m not going to do him the honor of linking to the piece – who says, “Not pre-screening this one was a smart move on Universal’s part. It has no need for critics because the people who will enjoy this movie are very unlikely to possess the cognitive skills or attention span to read a review anyway.” I came up with several witty rejoinders to that, but opt instead for the tried and tested one of, fuck you, Jeff Otto. For sometimes you don’t want something that pushes the boundaries of cinema; the films listed in the first paragraph are (mostly) classics, and if you’re going to steal from anywhere, steal from the best.

In the near future (next week, actually at the time of going to press), Glasgow falls prey to the Reaper virus, which is exactly what it sounds like. The government in London deal with the problem by building a 30-foot wall along the border and sealing off Scotland – which is basically the approach taken by the government to problems in Scotland since, oh, about 1707. [Hello, born there!] 30 years later, however, the virus breaks out in London, and all of a sudden, the information that people are still alive in Scotland, suggesting they found a cure, is now of more than academic interest. To get the cure, they send Eden (Mitra) up North, to find Kane (McDowell, appearing in about two scenes, then taking his salary and leaving), who might just have the solution. However, things do not go as planned, needless to say, not least because Glasgow is inhabited by nothing but psychopathic thugs with poor dress sense and bad skin, stuck in the past. So, no change, then. [Hello, not born there – East Coast Scotland, represent!]

It’s clear that Marshall has a strong interest in action-heroines, having not only directed The Descent but also written Killing Time. Mitra also has something of a track record, having been one of the live-action Lara Crofts for Eidos a few years back. Here, however, she comes across as more of a Kate Beckinsale wannabe – my first reaction when I saw the trailer was this it was Kate. That works better in Underworld or Resident Evil, where the setting gives us reason to believe that the central character has special powers of one kind or another; as a straight-up action heroine, Mitra is just not physical enough to convince. This may perhaps explain the limited amount of physical action she does; a fight against another woman warrior, appears to have been edited with a weed-whacker, but another, in which she goes one-on-one with an armored knight, is pretty decent.

It all builds to a monumental car-chase, though you have to suspend disbelief there, as apparently Bentley cars will start right out of the crate, even if they’ve been sitting there for thirty years. You can also plough them through an exploding bus, amongst a litany of other torments, and they’ll come out the other side with barely a scratch. Again, if you’re going to ground your film in the ‘real world’, admittedly a questionable concept given the plot synopsis above (and I haven’t even got to the more outrageous elements yet!), then mis-steps such as these should be avoided. They’ll just give the more moronic end of the critical fraternity – paging Jeff Otto – blunt objects with which to whack your film about the head, as they ride off on their high horse. They only bothered me slightly, since I was already in full-on disbelief suspension, and since the resulting car-chase was cheerfully destructive, I’m inclined to give it some slack.

There’s also a certain point at which it’s clear that Marshall is operating tongue in cheek: it may be the sign on the Glaswegian bus which reads ‘Out of Fucking Service’, or in the castle where Cane and his followers have regressed to medieval times, yet have left up another sign, this one saying ‘Gift Shop’. Or that two of the soldiers in Eden’s party are called Miller and Carpenter: the directors of Mad Max and Escape From New York being George Miller and John Carpenter, of course. Or the elaborately choreographed ritual of human flesh-eating, like an Archaos show [there’s an 80’s reference for you!], set to a song by punk icon Siouxsie and the Banshees. Though the immediately-preceding use of Fine Young Cannibals was, I admit, a bit much. Still, let go, don’t expect the atmosphere of The Descent – this is much closer in tone to Marshall’s preceding Dog Soldiers – and just enjoy the gloopy violence or slabs of black humour which pepper the film, and you’ll have a more than adequate time.

Dir: Neil Marshall
Stars: Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Craig Conway, Malcolm McDowell

6 Angels

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★★★
“Like The Prophecy, made for 75 cents and without Christopher Walken.”

Poverty-row production though this might be, I can’t bring myself to hate this as much as it perhaps deserves. While it’s ambitions are far beyond its means [the DVD sleeve promises ‘female warriors in awesome fights’ – let’s just say, it was probably a mistake for me to rewatch Crouching Tiger the same day!], writer-director Almeida does, at least, have an imagination. After 12 years in a coma, Taileen (Fabre) finds herself reborn as one of The Circle, a group of six angels, three good and three evil, who keep the balance of the world. However, Ezekiel (Mazzola), the leader of the devil’s team, plans to wipe out the holy trinity, in order for his master to reign, and Taileen soon finds herself the only thing standing between the forces of darkness and their goal.

Really, if you’re going to offer religious apocalypse, you’d probably better have a budget that could not be described as ‘loose change’. The action is often teetering on the edge of laughable, and the film doesn’t even play by its own rules. In an early scene, Taileen learns she can only be killed by a “profane blade”, but the devil’s advocates still blaze away at her with mundane guns, even after they’ve learned she can stop bullets with her mind. Despite this, there are enough elements that worked to keep me interested: Stiga (Kastel, menacing the heroine in the pic at lower right) comes over nicely, both dressing and acting like a slutty version of Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix. I also have to credit Scott Buckley’s excellent, sweeping and orchestral score, which appears to have strayed in from a far bigger movie. That really yanks the film up by its boot-straps.

Things build to a final showdown in a warehouse, where the makers finally locate their supply of fake blood, which has been largely notable by its absence for the first hour, and it is quite effective. I do wonder why the angels, on both sides, don’t make better uses of their powers, though must also say, said powers are also somewhat crap: if I was responsible for holding the balance between good and evil, I’d want something better than the ability to turn into a fat guy. Overall, one would quite like to see this remade as a big-budget work, because the ideas here are good; with a good effects studio – and significantly better fight choreography – this has a lot of potential. However, Hollywood appears too busy remaking mostly-mediocre Asian horror to notice. We are therefore stuck with a cheap version, whose flaws likely distract too much from its merits for this to find a wide audience.

Dir: Luis Almeida
Star: Allison Fabre, Greg Mazzola, Jasmine Kastel, Rolando Millet

Resident Evil movie in a nutshell

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Fans of the Resident Evil games may be less than enamored of their tranlation to the big-screen, but the series has been one of the most popular girls-with-guns franchises of the past decade. It has spawned two sequels, which is a damn sight more than most video-game films [or, indeed, action heroines] managed. Been a while since I watched the original, but if you have, you’ll likely get a kick out of this month’s Youtube offering, which condenses the entire movie into less than three minutes.

Dark Queen

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★★
“So bad, it’s borderline painful – yet we will remember this, albeit for all the wrong reasons.”

Let me be perfectly clear: one of the above stars is purely for entertainment value, since this is one of those movies which is so bad as to become enjoyable, purely on that level. There is hardly an aspect of this film which is not badly-executed: the script is badly thought-out, the performances are almost without exception woeful, and the continuity has to be among the worst of all time. One actress goes from a colored top and no bra, to a bra, to a white top and no bra, in successive scenes, while another enters a pool in a bikini, comes out topless, and five second later has the top back on and is dry. We laughed like drains, I tell you. Oh, you want the plot? Mousy scientist Helen (Kitchen) is trying to find a brain chemical that will unleash humanity’s psychic powers, using imprisoned serial-killer Horn (Marks) as her source. Even though the resulting chemical is green and glowing, in a way not seen since Re-Animator, she decides to test it on herself. This unleashes her alter-ego, Cassandra, who embarks on a plot to enslave mankind to her will. It’s up to her assistant Gary (Klitzner), along with a homicide detective (Rivers) to stop her.

Where to start? Kitchen is about the least-appalling thing the film has to offer, struggling bravely with two roles so under-developed that an Oscar nominee would have problems making them watchable, and occasionally manages to look like something other than a low-rent Xena. We’re convinced Klitzner is gay, which makes his success with just about every one of the laideez in this film, utterly implausible. Meanwhile, Marks’ psychopath chews scenery at a fearsome rate, making the later works of Anthony Perkins a masterpiece of understated subtlety in comparison. Our son strolled in while we were watching this, and was quite taken with Rivers [right, bottom] and her breasts – at that moment, being unveiled for his pleasure. He gave the breasts two enthusiastic thumbs-up, but then, he didn’t stick around for the rest of the movie. Score one for the wisdom of youth there.

It should be entirely clear which series the distributors of Dark Queen are hoping you’ll mistake their film for an entry in. In reality, this is not fit to lick Natasha Henstridge’s boots; it’s really much closer to Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, yet as such, is still a dismal failure – that whirring sound you hear is Robert Louis Stevenson spinning in his grave. However, even as it fails on just about every cinematic level, fans of bad cinema may find this has its merits. However, even there, it may still divide opinions: I had rather more fun with this than Chris [she, on the other hand, liked the midget-vampire movie, Ankle Biters, which I found almost unwatchable]. You can certainly sense where they were aiming with this; however, the execution is, frankly, so awful as to drain any potential from it, almost entirely.

Dir: Ken LaVan
Star: Tian Kitchen, Sean Klitzner, Michael Marks, Sheyenne Rivers

Gunslinger

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★★
“Despite the director, nothing memorable in this quickie.”

While Corman is better known now as a producer of schlock-horror, he has tried his hand at just about every genre in his time. This was his last stab at the Western, with Garland playing Rose Hood, who takes over as the marshal of Oracle, after her husband is gunned down. However, she incurs the wrath of local saloon-owner Erica Page (Hayes, best known for the title role in Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman), who is running a property-acquisition scheme, based on her hopes for the railroad to come to town. She brings hired killer Cane Miro (Ireland) up from Tombstone, only for him to fall for his intended victim, who is unaware of his mission. Which is surprising, since he is dressed from head to toe in black – even at age seven, when I used to watch The Virginian with my father, I knew this indicated an utterly irredeemable nature.

Garland and Hayes are generally decent enough, but the dialogue, especially between Rose and Cane, is painful to listen to. It’s clear the writers are aiming for wittily romantic banter, and fail miserably, on every level. Shot in seven days, Corman didn’t even let Hayes breaking her arm, falling off a horse, stop the shoot – he filmed some closeups while they waited for an ambulance. Hey, it’s not like the actress was going anywhere. While both Garland and Hayes are fine in their roles, none of the potentially transgressive elements here are exploited, and the poverty-row aspects are so painfully obvious as to be a distraction.

The film does finally get a certain momentum going in the final reel, where all the forces in the town end up gunning each other down; viewers, by that stage, may have resorted to looking for whatever entertainment can be found on their mobile phones. Cult favourite Dick Miller briefly appears as the Pony Express rider, and three years later, Garland would become one of the first TV action heroines, as undercover cop Casey Jones in Decoy. This film, however, would go on to get torn a new one by MST3K during their fifth season; that is likely a significantly better source of entertainment.

Dir: Roger Corman
Star: Beverly Garland, John Ireland, Allison Hayes, Jonathan Haze

Chocolate trailer

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This is the trailer for Chocolate, from Prachya Pinkaew, director of Ong-bak and The Protector, which made a super-star of Tony Jaa. It’s about an autistic girl who picks up martial-arts skills from TV and their next-door neighbours, a muay thai academy. She uses those skills to collect debts on behalf of her ill mother, which incurs the wrath of both local and Japanese gangs. As with Pinkaew’s earlier films, there is no wire-work or CGI – it’s all raw, athletic ability, and based on this trailer alone (or even the painful out-takes), it could be the best action heroine film of 2008. The Thai release is February 8.

The Angelmakers

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★★★
“When the Blue Danube turned red…”

You wouldn’t know it to look at the sleepy Hungarian village of Nagyrév [population: 872], but there was a time between the world wars when this was the murder capital of the world. Between 1914 and 1929, an estimated three hundred people were poisoned to death, using arsenic obtained by boiling down flypaper. The great majority of the murders were committed by local women, who wanted rid of their husbands; the local midwife, Julia Fazekas, was the source of the lethal materials. This was in an era when divorce was all but impossible, and many marriages were arranged; Julia offered a quick and painless (for the wife!) escape from a life of abuse and a loveless relationship. Since she was the closest the village had to a doctor, and her cousin was in charge of filing the death certificates, she and her accomplices got away with their crimes.

All good things must come to an end, however. It’s unclear what triggered police action, but Fazekas knew the game was up, and by the time the police knocked on her door, she’d used her own poison to commit suicide. 26 of her associates, however, were taken to court; eight were sentenced to death, seven to life imprisonment and the remainder to various terms in jail. Eight decades later, Bussink returned to the village, and found some inhabitants still alive, who were around at the time, such as the 93-year old Rosika, in whose pantry one of the murderers hung herself from a nail. Her family then used the nail to hang bacon up.

It’s an not uncommon moment of gallows humour in the film (which puts the death-toll lower, at “only” 140). While Bussink initially met some resistance from the locals, they seem happy here to open up to her; the women, in particular, view past events with phlegmatic resignation. Maybe there’s something about Hungarian ladies; see also Vera Renczi, who murdered 35, including husbands, lovers, and a son early in the twentieth century, and of course, Countess Erzsebet Bathory. However, the film never really does more than scratch the surface, and the running-time is padded unnecessarily by shots of the local countryside, rather than providing more historical background. There’s a pointed, if very clumsy, allusion to modern times, with a local folk-dance club discussing the problems they have with their husbands.

The overall effect is to open the door on a largely-forgotten corner of murderous history, but Bussink doesn’t shine much light into the dark corner. There was word of a movie based on the topic, to star Helen Mirren, which shifted the location from Hungary to Yorkshire, with Anna Friel and John Hurt also involved, and Jon Sommersby Amiel as the director. [Curiously, Friel recently played Countess Bathory in another film] That was first announced in August 2006, but IMDB still shows it as “in development”, so who knows. I suspect the Hollywood fantasy will be nowhere near as bleakly murderous as the reality, somehow.

Biohazards

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★★★

If you thought the novel was a quick read, I got through Biohazards during lunch, and that’s only with 30 minutes. Still, being a comic-book, we must cut it some slack, though I can’t say I find action (and there’s a lot of it here) is something that works very well in panel form, lacking the true sense of motion you get in cinema. That said, I still didn’t hate this first entry in the trans-Pacific entry, in which Kei and Yuri are sent to investigate the kidnapping of an industrialist’s mind by his rival [literally: it’s on a chip]. Adding a little spice, both companies are knee-deep in dubious bioweapons, so who is the real villain here?

It’s another different style, in some ways perhaps more Japanese than classic DP, though still with something alien to it, as if the artist had learned from one of those “Draw Manga” books. Which is less a knock on Warren than it probably sounds, being more an acknowledgement of how influential the Dirty Pair comics are [there was a time when manga was not to be found in Borders, y’know]. The in-jokes are actually more restrained than I remembered – and expected, after the very first page has a security guard singing the theme to Magnum of Love’s Destiny, a movie from the City Hunter series. But that was about it, unless “Power up the synthesizer, Neil” is a Rush reference? Hard to be sure…

There are some interesting nods to the original novels, such as Mughi’s ability to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum, and Yuri’s Bloody Card weapon is almost exactly as described in Great Adventures. That may be the weakness here, in that Warren and Smith seem less intent on bringing anything new to the characters, than being faithful to the original texts. As the series progresses, however, that would become less of an issue, but while the first, this is certainly not the best, or most representative, of the US comics.

Story: Toren Smith and Adam Warren
Art: Adam Warren

The Blackburn & Scarletti Mysteries, Volume II, by Karen Koehler

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★★★
“Truly a book of two halves, Brian.”

Coincidentally, a year after the first collection, I find the time to read volume two; this contains two stories rather than two-and-a-fragment, but weighs in at about forty pages or so longer. Same price though, I am pleased to note… The first, Legion, takes our FBI agent and her semi-vampiric colleagues off to the post-flood city of New Orleans where a demonic force has been unleashed, which is capable of transferring its presence from one body to another. Hmmm…sounds not unlike Fallen, perhaps? That aside, I did enjoy this one thoroughly: the pace is good and, if the eventual destination of the entity is not perhaps a surprise (it’s quite close to the pair, shall we say), it makes for some great set-pieces. The best of these involves a church where the possessed victim is resting up, which results in a hellacious battle that’s genuinely exciting. The story elements are tidied up nicely too, leaving this a self-contained and effective tale.

However, despite the second story possessing a great title – The Phantom of the Soap Opera – I was much less engaged by it. The set of a daytime TV drama is plagued by mysterious ‘accidents’ of an occult nature, which leads to the pair re-uniting in order to investigate, triggered by a call from an old friend of Scarletti’s. There is just not enough meat on the bones of this one, though perhaps Koehler wasn’t happy with it either, since there is a lot of back-story added here. Indeed, to such a degree that it burdens the main characters, and its relevance to the main plot is doubtful. I’m also growing rather disillusioned by Blackburn’s relationship to the Jackal, the full vampire who saved her life in volume one; Koehler is treading dangerously close here, to the cliches which eventually sank the Anita Blake series.

Another small peeve was a surprising number of typos in the volume, such as “a traveling bad slung over one shoulder.” Though I’m far from immune to these myself [even if you can only have the ‘u’ in ‘colour’ when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, dammit], and I did smile at one, when Blackburn was served by a “gun-chewing waitress.” I’d be sure to leave her a good tip. Overall, not quite as good as the first compilation, though that’s largely down to the second story – individually, Legion rates a ****, but Phantom only **, getting stuck in a morass of its own making. While that leaves the review ending on a disappointing note, Blackburn remains an engaging heroine, and if Koehler can get back to more action-oriented writing in the next volume (as she showed herself eminently capable of in Legion), I’ll be waiting eagerly.

Hard Candy

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★★★★
“More threatening than girls with guns: teenage girls with scalpels. Gentlemen: cross your legs.”

This is almost unbearably creepy, in two different directions: however, it’s almost impossible to discuss this film in any meaningful way without spoilers, so you have been warned. The danger of online predators is well-known, and when fourteen-year old Hayley (Page) agrees to meet photographer Jeff (Wilson), who is in his thirties, alarm bells are ringing. They reach a piercing level after she goes to his house, starts drinking vodka and flirting outrageously. However, the tables are abruptly turned: she’s spiked Jeff’s drink, and he wakes to find himself tied-up, and entirely at Hayley’s mercy. He soon finds out that’s a quality she is very definitely not inclined to provide.

So, who do we sympathize with? The paedophile? Or the psychopath? Pick your poison, and it’s the kind of bravely ambivalent film I love, for Jeff is far from the usual cliched portrayal of a child-molester: rather than a sleazy old man in a dirty mac, he’s charming, well-spoken and educated. Which makes him far more dangerous, of course. Though he meets his match in Hayley, and it’s a brilliant performance by Page. We have absolutely no idea whether any of what she says is true, regarding herself (is she 14, or is that part of her act?), her family or even the apparently-damning evidence she finds of Jeff’s paedophile tendencies. The last is perhaps an error on the film’s part, since it’s at its best when we’re less certain as to whether Jeff deserves the horrible fate Hayley has in store.

Oh, yes: horrible. Armed only with a medical textbook, a bag of ice and some sharp objects, she prepares to make sure that Jeff will not bother any other little girls again. Cue the film’s second, and most critical, mis-step, as it pulls a punch which would have made this an instant evil classic – you sense Takashi Miike, whose Audition this most closely resembles, might not have backed off. From here, the film does stray into implausible territory, with Jeff spurning several chances to escape, or overpower Hayley [who looks about 95 pounds]. However, that doesn’t really diminish from a film that has the guts to ask a lot of questions which seem to have easy answers, and then confront us with a reality that makes things more complex than we’d wish.

Dir: David Slade
Star: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson