Tag: wilderness

Fall 2: Deadpoint

  By

★★★
“Fall me twice…”

The original Fall was a sleeper hit, which found thoroughly deserved new life on streaming. I watched it again recently on BluRay, and yep: it still triggers a visceral, physical reaction in me, unlike almost any other film. A sequel was inevitable, and probably equally as inevitably, it doesn’t reach the same heights – pun absolutely intended – as the original. While pleasant enough entertainment, it comes over with roughly the same impact as a mid-season episode of American Ninja Warrior. Though it wasn’t long before Chris was re-confirming her desire to avoid any leisure activity involving heights (hanging Halloween decoration from the garage is about her limit), my palms stayed more or less dry throughout.

It follow Jax (Slater), the younger sister of Shiloh (Gardner, who appears in flashbacks), the daredevil from the original movie. She’s contacted by Luce (Thomas), a friend of Shiloh’s. She convinces Jax to join her on a plank walk in Thailand, clearly inspired by the notorious Mount Huashan plank walk in China. Even the shape of the mountain here is similar, though the real location is much shorter, little more than a hundred yards long. Naturally, things do not go well. They are cut of from their guide, Jon (Brittney), by one rockfall; when trying to make their way back, another cuts off the return path. And with this being an unauthorized expedition, rescue will not be coming for them any time soon. 

It does remain well-made, and there is a genuine sense of being a long way from the ground. So I’m not quite certain why it never engaged with the primordial part of my brain in the same way as its predecessor. I was somewhat less impressed with the characters, whose count of poor decisions certainly surpasses the last installment. Luce, in particular, seemed more irritating than anything, though to be fair, later revelations do provide some explanation. There’s also a sub-plot involving drug smuggling, which doesn’t make a lot of common sense, unless the price of fentanyl in Thailand is about ten times the price here. These problem infect in particular the first and third acts, replacing the smooth simplicity of Fall.

However, the middle still has its share of credible chills, with the horizontal nature of the route – albeit over a drop of several thousand feet – being what generates the Ninja Warrior similarities. Swinging and progressing laterally becomes the key to survival, using the remnants of the plank walk as tools, although they sometimes become hazards. Figuring out the mechanics for this is likely where the movie is at is strongest, focusing strictly on Problem > Solution > Repeat. Everything else is an unnecessary burden, because the viewers disbelief is already suspended out of bare necessity. If you need to ask “Why?” after the first shot of the precipitous drop below, this is probably not for you. Competent enough to make me amenable to Fall 3, albeit only just. 

Dir: The Spierig Brothers
Star: Harriet Slater, Arsema Thomas, Tom Brittney, Virginia Gardner

Abandoned: Angelique’s Isle

  By

★★
“Alone: the 1845 edition.”

This is based on the true story of Angelique Mott. In 1845, she and her husband Charlie were part of a prospecting expedition which landed on Isle Royale, an island in the middle of Lake Superior. The objective was to prospect for copper, and when their search was successful, the Motts were left to guard the claim, in the expectation they’d be there for only a couple of weeks, before being relieved. However, nobody showed up, and the couple were left to fend for themselves through a ferocious mid-Western winter. They ran entirely out of food before Christmas, but Angelique was not rescued until May, after more than ten months as a castaway – by which point, Charlie had passed away.

It’s an impressive story of wilderness survival, in the face of incredible hardship, so what went wrong here? It’s mostly the plotting, which manages to squander almost all the tension inherent in the story. As the tagline above suggests, we’re big fans of survival show Alone [albeit while sitting safely on the couch, munching Doritos and passing critical comment on the contestants’ fire-making skills], and I was hoping for something similar here. I mean, it’s reported that one of the ways she survived was “by pulling out her own hair, plaiting the strands, and creating snares with it, by which she caught rabbits.” That’s hard-core, and is the kind of detail which would have brought the move alive. 

Instead, we get almost nothing about the details of how Angelique survives on a daily level. The film also makes it seem Isle Royale was tiny, but it’s actually over two hundred square miles in size – now, it has become the least visited national park in the continental US. Instead, we get a lot of the couple just sitting around, looking sadder and hungrier by the scene. Dramatic tension is limited to Charlie going a bit mad, which apparently did take place shortly before he died. I did wonder if, after his passing, Angelique was going to go all Uruguayan rugby team on him, but she just closes up the shack and moves into another shelter. [The ground was perhaps too hard for burial]

As something of a saving grace, the film does a good job building its characters. Angelique (Jones) is an interesting character, depicted here as a Christian, but one whose heritage was from the Ojibwe tribe. In particular, she’s shown as close to her grandmother (Young),  giving her a mixed cultural identity. Charlie (Carrick) is less well-defined, though does have a very nice beard. The photography also helps, though it appears Thunder Bay in Ontario, stood in for the real Isle Royale. It still captures the terrible isolation and the ferocious climate, which explains why there has never been a permanent settlement established on the island. But this is not the story I wanted to see, and I don’t feel it does justice to the tenacity displayed by the real character.

Dir: Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Michelle Derosier
Star: Julia Jones, Charlie Carrick, Tantoo Cardinal, Aden Young

Carnage Park

  By

★★½
“Goes off the rails, and not in a good way.”

There’s a very strong start here, and this makes the way it implodes at the end all the more disappointing. The film certainly hits the ground running. It’s 1978 in rural California, and ‘Scorpion’ Joe Clay (Hébert) is fleeing from the scene of a botched bank robbery. His wounded partner in crime is bleeding out in the back seat, and there’s a hostage, bank customer Vivian Fontaine (Bell), in the trunk. But when he pulls off the road to sort things out, freeing Vivian so she can help, we discover there are much worse things in the desert than scorpions. For Joe quickly gets his head blown apart. 

This is the work of completely insane Vietnam vet, former sniper Wyatt Moss (Healy). He lures people off the road, torturing and killing them, because… Well, because he’s a completely insane Vietnam vet. I will not be taking any further questions on the topic at this point. He has the tacit collusion of his brother (Ruck), the local sheriff, though even he has just about had enough of covering up for Wyatt’s madness. Vivian does manage initially to get the jump on the predator. However, she commits the fatal mistake, a common one in horror movies, of not making sure the killer is really dead. And guess what? He is not, leading to an extended chase sequence through the mines on the remote property. 

Which is where the problems occur. Keating mistakenly thinks that having things unfold in near pitch-darkness, save for the occasional flash from a muzzle, somehow enhances proceedings. He is incorrect in this case. Not least because it goes to such an extreme, and for so long, the only evidence I had that my TV wasn’t broken, was the subtitles I had fortuitously left on from the previous movie. When it literally emerges, blinking, back into the light, you get a couple of captions in lieu of a climax, before the end credits roll. I am in no way exaggerating, when I say that it ranks among the worst endings I’ve endured, over the more than twenty years I have been running this site. 

Although the early going is certainly derivative, most obviously of Quentin Tarantino, there’s no shortage of energy and surprises as we move through proceedings. We discover, for example, that Vivian is already having a bad day, and this may be a factor in her eventually having had enough, and fighting back. She staggers through the hellish landscape, encountering other victims – both alive and dead – trying to find a way out or help. Yet she ends up self-sabotaging these hopes, in the most unfortunate of fashions, leaving her entirely on her own. Such a shame the film decides not to give its heroine the finale she deserves, instead burying both it and Vivian in the darkness of an underground mine, and offering no satisfactory resolution to speak of.

Dir: Mickey Keating
Star: Ashley Bell, Pat Healy, James Landry Hébert, Alan Ruck

Gone (2011)

  By

★★
“…and quickly forgotten”

If this seems familiar, it’s because we already reviewed the American remake of this Swedish film, Alone, made in 2020. It’s quite rare, in that I don’t often see the remake before the original. It’s usually the other way round, and the remake tends to suffer as a result, often seeming superfluous e.g. Point of No Return. I  carefully avoided reading my opinion of the remake before viewing this, but on a post-watch comparison… it appears I didn’t like either of them very much. They both ended up with the same grade – perhaps for slightly different reasons though. I guess that consistency is slightly better than most remakes, even if it is consistent mediocrity.

Malin (Ledarp) is moving away from the rest of her family after an incident for which she feels responsible, and is driving North, out of the city, with her possessions loaded up in a trailer behind her. However, she finds herself encountering the same driver (Bergqvist) on multiple occasions and gets a bad vibe from him. This feeling is 100% correct, because the man ends up chloroforming Malin. She wakes up in the basement of his very isolated house, in the middle of a Scandinavian forest. Quite what his intentions are is a little vague. But that he says she’s not the first woman to have been there, and that his family thinks he’s on a business trip to the UK, do not bode well for her long-term prospects.

To this point, the film was more or less holding its own. However, the ease with which Malin escaped her captor’s cell, using nothing more than a rusty nail, is likely the point at which the movie jumped the shark. Part of the problem is, it sets a standard of competence, which her subsequent actions – mostly filed under “running round the forest like a headless chicken” – are unable to meet. This is an area where the remake did rather better, it seems, though both films end up going in directions which certainly merited a raised eyebrow or two. Here, she ends up teaming with a passer-by and a hunter in the forest. Nobody’s behaviour makes a great deal of sense.

After so much roaming in the woods, this begins to feel more like an orienteering video, we eventually get to the expected, and long-awaited, confrontation between Malin and the evil patriarchy. She has, by this point, managed to get a message to the outside world, where her absence has been noticed, and the authorities do now have at least an idea of the area in which she’s located. It’s just a question of surviving until they find her. This does a ticking clock to proceedings, which I don’t recall quite being as present in the remake. When it happens, the ending comes with a bang rather than a whimper. Though in this case, that’s not a good thing, as the credits role almost immediately, leaving me once more, largely unimpressed.

Dir: Mattias Olsson, Henrik JP Åkesson
Star: Sofia Ledarp, Kjell Bergqvist, Björn Kjellman, Dietrich Hollinderbäumer
a.k.a. Försvunnen

Apex

  By

★★★
“Aileen vs. Predator”

How far Charlize Theron has come. It has been interesting to follow her transition from a clothes-horse to an Oscar-winning actress playing a serial killer in Monster, and then her unexpected turn to become perhaps the leading action heroine of the past decade (despite mis-steps such as Aeon Flux). She’s now in her fifties, so we’ll see how long she keeps going, but for now, I’m happy to enjoy her output. Here, there’s nothing particularly special, but as Netflix Originals go, this is certainly better than Thrash, the mediocre shark movie we also watched this weekend. It fares particularly better on the character side, giving the audience solid performances from both the heroine and the villain. 

The former is Sasha (Theron), a rock-climber who lost her husband, Tommy (Bana), after an accident climbing the ‘Troll Wall’ in Norway [a real, three thousand feet high cliff-face]. It’s basically the same opening as Fall. However, things then diverge, as Sasha goes to Australia for a hike into the Wandarra National Park, also involving climbing and a little white-water rafting. Silly girl: doesn’t she know that everything in Australia is trying to kill you? She soon learns this, encountering first a sketchy pair of locals, before meeting Ben (Egerton). Since this element is in the trailer, I don’t feel I need to hide the fact that he is the real threat. He hunts and then captures Sasha, taking her back to his dank cave lair, where…

Yeah, it’s a bit more than being your garden variety psycho, and Egerton plays it to the hilt. Theron, meanwhile, has the necessary skills to fight for her survival, in a way that Ben’s numerous previous victims did not. I’m not sure exactly how much of the work here was performed by Theron. There is clearly some composite work going on, especially with the numerous falls. But I’ve a feeling, from Charlize’s previous efforts, she’ll have done as much as humanly possible, with regard to the climbing and canoeing. Kormákur does a good job of capturing things right from the start, with some queasy cliff-face camerawork, and drone work that really shows off the immense size of the wilderness in which Ben hunts. 

It is all rather predictable, but gets by on the charisma of the two leads. Theron manages to look the part, convincing the viewer of her credentials as a climber, in a way much younger actresses struggle to do (hello, Daisy Ridley). Meanwhile, Egerton proves an admirable foil, capable of flicking a switch to go from pitiable to pretty damn scary, in the blink of an eye. There were a couple of points towards the end where I found myself thinking of ways this could have tweaked the formula to better effect. But Netflix is all about meeting the viewers’ expectations, not confounding them. If you’re looking for something entertaining, without any intention of pushing the envelope, this does exactly that: no more, no less. 

Dir: Baltasar Kormákur
Star: Charlize Theron, Taron Egerton, Eric Bana

Hole

  By

★★★½
“Tree’s a crowd.”

Well, this is unusual. We’ve never had a movie from Slovenia here before, a country I know almost entirely due to art-rock band Laibach. This seems to be barely known either, with a mere 26 votes on the IMDb at the time of writing. But it’s decent, and doesn’t hang about: at 75 minutes, there is not a lot of slack. Indeed, it’s a rare occasion where I would not have minded if this had been 15-20 minutes longer. It is certainly spare in terms of actors, with only three roles of significance. Mia (Cok) and Kevin (Plantan) are a couple of confidence operators, who prey on rich women: Kevin seduces them, and Mia robs them. Their latest mark is Ema (Krhin). 

Things go pear-shaped when Mia believes Kevin is getting too cosy with their target, and in a fit of jealousy, bludgeons Ema to death. To dispose of the body, they drive out into the woods [the only other Slovenian movie I have seen, horror movie Hillbillies, had a similarly rural setting]. However, while they are bickering about who should dig the grave, the corpse escapes, because Ema was merely unconscious, rather than dead. Mia and Kevin begin the hunt, knowing they’d be in real trouble if Ema makes it back to civilization. Kevin makes the ill-advised decision to snort some coke, followed by the consumption of some mushrooms he finds in the woods. That basically marks the end of his role as an active participant in the film. 

Thereafter, it’s the two women facing off, and this is where I would have liked to have seen things extended. It’s clear that both women are seeking to tap into their inner feral nature, and more of it (along the lines of Revenge, perhaps) would have been welcome. Mia and Ema appears to be under the protection of dark and light angels respectively – perhaps representing vengeance and survival? I dunno, I’m just speculating: it’s another angle which might have merited additional explanation. Though what we get in lieu of development is still fun: Mia may be the most foul-mouthed female character of the year, spraying F-bombs about, at a rate which would make Dexter Morgan’s sister blush. 

While the topic is clearly one which would lend itself to horror, events here play out as much in a vein of black comedy. For example, when Ema is wounded, she uses a sanitary pad as an impromptu Band-Aid. Hey, soaking up blood is soaking up blood, am I right? There are other moments which seem almost deliberately surreal, such as Mia hallucinating Kevin having sex with a tree. [Please read that sentence again, because it’s not one I expected to write when I got up this morning] It’s almost as if she was the one who had eaten the magic mushrooms. If there’s a lesson here, that’s probably it: when you go into any Slovenian woods, be sure to bring your own picnic. 

Dir: Dejan Babosek
Star: Lea Cok, Darja Krhin, Marko Plantan
a.k.a. Jama

No trailer I could find, but the clip below shows the final fight. Probably a spoiler :)

Blood Star

  By

★★
“Neither protecting nor serving.”

I get the idea of what this is trying to do: really, be a female-centric version of The Hitcher. Though to some extent, that franchise went there itself, in The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting. Here, we have Bobbi Torres (Camacho) driving across New Mexico in her sweet muscle car, and when she stops for fuel, has an awkward encounter with Sheriff Bilstein (Schwab). Things get worse when she gets back on the road, and is quickly pulled over by the officer for speeding, which gets her a thousand dollar ticket she is unable to pay. Thanks to a prologue, we know Bilstein has a psychopathic fondness for tormenting and killing young women. This ain’t gonna end well.

It is one of those films where you can tell whether someone is good or evil by their genital configuration. Every man Bobbi meets is evil; every woman we see is part of an unspoken sisterhood. I sense the aim was some kind of riot grrrl agenda, but it manifests itself in some spectacularly clunky ways. There’s one conversation which is especially cringey, Bobbi trading abuse stories with a diner waitress, Amy (Brumfield). It ends in a manner that is clearly intended to be shocking, but I was more relieved the pair had simply stopped spitting out clichés. And I am fairly sure that getting jabbed with a syringe does not typically result in instinct heroin addiction, as alleged here. 

Nor does it help that Bobbi isn’t very likeable, the script mistaking smart-ass and mouthy as endearing. Schwab does better as the authority figure, exuding menace with every sentence. Though despite sharing a fondness for toying with his victim, the Sheriff is inevitably nowhere near as memorable as Rutger Hauer’s mythical road warrior. The agenda here is less interesting as well: I’ve seen a few reviews which compare this to the Wolf Creek movie, and I’d not argue – in part because I didn’t like that Australian road-slasher very much either [the TV series, however, is worth a look] The scales here are tipped considerably in favour of torture porn (albeit more mental than physical), with the inevitable explosion of Bobbi limited to the final fifteen minutes. 

There are some positives to be found, such as the impressively sparse desert landscapes (looks like California played the part of New Mexico), and Bobbi’s car, a 1977 Ford Mustang, which arguably has more personality than its driver. There’s a plot point established about it having a balky starter motor, but I don’t recall this being as crucial as I expected. I did like the sense anyone could die at any time, with a couple of deaths out of nowhere. It needs a heroine who is considerably more aggressive, except verbally, in the first half. Bobbi ends up being too passive for too long in the face of the Sheriff’s obvious threat, which belies the strong, confident woman the script wants her to be.

Dir: Lawrence Jacomelli
Star: Britni Camacho, John Schwab, Sydney Brumfield, Travis Lincoln Cox

Pacific Fear

  By

★★½
“Surfing birds.”

At the beginning of this, I wondered if I was watching a Godzilla film. Because it opens with atomic bomb footage, depicting French test in the Pacific. We know what this leads to: gigantic lizards with fiery bre… Oh, hang on: it’s actually a group of women, looking for a place reputed to have particularly gnarly (if my knowledge of beach-speak doesn’t fail me, and it probably does) waves. There are three surfers, plus photographer Sarah (Galloy), who has been out of the game since an accident which wrecked her confidence. The island they find isn’t on any map, so it must be good, and not a death-trap waiting to happen to them. Right?

The problems occur when they stumble across a maraé, a sacred site to the locals (giving the film is alternate title). One of the women has native ancestry, so conveniently knows about this, and why disturbing it would be a Very Bad Idea Indeed. Guess who doesn’t listen? That’d be another of the women. Their next surfing session is interrupted by a hungry shark, and when the survivors struggle ashore, they are immediately met by a group of hostile tribespeople. Oh, and a former soldier, the General (Recoing), who seems to have stayed behind after the tests out of guilt. He has gone a bit Colonel Kurtz, to drop an Apocalypse Now reference, and the captured women are now in deep trouble. As in potential human sacrifices.

The main positive here is excellent photography, both above and below the water. The scenery is lovely, and it’s captured beautifully. If you’re not thinking about booking a holiday to Tahiti by the mid-way point, you have not been paying attention. However, everything else is kinda lacklustre, not helped by dubbing where the main direction given to the English voice actors seems to have been, “Make it flatter! Less interesting!” As villains, the combination of locals and Frenchmen are awkward too. It feels like the makers didn’t want to go the “savage foreigners” route, as in Eli Roth’s Green Inferno. Yet they ended up instead making them subservient to the General, which could be seen as even more condescending.

As for the women, Sarah is the only one given much depth, courtesy of her history. While the accident may not prove significant in terms of the plot, it does make her seem a genuine person, and it’s more than the other three get. Once things get going (and it takes a while)t, it becomes a reasonable entry in the wilderness survival sub-genre, though the scene of her jumping into a waterfall to escape her pursuers is either bad CGI, or shot so badly it looks like CGI. I’d have liked to have seen her go full Rambo, using her environment against her enemies, but realistically, that would be a stretch for a surfer turned photographer. There are a couple of moments of moderate gory violence, but not a lot of emotional impact. You’ll likely leave with little more than a shrug. 

Dir: Jacques Kluger
Star: Adèle Galloy, Marie Zabukovec, Marilyn Lima, Aurélien Recoing
a.k.a. Maraé

Run Baby Run

  By

★★★
“Don’t run before you can walk.”

For a good while, this struggled to retain my interest, and when it did, the problems outweighed the positive aspects. Fortunately, after a solid hour of faffing around in ways that provoked mostly rolling of my eyes, the film found its stride. That’s funny, because it’s a running reference. Ok, not very funny. Down the stretch it both figuratively and literally pushes the pedal to the metal, in quite an impressive manner. My reaction was divided. Part of me wondered, where the heck this was earlier on? However, rather than petering out like a sad trombone, there’s no question it’s better for a film to finish strongly, and give the viewers something positive to take away with them. 

The story is relatively simple. Diana (Leira) is out running on a forest trail, when she finds herself being stalked by a mysterious figure in a hooded sweatshirt (Cowell). That, basically, is that. And it is probably both the film’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness. There’s some stuff around the edges, such as Diana being deaf. This is never particularly relevant – yet I liked that it wasn’t, because it never became her defining characteristic. The nature of the story also means there’s relatively little dialogue. It’s probably a good thing, since this Spanish film is in English (and, oddly, French), with some line-readings fairly clunky as a result. It also means the music has to do a lot, and sometimes, it’s guilty of trying too hard. 

The main problem though, is the story, which is embarrassingly obvious to anyone familiar with the wilderness survival genre. For example, when Diana stumbles across some abseiling equipment and decides (apparently randomly!) to rappel down a cliff face. you just know that her stalker is going to appear at the top, when she’s midway through the descent. Similarly, accepting a lift from a truck driven by a large, hairy man… Yeah, surely there’s no possible way that could end badly. Cue the eye-rolling. Yet, it’s from then on the film begins to succeed, embracing the increasing insanity. For example, Diana also has to fend off a mad, old French woman, with incredible strength, who keeps a teddy-bear in a cage. 

This perilous situation is eventually followed by a lengthy car chase through the countryside – I guess it’s the engines that are doing the running there. That’s funny, becau… Oh, never mind. It’s actually very well-staged, with a genuine sense of speed and danger. that I found effective. Things are tied up with acceptable neatness, although I wouldn’t have quite done what Diana does at the very end [he said, vaguely, to avoid spoilers]. The final twenty-five minutes or so demonstrate a laudable level of energy – ironically, it’s the section of the film where the heroine does the least amount of running. Given it’s also the most entertaining, I’m not inclined to carp about the accuracy of the title.

Dir: Toni Andújar
Star: Catuxa Leira, Cody Cowell, Muriel Halloint, Oscar Foronda

Sira

  By

★★
“Just deserts.”

Sira (Cissé) is a young African woman, travelling through the fringes of the Sahara Desert in Burkina Faso, on the way to get married to Jean-Sidi (Barry). However, their caravan gets involved in an incident with Islamic terrorists, which escalates into murder, with Sira being abducted by the terrorist leader, Yéré (Minoungou). He changes his mind, raping Sira and leaving her in the desert, because she is “not worthy” to die by his weapon. She survives, and stumbles across the terrorist camp, and takes shelter nearby, sneaking in to obtain food and water. After a group of other kidnapped women show up, to be used as sex slaves, Sira begins to put a plan in motion, with help from an unexpected ally.

Lured in by the poster, I was hoping for something along the lines of Revenge, especially in the wake of early dialogue about how the heroine had been trained to take care of herself by her brothers. But this is a very different kettle of fish. I have a bunch of questions, not least over the time frame involved. Sira is living in the rocks beside the camp for the better part of a year. It’s long enough, to go from not being aware of a pregnancy, to giving birth in the same rocks. While it’s certainly a memorable image to have her blazing away with an automatic weapon, her child strapped across her back… It doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

Yéré’s terrorists don’t appear to do anything much for the great bulk of the time either, except sitting around. They do eventually go out on an attack in the final twenty minutes, but the amount of terror they generate is minimal. Indeed, everyone does their share of sitting around since nobody seems particularly bothered by Sira’s long-term absence. The police, and the authorities in general, are notable by their absence until the very end. Though this may be an accurate assessment of the local situation; I can’t say. Jean-Sidi makes a half-hearted effort to join up with Yéré’s forces. The fact he’s a Christian proves a bit of an instant red flag there, and Yéré does not take kindly to the attempt. 

It’s only at the very end things crack open, with the terrorist camp proving to be unexpectedly flammable. It does offer a glimpse into a culture of which I had little experience or knowledge, and Sira is an interesting character, one whose resilience is remarkable, given the circumstances under which she has to operate. This was the first time Burkina Faso submitted a movie to the Oscars (it was filmed in Mauritania for safety reasons), and is technically decent. But for a film over two hours long, it’s in need of significantly greater narrative impetus. It has the shape of a thriller, yet definitely wants to be a drama. At least I get to cross another country off my map of world cinema.

Dir: Apolline Traoré
Star: Nafissatou Cissé, Lazare Minoungou, Abdramane Barry, Nathalie Vairac