Tag: wilderness

Camino

  By

★★★½
“Flash, bang, wallop – what? A picture!”

caminoFollowing up on their successfully crunchy collaboration in Raze, director Waller and star Bell head into the jungle and back to the eighties – an era before cell-phones and digital cameras – for this story of one woman’s fight for survival against a band of Colombian rebels, led by Spanish immigrant, Guillermo (Vigalondo). In this case, the woman is Avery Taggart (Bell), a lauded war photographer whose latest mission is to cover the enigmatic yet charismatic Guillermo, whose mission initially appears as much philanthropic as military. Keyword: initially. For Avery stumbles into the rebel’s darker side, witnessing, and worse, photographing him carrying out a drug deal, then slitting the throat of an inconveniently-passing local child. Knowing this revelation would destroy him, Guillermo blames Avery for the murder, and sets out after her with his group, intent on preventing the incriminating film from getting out of the jungle. However, it won’t be easy: Avery has picked up a few survival skills from her life during wartime, and some of Guillermo’s foot-soldiers are unconvinced by his explanation.

I think the first surprise here is the opening chunk, before she goes into the jungle, which has Bell delivering the most intense acting of her career. Quite a discomforting performance too, it has to be said, and I did wonder if I was watching the right film for a bit. Fortunately, we’re eventually on the right track; nobody will exactly have rented this to watch Zoë emote in a hotel room, surprisingly impressive though it is. The action here is brutal: while the body-count is relatively small – compared, say to Raze – nobody dies quickly here at all, with demises which seem to stretch out forever. The peak is probably the first fight, in which Avery is stalked by Guillermo’s psychopathic lieutenant. This turns into a knock-down, drag-out brawl that is relentless and hardcore. Nothing after can quite compare, to be honest. The ending of the main story thread is, entirely deliberately, understated and almost casual, though a coda delivers a satisfactory payoff.

You do wonder how a photographer is able to do more than hold her own against jungle-hardened soldiers; I was half-expecting a further appendix scene where Avery turned out to be a CIA agent of some kind. [Truth be told, I wouldn’t have minded!] Vigalondo makes for a decent villain, if a little too verbose; had this had actually been made in the mid-80’s, rather than just set there, it would have been a perfect role for Klaus Kinski, and Nacho puts over a similar mix of thinly-disguised psychopath. The jungle almost becomes a supporting character here, abetted by an unusual, crunchy yet chewy soundtrack from electronic project Kreng. The film might have benefited from some editing and the script an additional polish. But, as expected, it’s Bell’s show and she delivers the convincing mix of elegance and physicality we have come to appreciate, like a tightly-wound spring inside a camera case.

Dir: Josh C. Waller
Star: Zoë Bell, Nacho Vigalondo, Francisco Barreiro, Sheila Vand

Big Sky

  By

★½
“This sky’s gone out…”

bigskyHazel (Thorne) suffers from severe agoraphobia, which has left her trapped in her room, but her mother, Dee (Sedgwick) has finally succeeded in convincing Hazel to seek treatment. A ride is arranged to a treatment centre in the middle of the desert: to help Hazel cope, she’ll travel in the blacked-out back of the van, with her mother up front. However, on the way, the van is ambushed and another passenger kidnapped. The perpetrators, brothers Jesse and Pru (Grillo and Tveit), shoot everyone else to cover their tracks, but don’t notice Hazel in the back. Dee is badly wounded, and their only hope of survival is for Hazel to overcome her fear and head out across the wide-open landscape for help. However, the brothers have realized they left some loose ends, and Pru – who has significant mental issues of his own – is sent back to tidy up the survivors.

Cutting to the chase here, there is limited entertainment value to be found in watching someone stare and their feet and move, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, through the desert. I get that they are struggling with their condition, but that doesn’t make it interesting to watch: I was painfully reminded of Roger Corman’s The Trip, one of the very few movies I have walked out on, which consists largely of watching someone else take drugs. I’m also a little bit unsure about what this is saying about agoraphobia. The film appears to suggest that all you need to overcome it, is sufficient incentive, and that feels a bit like somebody yelling “Cheer up!” at someone with depression. Credit for having a heroine with such an obvious disability, and Thorne does a decent job at making her a sympathetic LEAD, even if the reason for it also feels like it falls into the realm of cod psychology. Though probably not so much as Pru, whose issues, it turns out, were the result of being hit in the head with a garden tool.

The film is obviously trying to draw a line between him and Hazel, but the script seems to lurch between the two pairs of characters, as if unable to decide whose story it wants to tell. Things happen for no particular reason than because the film decides they need to, such as Dee finding a gun in the van, and the film crawls towards its obvious climax at about the same pace as Hazel crossing the desert. Quite how such an obviously half-baked script ever managed to make it to production, I’m not sure, but you’ll probably end up wanting to lock yourself up in a cupboard – or, at least, as far away from the film as possible.

Dir: Jorge Michel Grau
Star: Bella Thorne, Kyra Sedgwick, Frank Grillo, Aaron Tveit

Queen of the Desert

  By

★★
“Just deserts”

queendesertEccentric explorers with strong personalities facing the challenge of the wilderness is hardly uncharted territory for Herzog. Most famously, his pair of incendiary collaborations with fellow German, Klaus Kinski, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, Wrath of God are both classics, so I had high hopes for this biopic about Gertrude Bell, who was, according to her Wikipedia page, “an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, spy and archaeologist,” operating in the Middle East during and after the first World War.

Daughter of an English baronet, she found the aristocratic English life stifling, and want to Teheran where her uncle was a diplomat. She fell in love with the region and its people, and spent almost the entire rest of her life there. It was a time of turmoil, as the ruling Ottoman Empire was collapsing, with other Western empires, including the British, seeking to take over the territory. In that setting, Bell’s expert knowledge of the region was invaluable, and she became an intelligence asset, working alongside T.E. Lawrence (Pattinson). better known as Lawrence of Arabia. But her personal life was more troubled; her father refused permission to marry her first love (Franco), who then committed suicide. After a long lay-off from love, she begins a relationship with soldier Charles Doughty-Wylie (Lewis) – who is already married.

Herzog’s work is at its best when he invests fully in it, such as Fitzcarraldo, where he told the story of a man who dragged a steam-boat over a mountain (for rubber plantation purposes), by actually dragging a steam-boat over a mountain – watch the documentary, Burden of Dreams, for more on this, and the psychological toll the whole production took on the director. Here, you don’t get any sense of personal cost; it’s probably the most slick and Hollywood film Herzog has ever made, and that takes away more than it adds. Kidman is decent enough, yet her depiction is likely too restrained. It peaks very early, with Bell’s barely-suppressed, seething hatred for the suitors who come to woo her in England, and there are not many occasions after, where you get any sense of emotion. The desert landscapes are impressive [not the first time Herzog has been there either; see his post-war documentary on the Kuwaiti oil fields, Lessons of Darkness], yet there’s only so often you can watch Bell riding across them while a vaguely epic score swells behind her, before the impact diminishes.

All told, you probably get a better insight into Bell’s life from reading the Wikipedia page mentioned earlier. The obituary quoted there is likely a better testament to its subject, than the two hours of scenic desert landscapes and unresolved sexual tension we get here:

No woman in recent time has combined her qualities – her taste for arduous and dangerous adventure with her scientific interest and knowledge, her competence in archaeology and art, her distinguished literary gift, her sympathy for all sorts and condition of men, her political insight and appreciation of human values, her masculine vigour, hard common sense and practical efficiency – all tempered by feminine charm and a most romantic spirit.

Dir: Werner Herzon
Star: Nicole Kidman, Damian Lewis, James Franco, Robert Pattinson

Awaken

  By

★★
“Liver and let die.”

awakenThere’s a stellar B-movie cast here, of faces you’ll recognize, even if you don’t remember their names; let me start by listing a few. Vinnie Jones! Daryl Hannah! Edward Furlong! Robert Davi! Michael Paré! David Keith! Even Benny Urquidez, whom I don’t recall seeing since he memorably battled Jackie Chan in a couple of 80’s flicks. Shame the plot is such nonsensical garbage. The heroine is Billie Kope (Burn), whose sister disappeared five years ago and Billie has been trying to solve the mystery ever since. She mysteriously wakes up to find herself on a tropical island with a group of other, similarly abducted people, who are occasionally hunted by camo-clad soldiers, under the command of Sarge (Jones). Turns out they are, effectively, a holding pen for an organ trafficking ring run by Rich (London). With the help of some of the the other prisoners, such as Nick (Copon), Billie has to fight her way off their island prison and find the truth about her sister’s fate, before becoming a live organ-donor herself.

There’s so much here that doesn’t make sense, with characters wandering in and out of the movie without logic; for example, leader of the prisoners Quentin (Davi) just walks out of the plot, and you never find out either what happens to Mao (Hannah), whose daughter is intended as the recipient of Billie’s liver. I’m not certain of the medical accuracy of much of what’s depicted either, but I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, so we’ll leave that alone. Instead, I wallowed in some of the more surreal aspects, such as the football commentary Sarge is listening to on the radio; seriously, just listen to it and see if it sounds like any game you’ve ever heard. Though at least Jones, and to a lesser degree Hannah, appear to have realized the dumbness of what they signed onto, and decided to go full, bone-in ham and have some fun with it. If only the rest of the cast had adopted the same approach.

However, Burr isn’t too bad: she also co-produced and co-wrote the film, so credit is certainly due for her passion. While she could do with some more muscle, she packs the right attitude and the scenes of her training with her father (Urquidez) set the tone early. She uses a brisk, no-nonsense style of fighting, closest to MMA than kung-fu, and the fights in general are edited and put together well – fast-paced, yet still coherent, which is less common than it should be. Unfortunately, it’s the storyline which strangles this puppy, and any viewer who is moderately high up the evolutionary ladder will be alternating raised eyebrows and derisive snorts for much of its duration. Occasionally-decent action makes this just about an adequate time-passer, and there’s worse on Netflix. Yet, that last clause falls more into the “damning with faint praise” category, and is hardly much of a recommendation.

Dir: Mark Atkins
Star: Natalie Burn, Michael Copon, Jason London, Vinnie Jones

Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia

  By

★★★
“Not sure if serious…”

johannaThe scenario here could be the jumping-off point for a wilderness adventure, with a train going across Mongolia being held up by a tribe of nomadic locals. and the Western women on board taken hostage by the princess who leads them (Xu). But it ism’t. Indeed, Ottinger seems almost deliberately to go out of her way to avoid anything that might increase the pulse above a resting rate. What follows is more a depiction of rural Mongolian life, which appears to have changed very little since the era depicted in Warrior Princess. It’s a topic that seems to have entranced the director, as she went on to explore the topic at greater length in Taiga – and when I say “greater length”, I mean it, since that film lasts eight hours and 21 minutes. This clocks in at a comparatively brisk 165 minutes, with the first hour almost entirely within the confines of the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian Expresses, before exploding out into the wide, sweeping vistas of the Mongolian steppe.

Until then, it introduces us to the Western women, led by Lady Windermere (Seyrig), an ethnographer who knows both the Mongol culture and their language – skills which prove fortuitous, to say the least. The others include a Broadway singer (Scalici), and a young backpacker (Sastre), whose use of a Sony Walkman – kids, ask your parents! – is about the only thing which locates this in a specific era. But once they are taken hostage, for reasons which are never even hinted at, the film largely loses interest in them, save the backpacker, who appears to “go native” more than the others.  It becomes more about the princess, for whom “action” is simply part of everyday life. She hunts with her bow and arrow; she talks with visiting emissaries from other tribes, treating them with scorn where appropriate. She rules – in the literal, rather than the social media corrupted sense of the word.

Quite what any of this has to do with Joan of Arc escapes me entirely. The whole movie feels like some kind of trolling exercise, aimed at readers of this site, by having the pieces in place for an action heroine film, and then steadfastly refusing to deliver on it. But if so: hah! Joke’s on them, because I didn’t actually hate this. Seyrig, who was the star of one of the best Euro-horrors of the seventies, Daughter of Darkness, is always worth watching – or, more relevantly, worth listening, as her voice sounds like slowly melting butter. There is enough quirky eccentricity early on, such as the Kalinka Sisters, a trio of strolling players also on the train, to keep things moving, until the landscapes and culture then take over. While I’d still say Cave of the Yellow Dog is the best “slice of Mongolian country life” film, and I will not be sitting through Taiga anytime soon, this is probably not something the likes of which you’ll have seen before. As such, Ottinger deserves admiration for pursuing her own artistic vision, regardless (it appears) of any commercial constraints.

Dir: Ulrike Ottinger
Star: Delphine Seyrig, Ines Sastre, Xu Re Huar, Gillian Scalici

Autumn Blood

  By

★★
“The hills are alive…”

autumnbloodFeaturing some of the most luscious landscapes I’ve ever seen, unfortunately, that’s easily the best this Austrian film has to offer. While certainly ambitious, in its attempt to sustain an entire feature-length narrative with little more than a few lines of dialogue – and even those are largely superfluous – it brings home why talking movies talk. Too much here is unexplained, leaving you with an irritating series of unconnected events, whose motivation remains forever opaque.

It begins with two small children witnessing the death of their father in a shooting incident. Several years later, the girl, now a young woman (Lowe), she is attacked while bathing in a mountain spring by a lascivious local man. Her mother dies shortly after, leaving her and her younger brother (Harnisch) without protection, though she continues going in to collect their weekly allowance. The man shows up, with two friends, at their remote cabin, and the girl is assaulted again. A social worker (McCrudden) has been alerted to the childrens’ situation, but when she shows up and starts looking for them, the local men decide they need to silence all the witnesses to their crimes.  That won’t necessarily be as easy it seems.

Actually, I didn’t mind the lack of dialogue too much; in some ways, it was a refreshing antidote to a certain type of film (hello, Quentin Tarantino), which thinks its characters can never stop flapping their lips for a moment. However, it doesn’t feel like the (unfortunately-named) director Blunder, the script, or the actors, realized they need to step up their game in the absence of dialogue, and use non-verbal elements to tell the story instead. That never happens, and although the basics are never unclear, this isn’t the case for important elements, such as who kills their father, and why he returns to play a pivotal – indeed, bordering on deus ex machina – role at the end. The setting is deliberately kept ambiguous: what little dialogue there is, is in English, yet the backdrop is unlike any English-speaking country with which I’m familiar.

As noted, the performances are also problematic; Lowe likely comes off best, perhaps because she has most screen time, which allows her character to develop a little further. Certainly, no-one else gives anything even approaching a memorable portrayal, with neither the villains nor the social worker appearing to be more than plot points, on which things build to an extended, largely forgettable climax in the woods. I have to say though: as a commercial for the Austrian Tourist Board, it’s entirely successful, even if, going by this, the native residents may need to work on their interpersonal skills a bit. When the on-screen action loses your interest, as it almost certainly will at some point or other, you can just sit back and admire the Alps instead.

Dir: Markus Blunder
Star: Sophie Lowe, Maximilian Harnisch, Gustaf Skarsgård, Annica McCrudden

Tracks

  By

★★★½
“Because Cheryl Strayed is a wuss.”

tracks02I am getting an echo of Wild here, even though this actually came out first. Both are based on books by women who decided to deal with their emotional and psychological baggage by striking out on a lone trek through the wilderness. But rather than the relatively civilized world of the Pacific Crest Trail, the heroine here, Robyn Davidson (Wasikowska), heads 1,700 miles across the Australian outback, from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, accompanied by four camels and a dog. That’s hardcore, being far more of a solo voyage, with long periods where Davidson is entirely on her own – the sole regular companion is photographer Rick Smolan (Driver), who drops in sporadically to document the trek for her sponsor, National Geographic magazine. We first see Davidson as she arrives in Alice Spring, following her as she goes from a naive woman with no experience of the livestock she’ll be managing, to someone who can handle what’s basically a cross between a cow with a bad attitude and a giraffe.

As with Strayed, there is trauma in the past which, it’s implied, acts as the trigger for the expedition. In the case of Davidson, it’s more childhood trauma, with a mother who committed suicide, and a father who, unable to cope with the aftermath, shipped Robyn off and had her dog put down. This is revealed in flashbacks, and for my money, is handled rather better than in Wild, in part because it doesn’t dwell on this or make it the focus. Tracks is more about the physical journey, with the spiritual one a side-dish, the reverse of the situation in Wild.

This does require a lot more restraint from Wasikowska, in terms of her performance: she has to do more acting and less Acting, if you see what I mean. I prefer that approach, and the smaller, quieter portrayal we get here only emphasizes the enormity of the landscape through which she is moving. The outback is, in many ways, an unspoken character here, sometimes threatening, sometimes staggeringly alluring, though I’d have been interested to hear some more of the nuts and bolts of the expedition: even prosaic stuff, such as, how the hell does Robyn not get incinerated without a hat? Maybe there’s a documentary film that can fill in these blanks.

There’s not much sense of threat on the human side, with just about everyone who encounters the “camel lady” being generally supportive. The worst issue is when Rick photographs an Aboriginal ceremony he shouldn’t be, leading to some friction with the natives, but it’s hardly the stuff of great drama. It’s more of a character study/travelogue, and from what I’ve seen, Wasikowska – best know as Alice in Tim Burton’s Wonderland – certainly looks the part of Davidson. Yet its calm tranquility ends up more a strength than a weakness, and even when there isn’t much going on, the landscapes still hold your attention with their sparse beauty.

Dir: John Curran
Star: Mia Wasikowska, Adam Driver, Rolley Mintuma

Africa

  By

★★½
“Supermodel goes wild.”

africaKinda dumb, to say the least, yet not entirely reprehensible. Supermodel Victoria Young (Potgieter) is under a lot of stress, having just signed a huge new contract, and to clear her head decides to take a drive across the South African veldt. A close encounter with a truck propels her car off the road, and the dazed Vicky wanders off in the wrong direction, away into the bush. Her manager/boyfriend Josh Sinclair (Wise) is left to co-ordinate search and rescue, though the police seem to think it’s just some kind of publicity stunt, and in the cut-throat world of modelling, there is no shortage of those seeking to exploit Vicky’s absence for their own ends. Meanwhile, by the time she regains her full faculties, she has no clue how to get back to civilization, and has to figure out how to survive a hostile environment. Plus, as time goes on, fend for herself, finding food – as well as avoiding becoming food for the local fauna.

I could certainly have done without the entire urban shenanigans, which appears to have strayed in from a bad 90’s Lifetime TV movie. Much more interesting is watching Vicky disintegrate from a pristine beauty, into someone who has to rip the leg off a half-scavenged carcass in order to eat, in between bouts of hiding up trees while a pride of lions takes a nap below. Some of the early sequences border on supermodel torture-porn, for example, as she agonizingly pulls a thorn from her foot, even though it is kinda obvious that the actress was never in the same scene with anything larger than a monkey. Similarly, the sequence where she pulls a grub out of a rotten tree, and cooks it on a stick like a disgusting living S’more, would have been more impactful had it then continued, unflinchingly to show Vicky chowing down on it. Though I did kinda snigger at the cut instead, to a rival model throwing up in the bathroom.

I’m not sure how realistic it is intended to be: I suspect that drinking raw water from a water-hole, in which various wild animals have been trampling [and, likely doing other things], would be a fast way to the emergency room. It might have been nice had they provided some rationale for her survival skills, even a token one such as her growing up on a farm; if you actually dumped Kate Moss into the middle of Africa, the real outcome is likely going to be a bit different. I did like how Vicky’s survival was entirely dependent on her own actions – there was no helicopter flying in at the end, as a deus ex machina. However, it would have been greatly improved by having the courage to focus purely on the “Woman vs. Wild” aspect, as the rest of it is mostly nonsense, which adds very little to proceedings.

Dir: Paul Matthews
Star: Dorette Potgieter, Greg Wise, Patrick Bergin, Elizabeth Berkley

Rana, Queen of the Amazon

  By

★
“Should come with a box of moist towelettes.”

ranaThere are times when watching a film raises existential questions. Who are we? Where are we going? Or, in this case, why the hell did I start this damn website if it means I have to watch stuff like this? I knew, going in, it would be cheap, but I was hoping for something light-hearted, a tribute to the “jungle girl” serials of the forties. Hell, I’d have settled for a micro-budget version of The Perils of Gwendoline, a film which manages to be both innocent and incredibly trashy at the same time. Instead, what I got was something that was badly-made and, frankly, creepy. I think the sequence which drove this home was when American agent Alexandria Solace (Murphey) was running through the “Amazonian” forest [quotes have rarely been used more advisedly] when she falls into a pool of quicksand. And spends the next, seven minutes, thrashing around in the mud, trying to climb out, in painfully obviously pandering to a certain, specialized fetish market. Not being part of said target audience, it was the longest seven minutes of my life. There was also rather too much… strangulation going on – to similar purpose, one imagines.

The feature is divided into three “episodes”, so does seem to be aiming for a serial approach, with titles being “The Jungle Woman versus the Nazis”, “The Jungle Woman and the Flowers of Death” and “The Jungle Woman and the Fangs of Death”. Though would it be churlish of me to note that there is only one actual Nazi? That would be Ilsa Von Todd (Krause, who has gone on to a semi-respectable career in B-horror), whom we first see plotting to take over the world with her army of mind-control zombies. [Actually, we first see her putting on her stockings. V-E-R-Y  S-L-O-W-L-Y] Though she hasn’t exactly got very far – the army count reaching precisely “one” – it’s apparently deemed sufficient threat for the US to send agent Solace down to the Amazon to stop her. Which she does, with the help of Lana, and after significant amounts of thrashing around and unconvincing fisticuffs between the three of them and the zombie.

However, no sooner has Von Todd been returned to the United States, than she escapes and heads back to the jungle, to take revenge on Lana in the second installment. Beginning with the quicksand scene mentioned earlier, this involves also involves Lana being tied up and struggling against her bonds for an extended period, before finally escaping through the kind of ludicrous deus ex machina which does, I guess, also harken back to cliffhanger serials. The finale sees [sigh] Von Todd escaping from federal custody again, but don’t ask me any details, since I had lost the will to live by this point. I do seem to recall a “snake” at one point which was clearly a green sock puppet.  I may have hallucinated this. The best thing I can say, is the theme song is kinda catchy. Otherwise, let us never speak of this again.

Dir: Gary Whitson
Star: Pamela Sutch, Tina Krause, Dawn Murphey, Laura M. Giglio

Preservation

  By

★★★
“Why we don’t camp: Reason #134.”

preservationIt was supposed to be a nice weekend of camping for husband and wife, Wit (Schmidt) and Mike (Staton), perhaps allowing them to rekindle a spark which has become lost in Mike’s career, though Wit is trying to pluck up the courage to tell him she’s pregnant. Hopes of either are derailed, when their trip becomes a three-way, as they are joined by Mike’s brother, Sean (Schreiber), recently discharged from the Army under circumstances that he won’t talk about. Unfazed by discovering the camp ground that’s their destination is closed, they proceed, Wit learning the ropes of hunting from the two brothers. But the next morning, the three wake up to find themselves stripped of all supplies, down to their shoes, and with a black X written on each of their foreheads. It’s clear somebody – or somebodies – is out to get them, and Wit is going to have to dig very deep and find a way to overcome her civilized sensibilities if she is to make it out alive.

It’s a fairly straightforward survival horror, pitting (mostly) Wit against a trio of masked adversaries, who communicate solely through their mobile phones, also using them to record their kills, in what appears to be a none-too subtle jab at modern culture. Though it is, at least, refreshing to see a modern genre entry which does not include a scene of a character looking at their film and sighing, “No signal…” The transition of Wit, from a vegan who is unable to take an animal’s life – albeit one that’s a trained trauma nurse, and so not exactly fazed by the sight of blood – into a ruthless killing machine, prepared to do anything necessary to survive, is well-managed, with Schmidt, best known for her role in Boardwalk Empire, making for a solid heroine.

Less effectively handled are the relationships between her and the two men, to the extent that neither are necessary to the movie at all. They’re disposed of with relatively little effort, arguably leaving the first half of the film as a waste of time. Nothing much comes, for example, of Sean’s apparently blossoming PTSD, nor do we find out the reason for his discharge. Additionally, early on, it does seem like the attackers have a supernatural aspect, as shown in their ability to absorb punishment and keep on coming, as well as whisking the trio’s tents away without even waking them. Yet this turns out clearly not to be the case, leaving these earlier instances of invulnerability unexplained, and there are too many echoes of another movie with similar themes, Eden Lake. The film is a great deal better when it’s just Wit against the wildlings, and when it reaches there, it’s actually impressively brutal. Just a shame it takes longer than it should to find its footing.

Dir: Christopher Denham
Star: Wrenn Schmidt, Pablo Schreiber, Aaron Staton, Cody Saintgnue