Sightseers (2012)

What a marvellous surprise. Despite the tremendous promise of the trailer that was shown at this year’s FrightFest, I was still a bit unsure as to what I would think of director Ben Wheatley’s latest effort. I needn’t have worried. SIGHTSEERS is very, very good indeed, and is the equivalent of such brilliant blacker than black BBC TV comedy fare like the first series of Julia Davis’ NIGHTY NIGHT, or her work with Rob Brydon in HUMAIN REMAINS. In fact the couple in SIGHTSEERS could easily have been a half hour in that show. Thankfully their adventures easily make for a ninety minute feature which is good for us, and good for the reputation of British cinema. There hasn't been anything quite as funny, disturbing, quirky, unpleasant and yet endearing as this on the big screen for as long as I can remember.

Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who also wrote the script, play Tina and Chris. Tina is the archetypal thirty-four year old woman who has never had a relationship and still lives with her domineering witch of a mother, knitting her own underwear and dreaming of romance in faraway places like Redditch. Chris is a ginger bearded plastics engineer who is ‘on sabbatical’ and has a penchant for caravanning and tram museums. They’ve been going out together (whatever that may mean in their world) for three months, but now it’s a big moment in their relationship: their first holiday together. Their itinerary will include such British tourist standbys as Blue John Cavern, Ribblehead viaduct, and a pencil museum. It will also include a number of murders as members of the general public do tiny things to rile Chris and cause him to do them in in increasingly unpleasant ways. Initially horrified by this, Tina soon starts to get in on the act herself, especially when she catches the bride-to-be at a particularly awful hen party trying to get it on with her man.

It’s rare that a film is actually able to live up to the poster claim of ‘Instant Cult Classic’ but SIGHTSEERS may well be it. It’s a film that encapsulates perfectly a specific type of British holiday and indeed British holidaymaker. Where it scored in spades for me was that it doesn’t shy away from the horror aspects of what is going on.  It would have been easy to make SIGHTSEERS a charmingly quirky comedy about a couple who just happen to kill people. What director Ben Wheatley does for an already splendid script is give it a sense of depth, atmosphere, and realism that means that often you’re laughing at things and then realising you’re properly disturbed by them. Jam packed with quotable lines (“He’s not a person, he’s a Daily Mail reader,” “Every time I find my oeuvre someone shits on it”) SIGHTSEERS is a film whose reputation will grow and grow. I suspect it will do very well in Europe and will either be a fantastic hit or a colossal miss in America, in the same way no-one would have been able to guess how Monty Python would do there.

SIGHTSEERS is really great and I loved it. Writing about it now has made me want to watch it again and I no doubt shall. In the meantime get down to your local cinema and support a bit of homegrown British comedy horror brilliance that we can all be proud of.

127 Hours (2010)

I’ve been a fan of Danny Boyle’s since I saw SHALLOW GRAVE on its initial cinema release, and my appreciation for the man was understandably increased when I read that the reason he got Simon Boswell to score that film was because Boyle was familiar with Boswell’s work in contemporary Italian horror cinema of the time. Several of his subsequent films have contained elements of horror (the dead baby of TRAINSPOTTING, the blinding of the beggar child in SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) and he even made a good stab at a properly disturbing British horror film with 28 DAYS LATER. 127 HOURS is based on a true story, but is no less horrific for that. In fact as an out and out horror film it qualifies on several levels, all of which work well enough together to form a tour de force experience in disturbing cinema.

Aron Ralston (James Franco), a mountain climber, canyoneer and thrill-seeker sets off for a weekend’s exploring of the Blue John Canyon in Utah. He gets to ride his mountain bike over the landscape, meets a couple of girls who invite him to a party, and then falls down a gorge and gets himself stuck when his right arm gets wedged between a boulder and a canyon wall.

This is where the film gets interesting, and where it becomes a virtual single-hander (sorry) for actor James Franco, who has to contend with diminishing water and food, the elements, the fact that no-one’s going to come and rescue him, and the fact that unless he can do something to free his trapped arm he’s going to die there.

Thankfully, Boyle is a director who appreciates that this kind of material, if presented to a paying audience, needs to be entertaining first and worthy second. He also appreciates the difference between keeping an audience engrossed and poking them in the eye every couple of minutes to remind them to wake up. Consequently, while we get a lot of visual trickery (split screen, CGI, soft-focus flashbacks), none of these techniques ever feel intrusive, and Boyle gets the balance just right so that they add to the feelings of Ralston’s isolation and desperation rather than detract from them.       And yes, I do think 127 HOURS is a horror film. On the most superficial level it plays on Algernon Blackwood’s themes of man vs the wilderness. A wonderful shot early on takes us from Ralston’s just-trapped self out of the gorge and across the beautiful but wild and forbidding landscape in which he has become hopelessly lost, evoking as great a sense of cosmic horror in this one man’s insignificance in such a vast and empty place as Lovecraft could ever hope to achieve.
       Then of course there’s the climax. Ralston’s arm has to go. He has no medical training, an improvised tourniquet, and a cheap stocking-filler knife. The end titles mention the old ‘certain scenes have been altered to heighten dramatic impact’ get-out clause but in this case I really didn’t mind, just as I didn’t mind that the amputation would have been a bit more involved and rather more torturous than what’s depicted on screen. 127 HOURS is an example of this kind of story being told in the right way. It’s based on a true story but it’s presented as an entertainment, with all the suspense and human interest a good telling of such a tale requires. It even has a happy ending that ties in the story to the real life character without becoming too sentimental. Full marks to Danny Boyle.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

I’ve never done this before on House of Mortal Cinema, but I think it’s reasonable to offer a mild spoiler warning here. While I have no intention of giving away the entire plot of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, it is one of those films that many will get the most enjoyment out of if they come to it cold. So if you’re one of those kinds of people I suggest you go and watch it now, because you won’t be disappointed, and then come back and read this.

I’ve always been a fan of Joss Whedon. I’ve seen every episode of Buffy, Angel and Firefly, and while he’s not a perfect writer by any means he has a love and knowledge of the genre that means he is indisputably One Of Us, and that knowledge and love has never been more in evidence than in his latest project, which is a glorious deconstruction of horror movie conventions of the last couple of decades while at the same time never being anything less than affectionate regarding its source material.

Five young friends set off in their camper van to spend a weekend at the title location. They consist of: a hot young thing who has dyed her hair blonde, her athletic boyfriend who is majoring in sociology, a young chap who turns out to be a bit of an academic type, a bong-puffing slacker modelled on Scooby Doo’s Shaggy, and a virginal Final Girl. On the way to the cabin they stop for gas at the kind of place that could have fallen out of THE HILLS HAVE EYES, with a creepy proprietor to match, who warns them that if they head for the cabin, they may well not be coming back. So far so cliched, BUT, and it’s a big one, which is why I’ve put it in capitals, as well as this there is also a separate subplot running alongside this, one that takes up the entire pre-credits sequence, as well it might, considering how important it’s going to be later on. 

      In the kind of undefined highly secure and highly equipped facility that Irwin Allen could only dream of, a group of scientists and engineers are preparing for Something Important, something which involves our bright young things as they are closely monitored on as they travel to, and arrive at, the cabin. By the time they get there we've been given enough information to know that Things Are Not As They Seem.

Once inside the cabin the friends increasingly start to act like the traditional horror movie cliched characters we’ve seen a hundred times before, and before you can say Evil Dead the cellar door springs open. The cellar itself turns out to be home to a thousand and one different horror movie plotlines, and which one they end up choosing then determines the method by which they are supposed to die.

I’m actually not going to say much more than this, except that the film didn’t go where I was expecting and instead turned into a wonderful monsterfest of biblical proportions. In fact, during the utterly glorious climax, the movie I was most reminded of was Anthony Hickox’s WAXWORK, to which this film bears more than a passing similarity. THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, however, does the same basic idea so, so much better. It’s thrilling, clever, scary, well-written, and has a climax I wish I could have watched at a horror film festival just to feel the buzz of the room. Fans of Whedon’s filmography will appreciate appearances by Tom Lenk and Amy Acker (always easy on the eye and particularly delightful here in her lab-coated scientist role). Whedon even throws in the kitchen sink in the shape of a huge dollop of Lovecraftian cosmic horror to round things off.

Above all it’s sheer unadulterated fun, and all the more so if you’re a horror fan with a sense of humour. If you are, then you’ll need to watch it at least twice because during the ensuing mayhem of the marvellous climax there are so many horror film references that even I couldn’t keep up. THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is glorious, glorious fun. In fact I can quite safely say it’s probably the most fun you can have without causing the end of the world. It's going to be one of the year's best  and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Apollo 18 (2011)

Here’s another film I really liked when I saw it on its initial cinema run last year and then was quite surprised to read the considerable number of terrible reviews it subsequently received. It’s always a delight to revisit a film on DVD and find that my initial impressions about a movie haven’t changed and certainly that’s the case with APOLLO 18, a low-budget found footage movie set almost entirely on the moon.

Admittedly it’s the ‘recovered film’ angle that doesn’t really work and it’s easy to pick holes in this aspect of the storytelling. However, if you approach it as a 1970s BBC Play for Today where the writers have tried to do a William Hope Hodgson - style ghost story with astronauts instead of sailors and thrown in a dose of M R Jamesian corner-of-the-retina creepy-crawliness for good measure, the chances are you’ll get more out of it than the average cinemagoer raised on Michael Bay explosion-a-minute expectations of movies set in outer space.

The opening captions for APOLLO 18 claim that in 1974 the US attempted another moon shot that was subsequently covered up. Loaded with more cine-cameras than could probably be found in the average branch of Currys at the time, our three intrepid astronauts are launched off into the stratosphere, where, once they reach the moon, one of them remains in orbit while the other two pilot down onto the surface where yet more cameras get set up to allow a few more angles to aid in the storytelling. Once there they discover the remains of a Russian craft and its dead cosmonaut, who appears to have been killed. But by what? The only thing on the moon is rocks, and they can’t be creeping around, can they?

One of the reasons the film has been criticised is because it’s slow, and certainly not a lot happens in the way of scares in the first half an hour of the film’s brief 83 minute running time. But this is very much a slow build of a film, and once the scares kick in they’re very effective. What the film also does very well is convey the sense of absolute isolation of the astronauts, much as the seafaring horror stories of William Hope Hodgson achieved at the beginning of the twentieth century. This, combined with the slowly building creepy scuttling horrors that slowly reveal themselves, mean that APOLLO 18 is probably best enjoyed at home as a quiet night’s viewing rather than a raucous Saturday night out. 
       As I’ve mentioned above, the film has also been criticised for its use of the found footage method to tell its story, and that does require a few leaps of faith that less involved viewers won’t be prepared to make. One of the reasons this method has found favour with horror film-makers is, I’m sure, because modern cinematographic techniques have now become so sophisticated that it’s actually impossible to make a gritty, grainy, grotty-looking horror film anymore without the end result looking horribly self-conscious, post-modern or, to the eyes of the above-mentioned Michael Bay fan, ‘shit’. The good old days of filming something in 16mm and then blowing it up to 32mm for cinema distribution (such as THE EVIL DEAD or pretty much anything by dear old John Waters in his heyday) are sadly long gone. Found footage gets you round this because anyone equipped with an early 1970s cine-camera was never going to come home with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and the shaky, blurry, semi-incompetent-1970s-Dad style of film-making can be easily manipulated to the horror film maker’s advantage. Not all of these films work, but APOLLO 18 is actually one of the better ones and deserves more of a chance than many reviewers gave it, for that and for, consciously or not, actually having more literary influences than the average outer space horror film. 

[Rec] (2007)

While I'm a fan of the zombie movies of George Romero (and in particular of DAY OF THE DEAD), and while Stuart Gordon's REANIMATOR is one of my all-time favourites, it's European zombie horrors that I've found properly frightening and disturbing. Fulci's quartet (ZOMBI 2, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE BEYOND, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY) and Danny Boyle's 28 DAYS LATER all contain sequences that have had me on the edge of my seat, the latter because I found the fast-moving Rage virus victims absolutely terrifying. But out of all of these movies, Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza's [REC] is the one I like the most. It's the best paced, the scariest, the most kinetic and the one that still leaves me shaking, even though I've now seen it several times. Taking the format of footage filmed for a documentary about a night in the life of the local fire service, [REC]'s narrative is told entirely from the point of view of Pablo, the cameraman whom we see only very intermittently, and who somehow manages to keep filming under the direst of circumstances. In this respect [REC] is a little bit like Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST but without the breaks from the filmed footage, and mercifully free of the mean-spiritedness. Manuela Velasco is the pretty presenter (apparently her real job on Spanish TV) who does her best to provide a running commentary of events when the team gets called to a residential block where an old lady is apparently trapped in her flat. Once the team are inside the building and have discovered the woman covered in blood and keen to chew on anyone who comes within biting distance, the building is sealed by the authorities. Initially there is no explanation as to what is going on and the film becomes extraordinarily tense as more and more people succumb to the zombie plague that has been unleashed. The brief running time of less than eighty minutes means that once the action begins the only time the film truly pauses for breath is close to the end, and even that is just so something even more terrifyingly horrible than what we've already seen can appear. In fact the climax almost tops everything that has gone before as the film veers off into deliciously ambiguous territory regarding the cause of the disaster, and the ending is anything but comforting. [REC] 2, this film's direct continuation, ran the risk of diminishing the impact of the first because by necessity the questions raised had to be addressed to some degree. It's interesting to note that [REC 3], due for release soon, takes a different angle on the material with the zombie plague being unleashed at a wedding. One of the reasons that [REC] works so well is because it relays superbly to the viewer the sheer frenetic anarchy of what is taking place. Hopefully [REC] 3 will use its setting to provide another dose of fast-moving terrifying outrageousness to match the original. 

Intruders (2012)

A subtle, restrained, and really rather decent little Spanish horror picture that has been fortunate enough to get multiplex distribution in the UK, INTRUDERS has received mixed reviews in general and one very poor and inappropriate review which gives away an important twist in particular (enormous injurious slap on wrist Philip French of The Observer), all of which has encouraged me to write a few words in its defence.

Spanish in all but location and its main stars, the film begins in England with the story of construction site manager Clive Owen, whose daughter Mia has just turned twelve. Climbing a tree at her grandparents’ house in the country Mia finds an old wooden box hidden in a hole deep inside the trunk. The box contains an old crumpled piece of paper on which has been written the tale of a ghostly creature who wants nothing more than to steal a child’s face to take the place of its own blank visage. Mia copies the story out and presents it as her own at school. As the tale begins by describing how you have to say the monster’s name to wake him up it’s perhaps not surprising that before long the creature is appearing in her bedroom, with Clive seeing it as well and doing his best to fight it off. When nothing shows up on the security monitors Clive has installed it’s time for the psychiatrists and social workers to accuse Clive and Mia of suffering a dual hallucination, but as the rest of the tale unfolds we horror fans are relieved to learn that that’s not what’s going on at all. To say any more would be to spoil the surprises director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has in store (are you listening, Mr French?). I haven’t even mentioned yet that the above narrative is intercut with a similar story taking place in Spain, where a young boy is being haunted by the same monster, and his mother has turned to the local Catholic priests to try to exorcise the creature. How these two stories are eventually tied together is extremely satisfying in a movie that is leisurely paced without ever being boring, and never puts a foot wrong where so many movies might have been tempted to veer off into the realm of inappropriate CGI and silly plot developments. The acting is excellent all round and there is an emphasis on the child characters that put me in mind of some of the superior ghostly television dramas for children produced by ITV in the 1970s. Add in some properly scary apparitions in a suburban setting, and INTRUDERS could almost be likened to an episode of SHADOWS with Ramsey Campbell as script editor. In fact the movie is probably as close as the modern horror genre gets to what might be termed ‘quiet horror’. There’s no blood, very little screaming, and only a bit of CGI. But when a scene can culminate in a single handwritten line scrawled on a piece of paper that chills you to the bone you know a film’s working bloody well without the need for any of that. Good old EuroHorror - alive and well and still doing the business. INTRUDERS deserves more success than it’s probably going to get, although the league of Clive Owen fans out there (I was pretty much the only man in the cinema at the screening we attended) may help to do otherwise.

Switchblade Romance (2003)

Starting off like so many slasher movies before it, SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE (let’s call it by its English title for the sake of this review, shall we? Especially as it’s a rather better title than what Haute Tension translates as) begins in a farm house in the middle of the French countryside. Alex has brought her friend Marie back from university with her so they can do a bit of revision during the holidays. The law books never get opened, though, because as soon as everyone’s in bed it’s the cue for almost Alex’s entire family to get massacred by a mysterious caller who then proceeds to kidnap her. Marie ends up with her in the back of the killer’s van and the rest of the film details their trip through the French countryside before culminating in a final blood soaked showdown. To say any more would spoil the story for those who haven’t yet seen it, suffice to say the film takes a turn I wasn’t expecting but was extremely welcome in these days of by-the-numbers slasher movies.

The new wave of extreme French horror cinema has tended to emphasise the more grim and miserable aspects of the genre. SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE predates films like INSIDE, MARTYRS and THE HORDE and while it’s no less bloodstained it does have a lighter, more entertaining vibe to it. Having seen it it’s now no surprise to me that while his contemporaries have been exploring the finer points of miserabilism in their homeland director Alexandre Aja moved to Hollywood to direct an okay remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES and a quite outrageous over the top fun filled extravaganza of a remake of Joe Dante’s PIRANHA. 

As SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE progresses, and particularly as we get into the last twenty minutes, it becomes obvious that this and PIRANHA 3D are the work of the same man. Personally it’s a delight to discover a modern French horror director who wants to entertain at least as much as he wants to mortify. It’s also a pleasure to see Giannetto de Rossi’s name in the credits, his torn throat appliances having come a long way since Olga Karlatos had hers ripped out in Fulci’s ZOMBIE 2. In fact the only thing I really didn’t like about this film was the music, which comes across as one of those ‘sound design’ efforts filled with scraping noises and wobbling base noises when a proper score would have made this even more enjoyable. On the basis of this and his subsequent projects, Alexandre Aja has confirmed his position as the only modern French horror director I would like to actually meet, if only so I can ask him if the J&B gag in this film is a reference to the Italian giallos SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE could actually so easily be a blood drenched, slasher-orientated, over the top tribute to.

Wrong Turn 2 (2007)

One of the wonderful things about this genre of ours is that joy can come from the most unexpected places. Rob Schmidt’s original WRONG TURN (2003) was an okay hillbilly horror movie in which Eliza Dushku, Desmond Harrington and friends encountered a trio of deformed mutants and suffered the consequences. Schmidt went onto direct one of the few episodes of the second series of MASTERS OF HORROR worth watching - Right To Die, and in fact it was that TV episode that encouraged me to seek out his debut picture.

Joe Lynch, on the other hand, (who directed WRONG TURN 2) I met at FrightFest last year where he and his friend Adam Green (HATCHET, FROZEN) were premiering their new drive-in anthology movie CHILLERAMA. Lynch seemed such a personable chap, and so alive with the love of all things Mortal Cinema-esque (as did his colleague, I hasten to add) that I thought it only charitable to seek out what I assumed would be a fairly routine effort.

Far, far better than it has any right to be, you will know if you’re going to enjoy WRONG TURN 2 before the titles have finished when a blonde-haired young lady called Kimberly is despatched in a way so over the top outrageous that it will either be time to switch off the film or settle down for a hillbilly horrorfest of near-crazy proportions.

This time, instead of people randomly lost in the woods the plot centres around a simulated post-apocalypse reality TV show. The participants are introduced in such a deserve-to-die way as to bring a nostalgic tear to the eye of even the most hardened fan of slasher films. What then follows is an exercise in country carnage, with several scenes going over the top in terms of violence. Judging from the way certain scenes seems to have been included simply on the grounds of outrageous bad taste one also wonders if Mr Lynch may also harbour a love for the gleeful excesses of John Waters. In fact a viewing of his CHILLERAMA episode almost confirms it (I’ll leave you to find out the title yourselves).

As well as having a healthy sense of gory fun the cast is peppered with familiar faces from these sorts of things. Both Crystal Lowe and Texas Battle (I suspect these aren’t their real names) appeared in FINAL DESTINATION 3 as the one who dies naked in a tanning booth and the chap who gets his head squished in the gym, respectively. Walter Murphy is the only carryover from part 1, doing his best John Carradine impersonation as he tries to provide some explanation as to why the mutants developed in the first place and allowing Lynch to provide a nod to PROPHECY. In fact there are plenty of homages for horror fans to pick up on, with scenes reminiscent of everything from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE to TROPIC THUNDER, but in a good way.

So, highly unexpected, highly outrageous and highly enjoyable. Well done Mr Lynch. On the Mortal Cinema shelves lurks WRONG TURN 3, which will have a hard time living up to this one, but only time will tell.

Eyes of Crystal (2004)

Does the giallo as we all know and love it have a place in 21st century horror? Well that all depends. Last year Spain offered us the thoroughly enjoyable, stylish and barking mad thriller JULIA'S EYES (which is reviewed on this very site). A few years prior to that Italy and Spain got together to produce EYES OF CRYSTAL, a police procedural that could be considered a serious giallo (complicated plotting, obscure clues, creatively bizarre murders) without all the daft (but fun) elements of its 1970s precursors (outrageous fashions, terrible wallpaper, J&B, excessive scantily clad pulchritude). Oh yes, EYES OF CRYSTAL (or OCCHI DI CRISTALLO to give it the original Italian title) is definitely a giallo for the 21st century, a sleeker, more polished, more distilled version, if you will, of its predecessors.

            There's a mad taxidermist roaming the streets of an unnamed Italian city, busy reconstituting the doll he keeps having flashbacks to from his youth (along with burning nuns and other Italian standbys) from human body parts. His murder victims are left with the parts he has removed replaced with mannikin limbs and, more often than not, with Latin phrases written in blood on the wall close by. Luigi Lo Cascio is the Young Cop Who Doesn't Live By The Rules (he shoots a rapist in the knee in the film's opening sequence after they have caught him just to show he's a bit unstable) assigned to investigate the murders and work out why people are turning up on the beach minus their legs. Senior policeman Simon Andreu (star of THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE and providing a nice link with the EuroHorror of old) gets admitted to hospital where he lies slowly dying of a brain tumour and seeing visions of him and the killer together when they were boys at the orphanage where they grew up but unfortunately he can't remember the chap’s name until it’s just too late. Lucia Jimenez is on hand as the gorgeous girl who needs Lo Cascio's protection but ends up tied to a rickety old bed in her skimpies as the killer dangles his knife over her. It all reaches a climax at the big scary orphanage overlooking the cliffs near the sea where the killer's identity is revealed, as is his whacked out reason for what he's been doing with all the body parts.

            Extremely stylishly shot, EYES OF CRYSTAL often manages to out-Dario Mr Argento with some of its delicious visual set-ups, and there are so many the movie is worth watching at least twice just to appreciate some of the more subtle visual treats and framing on offer here. A glass eye factory and a climax that relies partly on a homage to a certain Mario Bava film that will have all his fans nodding in appreciation, this really is very good indeed. Director Eros Puglielli seems to have worked solely in Italian television since making this which is a shame, as his eyes would be better employed constructing more stylish visual feasts of giallo for a modern generation.

Tears of Kali (2004)

There aren't enough German horror films around these days, or anthology horror films, or horror films that use the theme of deeply worrying New Ageist cults as a springboard for bloodstained full-on movie terror. So it's a delight to report that here we have a film that's all three, as well as being absolutely cracking piece of nastiness into the bargain. A tiny budgeted modern EuroHorror thoroughly deserving of the attention of fans of extreme cinema everywhere, TEARS OF KALI starts off with a prologue sequence set in a grim room in Poona, India in 1983. Various cult members are lying on filthy mattresses and are busy throwing up, having fits or just screaming. The scene culminates in a naked girl cutting her own eyelids off in a scene Lucio Fulci would have been proud of and, dare I say it, probably wouldn't have done anywhere near as well or as unpleasantly as we get to experience here. It's a grim shocking moment and more than sets the scene for what is about to follow.

            The cult is called the Taylor-Eriksson group and the film flashes forward to modern day to show us what has happened to three of its members in three respective stories. The first concerns a girl incarcerated in an asylum after being accused of murdering one of the cult's members who has set up his own group in Berlin and has been trying to practice the cult's methods. We hear a lot about 'deep meditation' and 'journeying into the darkest regions of the soul' before the story jumps down our throats with some superbly atmospheric out of body horror. The second story finds a young offender undergoing rehabilitation therapy by a former cult member whose treatment involves forcing the young man to cut off his own skin. A genuine two-hander this one, with a gruesome and intense finale that is wholly horrible without the excessive grue ever becoming too silly or over the top. The final story is about a faith healer who manages to exorcise the evil within one of the cult members. Unfortunately it's still lurking around the building when he's due to leave and after it’s killed his wife he and his patient end up trapped in the cellar as the thing tries to get in. A tiny coda ends the movie on a downbeat note.

            I really liked TEARS OF KALI, but it's a film that isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. The violence is often excessive but never cartoonish, and the tone is deadly serious but without the misanthropic nihilism that we have seen in French EuroHorrors like MARTYRS and THE HORDE. I think it's always a mark of great achievement for a film like this if you end up totally ignoring the tiny budget and glarey shot-on-video feel because you're so absorbed by what's actually going on, and that was definitely the case here. One of the commonest complaints levelled against anthology pictures is their uneven feel, but by having a very strong linking theme and consistently graphic disturbing and upsetting storylines the movie avoids this pitfall as well. It treats its subject of what might happen to the members of a properly sinister cult in a fascinating and original way, and makes that premise the star of the movie, such that when it finished I found myself very keen to know what other members of the cult might be up to now. TEARS OF KALI 2? I'll be first in line.

Rare Exports (2010)

Probably the most widely distributed subtitled Finnish film in UK cinemas last year, RARE EXPORTS has finally had a Region 2 DVD release for all those who didn’t catch it on the big screen. Although it’s not obvious from the title, it's a Christmas film for all those of us who can’t stand the thought of the usual modern sugary sentimental claptrap that passes for yuletide cinema these days, daring to ask the question: Is Santa Claus a cuddly old man on a Coke advert or is he in fact a 60 foot tall Lovecraftian demon who delights in tearing naughty children to pieces leaving shrunken wicker effigies in their place, has been buried in ice for centuries, and God Help Us All if he thaws out?

           We’re in Lapland. At the top of a mountain a mining company has discovered that there is a block of ice 60 feet square buried deep in its depths, and they’re being paid to dig it out. Meanwhile our 9 year old hero is convinced this is the burial place of the original Santa Claus, a mythical creature far removed from the kindly fat bearded bloke we’re more familiar with. Via a delicious title sequence we get to see old woodcuts demonstrating just how much more interested this Santa is / was in punishing naughty children than rewarding the good. “He tore the naughty children apart,” says one character “until even their skeletons weren’t left”.

            I won’t say much more except that Santa’s elves are some of the scariest things I saw on screen last year, and the scene of them besieging a warehouse where ‘Santa’ (who is a bit of a cross between Carpenter’s PRINCE OF DARKNESS and Tim Curry’s devil from LEGEND but bloody huge) is being defrosted is one of the most Lovecraftian film moments I’ve seen in a while. Add to that the fact that our heroes are good old-fashioned reindeer hunters who look like rejects from a Metallica tribute band and a nine year old boy with cardboard taped across his bottom so he doesn’t get spanked and this is one very strange Christmas movie. The freezing locations and sense of dread (a scene of a field of reindeer slaughtered by…something at one point is just plain unnerving) reminded me of Carpenter’s THE THING, but most of all I loved the twisted sentiment – peace on earth and goodwill to all, or Santa will tear your face off. Highly, highly recommended.

The Thing (2011)

It is a truth universally acknowledged in Hollywood that a successful film must be in want of a remake, sequel or prequel and no movie company is more familiar with this than Universal Pictures, having originally built its fortunes on its hugely successful Frankenstein, Dracula and Mummy series of pictures of the 1930s and 1940s. When John Carpenter’s big budget remake of THE THING was released in the early eighties, however, it was a financial disaster, as would any film about a hideous shape-shifting paranoia-inducing creature in an isolated Antarctic setting have been in the Summer of Steven Spielberg’s feel-good ET THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL. Time and critical attention have, however, been immensely kind to Mr Carpenter’s film and it is now rightly recognised as a classic, considered by many (including myself) to be better than the original 1951 version, which in the world of horror films is a nigh on impossible feat to pull off. When word went out that it was itself to be the subject of a remake the first word that sprang to my mind was ‘pointless’, especially when it turned out that the new film was to be a prequel to Carpenter’s picture, with the ending therefore being necessarily pre-determined. So it was with my expectations at rock bottom that I went to see the new version of THE THING, presuming that I may well end up bored, annoyed, frustrated and to come out of the cinema having wasted time and money. So it pleases me greatly to say that I really rather liked it.

           Perhaps the most surprising thing about THE THING the prequel is not that it’s actually okay, but that it’s a movie that has been made with fans of the previous film in mind. In fact someone who loves Carpenter’s THE THING is going to get a lot more out of this than someone unfamiliar with it, and with any luck it will send those latter audience members scurrying to pick up the quite stunning BluRay edition of the 1982 film that’s now available. There’s nothing at all original here and the plot is entirely predictable, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the Kurt Russell role surrounded by hairy Norwegians with an increasing  propensity to turn into huge Lovecraftian monsters at the drop of a dental filling. In fact the first scene in which we discover the creature’s inability to regenerate inorganic material (in this case an internal fracture fixation device) provides a nice lead-in to the discovery of what the creature that has just been dug out of the ice, been defrosted and gone on a killing spree before being gunned down, is actually capable of. Making the original form of the thing insectoid doesn’t go any way to explaining how on earth it piloted the ship we get to see, and there’s still no explanation for why a monster presumably capable of operating such hi-tech equipment is happy to want to splodge around and randomly kill people when it could just as easily slope off back to its flying saucer and fly away. But the number of touches that are there to ensure consistency with Carpenter’s film, plus some impressive special effects mean that you would have to be an extremely unforgiving and demanding horror fan not to have a good time with this. I was expecting ropey CGI but instead I had difficulty distinguishing the prosthetics (there’s a long credit roll at the end for the prosthetics teams which had me feeling quite nostalgic in itself) from the digital work. The music by Marco Beltrami opts for mainly orchestral work this time out, only segueing into synthesisers at the end for a final sequence that’s the best writer Eric Heisserer and director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr could possibly have done with the brief they were presumably given. There are quite a few reviews out there at the moment trashing this film which is partly why I felt like writing this one up as it really isn’t bad at all and, in a rare thing for sequels and remakes these days, seems to be acutely aware of its appropriate place in the movie scheme of Things.

Outcast (2010)

One of the most interesting themes that seems to be coming to the fore in modern British horror films is that despite their contemporary urban settings, at their heart is very much a sense of the mythic, a hearkening back to the kind of folk tales that went to form much of what we now know as Celtic and other mythologies. Philip Ridley's HEARTLESS dealt with the age old tale of the Bargain With Powers With Whom One Should Never Deal, while OUTCAST goes one better, giving us a timeless story of magical powers in conflict and a beast conceived by misguided intentions that is aroused to transformation by Sex and Blood. The movie takes place on an Edinburgh council housing estate but it could just as easily be set anywhere and at any time during Britain's history. In fact as I watched it I wondered just how outright terrifying the film might have been if it had been set during the Middle Ages, with no electricity, grim weather, and an overwhelming all-pervading sense of the superstitious adding to the all too real terrors. The urban setting works well though, and serves as a reminder that tower blocks are really no different from a little huddle of medieval huts around a campfire. In fact perhaps to drive the point home we even get an ‘urban campfire’ scene early on in the proceedings that serves as a centre point for a teenagers’ get together.

            Mary (Kate Dickie) arrives with teenaged son Fergal (Niall Bruton) in Edinburgh, moves into the scabbiest, grimmest looking flat on an estate where the sun never shines, and immediately starts painting mystic symbols on the walls in her own blood. Pretty soon we find out why as we're introduced to Cathal (James Nesbitt in a fine angry scary form) who has been selected to pursue her and her son from Ireland. He's been given special powers to enable him to detect and destroy them but needs the assistance of Liam (Ciaran McMenamin) and permission from the Laird (James Cosmo - a nice touch) to enable him to carry out his task. Fergal meets nice girl Petronella (Hannah Stanbridge) and they embark on the kind of ultimately doomed romance dark myth has thrived on since forever. There’s also a monster on the prowl and as the bodies begin to pile up and Nesbitt gets ever closer the stage is set for the final showdown.

I enjoyed OUTCAST far more than I was expecting to. Dickie and Nesbitt are fine and well matched as the magicians from the old country, and Bruton and Stanbridge are engaging and likeable enough to engage audience sympathy. The council estate backdrop works well at being just that and director Colm McCarthy is wise not to rub his squalid urban setting in our faces too much, instead concentrating on the timelessness of his story and taking the time to include elements that continually catch the attention (the use of birds as sacrifices, the cockroach candle, the use of a blooded knife) all of which add up to a fine little modern British horror picture that, along with certain other recent efforts like PANIC BUTTON and KILL LIST has actually made me quite optimistic for the state of the BritHorror of today. Hurrah!

Guilty of Romance (2011)

Oh my goodness where do I start with this one? Probably with the honest admission that the only reason we went to see GUILTY OF ROMANCE, a title more suggestive of a romcom than the sleazefest it actually is, was because we had read a description of the opening scene, where the apparent remains of two bodies are discovered in a Tokyo love hotel. The parts that have been removed have been replaced by parts of shop window dummies, a lot of pink paint has been splashed about and the word ‘Castle’ has been daubed on the wall. ‘What follows’ said the pre-screening blurb, ‘is a descent into a sexual hell’. So even though its director might be horrified that this could be considered a genre piece there were certainly enough elements to suggest a possible evening of delirious whacked-out cinema. Which is exactly what we got.

            After the opening scene we are introduced to Izumi, a meticulously behaved housewife who is married to a bestselling novelist. Every day he leaves the house to go out and write at some undisclosed location, coming back late to compliment her on the precise alignment of his slippers and the correct temperature of his tea as she sits at his feet. The long days of nothing mean, however, that boredom soon sets in, and she gets his permission to get a job selling sausages at a local supermarket. It’s there that she’s approached by a personable young woman who says she can get Izumi work modelling, and before you can say ‘It’s probably not for Vogue’ she’s working in pornography and indulging in multiple random affairs, while feeling intensely liberated from her ‘normal’ life in the process. She meets Mitsuko, a prostitute who in the daytime is a lecturer at a highly respected university and who is obsessed with the works of Kafka, in particular The Castle. Mitsuko’s elderly mother knows all about her double life and during a bizarre tea party tells how her deceased husband also exhibited an unnatural interest in their daughter. Needless to say everything is headed into horribly wrong territory here and after the film spends rather too long procrastinating and over-emphasising the life of a Tokyo prostitute we get a completely insane ending that is going to be appreciated far more by trash film enthusiasts than the art house crowd I suspect this film was made for.

            The Guardian has called GUILTY OF ROMANCE an eccentrically confused mess as if that is a bad thing, but we art-house-trash-and-everything-else horror aficionados are well acquainted with movies that don’t make sense, have been thrown together with everyone’s fingers kept crossed behind their backs and of course out and out rubbish. GUILTY OF ROMANCE isn’t any of these but I can’t quite agree with the opinion held by some that director Sion Sono is a genius either. The film veers from the almost Bava-esque opening (mannequins, corpses, bright colours) to a much quieter but engrossing forty-five minutes, after which there is far too much meandering before everything goes completely mental. It’s apparently meant to be part of his ‘hate’ trilogy, but while almost every character in the film is up to things they really shouldn’t be, at no point did I feel myself really disliking any of them. Instead the film conveys a far more ambivalent attitude to the lives these characters have created for themselves. It’s a bit of a misfire and will probably leave some viewers open-mouthed while still being a far more viable option for a night’s viewing than the romantic comedy it most definitely isn’t.

Insidious (2011)

Good movies about ghosts tend to be subtle. The most memorable ghostly movies of the last fifteen years (Shyamalan’s SIXTH SENSE, Amenabar’s THE OTHERS and Juan Antonio Bayona’s THE ORPHANAGE) displayed tremendous skill in conjuring up the kind of delicate dread atmosphere needed to make the kind of stories they were telling succeed superbly. Going further back, movies generally regarded as classics (THE INNOCENTS, THE HAUNTING) employ similar carefully structured storytelling to draw the viewer in. We’re shortly promised THE WOMAN IN BLACK from Hammer, and THE AWAKENING from writer Stephen Volk, and very good the trailers for both of those look, too.

INSIDIOUS is also a movie about ghosts, and it’s a rattling good one, but rather than a gentle journey into the cobweb-enshrouded depths of the supernatural, it’s more a ghost train ride into hell, complete with things designed to make you jump at every opportunity. So, enthusiasts of supernatural subtlety be warned – this probably won’t be your cup of tea.

            Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and his wife Renai (Rose Byrne) move into their lovely new dark gloomy house with their three children. It’s not long before weird things start happening that culminate in their son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) falling from a ladder and ending up in a coma. Renai sees several spooky apparitions and the family move again, only for the manifestations to follow them. Cue the intervention of parapsychologist Lin Shaye and her comedy sidekicks Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson who determine that it’s not the house that’s haunted so much as the boy himself. Barbara Hershey, playing Josh’s mother and looking a good deal saner than in BLACK SWAN (thank heavens) has some secrets to reveal about her son’s past as well, and the stage is set for Josh to enter the astral plane to get his son back.

            Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell’s love for the genre is obvious in interviews and thankfully it translates well to the screen. Images and sounds redolent of early twenties horrors like NOSFERATU and the films of Dario Argento mean they run the risk of criticism for being derivative but, in the same way that a good comedy just keeps at you with plenty of properly funny gags, they provide the viewer with so many well-executed scares that INSIDIOUS is very difficult not to like. Add in some very clever framing and all kinds of things happening that you really have to be paying attention to notice and it’s difficult to catch everything that’s going on in a single viewing. The music’s good too – a mixture of electronic sound effects reminiscent of those pioneered by Delia Derbyshire and her team for LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE and very scratchy violins. It’s not often the composer gets screen time in a movie (I can remember Jerry Goldsmith getting a cameo next to an ice cream machine in GREMLINS 2 but that’s about it) but here Joseph Bishara gets to play the ultimate nasty demon as well, and a fine job he does of it.

Wan and Whannell’s previous horror efforts received mixed reviews, with both getting more than their fare share of negative notices. I’m not afraid to admit that I loved SAW, and DEAD SILENCE, while flawed, was a genuine attempt at the kind of old fashioned horror film that you just don’t see anymore. With INSIDIOUS they’ve proven that they’re getting very good indeed at being very very scary and I very much hope they’ll decide to stay within the genre for at least another couple of films.

Julia's Eyes - More Spanish Horror Worth Seeing

In recent years one country more than any other has given hope to Euro-horror fans everywhere. Atmospheric ghost stories, the kinetic zombie antics of the excellent [REC] and even a splendid series of television ‘FILMS TO KEEP YOU AWAKE’ (PELICULAS PARA NO DORMIR -which I’ll be covering on here in due course) have put Spain on the map as a leading producer of quality screen terror. JULIA’S EYES, which has just come out on UK Region 2 DVD & Blu-Ray after a limited independent cinema run here, is another one to look out for, although how much you will enjoy it will depend on your tastes.

Inappropriately marketed in some territories as a subtle psychological chiller, anyone going to see JULIA'S EYES  because of its implied links to quiet Spanish horror hits like THE ORPHANAGE or some of Guillermo del Toro’s own projects may well find themselves getting rather more in the way of outrageous incident than they bargained for. The rest of us can sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that the spirit of the giallo seems to be well and alive and making a comeback from Spain.

            Julia suffers from Made-Up-Movie-Optic-Nerve-Degeneration, one of those plot devices that allows her to lose and regain sight whenever it becomes necessary to the plot or to aid in the construction of an atmospheric scene. Her sister has the same condition at the beginning but is swiftly put out of the picture (literally) because she appears to be another one of those movie characters who can tie an expert noose to hang themselves with (or do they sell them in ‘specialist’ shops nowadays?). Julia’s convinced her sister was murdered and that the girl’s mysterious new boyfriend is to blame and so the hunt is on, taking her to the hotel where they stayed just before her death by way of a changing room full of naked blind women who sniff out Julia’s presence, and the man who is now stalking her, in one of the set pieces that, along with what is actually a very well developed, tense and mysterious first forty five minutes, certainly endeared this writer to this particular picture.

            It’s in the movie’s second half that the audience is going to be divided, when the movie enters seriously silly giallo territory, with the requisite One Daft Thing After Another taking place. However, and where the film scores big points, all these daft things are perfectly executed, the performances are spot on and some of the shocks are so well choreographed that I jumped and cringed along with everybody else. Two of the murders later on suggest that, rather than studying the likes of Del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH and THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, director Guillem Morales has been rather more influenced by some of the murders in Norman J Warren’s SATAN’S SLAVE and Pete Walker’s SCHIZO. The climactic turning out of the lights has been used in many a picture but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work again here and in a way it would be disappointing if it wasn’t.

            Definitely designed as a crowd pleaser, JULIA’S EYES is delicious entertainment. It’s scary, well paced, and when it realises it’s going to go over the top it does so with verve and enthusiasm, embracing its clichés with gusto and is a much better film for it. It also happens to be a film with a more mature central female character than we get to see from Hollywood, someone who is in a loving relationship, which the film manages to express on several levels and at several points in the movie without interfering with the pacing. Actually it’s a refreshing change to see a modern horror film without a teenager in sight. Lady P and I really loved it. Cracking job, Guillem – we’ll be first in line for your next one.