Amélie

Tautou’d Life

Amélie
aka Le fabuleux
destin d'Amélie Poulain
France 2001 Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Sony Blu Ray Steelbook Zone A

Amélie or Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain* as it was known in its own country, is easily one of the greatest movies ever made, as far as I’m concerned. It came out at a time in my life when I’d pretty much stopped seeing films more than once at the cinema... I made an exception for this film. In fact, I went to my local film emporium thirteen times to see this and I was still moved to tears every time I saw it. And the fact that it was playing long enough in the cinemas here that I was able to revisit it every weekend demonstrates what a huge smash of a film it was... even here in the UK. Of course, it helps that my local cinema was not the gaudy Cineworld it is now (and I don’t know how long there will be a cinema near me, to be honest... there are rumblings coming from the owners of the chain again). Instead it was a UGC cinema who, while still a multiplex, were much more friendly to the idea of showing non-English speaking films and they also had money sunk into this movie.

The film stars the great Audrey Tautou as the titular Amélie, a part written originally for Emily Watson, who had to decline due to scheduling reasons. One night the news of the death of Princess Diana  on the TV causes her to accidentally discover the lost treasure of a boy who used to live in her apartment decades before... a box of playthings hidden behind the wall containing things like a miniature racing car and bicycle... which leads to her, once reuniting this box of goodies with their original owner, onto a path of doing anonymous good deeds for people... and visiting comical retribution on certain others. But can she find her way to the heart of the oddball man she has spied from a distance, played by director Mathieu Kassovitz?

Director Jeunet brings a few of his old cast form Delicatessen (reviewed here) back for this one, such as Rufus and the always watchable Dominique Pinon plus a cast of strange faces playing off kilter characters, weaving together a breakneck paced story of strange incidents (as is his style) and filling the story with enough charm and heart to make even a cold hearted blogger like myself weep uncontrollably.

It would not be amiss to describe the film as a magical experience, with the surreal experiences of the strong imagination of the title character juxtaposed with a world populated, sometimes, with manifestations of her psyche such as a friendly crocodile or a pig lamp which turns itself off in one scene. The colouring of deep reds, deep greens and yellows are almost Bava-like but maybe a bit richer and surprisingly coherent in the way they hang together in their perfect compositions. And beautful imagery... like bunnies and teddy bears made up out of the clouds as an infant Amélie takes photos of cloud formations or, when devastated in one scene as an adult, Amélie transforming and collapsing into a puddle of water... are what makes cinema the art form it’s always been.

Now there’s way too much going on in this film for me to talk about in the somewhat limited space of a blog post but I would like to say one thing about the status of the movie (or what I believe it is) and then give two samples where I think Jeunet excelled himself in pushing the art of the motion picture forward (among may other examples to be found in the film).

Firstly, when Citizen Kane came out in 1941, a film usually found at the top of most director polls of the greatest films over the decades, it was certainly innovative but it was also, in many ways (I believe), a summation of where the art of the motion picture was at the time... presenting various clever and sometimes invisible (in what went on to get certain shots, for example, into sharp focus) technical solutions which were state-of-the-art at the time. I believe that when Amélie was released in 2001... it did exactly the same, It’s certainly innovative and full of imagination but also did things which either represented or, in the case of two sequences I want to talk about next, creatively pushed what you could do with film. And remember, there’s a lot more CGI in Amélie than people realise. Objects like a small lamp being a certain colour were digitally dropped into shots to balance the colour schemes, for example... and, well, all I’m saying is Audrey Tautou does not, in real life, have a knack for skimming stones (which her character collects everywhere she goes in the story for just that purpose).

So, there are two moments (or three because one is comprised of a set up to a later moment) I want to talk about. One is a scene right near the end of the film where the director has a second piece of film playing in a quarter of a shot behind Amélie as we watch her make her ‘famous plum pie’. We see her but we also see what she’s imagining in the film over her shoulder. A day dream of her future lover coming into her apartment and creeping up on her while she’s preparing her pie. So at one point we see him creeping up from behind her (the same scene from a reverse angle) and he moves the bead curtains directly behind her to announce his presence... but Amélie snaps out of her dream because the beads behind her have simultaneously moved at the exact same time... only to look around and see it was just the cat moving the curtain. It’s a wonderful moment and the juxtaposition of two narratives, one real (in the context of the film) and the other imaginary suddenly matching up is, absolutely brilliant.

The other thing I want to talk about is the sound design in two scenes (and I’m not talking about Yann Tiersen’s absolutely amazing score, most of it needle dropped in from his old albums but some of it original and written for the film). Amélie’s landlord was abandoned by her husband in the late sixties and then died in a plane crash before reconciling with her. Amélie ‘borrows’ her old wartime letters from her once future husband, photocopies them and then pastes various words together to create a ‘lost letter’ found after forty years by the post office... a letter reaffirming the landlady’s husband’s love for her. But listen to the sound design on the scenes... once where Amélie is reading all the letters in a montage of moments and then again, later, when the landlady (played by Yolande Moreau) reads back the faked up ‘new letter’ which has arrived...

When Amélie reads each letter, a different ambient sound is heard playing in the background, signifying what country the gentleman in question was stationed at or what was going on in the background at the time the original letters were written. The photocopies are then cut up and reassembled to make a new message and aged. But later, when the landlady reads the letter for the first time, the background sound from the originals of each word are replayed, colliding in bits to signify the hodge podge nature of what she’s reading to the audience. Again, it’s a moment of brilliance in what, frankly, is a movie of brilliant moments that never let up.

I could probably go in all day on this one but I won’t... Amélie is one of the few films I know, such as Blade Runner (reviewed here) and Wonder Woman (reviewed here) where I believe I could actually write a quite thorough and enthusiastic book, if given the time and money to research. As it is, I’ll leave it here (with much more unsaid) and assume that the reader has gathered that, if Amélie is a film they haven’t seen then, they should maybe give themselves the opportunity to be won over by it in much the same way many people were (my understanding is the box office on this one was huge.... and for good reason). This one’s a real piece of cinematic art... don’t let it slip through your fingers. 

*One last thing, for those of you waiting for a super high definition version of the film. The great Severin films in America wanted to put out a high definition, 4K scan of the film last year as a companion piece to their release of Delicatessen. Alas, when they and Jeunet approached the company who owned the original negative, they were told it had been thrown out... because why would anyone need the negative once a digital scan was already in existence. So there you have it... such ignorant crimes against filmanity do still happen. I guess we won't be getting a 4K scan then.

Doctor Who - The Well

Tennant To Midnight

Doctor Who - The Well
UK/USA 2025
Airdate: 26th April 2025

Warning. Yup... spoilers from the outset.

Oh rats! What a shame. 

The first two episodes of this latest series of Doctor Who were actually better than anything we got last year but, just when I thought it was safe to go back in the Whoniverse, we get an episode, The Well, which is... while still better than pretty much all of last year’s episodes... just a bit of a mess, to be honest.  And that’s made more irritating by the twist reveal, halfway through the episode.

Okay, so we have Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu on form as The Doctor and Belinda, at least. Although Gatwa’s performance as The Doctor is once more tempered by the bad writing, which means he is tearing up at the drop of a hat again (this has to stop at some point... surely?). And we have a good supporting cast around them when they accidentally find themselves as part of a group of marines dropping onto a planet which they don’t name right away for fear that viewers will see the twist coming a mile off. With good reason because, the twist only works as a kind of call back to the name of a former, David Tennant episode called Midnight (there’s brief footage flashing back to the 2008 episode, just in case people don’t ‘get’ the joke). I didn’t see it coming and that’s probably because...

Okay, so I was having misgivings s about the episode being shoddily written right from the start but the reveal that it’s the unnamed ‘mimic antagonist’ of Midnight actually makes things worse. For one thing, the antagonist of the original story did not have the same modus operandi as the version of it in Midnight at all. So it really is a sequel in terms of labelling only, it seems to me. Secondly, Midnight was one of the best stories of the original Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who... so turning this into a ‘by name only’ sequel invites comparisons to that original and, honestly, this thing isn’t a patch on that one in any way, shape or form. Invoking the name almost denigrates the original episode.

The other thing about this one which was really bad was the damned costumes that The Doctor and Belinda choose to wear. When they find out the TARDIS has landed far in the future, without knowing anything about what or who they are gong to run into... they decide to dress up in future garb. And they choose these very specific matching jumpsuits which immediately had me thinking... “wait, what?” Are they going on a space expedition or something. To which the answer was immediately, yes because... well the suits they are wearing are an exact match to the uniforms being worn by the troops they go down with to the surface of the planet Midnight. Which... um... what? That’s pretty crazy. They accidentally dress in some uniforms belonging to the group of random strangers they then go on to meet? What happened to the writing on this thing? Explain this, please because, this makes no sense.

The only decent part of the episode was the surprise appearance of Anita Dobson as Mrs. Flood at the end of the story, as a character turning up in situ with other characters. So that was a novelty but, honestly, makes me start thinking of the inclusion of Susan Twist in every episode of the last story. And we all know how completely terrible and stupid that reveal turned out to be. But, it does look like she’s gathering intel on The Doctor here.

And I think that’s me done on The Well. This has got to be one of my shortest Doctor Who reviews ever but, I just don’t have much of anything positive to say about it, truth be told. This was definitely something and, I think that somethings was... just another unremarkable episode of modern Doctor Who. I won’t be revisiting this episode again any time soon.

Magic Crystal

Rock Alien Line

Magic Crystal
aka Mo fei cui
Hong Kong 1986
Directed by Jing Wong
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Magic Crystal is another of these great, 80s Hong Kong action films that companies like Eureka Masters Of Cinema and, in this case, 88 Films have been releasing onto a largely unsuspecting public over here in the UK. This one co-stars a young Andy Lau and a young Cynthia Rothrock as two of ‘the good guys’ who are out to stop the shenanigans of a Russian gangster played by Richard Norton (who’s lethal and ruthless but who has a magnetic and likeable personality in this one)*. Norton would also go on to co-star with Rothrock in her big break out US hits, China O’ Brien and its sequel, among others.

In this, Andy Lau plays... um... Andy Lo, part of a special, ‘get in trouble and we’ll disavow all knowledge’ police force unit called Falcons. After setting up his character and his comic relief side kick (we’re back to very broad toilet humour in this one... yikes) he gets involved with an archeologist friend in Greece, who is killed because of a green crystal he has found in an underground cavern. However, said crystal is hidden secretly in Andy’s sister’s kid’s luggage and, when they return to Hong Kong, the rock bonds with the kid, starts talking to him and uses its powers of mind control and the ability to grant superhuman powers, etc, to try and stay out of the clutches of the bad guys.

By now, Andy’s dead friend’s sister has gotten involved, as well as his own expert fighter sister... not to mention two Interpol agents, one of whom is Cindy, played by Cynthia Rothrock (why the heck is she always playing a character called Cindy in half of the Hong Kong movies she was in?). So there are action and chase scenes aplenty in this movie and, yeah, it’s really not bad.

I did find a lot of the humour way too crude for my liking (which seems to be a problem I have with a lot of these Hong Kong movies... I prefer it when they rein it in) but a lot of the fight choreography is impressive and there’s a quite surreal sequence where a licentious, comic relief character has his feet and hands swapped... which makes for some, well, interesting viewing.

There are lots of little Easter eggs in this for movie lovers too. For instance, when the young kid is given super kung fu skills by the crystal so he can defeat the school bully, he runs his thumb over his nose before going into action, just like Bruce Lee used to. And the end sequences, where several characters gather for a big fight in the underground chambers in Greece, is full of straight rips offs of the archeological trap scenes from the Indiana Jones movies... not to mention a bit of a rip off, both sonically and, perhaps, a little in the look of... the final alien of Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. But on a much diminished budget, obviously... this is beyond bargain bucket in terms of the films it’s... um... homaging.

But I honestly didn’t mind it... despite the tone of a lot of the humour, I quite liked this and it’s another entertaining ‘beat ‘em up’ from Cynthia Rothrock, doing her thing on a blown out knee for a lot of the time, apparently... having to go full on kung fu after she’d injured said knee doing a scene earlier on in the shoot. Although, why the heck an Interpol agent would just happen to be carrying a case holding an unfolding spear rather than, you know, arming herself with a gun, is anybody’s guess.

Like many of these Hong Kong action movies of the time, Magic Crystal has a synth-pop kind of soundtrack but, it’s not the most irritating one I’ve heard and it pulls it weight when it needs to, helping the pace of the film when it most needs it. So, yeah, I’m glad I’m finally piecing together these early Hong Kong action films of future stars courtesy of some of the UK (for a change) boutique labels. Keep ‘em coming.

*Alas, Mr. Norton died a few weeks before this review was published, at the end of March 2025.

Bear McCreary Live

 

So Sang We all

Bear McCreary Live
Themes & Variations Tour
Indigo at the O2
London
18th April 2025

It was Friday the 18th of April, a Good Friday in more ways than one it turned out, when I saw one of my favourite living composers, Bear McCreary, on the very first night of his new Themes and Variations Tour. And I was pleased it was a Friday night, for sure... meaning I didn’t need to get up early for work the next morning and so could dwell on the previous night (at time of writing, although this review will probably go up a few days later) without having to worry about post-concert recovery time, so to speak.

And it was a concert I was half expecting and half wasn’t, in terms of the size and sound. Seven men formed the band including McCreary himself, of course, helming guitar, keyboards, accordion, hurdy gurdy and, as all were, chipping in on some of the vocals. Included in this small line up was Morgan Sorne, who also had a short set as a supporting act before the main show. He did some amazing stuff with his five octave ranged voice, recorded in little bursts and then repeated electronically as he added layers of harmony and percussion. He’s pretty talented and I really liked the stuff he performed. I’d go all in and grab a load of his CDs but, alas for me, it looks like you can only get his stuff digitally these days... so I’m going to have to miss out, it looks like.

Then he was joined by ‘Bear and the gang’ as they performed a large variety of songs from Bear’s recent rock concept album The Singularity (which I finally bit the bullet on and bought a CD of from the merch stall at the show, accompanied by the supporting graphic novel of the same name, along with the obligatory Bear McCreary t-shirt, of course) and these very heavy tracks were interspersed with equally weighty interpretations of music from Bear’s various TV show and video game scores.

Now, I’ve been an admirer of McCreary since his Battlestar Galactica days but, most of the TV shows and games were ones I’ve not heard of (a programme with a set list would have been really helpful and would have got me to part with even more of my money) but I enjoyed them all none the less, tapping my fingers and stomping my foot as much as my somewhat gammy knee would allow for, sitting down at the front near this huge speaker, as the group of artists on stage tried to hasten the atrophy of my inner ear (it was awesome).

And for these various cues (numbers?) they also brought out their secret weapon, Bear’s brother Brendan McCreary, who not only screamed out the accompanying vocals in harmonic ways that perhaps the human voice was not meant to explore but, also, he was jumping, dancing and otherwise gallivanting back and forth across the stage in the most energetic manner I’ve seen since Voice Of The Beehive played Kentish Town back in the 1980s. This guy was so enthusiastic about his performance that he was, on his own, one of the primary entertainments of the show.

But, honestly, all musicians shone in this outstanding performance and, as I said above, I didn’t know a lot of it but I was so consumed by the energy and melodic harmony of the thing that it just carried me away. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen so many film composers live, often multiple times, over the last 45 years... such as Williams, Goldsmith, Barry, Bernstein (that’s the Elmer of the two ;-), Glass, Nyman, Mansell and too many to mention in such a short review but McCreary’s show was easily up there with some of the best of these, including modern favourites such as Brian Tyler and Hans Zimmer. This guy and his band were absolutely amazing... as were the animated visuals accompanying the show, one of which looked a little like something Rick Griffin might have designed in the 1960s at his most surreal. 

And what an encore... his cover version of All Along The Watchtower from Battlestar Galactica followed by his cover of Blue Oyster Cult's Godzilla, which he transformed for his score to Godzilla - King Of The Monsters. I was really pleased he did these ones that night.

And that’s that. I shall leave this short review in awe now as my tired old mind is having trouble thesaurusing the satisfactory superlatives but I and my companions for the evening had an absolute blast with Bear McCreary’s Themes And Variations Live concert and we all made noises to the effect that we’d definitely jump at the chance to see him again, next time he’s back in good old London town... hope we don’t have too long a wait on that.

Resurrection

Easter Shuffle

Resurrection
Directed by Russell Mulcahy
USA/Canada 1999
Interlight Pictures

Warning: Some spoilerage on this one but I dont reveal the killer’s identity.

So I was looking around for something to watch for this year’s Easter themed blog review and I came across a movie which... I don’t think I’ve seen before (although, to be fair, having now watched it, it’s fairly forgettable) and which has an interesting premise.

Resurrection is all about Detective Prudhomme, played by Christopher Lambert and his latest case, which he works, for the most part (until the inevitable moment you know is coming), with his partner Detective Hollinsworth, played by Leland Orser. Hollinsworth is the more sympathetic of the two while Prudhomme is pretty humourless and dry, with a marriage to his wife halfway on the rocks due to the recent loss of their son through an accident. It’s almost exactly the same tragic back story as that in John Woo’s recent Christmas action flick Silent Night (reviewed here) but, yeah, the whole film is pretty cliché ridden, to be fair. Anyway, a serial killer starts going about his business and taking bits of his victim’s bodies with him week after week, because he believes he can rebuild the resurrected body of Christ in time for Easter, using the collection of body parts with which he’s absconding and then piecing them together, Dr. Frankenstein style. It’s up to Prudhomme and Hollinsworth to try and stop him, aided by people like a criminal profiler played by Robert Joy (who I believe plays Victor’s father in the recent, third series of From, reviewed here) and, playing the local priest, trying to get the detective to set foot in a church again after the death of his son, we have the great director David Cronenberg giving a pretty credible performance.

Okay, so the film is definitely looking like something which is trying to cash in on the success of David Fincher’s Se7en, with the detectives finding mutilated bodies in places while the rain hammers down on them and with a lot of the film being shot in very muted, dull grey colours. And I’d like to say it feels very 1990s but, if anything, it kinda feels very 1980s but, this is not a criticism at all. The film dashes along at a fairly breakneck pace and, although some of the characters are quite likeable, Prudhomme is not really the hero I’d like to follow in this one, I’d have to say.

Now it’s not a bad film… it’s quite respectable in execution and I certainly was kept entertained for a fair amount of it. But it does have some problems such as some very bad, stilted dialogue which, although possibly keeping in tone with the characters, becomes almost laughable in the early stages of the film. However, the biggest problem is the way it telegraphs itself to the viewer constantly. There are literally no surprises here. For instance, when the serial killer is shown to have killed Prudhomme’s wife, you know way before he does that the killer actually got the wrong person because of some of the details of situations set up earlier in the film. Similarly, when the serial killer enters the picture as a character fairy early, you know right away that this is the person responsible for what’s going on and you have to wonder why it takes the police so long to twig just what’s going down. So, yeah, you do feel the main characters are not the smartest and having to play catch up to the audience a lot of the time.

But, it is atmospheric and, as Easter themed movies go, it’s one of the more unusual, it seems to me. Composer Jim McGrath’s score also keeps things going and glues the sections of the movie together pretty well so, while it’s neither a barrel of laughs or, really not all that much fun, the film does entertain and holds the attention a certain amount so, I can’t complain about this one too much. It’s not that good but it’s certainly not the worst I’ve seen of this kind of police procedural thriller so, it is what it is, I suppose. Resurrection is not a film I’d recommend unless you want something a little different for Easter time.

Doctor Who - Lux

The Doctor Lux Out

Doctor Who - Lux
UK/USA 2025
Airdate: 19th April 2025

Warning. Some possible spoilers on overall arcs here.

Well colour me surprised. Yes, the latest Doctor Who story Lux is the clichéd old concept of a character, in this case a cartoon character called Mr. Ring-A-Dong and voiced by Alan Cumming, walking out of a cinema screen and coming to life to wreak havoc... but it’s also well done and, despite having a scene where the Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, is tearing up yet again... it’s a pretty great episode. So that’s two in a row good ones now, since the debacle of last year’s series. I’m so pleased this was this well put together.

And it’s a somewhat engaging story as The Doctor rigs up a Vortex Indicator, which he shortens to ‘the Vindicator’ to act as a slingshot from wherever he and his cool new companion called (for now) Belinda (played brilliantly by Varada Sethu) next land, to get her home to the date from whence she came in 2025, since the TARDIS keeps bouncing off from the spot.

And then they stumble upon a mystery of an officially locked up cinema in Miami in1952. There they encounter the latest in the long play story arc of The Harbinger in Lux, who is one of the Gods of The Pantheon, as indicated to the audience by vocalising the notes of The Giggle from the episode of the same name from 2023 (and reviewed by me here).

There was a lot of great stuff about this episode with the cartoon manifestation of Mr. Ring-A-Ding being just one of the more epic effects being squeezed into, what was actually a fairly intimate episode, I thought. I could have perhaps done without the joke where, being accused of being Scooby Doo by Belinda, The Doctor identified more with Velma but, it was certainly a fun way of referring to any sexual politics encompassed by the show in its current form, rather than shoving it down everyone’s throat like last year.

And I loved the whole, long sequence where The Doctor and Belinda were trapped in a film, initially as cartoon versions of themselves, before they realised how to get a mindset where they become more shaded and defined before they return to their normal 3D shape and way of thinking... albeit still trapped in the film for a fair time.

Another pleasure of the episode was a scene in the same sequence where three fans of Doctor Who watching at home were, quite respectfully I thought, shown to take an active part in the proceedings, even if it turned out that they (aka we watching at home) were a fiction too. But considering the way a lot of the fan base of the show has been turning against it in recent years (especially last year), I was impressed there weren’t too many blatantly sly digs at the viewers and I especially loved that the favourite episode of all three of them was one of the show’s classics, Blink, much to the current Doctor’s chagrin.

Now I thought the segregation of black and white people in places like diners and cinemas in 1950s America was either pushed too strongly or, I dunno, maybe not pushed strongly enough... I still can’t quite make up my mind. But it might be a matter of time that it was not pursued in a more damning way, when you’ve only got 45 minutes to present a story. That's okay though...  it didn’t feel all that loosely balanced against the rest of the episode and I thought they just about got away with it.

I also loved that Mrs. Flood, once again played by Anita Dobson, turned up at the end in 1952 America (unseen by The Doctor and Belinda) and I’m guessing the importance of her character on events may be coming to the fore here. It’s interesting that she noted that the Doctor’s run would be coming to an end on May 24 this year, which is presumably the day on which this last series is due to put out its final episode. Is this hinting at my long suspected cancellation of the show? Quite possibly but I guess we’ll see in six weeks or so.

And that’s me done with Lux. The ending with the release of 15 captured presumed dead people seemed a little like the writers wanting to have their cake and eat it (a braver conclusion might have been to have their existences as trapped in celluloid burned up in the fire which occurs near the end of the episode) but overall I have to say I really enjoyed this one and am somehow looking forward to the third episode with a new sense of optimism... or at least hope. Fingers crossed the series continues in this light from hereon.

Novocaine

No Pain, No’caine

Novocaine
Directed by Dan Berk & Robert Olsen
United States/Canada/South Africa 2025
Paramount
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: One mention of an injury spoiler.

Well now, I saw what I thought wasa particularly harsh review of this one so I was going into Novocaine concentrating on how good the trailer was, as opposed to the word of mouth. And I have to say that, while it has some slight technical problems, I thought this one was actually pretty good.

Novocaine deals with a bank manager, Nathan Caine (played by Jack Quaid and nicknamed Novocaine) who falls in love with one of the new workers at the bank, Sherry (played brilliantly by Amber Midthunder). Nathan is called Novocaine because he has a condition in that he doesn’t feel pain (like the villain from The World Is Not Enough, reviewed here). What this means is, when the bank is robbed by three quite vicious criminals and Sherry is carted away as a hostage, he can go on a ‘somewhat apologetic’ manhunt to get Sherry back without worrying about the pain inflicted on him, while the police also hunt him... because it’s not long before he’s accidentally killed one of the gunmen in a brutal fight.

That’s it, in a nutshell and the film has been accused of being a ‘one joke’ wonder in terms of the kind of brutal violence the hero can just take and walk away from in a playful manner and... yeah, okay, in some ways it is. But that being said, the writers get a lot of mileage out of it and it really doesn’t get dull throughout the course of the picture. It’s also got some nice chemistry and strong performances from the two leads, Quaid and Midthunder... and some pretty charismatic and downright hateable villains too. Jacob Batalon from the recent Spider-Man films is pretty good as Novocaine’s ‘guy in the chair’ and Betty Gabriel does a really good job as one of the sympathetic cops pursuing both Caine and the bad guys.

Now, there are some problems. For instance, there’s a twist moment with one character that, in terms of the movie as a whole, should have been revealed much later on in the story than the halfway point because it kind of detracts from the motivation of the main character you are following. That being said, both myself and my friend,* who went with me, saw that twist coming as soon as the character first appeared (and I’m pretty sure I got a sense of it from the trailer too) so I was somewhat disappointed with that direction. Also, once you have the twist confirmed on screen, you figure that ‘this incident’ and ‘that incident’ now have to happen in order to get the characters worth believing in again and, sure enough... !

One other thing is the editing is a bit choppy and obfuscating in some sequences. 

Plus, there’s a gun in a room suddenly appearing on the floor of a kitchen when it should have been in the alley outside of the building at one point... so I’m guessing the first big fight scene of the movie was deliberately cut down by the director to speed things up for this sequence and the by-product of this decision was having a gun suddenly turn up where there couldn’t possibly have been a gun at this point. Or did I just miss something here? Answers on a postcard.

The biggest problem, however, is that it doesn’t matter how little pain you feel, if a man takes some of these over the top injuries... such as half an arm breaking off like a broken Pez dispenser but then using the long bone protruding from the flappy stump as a weapon... then I don’t buy that a lot of bandages and a few months rest is going to mean you’re all stitched up and good as new. There are some life changing injuries in this film (it may be an action comedy but it doesn’t skimp on the brutal violence) and there’s no way a person just gets up and then is right as rain a little while later.

So, yeah, beyond the execution and limits of the premise, there are huge credibility issues with Novocaine for sure (including characters that just seem to dissappear for the rest of a scene when they’re not wanted and some super extra slow response times from the pursuing police). That being said though, I had a great time with this one and would be happy to see a sequel to it if it comes to pass. The main leads were likeable and I’ll happily pick up a Blu Ray for my parents to check out at some point, I suspect.

*We were the only people in the audience... which would possibly explain why Starbucks has suddenly upped stakes and left all cinemas last week, leaving a huge space which my local cinema doesn't know what to do with. 

Video Nasty

The Long List Goodnight

Video Nasty
BBC
Six Episodes
Ireland/UK/Germany
January 8th 2025 2024

A short shout out to Video Nasty, an interesting show which kinda passed everyone by at the start of the year.

Two friends, Billy (Justin Daniels Anene) and Con (Cal O'Driscoll) are school kids in Ireland in the early 1980s. As anyone interested in film will know, this was the time of the tabloid dubbed ‘video nasties’, when a list of titles was being used by the police to seize and confiscate said items as people were getting fined, prosecuted and even jailed for renting out certain tapes on an official list deemed harmful to the general public (I’m still ashamed of my country for this period, read more here and here). So Billy and Con are collecting these through the ‘back of a van’ black market (ahhh... the days where you could rent any tapes from the back of a van... this brought back memories) and they have almost put together a full, pristine set of the 72 banned titles on the main list. The opening of the show sees them buying their 71st tape, Nightmares In A Damaged Brain (as it was known over here, review coming at some point)... with Billy, having been in pen pal mode with a girl in England called FangoriaFanGirl (ahh... the days of the original Fangoria), setting up a trip to England to meet up and exchange tapes.

The object being that once the lads get their last tape on the list, Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (or Nightmare Maker, as I think it was known in the UK), they can sell the collection for a tidy sum. So they and Con’s sister Zoe (Leia Murphy) run away from home for a bit, having problems of their own back there anyway... and get to England, only to find the girl has been murdered with a power drill and a sinister conspiracy within the village is at work. Can they escape from their twisted Christian captors and their Mary Whitehouse style mantra with their lives and clear their own names of the murder... and can their parents find them in time?

Okay, so I appreciate that someone has even done something themed around the censorious evil of the video nasty witchhunt campaign but, I have to admit, I’d have wanted something, perhaps, a little less subtle than what we get here. I mean, the acting is very strong with all the main and supporting cast and, also, the research is mostly good (Severin films in America supplied some of the footage/tapes and advice, I believe although, apparently the sleeve on the Nightmare Maker tape has slightly different packaging to the original, first generation pre-certificate version)...  but the main story could easily be a stand alone, cautionary tale with any other conceptual window dressing, it seems to me.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that, although there is the proper judgement made on the ‘humanistically challenged’ aka nutters who tried to ban these so-called ‘dangerous films’ (95% of which can now be bought in a bricks and mortar store in the UK with no cuts, nowadays), it all feels like almost an afterthought and, though it ticks certain boxes for the people who remember those dark days, it just feels like more emphasis and enlightenment about why this happened at the time and how wrong it was (and still is, in the case of films like The New York Ripper, which is still censored in its useless UK edition) to have gone through this exercise in the first place.

Everything feels like the writing is just holding back too much. There’s a line one of the characters says in terms of the nature of the predicament they find themselves in, where he’s alluding to the fact that they don’t know if they’re dealing with just one psychotic family or a whole village conspiracy, where he says “We don’t know if we’re in Texas Chainsaw or Wicker Man here.” And while I appreciate the terms in which that sentiment has been couched, I can’t quite feel like it’s a little on the nose in some ways because, as I watched the drama play out for six, half hour episodes, it did feel like I was watching a group of characters from Grange Hill walking into a cast of characters from The Wicker Man. And while I was certainly rooting for the main group of kids... I didn’t really care too much about what would happen to them by the end of the show. Live or die, I wasn’t fussed... everyone had their own shades of grey and I just wasn’t invested in them. And the last scene of the show seemed a little ludicrous too... possibly an homage to a certain style of film but, honestly, a kind of hollow threat of a possible sequel rather than anything I could be bothered with, truth be told. Not the BBCs finest hour, I would say so... yeah, nothing much to see here.

Drop

Date Expectations

Drop
Directed by Christopher Landon
USA/Ireland 2025
Blumhouse
UK Cinema Release Print

I have to admit, I saw the abominable trailer for Drop and decided to give the movie a wide berth, even thought it’s directed by Christopher Landon, who made the brilliant Happy Death Day (reviewed here), Happy Death Day 2U (reviewed here) and Freaky (reviewed here). However, I then found out the score is by one of my favourite living composers, Bear McCreary (who I am seeing in concert a the O2 in London in four days from now) and, yeah, I don’t see or watch many of the projects to which he’s attached so it seemed worth it to go and check this out for the music.

I was not disappointed, either. And when I say that I mean... I was really surprised because, the trailer made it look like a thriller relying on a very old, clichéd plot which, to be fair... it absolutely is.

The story set up is about a domestic abuse survivor called Violet (played brilliantly here by Meghann Fahy) who, after a year or two, leaves her young son (played by Jacob Robinson) in the care of her sister (played by Violett Beane) at home while she goes on her first date in a very long time. So she meets her prospective ‘match’ at a very expensive, high up in a skyscraper restaurant but, soon she starts getting message drops on her phone showing her house broken into and the lives of her son and sister under threat... with increasingly intimidating instructions that she must kill her date (played by Brandon Sklenar) before the night is out. So, yeah, told you it was an old plot. The last time I remember this being done just recently was the 2018 movie The Commuter with Liam Neeson (reviewed here) and, yeah, I really wasn’t looking forward to this for the story, for sure.

But, as I said above, this one surprised me. I mean, it’s one thing to be revisiting the same tired old ground but it’s quite another when the execution of the concept and the way in which the film is directed, shot and edited is so immaculate and gripping, as this one is. For example, the phone drops are presented as texts which are superimposed with the correct perspective onto various elements of the photographic compositions as the restaurant bound protagonists go about their business. Which is nicely done, for sure (and I bet there were some hard choices made by the director about placement and duration made with these on screen messages).  

But the real brilliance of the film is the sweeping photography, taken from various unusual angles to push the story along. Now, I rarely use the term Hitchcockian for many modern movies made past the 1990s but, this one certainly would earn that title. This does look and feel like something Alfred Hitchcock would probably enjoy if he saw it and I don’t even mean that in a second-hand Brian De Palma way, which would be stylish enough. This one just felt like something Hitch would possibly do or, as I said, certainly approve of.

And the acting on this one really holds up too, which certainly helps push the cinematography and shot design into ‘great’ rather than ‘good’ territory. Fahy and Sklenar really help sell this as two innocents who are fighting for their lives (one of them not even aware of what is going on) and the chemistry between them is so good that it really sells the idea that these two people are just wanting to go on a fun date. And their co-stars are very good in this too, with special shout outs to Gabrielle Ryan and Reed Diamond in this.

And then there’s that Bear McCreary score. I hope this one, someday, gets a proper, physical CD release so I can hear it as a stand alone piece (and not the stupid digital only version which I won’t be downloading) because it’s really incredible and supports the visuals in the best way. He’s not pulling a Bernard Herrmann here, which is a direction he certainly might have gone in and it would have been valid... but it does have the kind of sweeping tones which, while being completely contemporary sounding, a 1950s suspense movie might have had and it really complimented, supported and enhanced things very nicely.

So yeah, that’s me done and extremely surprised by Christopher Landon’s Drop. My expectations were low but I really had a good time with this one and will certainly be picking up a Blu Ray when it becomes available so I can show my folks. Catch this one at the cinema if you can because it looks great on a big screen.

Doctor Who - The Robot Revolution

The Catch
Chandra Crossing

Doctor Who -
The Robot Revolution
UK/USA 2025
Airdate: 12th April 2025

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Okay, full transparency... I might as well own up that I am expecting this year’s new-Who reviews to be more in the form of short capsule reviews. There’s not enough gone into the stories to really sustain them for much longer at the moment and I can’t see that changing anywhere before the end of the current series (which is only scheduled to run for eight episodes this time around anyway).

Also, before I get into it... I have to say that one member of my household was dead against going back for the new season of the show after the track record it’s had over the last six years or so and, while we persuaded him to watch... yeah, he really did not like this one and was very critical of it. Which I totally get. I thought the last season was particularly dreadful (asides from the strengths of the two main lead performers) and I can totally see why the show has become anathema to him.

That being said, I thought The Robot Revolution was a terrific Doctor Who season opener. We got an introduction to the new companion Miss Belinda Chandra, played by Varada Sethu and The Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, even gives a reason, of sorts, as to why she’s the exact duplicate of a character he met last season (played by the same actress) in her far future... although I expect that explanation will be altered significantly to take on a different significance by the time of the last episode.

The story was a time twisty adventure which was all about her and the current night/six months prior/ten years prior, depending on your entry point into the story, when she was kidnapped by robots and taken to the planet... Missbelindachandra, of which she is surprised to find out she is the queen.

There are cute, barely tolerable robots, big bruiser robots, a mad controlling manifestation of AI (not really AI) of her ex-boyfriend and laser battles and tricky reveals that propel the story forward at a quite fast pace - if this was a more episodic serial show as it was from the 1960s - 1980s there would have been more time to explore the concepts... things were a little bit rushed, it seemed to me.

I liked it a lot, though and, the lead actors Ncuti and Varada are both good here (as they were last season but if the scripts don’t work as well as this one did we may still be in trouble). Yeah, I thought this one was great but I’m not naive enough just yet to expect them to be able to keep this up... since the last season was made back to back with this one the makers would not have been able to do much about audience feedback from last year’s show, for sure. So we’ll see how it goes.

I mean, Anita Dobson was back as Mrs. Flood, talking to the audience again and popping up somewhere she shouldn’t be, so that was interesting (although after last season’s so called solution to the overall arc, I’m not trusting any of this just yet). However, it wasn’t long before The Doctor was crying his eyes out again and getting way too emotional about stuff... so, yeah, I’m not fully on board yet. And since we havent even had a soundtrack CD for the last season yet, then I’m not even going to mention the music. No CD, no comment.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about The Robot Revolution. I thought it was brilliant but, so much has been wrong with the show recently that I’m just not trusting it. We shall see what we shall see. 

Royal Warriors

Heavy Duty

Royal Warriors
aka Wong ga jin si
aka In The Line Of Duty
aka In The Line Of Duty 2
Hong Kong 1986
Directed by David Chung
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

Well, this is confusing. So, Royal Warriors is one of Michelle Yeoh’s very early films, the next film she did after Yes, Madam (reviewed here) and Magnificent Warriors (review coming soon). Except, in some territories it’s known as In The Line Of Duty and kicks off that series... even though the next films are nothing to do with this one and feature different cast and characters. Except, it’s also known in some Western states as number two in the In The Line Of Duty series, with Yes, Madam known as the first of the In The Line Of Duty films... even though that one also has nothing in common with the others (other than Yes, Madam also stars Yeoh... in a totally different but similar role).  Okay... so this is all very confusing, it has to be said.

What’s not confusing is that this one has a lot going for it in terms of the action and stunts. Opening with a silly, gang fight sequence in which Yeoh rescues a man completely unrelated to the plot from a pair of thugs, who are also completely unrelated to the rest of the movie... it moves on swiftly to a really strong action sequence on a plane where Yeoh and the two mail protagonists...  a fellow police officer of her majesty’s Hong Kong police force (hence the title this has been released as over here, Royal Warriors... which is kind of tenuous anyway) played by Hiroyuki Sanada and an air security officer called Michael Wong, played by... um... Michael Wong.

However, the two bad guys the three manage to kill before they harm anymore passengers, are part of four friends who promised to look out and avenge each other in whatever war they are flashing back to here. So, our three heroes (Wong is trying to get into a romantic relationship with Yeoh’s character) are targets for the other two. And then, the next day when Sanada’s character leaves the police force to go back to Japan with his wife and kid, he watches the car said spouse and sprog get into explode... and the chase is on, so to speak.

And it’s a pretty heavy and serious film, no doubt about that. There are stabs of humour here and there but none of the usual, very broad comedy I’ve seen in a lot of these types of movies lately (thank goodness). Instead, the film just keeps pouring on the grief with loads of innocent bystanders being killed in the crossfire of the action set pieces and then with Wong’s character killing himself to stop Yeoh’s police officer being lured into the same building as the final killer left standing. In fact, the whole bait for the killer to bring the two surviving cops to where he wants to trap them is Wong’s stolen coffin, under danger of being crushed by the villain... so, yeah, it’s a pretty heavy film a lot of the time.

However, despite the cheesy 80s synthesiser soundtrack... another sad prerequisite for the Hong Kong films of this era, it seems to me... the film is quite solid in the way it positions and executes the various fights, shoot outs and chases in this one. Hiroyuki Sanada has some good fighting moves in this and so does the always brilliant Michelle Yeoh, for sure. You can certainly see why, after doing a load of these Hong Kong movies, she was disappointed that on the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (reviewed by me here) she wasn’t allowed to perform all her own stunts.

And that’s me done on this one, I think. Royal Warriors, or whatever you want to call it this week, is a good, solid Hong Kong action movie and I’m glad I’ve finally started catching up to these films, if a little late in life. Labels like 88 Films and, in this case, Eureka Masters Of Cinema, are doing a good job at finally getting these things released for the UK market and, while I’m skipping a fair amount of the ones they’ve been releasing over the last few years, I’m happy to be able to get to see some of these films and you’ll certainly see a fair few more reviews of this kind of stuff coming up on the blog in the next few months or so... if you like these kinds of things.

The Woman In The Yard

Playing Your
Yards Right

The Woman In The Yard
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
USA 2025
Blumhouse
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Apologies but there are some pretty big hints at spoilers in here... if you haven’t already guessed the identity of the title character from the trailer, that is.

The Woman In The Yard is Jaume Collet-Serra’s new horror movie... or possibly a dark sci-fi fantasy depending on your mindset but, I think this one pretty much crosses over into the realm of the horror film, for me at least.

The film stars Danielle Deadwyler, who was so fantastic in the TV adaptation of Station Eleven (reviewed here) as a mother who has survived the car crash which killed her husband but has gone into a sharp mental decline as a result, trying to look after her son and daughter (played brilliantly by Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahiha) with the bills piling up, the money and food on her farm drying up and, on the day in which the film plays out, the electricity being cut off. And then a veiled woman appears sitting in the yard, watching them and giving enigmatic and cryptic foreshadowing as to her malevolent presence here. Then she starts attacking the house in shadowy and sinister ways from her chair, which occasionally gets magically closer to the building.

And it’s a great set up for a while. I loved the first hour of this movie and I thought some of the cinematography was great, such as that great shot which is also seen in the trailer where the camera pans down from a distorted glass window shot looking out to the woman in the yard and then hitting clear glass panel but keeping the blur of the vertical line of the foreground window plummeting down the shot. And, with the various ways in which the reality of the world of the house is distorted and keyed into the shadows, I have to say the film made me think of the long, shadowy arm that the legacy of early 20th Century German Expression such as The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu has cast on cinema over the years. This film does seem to have the spirit of that atmosphere within a lot of its DNA, it seemed to me.

Alas, the last half an hour of the picture was, for me, a real dud. A lot of the mystery of the film seems to hinge on the identity of the mysterious woman and, honestly, I correctly identified who it was just from the trailer. At one point the director tries to pull the wool over the eyes of the audience by introducing another actress in the mix, Okwui Okpokwasili but, this just makes the follow through on the ending of this one even more disappointing and, although there is a certain amount of interpretation to be had of that ending (which many people will take to be a happier ending than I think they will realise when they reflect on it a little bit later, after they’ve processed it), it’s just not enough for the last act to save the movie, which had been doing pretty well up until that point.

Ultimately, The Woman In The Yard is not a terrible movie and, honestly, I was really enjoying myself for the first hour but, it really does paint itself into a corner by the end of the story and having only 5 characters in the cast, including one actress who is a total red herring, doesn’t help it so much in terms of the mystery at the centre of the tale and I think a lot of people will be judging the film solely on its end game, to be honest. So I suspect it won’t have very favourable reviews, would be my guess. Still, a good try but, at the end of the day, it doesn’t quite make it into 1950s/1960s The Twilight Zone territory, I’m afraid... which is what I suspect it’s desperately going for. Sorry for the short review but, not much else to say about this one.

No One Will Save You

My Grey Heaven

No One Will Save You
Directed by Brian Duffield
USA 2023
Star Thrower Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers throughout.

Just a quick shout out to a movie from a couple of years ago called No One Will Save You and, also a bit of a warning because, in order to discuss this one properly, I think it’s necessary to talk about what happens at the end (most of the rest of the spoilers in here are just stuff you will figure out from the trailer). Also, I found out one of my comparisons I’m going to make, after I watched this and read the trivia section on the IMDB... well it turns out that Stephen King tweeted out the exact same connection to a specific episode of a specific TV show that had been in my mind when I was looking at this one. So glad I’m on the same page as everyone else here.

This is a movie about a young woman called Brynn (played by Kaitlyn Dever) who lives alone in her late parents large house, slightly remotely on the edge of a forest, a short bike or car ride from her local town (which she visits as little as possible). She is despised by a good deal of the population of the town for something which has happened in her past some ten or more years earlier. Something which Brynn has to live with every day.

And then, one night, as she is trying to sleep, she hears something downstairs. It’s a home invasion but, as she sneaks around trying to see who it is... she soon realises the question is not who but what’ is it? Which, as you’ll know if you’ve seen the trailer, is an alien. And not just any alien, this is obviously based on the greys (or Zeta Reticulans) of popular, modern UFO folklore (and don’t get me started... I gave up researching these guys years ago because of too many sleepless nights). That first night becomes a fight for survival but, survive Brynn does, after accidentally managing to kill said alien.

However, when she goes into town the next day, she finds signs that she’s not the only one who has been visited in the night. Indeed, not only does she change her mind about reporting it because of the reception she gets at the police station, but she’s chased by two humans who are obviously alien/human hybrids. And the rest of the film is about the second night, when more aliens come for her (and the rest of the local population).

Now I’ll get to that spoilery ending in a minute but, the film made me think of two specific sci-fi/horror tales of yesteryear. One of them is Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, based on the way aliens take control of humans with a living seed creature vomited from their mouths (in this case) into their victims. But the other thing was (and this is the thing Stephen King clocked too), the similarity to one of my top five episodes of The Twilight Zone, specifically The Invaders, which has a wonderful score by Jerry Goldsmith. That episode has a cast of one (Agnes Moorehead) and depicts a woman who is victim to a similar home invasion from teeny, tiny creatures. I won’t give the twist of that episode away (which is a humdinger) but, in order to make that twist work, there is no dialogue in the episode at all and it’s all set in the woman’s home.

Well, No One Wil Save You is definitely cut from the same cloth. The whole thing is practically wordless (other than a source song and some alien vocal sounds, there are only five words spoken throughout the whole film) and, asides from a few forest and town scenes, the majority takes place on Brynn’s property.

And it’s a well made suspenseful film, it has to be said. You will feel for the lead as she battles, with far inferior means, to stay out of the clutches of the aliens and, despite the revelations of what she did in the past, she’ll probably have your total sympathy (and that’s kind of the point in terms of leading to the ending of the movie too). And the greys themselves can be pretty terrifying, not just a one trick pony as they come in a variety of versions of increasing scariness. So there’s a definite feeling of unease as you watch Brynn fight for her life.

And so we come to the end... don’t read further unless you want to know.

By the end of the movie I felt kinda shortchanged by the conclusion... for all of thirty seconds... until I realised that this was a pretty good ending. When the aliens probe Brynn’s mind and discover how she’s repented for her accidental crime and had to live with the unforgiving towns folk, they spare her from being a human hybrid. Instead, with the planet now populated with human/alien hybrids, Brynn gets to live with them in her home town, teaching them how to be the best part of her human race, giving her a far easier and happier existence than when the Earth was populated by her own species. It’s kinda like what might have happened if the main protagonist of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers had let himself be reborn as an alien pod person, living in harmony (of a kind) with his fellow pod people... instead of what happened at the end of that movie. Here, Brynn has found her calling, continuing to live her life collecting doll houses for her diorama (where she watches her model townsfolk in a similar way to how the aliens hover in their flying saucers and monitor their new world) and teaching her new friends how to dance.

And that’s me done with that. No One Will Save You has a perfect ending for a pretty suspenseful film. Not the happy ending you might have wanted but, certainly a happy ending that Brynn deserved. And who needs humans anyway... horrible creatures. This one is definitely worth a watch, as far as I’m concerned.

Death Of A Unicorn

Unique Horn

Death Of A Unicorn
Directed by Alex Scharfman
USA/Hungary 2025
A24
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Definitely some minor spoilers here.

Death Of A Unicorn is a bit of an unusual film, it seems to me. At first I thought it was a little like one of those movies that Hollywood sometimes churns out as being an ‘independent movie’ when it’s about as far from one as you could get on a truly independent budget… but the studio is still trying to sell it as a quirky, fun and unusual movie to appeal to a specific kind of audience. And I’d normally avoid such things if it weren’t for the fact that, despite seeming to try to be all those things so fiercely… it is, actually, also a genuinely quirky, fun and unusual movie.

The story involves the oft times brilliant Paul Rudd as Elliot, a lawyer who has been invited around to a hugely wealthy family’s retreat in the mountains to seal a deal to serve said family, with the pharmaceutical CO father of the family (played by Richard E. Grant) near death from cancer. He is also accompanied by his daughter Ridley, played by the equally brilliant Jenna Ortega (who was so good in Beeteljuice Beeteljuice, reviewed here). They are here for the weekend but, on the way, they accidentally hit a unicorn with their car and, after trying to kill it to put it out of its misery, Elliot and Ridley get sprayed in its blood. This has the effect of clearing Ridley’s skin condition and fixing Elliot’s vision so he doesn’t need his glasses (among other things). They stuff the fabled creature into the back of the car and Elliot tries to get in good with the family, consisting of Grant, Tea Leoni, Will Poulter and various servants and doctors including Jessica Hynes as a personal bodyguard/chief of security. Then the unicorn wakes up and is put out of its misery again with a gun shot to the head… before the family discover the medicinal properties of its ground up horn, which cures the father of his cancer. The unicorn then becomes their main concern as a money spinner but, the unicorn’s mum and dad are on their way to take revenge on the humans… among other things.

And it is a nice little film. I was torn at first because the villainous, shallow, filthy rich family are given such over the top performances by their respective actors that it just felt like they were all having too much of a good time hamming it up at the expense of the audience, for a while. However, I can only think this must have been a deliberate instruction from the director because the characters who are not ‘all about the money’ and who are more decent types, all seem to come across as naturalistic and genuine in comparison. Rudd is delicately balancing a half in/ half out relationship with the human antagonists and Ortega, as the voice of reason, anchors the film when things threaten to get overly pretentious with the majority of the rest of the cast. Ortega also has a special relationship with the unicorns, it turns out… I’ll leave you to discover that element of the film for yourself.

It’s also a film where the depiction of right and wrong in terms of where the characters’ respective moral compasses are set is not necessarily something that will save them from the wrath of the unicorns. A doctor played by Sunita Mani, for instance, definitely has the audience sympathies I would say, despite being torn between her own humanity and the best financial interests of the family. This doesn’t stop her from being despatched in a way which would mean the police, who discover the bloodbath at the end of the movie, wouldn’t have to look in a few different places to recover her remains.

The film is nicely shot and edited with some amazing visual effects. The unicorns are, I can only assume, fully CGI but they come across as great personalities… and mostly terrifying. This is a 15 rated film in the UK and for good reason. Don’t bring your kids along to this one because the unicorns are quite ferocious and you will see some nicely gnarly scenes of such things as unicorn horn impaling and people being ripped apart (sometimes a thrilling combination of both) or, for example, having their heads burst under hoof. These unicorns have more in common with the ones depicted in the second Shazam! movie (reviewed here) than anything you might get in kiddie literature.

Also, it has a quite nice ending with a little ambiguity, perhaps, as to the fates of a couple of the characters but with a sense of positivity and, in one character, a certain sense of redemption for what’s gone before. So I have to admit I quite liked Death Of A Unicorn, which I was lucky enough to see four days before it opened officially, at a special preview screening. Very much worth a watch, I would say.