Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire

Peanuts Gal For
Monkey Magic

Godzilla X Kong -
The New Empire
Directed by Adam Wingard
USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK Theatrical Cut

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Last week I went to the cinema to see Ghostbusters - Frozen Empire (reviewed here) in which a centuries long imprisoned creature is released and aims to turn the Earth into a new ice age. This week I saw Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire which, apart from having a superfluous X that makes it the most ridiculous and childish title for a Godzilla movie ever, deals with a centuries long imprisoned creature who is released back into the mix with his followers and big ice creature, with the intent of conquering the Earth by turning it into a new ice age. I bet the makers of this one were pretty miffed that the new Ghostbusters had a better title that they could have used themselves.

This one is, by my counts, the fifth in the sequence of the US Monsterverse franchise, comprising Godzilla (reviewed here), Kong - Skull Island (reviewed here), Godzilla King Of The Monsters (reviewed here), Godzilla VS Kong (reviewed here) and now this one. Not to mention the relatively recent Monarch TV series, which I haven’t got around to watching as yet. It carries over three characters from the previous movie, as played by the great Rebecca Hall reprising the role of the main scientist, the extremely cool Kaylee Hottle as her deaf/mute adopted Skull Island daughter and Brian Tyree Henry, providing comic relief as the vlogger who was helping out Millie Bobby Brown in the last movie.

And, not only is this installment in the franchise way better in most respects than Godzilla VS Kong, it’s also a very fun watch and I really rather enjoyed it. Now, given the critical and commercial success of the Academy Award winning Japanese movie Godzilla Minus One (reviewed here ) a few months ago, I was fully expecting to be able to say that the aforementioned movie was way better than this one. And... yeah okay, I am saying that... no comparison. I’d take a film like that one over this any day of the week. However, you have to remember that you really can’t cant compare the two. Godzilla Minus One is very much a serious film similar in tone to the original 1954 Gojira movie (reviewed here) and uses Godzilla as a surrogate for the post survivor trauma of the ‘failed’ kamikaze pilot who is the film’s main protagonist. It’s carrying a lot of weight and it does it beautifully.

In contrast to that, Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire is very much in the style of the fun, mid 1960s to mid 1970s Toho Godzilla ‘monster romp’ movies... and as a lover of both kinds, I am quite happy with what the US filmmakers are able to achieve here, to be honest. It’s a different flavour of Godzilla but they are doing a much better job of that kind of brief here.

Now, the movie almost totally takes place in the Hollow Earth world discovered in the last film, asides from a few sequences where Godzilla and Kong manage to wreck part of Egypt and Brazil between them. And also one memorable moment where the movie’s other main protagonist, a monster veterinarian played by Dan Stevens, extracts Kong’s infected tooth with his helicopter and gives him a new, super duper tooth. Also, after a sequence where Kong suffers from frostbite in his right arm, due to reasons I won’t disclose, he cures it and gives him a new armoured glove so he can punch things better. So yay!

Also, Kaylee Hottle’s character ends up fulfilling the same role as The Peanuts did in the original Mothra films from the 1960s. She is the new human envoy to Mothra and she wakes her up to help out when Kong is trying to lure Godzilla into lending a hand in tackling their bigger problem. It’s nice stuff but, alas, she doesn’t sing the famous Mothra song... which would have been a nice touch.

And was that a shop sign depicting Gamera I saw for a second before Godzilla smashed through it? I’m pretty sure that’s what I saw... can anyone else confirm in the comments?

And it’s a film filled with good action, much better acting than you would expect and a fun storyline. My only real criticism is that the score by Antonio Di Lorio and Tom Holkenborg is bereft of any of the iconic Godzilla themes from the Toho series and, just fails miserably on that level. Every time you are expecting there to be a big Ifukube moment, the score does something which seems, I dunno, like a melody falling just short of the original to evade copyright payments. Which is a shame because, even the great Godzilla Minus One, which had a far superior score to this one, recognised the value in popping in Ifukube’s melodies into certain scenes. And to add insult to injury, the score to this one seems to be unavailable on a proper CD (which is a first for the films, it would be the only live action Godzilla theatrical release without CD representation to date). Shame on Watertower Records for not releasing it in the only physical format that real music lovers want. I hate this backwards decade, ignoring the essential physical media releases which should accompany these films.

Apart from the ‘knock off’ sounding scoring though, Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire was way more entertaining than I was expecting it to be and, if you liked Kong VS Godzilla (I kinda didn’t think it was all that), then you should definitely love this one. Don’t expect to be seeing the same kind of story substance present in Godzilla Minus One though... two very different kinds of films.

Godzilla VS Kong

Kaiju KO

Godzilla VS Kong
USA/Australia/Canada/India 2021
Directed by Adam Wingard
Warner Brothers

Warning: This review will have kaiju sized spoilers.

Oof! Godzilla VS Kong is something I’d been looking forward to for a while. The fourth in the new US Monsterverse movies and following on from the two good films in the series, Kong: Skull Island (reviewed here) and Godzilla: King Of The Monsters (reviewed here), I was probably expecting a lot more from it than it could maybe, in hindsight, have credibly delivered. Also, I’ve quite liked some of director Adam Wingard’s previous movies and, although I think it’s a bigger film than he’s used to heading up... I had a lot of confidence in him on this.

And I can certainly confirm that the film looks really nice and has some beautiful, bright colours and lots of ‘monster smack’ carnage on show. It also has returning performers from one of the previous installments in the form of  Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler reprising their roles from Godzilla - King Of The Monsters. They are joined by some equally cool people such as Alexander Skarsgård as a good guy scientist and one of my favourite modern actresses, Rebecca Hall. And it even has the return of one of my favourite, iconic kaiju characters who tends to turn up from time to time in the Godzilla movies over the years, Mecha-Godzilla. So, yeah, I should have probably got a lot more out of this than I did. It looks great, has lots of explosions and punching of things and has great actors delivering the lines. Terrible nonsense lines though so, that doesn’t help things along, to start with.

I think my biggest complaint after seeing it is that I just didn’t understand what the heck this movie was about at all. Now it doesn’t help I was being hit by ‘buffering’ every minute or so for a while (I don’t know why streaming is so popular in the UK when our internet infrastructure is so terrible trying to handle anything remotely HD) and I’m sure I would have responded to this much better if I’d seen it in a proper cinema (the only way a movie should be watched the first time)... but I’m not sure anything would have helped me comprehend the plot to this film, which re-positions Godzilla as the bad guy and then, at the end, says it’s alright because he was just attacking ‘company x’ because they were doing bad things. Nope. He was killing innocent people and destroying cities in the process and that’s not a cool look... Gojira was definitely back to his old 1954 self as far as I’m concerned. And the general comments shouted by the rest of the family as we were watching, echoing mine such as... “What’s going on?”, “What just happened?”, “Was there two of him in that shot... how?”, “Is someone going to come and explain why they’re doing this and what this means?”... well, I think they speak for themselves.

I know that, for some reason I couldn’t figure out, people needed to get Kong to get them to the centre of the Earth (you know, the old hollow Earth theory again) but something to do with the gravity shift was a danger but... it’s okay because Kong was with them and... sorry, what? And a ludicrous subplot that re-introduced a less than interesting redesign of Mecha-Godzilla when, frankly, after we saw a giant mechanical eyeball near the start of the movie, we really didn’t need it spelled out. And no Charles Dance in sight? We saw him as the main villain making off with a dead Ghidorah head in the post-credits of the last movie but here, the head is back but the villain isn’t. Like he just disappeared into the ether.

But we do have the Ghidorah head... now a skull. Because obviously, a human mind needs to make a connection with a Ghidorah head to be able to control the man-made Mecha-Godzilla right? I mean, what? Just what? And then, when the human brain is destroyed, this makes Mecha-G go off into its own rampage... why? Lots of whys and whats here because... I’m sorry but this movie’s plot is just absolute twaddle. And don’t get me started on how it’s set just a couple of years in our future but there’s no mention made of the Coronavirus. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be around for a while and it seems kinda stupid that Hollywood would think we would forget about that. Nobody is masking up in this film, for sure.

Also, I know the director and composer are probably huge fans of the original films in the respective franchises but, I felt the whole thing played out with a lot less respect than either monster deserved. Junkie XL’s score has one, possibly accidental, similarity to Ifukube’s five note power theme for The Big G which I noticed in one action scene and which I suspect was just serendipitous. The previous score by the great Bear McCreary was loaded with musical references to a whole host of Toho monster themes giving the leitmotifs associated with them their due in a fan pleasing score that really served the movie well. This new score is appropriate to the action but just feels like a wasted opportunity and gives no real reference to Ifukube, Sato, Koseki or even Max Steiner in its make up. It’s just another score which could have been ‘anything appropriate’ when it’s been demonstrated in the last film that a good, striking, use of the previous material as musical building blocks can be carried out very well. I felt like this was a major step backwards for these movies and it’s now the fourth in a series which, like the previous three, has absolutely no musical continuity with any of the others. It’s just egos doing their own thing when they could have served a more functional purpose for the good of the whole canon of works.

And, by the way, King Kong has been around since 1933 whereas Godzilla is a relatively new character from 1954. Show some respect... there’s no way, despite Kong being stripped of his royal nomenclature for these movies, that Godzilla would beat him to near death. Kong's more dexterous. It just beggars belief. And, although the shout out to certain other Kong and kaiju movies where human intervention is necessary to restart (or in some films replace) a slowing heart is appreciated, the circumstances which took us to that point felt somehow unacceptable to me.

And so there you have it. Godzilla VS Kong looks great, has made huge gains at the box office but, sadly, under all the hullabaloo it’s just an empty and somehow inarticulate shell of a movie masquerading as something much bigger than it actually is. I can enjoy the moments of monster carnage and will probably do so again on Blu Ray but, as a consequential entry in the entire body of work of both the King Kong and Godzilla franchises, it leaves no mark and is, perhaps, best left forgotten. I was, at the end of the last picture, looking forward to this franchise continuing but now I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. Everything seems to be thrown away and the dots that are meant join the films together make a tenuous and unnecessary trail at best. I can’t recommend this one, to be honest.

Blair Witch

Heather Report

Blair Witch
2016 USA Directed by Adam Wingard
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’ve actually opted for spoilers in this one because I want to talk about specific aspects. If you don’t want to know this stuff then don’t read.

This film, directed by Adam Wingard who made the excellent The Guest (reviewed here), was originally called The Woods when it was being shot and then trailered. I remember seeing the trailer for ‘The Woods’ a few months ago and thinking... “Wow. This looks like a remake of The Blair Witch Project”. Not more than a couple of weeks since I saw that trailer, it was revealed to the public at large that The Woods was not really the title of the film and that it was, indeed, to be called Blair Witch. The first thing I thought of was how perfectly appropriate it was that someone had managed to make a sequel in secret, given the way the original movie was initially marketed as a ‘real phenomenon’ documentary.

Now, I remember the buzz surrounding the original movie because, around about the same time, somebody at my work place had asked me to be one of two test subjects to spend time looking around the internet, getting familiar with it and trying to figure out if the internet and emails were something which would be worth getting for the business. I remember reading about the initial viral campaign and then, when all was revealed that The Blair Witch Project was just another horror movie... but extremely low budget and extremely scary... my interest was piqued. I remember one reviewer coming out of a screening at Cannes or Sundance or somewhere like that and she was visibly shaking because the experience had been so scary for her.

The film didn’t exactly start the found footage phenomenon in the genre... that claim probably, if memory serves, belongs to Cannibal Holocaust... but The Blair Witch Project did, indeed, popularise the technique for horror film audiences and it’s a style that certainly hasn’t gone back out of fashion in the 17 years or so since its cinematic release. There are loads of these found footage horrors made every year, it seems to me.

Adam Wingard’s new movie slyly sidesteps the horrendously disappointing first sequel, Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, without actually contradicting events in that story, from what I can remember of it. Instead, what  he’s done is to have one of the new crew of forest explorers leading an expedition because he is the brother of the lead protagonist of The Blair Witch Project, Heather Donahue, originally played by... Heather Donahue. Yeah, I know... it seemed to be a part of the first movie’s viral campaign that the characters were indistinguishable from the actors who played them. So, following the trail of some new footage found of the incident (which makes no sense to me), Heather’s brother James takes his friends out there, to hook up with the people who found the new footage and try to find the house that Heather and the others ended up in at the conclusion of the first movie.

And then, of course, when they all start camping in the forest the first night... things start to go wrong for them.

Now, I have to say I have a lot of respect for Wingard after The Guest and so, before I go into what some people may say is a weakness of this movie, I just want to say that I had an absolutely terrifying time watching this at the cinema, as my adrenalin levels rose and fell at every shadow and scream. So, in many ways, it’s the equal of the first movie in terms of being a scary experience but...

... I’d also have to say that it’s practically a repeat of that first movie. Which, in all honesty, is exactly what I was expecting from it after seeing the trailer for both The Woods and Blair Witch, at different times. It’s all in colour this time because most of the cameras used are high tech ear cams which the actors wear themselves. They also have a drone with a camera attached to it and all kinds of other things like satellite navigation. Of course, as you would expect from a film set in the Burkkitsville Woods of the first movie, none of this stuff is working properly for very long and even watches and mobile phone alarms are shown to be alarmingly off track when it comes to giving our hapless victims any help whatsoever in somehow managing to find their way out of these woods alive.

So... yeah, it’s also a lot less subtle a movie than the first one was. In the first one, the divide and bewilder routine worked over a series of nights, on a slow build, with lots of daylight conversations highlighting the fraught victims... and that became the main narrative anchors to stabilise the audience between scares. In this one, we have the first day, the first night, what’s left of the second day after some strange, time shifting stuff, and then we’re already on the second and, what appears to be final, night of the film. So the characters spend much less time walking around the forest trying to either find their way out or looking for a lost member of their party and much more time running in blind terror from actual seen, physical attacks on the group. Well, seen in the sense that you see things moving around by themselves and hear giant footstep sounds giving chase etc.

The film also spends a lot longer on the inevitably climactic scene in the house at the end of the movie... as various characters are chased around by a, mostly, unseen terror... although Wingard has also opted for brief glimpses of the witch this time as a malevolent, supernatural (almost parody of herself) creature. The back story of her death is elaborated on earlier in the film, as the witch was tied to a tree and left exposed to the elements with weights hung from her limbs creating a makeshift rack as her punishment and execution. Here, the smartly considered “blink and you’ll miss them” moments where you get an impression of her, match the idea that she has very long, extended, spindly arms and legs as a visual echo of her original fate at the hands of the community she was at odds with. Luckily, the director and his team are smart enough to not let you get too clear a look at the witch herself and, like the rest of the movie, it’s pretty much all done with sound and constantly shifting, moving camera shots. It’s actually very effective.

The performances are what you usually get from found footage productions... very naturalistic and believable. This kind of movie making definitely seems to bring out the best, to an extent, in an actor and, if this is the kind of feel they want to create, then the cast here all do an admirable job. As does the director, who succeeded totally in making me clutch the arms of the cinema seat on this one. I think people have been a little rough on this film, judging by some of the tweets I’ve seen over the last few days. I understand how people are going to latch onto the fact that it’s almost a straight remake of the first in tone and content but... I can’t help but think that, for the first Blair Witch film in an incredibly long time, many of those same people might have complained if it was significantly different or progressive from the first one. Either way, as far as I’m concerned, Blair Witch is a big recommendation from me for all those of you who like horror movies and especially if you like the first movie in the franchise. I won’t be going into the woods alone for a while after this, I can tell you that.

The ABCs Of Death

Primer Scream

The ABCs Of Death
2012 USA/New Zealand
Directed by Kaare Andrews, Angela Bettis, Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, Jason Eisener, Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Jorge Michel Grau, Lee Hardcastle, Noboru Iguchi, Thomas Cappelen Malling, Anders Morgenthaler, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Banjong Pisanthanakun, Simon Rumley, Marcel Sarmiento, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard, Yudai Yamaguchi
Monster Films Blu Ray Zone B

And so... on to The ABCs Of Death. This is another movie which, like V/H/S (reviewed here), did the festival circuit back in 2012 and which I managed to miss or somehow not have the opportunity to see. And, again like V/H/S, it's another portmanteau movie comprising of lots of different shorts bound together by a unifying concept. And, of course, I am very aware you should never start a sentence using the word “And” because that’s just bad grammar... but sometimes I feel that in terms of setting the right tone it’s the correct thing to do anyway... so what are you gonna do?

Like most movies which are collections of shorter films or chapters, The ABCs Of Death is not alone in being somewhat a hit and miss affair but, it has to be said, because of the basic premise of this work, you certainly do get a fair amount of chances at being both over and underwhelmed, as the case may be, for just over two hours. This premise resulting in, naturally, a very much “does what it says on the tin” kind of experience is that 27 directors from various different countries have been approached (one of those is a two person directing team) and each given a letter of the alphabet. From that letter, the people in question are tasked with picking a word and making a short four to five minute movie about death involving their word of choice... with no interference about the content of that short.

As you would expect from using such a large group of people, the resulting films are diverse and often wildly different in style from each other. It also means that, since the order is kinda nailed down by the letter given, there’s no control over the tone of the short film and its relationship to the shorts that come before or after it. So, for example, you may get two or three which take a strong, humorous approach to proceedings lumped in together followed by a couple of really bleak visions, and so on. Also, there’s always the chance that some writers/directors are going to come up with some similar material and this does happen on occasion. Two of the teams involved, for example, take a starting point in a similar vein to Fellini’s Eight And A Half... by which I mean the short films both start off with the directors/writers etc trying to come up with a word to use for their segment in the movie The ABCs Of Death. Which is kinda interesting but, no more unusual than there being, for example, a couple of shorts that take an animation approach to their subject.

There’s also a nice “game on” approach to the movie too in that the title of each short, featuring the letter and the word, is not revealed until the end of each short... so you can have a fun time trying to guess what the word is that the director has picked as you watch each short unfold. Some of them are not going to be easy to guess... a couple of them are downright impossible.

Everybody is going to have their own highlights and lowlights in this collection but, for me, the real pick of the crop were the following...

Jake West, director of one of my all time favourite vampire movies, Razor Blade Smile and those two recent Video Nasty documentaries (reviewed here and here) has a great little short called S Is For Speed which juxtaposes grindhouse glam sensibilities with the flipside of the coin, where human beings are practically wasted corpses and it really highlights the way a person can look completely different from two different make up jobs.

Ben Wheatley, who made Kill List (reviewed here), Sightseers (reviewed here) and the first couple of episodes of Peter Capaldi’s incarnation of Doctor Who, Deep Breath (reviewed here) and Into The Dalek (reviewed here), amongst others... delivers a mini rollercoaster of a ride with a POV view of an undead monster and the way he or she is seen by the pitchfork and torch brigade in pursuit. It was nice seeing the two lead actors of Kill List, Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley, reunited for this one, entitled U Is For Unearthed.

Once you can figure out the fact that, due to the movie magic of editing around things, certain nasty looking fights don’t really happen while shooting, the human versus dog sport of Marcel Sarmiento’s D Is For Dogfight is worth a look and has a lovely conclusion that really emphasises that a dog really is man’s best friend. Really charming twist/reveal on this one.

Timo Tjahjanto’s L Is For Libido is quite refreshingly sick and is a real tribute to one's stamina. It’s also quite gory, if that floats your boat, with a final denouement which is quite extreme and which manages to top the already fairly extreme nature of the basic premise of this piece.

And then there’s my favourite of the lot and the one set of directors who, once I’d discovered they were involved with this project, ensured that The ABCs Of Death was an instant purchase for me. O Is For Orgasm is directed by none other than the wonderful team of Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, who gave us the brilliantly surreal, giallo infused movies Amer (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here). The names of the director(s) of each short is not revealed until the end of each one (under the title) but their style of directing is so recognisable, right from their first frame of film here, that it would be impossible to mistake it for anybody else’s work. O Is For Orgasm is basically another abstract montage of beautifully lit, brightly coloured, surreal moments with absolutely no dialogue involved. It’s a tour de force of sheer cinematic beauty for its brief running time, on a par with some of this pair’s early shorts and, for my money, this one short stretch of film is worth the price of admission, so to speak.

And that’s that. I’m guessing this was a fairly popular collection on its initial release because there’s a sequel just been released in some countries and I have to say that, because the shorts segments are so... well, um... short, there’s never really a moment in this film when you start to get bored (although I’m pretty sure I’d seen one of the animated shorts in here prior to its inclusion in The ABCs Of Death, a number of years before. Definitely a must watch if you’re a fan of horror and don’t mind watching short movies. One of the more successful portmanteau movies I’ve seen in my lifetime, for sure.

V/H/S

Taped Heck 

V/H/S
2012 UK
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, Joe Swanberg, Chad Villella, Ti West, Adam Wingard
Momentum Blu Ray Region B

I remember wanting to see this movie when it did the festival circuit a couple of years ago, despite seeing some pretty mixed word of mouth, so to speak, on Twitter. Ultimately, it’s a movie which seems to doom itself to failure in some ways, fairly early on in the game but, at the same time it’s certainly a nice idea to present an old style horror anthology by using the, relatively, new popularisation of the old found footage variation of horror film. And, it has to be said, there are some fairly bright moments in the movie that make it worth persevering with through the negative stuff and I can certainly see why a couple of more enthusiastically received sequels have already been made in what is now a strong, found footage franchise.

The film is all shot on VHS tape... well, probably not actually, it’s probably shot on something much better and visually downgraded after the fact. This becomes especially apparent in the last story of the movie where some interesting CGI stuff is utilised throughout yet another “shaky cam” sequence. This, of course, allows for the various crews getting away with all kinds of bad camera work and not having to think too much about the design of any particular sequence in terms of framing... other than the details of the set or location dressing, of course.

The framing story starts off really quite badly by inviting us to follow a bunch of thugs who have been hired to steal a specific VHS tape from a house. Unless you are some kind of hoodlum yourself, you will find yourself having absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for any of the characters and will want to see them all die in as horrible a way as can be conceived, right from the outset. Now, while this may well be the tactic being deployed by the filmmakers here, for me this just didn’t work that well. If I can’t sympathise with any of the victims then I’m really not going to invest enough emotion in them for the scenes of suspense to work on me and while the director was taking great delight in showing little, telling details unheralded in a corner of a frame, such as a corpse vanishing, for instance, this stuff really didn’t get the heart racing as much as I’d hoped a horror movie might.

The idea is that while the hoodlums are going through the house, one of them starts watching the various other “found footage” VHS tapes in the TV room and we watch these along with him... and it’s here that the film threatened to lose me on two counts.

The first problem is that the group of characters in the next found footage film are basically... another bunch of hoodlums not much different from the ones in the framing footage and who have absolutely no sympathy from me when they start dying. The other problem is, and this should really have been a no brainer of a mistake not to make, is that we are no longer watching the video footage we were watching... somehow, each of the miniature found footage stories are now directly on our screens. So that completely kills that concept then... did someone splice these onto one long tape in just the right places so that the framing story can then take over again in between each segment? This makes absolutely no sense and it was just about now that I kind of gave up on the film inside my head for a bit.

Luckily for me, the first story has an enthralling femme fatale, lets call her the “I like you” girl, in the form of British actress Hannah Fierman and it was her that got me interested again. Now it’s obvious, right from the outset, that no good is going to come out of the main protagonists hooking up with her at a party (yeah, good, they all deserved to die for their thuggish behaviour anyway) but it’s such an old school dose of clichéd but classic sexual horror that I was enchanted with it in some ways... primarily, I suspect, because the actress I just mentioned had such an interesting screen presence.

After this segment, the film becomes a bit of a hit and miss affair, as would be expected in these kinds of anthologies. The majority of the scenarios presented to us are nothing too new but, in some cases (the well made ones), this really doesn’t matter. There’s a nice “haunted apartment” section, for instance, which turns into something else and which, while not altogether unsurprising, has enough in terms of the writing and performance that, if anything, it leaves you feeling the segment was just a little too short. The down side of that, however, is that it’s not actually pseudo-VHS footage... it’s pseudo-Skype footage... which, of course, makes even less sense when you consider it in the context of the found footage framing device... what, somebody transferred their collected Skype conversations to VHS tape. Why?

Another segment is a “final girl” story with a nice “Predator-like” killer who can only be seen on video and with a main protagonist who is using her companions as bait to catch him... which could have been quite refreshing and is relatively well done visually but which has a script and story that really lets it down. Seriously, if you’re going to go hunting a killer, you take weapons with you and not rely on setting traps which it’s obvious couldn’t have been made and prepared in the ridiculously short amount of time played out via the footage. No matter how unintelligent the characters are in horror films, sometimes as a necessity, this one really takes the cake for a person going in completely unprepared and needlessly. So the twist in the tale in that one was tempered by the quite extraordinary lack of brain power of the person who sets events in motion in this one.

There are around six stories in the film in total and, while some of them do hold your interest... and some of them do finally have some characters who are at least a little sympathetic... it’s not exactly the best set of horror shorts I’ve seen although, the last story with it’s Dennis Wheatley style shenanigans is quite nicely done with some well executed special effects. There was an alternative ending on this sequence which I’m glad the director didn’t go with but, strangely, this story marks the end of the film. The framing story is, surprisingly, already played out by the time this last segment appears with, pretty much, no context... so it was a bit of a jarring ending in some ways.

Ultimately, although I was disappointed with a lot of this film, it’s still a nice idea and, like I said earlier, you expect anthology format kinds of films to be a bit hit and miss. This one is mainly miss for me but there were enough interesting spins on old classics to keep me interested... once I’d gotten past the first quarter of an hour. Due to the nature of the beast, I can’t say it’s not worth watching because I expect everyone is going to have their own specific hits and misses among this lot so, if you’re a fan of horror, and found footage shaky cam horror in particular, then you could do a lot worse than to spend an evening in with this movie, of you can rustle up a cheap copy. I’ll certainly be checking out the sequels at some point... when the price is right.

The Guest

Guest In Peace

The Guest
2014  USA
Directed by Adam Wingard
UK cinema release print.

I saw the trailer to this movie in cinemas a few weeks ago and remember being curious as to whether the title character of this movie was supposed to be a hero or a villain... or something in between an anti-hero and a villain... but decidedly unintrigued enough to bother finding out either way. It was not a movie I’d planned on seeing.

However, fate had other things in store for me as I was going to work one day and I was passed by a red, double decker bus stopping opposite where I was awaiting my similar ride into work. The bus side advert was a poster design for The Guest and, it has to be said, this was instantly appealing. It looked like someone with the psychedelic sensibility of a budding Mario Bava had got the purple paint out and swirled it around and used it as window dressing for a completely different movie to the one I had been expecting from the trailer. This poster was beautiful and I decided then and there that any director or studio who had let this brilliant throwback design out of the gate to sell their movie deserved my backside on a seat in front of their work at the very least. Some good “tweet of mouth” on the internet over the next few days solidified that idea for me.

Now, I’ve not had great times with the director, Adam Wingard, just lately from my experience of his framing film for V/H/S (review will be coming either September or October), although his short for the original The ABCs Of Death was quite cute (again, review to follow). I might have decided against going to see it if I’d have taken careful note of the director’s name and all I can say about that is... thank goodness I didn’t take note of the director’s name.

Adam Wingard’s The Guest is a really nice little movie which has a kind of upending of audience expectations of the characters they are watching. Or maybe upending is the wrong word because, frankly, you are on your guard right from the word go that not all is what it seems and then, rather than overturn your perception of events just the once, the director kind of plays with the tropes of what is, essentially, the set up of an old style American Western and keeps the audience guessing as to both the motivations and integrity of the character all the way through.

And it’s quite a neat trick to do too because those two qualities, which are usually perceived as being mutually inclusive good things in a character, are what gives this movie its edge and they actually play against each other to get to a point where you, the audience, have to make your own judgement call on both the intentions of David, played very impressively by Dan Stevens, and the ultimate consequences of the collateral damage in the movie by that character’s direct actions.

The basic set up is an ex-soldier returning from service in the Middle East, who goes to keep an eye on/help the family of his best mate over there, who was recently deceased in service. He stays on at their house for a few days and slowly goes about fixing, in his unique way, the various problems of the remaining members of his friend’s immediate family... the mother, the father, the other son and the daughter. But there are signs, mostly conveyed through Dan Stevens' reflective facial expressions and, sometimes less than subtlely, with a sinister barrage of musical sting, that all is not right behind the brain of The Guest. 

In a way, it’s kinds like Shane filtered through the government shadow group paranoia of something like The Bourne Identity and then, when it gets to the last act, just going off the rails a bit. To say more would be to give away the main hook of watching the movie and I really do want to make this review as “spoiler free” as I can. What I will say though is, it’s not a cut and dried situation and I’d hazard a guess that if you asked a hundred people who had just watched the movie whether or not the title character was a hero or a villain, you’d probably have something like a quarter to a third of them answering in direct opposition to the remaining percentage of the sample.

The film seems quite low budget. It’s not wall to wall action, which is maybe what an audience may expect form the trailer but which is, frankly, all the better for not being that kind of Hollywood style concoction. And it also turns out that Wingard and the writer, Simon Barrett, have that sense of timing that a lot of the current talent in big budget action movie making has kind of lost... the ability to pace the movie and lead up to the set action pieces with a certain amount of the tension/release/build and then build some more aspect which make certain films with an action/thriller prospect in them so good to watch when they combine all the ingredients in the right way. Simon Barret obviously recognises just what the ingredients should be here and Adam Wingard, it turns out, is a remarkably good cook with this kind of recipe.

The other ingredients are a cast who all know their game very well and play their, sometimes stereotypical characters, with the kind of enthusiasm for the “quick character sketch” that helps you both understand the characters and sympathise with (or hate) them speedily. Which is handy in a movie like this. There’s also a nice score which mixes electronica with the occasional pop song (less keen on the songs but they certainly aren’t inappropriate) and helps heighten the tension and action expectations in key areas of the movie... and, yes, I am annoyed I couldn’t find a CD release of it on Amazon.

My one slight criticism is the gun selling sequence in the film... which has very minor shades of Taxi Driver and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly in it and which, for me, becomes the one on-screen sequence which doesn’t quite glue together with the rest of the narrative in terms of a central character who wants to never be a blip on anyone’s radar. It does, however, get the story chugging into high gear for the last third of the movie and there could be justification for this if we knew a little more about the background of the character than the “absolutely essential minimum” that we are given here (which means that it can all be further explored should any sequel, arise, of course).

And that’s about as far as I’m prepared to go in terms of talking about The Guest if I want to keep it spoiler free. The film will probably be seen as a bit of a genre bender for some audience members and there will probably be another section of the audience who won’t see it like that at all... which is pretty good because it gets people talking and exploring the ideas presented here, the chief one for me being the military mind of doing what you are told you are supposed to be doing in any given situation as opposed to making moral judgements on a set of situations... which is not something that’s explored in movies often enough, it seems to me.

So, yeah, The Guest. If you like slow burn thriller and/or early American Westerns and want a good night out at the movies with a low budget entertainment that resembles those rare times when you rented a “straight to VHS” tape in the 1980s and actually discovered a bona fide, underrated classic as opposed to the usual tape fodder you would get in your local off licence or newsagent, then The Guest is definitely something you should consider inviting into your life for a couple of hours. It’s good fun.