The Conjuring - Last Rites

Warren Piece

The Conjuring - Last Rites
Directed by Michael Chaves
Canada/USA 2025
Atomic Monster
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Slight plot spoilers.

The Conjuring - Last Rites is the fourth and, allegedly (don’t believe it for a minute unless the box office really tanks), final of the main, pure stream of the Conjuringverse (or Warrenverse would perhaps be more apt?) movies which, by my count, makes it the seventh of the ten films in the franchise to date to feature Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga  as real life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Now, I heard a really allergic review to this movie by one of my favourite reviewers which damned this film for being about something that has since been debunked (again, allegedly) and for going to way too supernatural places that are unlikely to have happened in real life. 

All I will say about that is that, since The Conjuring 2 - The Enfield Case (as it was known over here in the UK and reviewed by me here) it’s pretty obvious the films... which originally included input from The Warrens themselves, in the very early stages and were designed to be scary dramatisations, if memory serves... are extremely enhanced, to say the least, renderings of what may or may not have happened. And I personally don’t really care... these were designed to be supernatural entertainments, first and foremost so, not bothered, it’s not a problem for me.

Maybe that’s why I responded so positively to this one. 

The film starts off in 1966 when Lorraine is pregnant with their child Judy and The Warrens go to try and help a young woman being plagued by a demon in a mirror. It goes wrong and the unborn baby is affected and stillborn... for about a minute... before being brought back to life by the power of prayer and, of course, she grows up to be the child we are familiar with, at different ages, in the previous films in the franchise. We then jump 20 years to the main timeline of the film, where Ed is still suffering from the dodgy heart condition that plagued him during The Conjuring - The Devil Made Me Do It (reviewed here) and so the couple, while still giving lectures, have retired from helping people with their ‘special set of skills’. However, after the mirror from the opening of the movie turns up in another state and the demon within starts terrorising another family, it’s not too long before, due to their daughter finding herself pulled to the house where the evil now dwells, The Warrens are back on the case. 

Okay, so this is the usual melange of clichéd formula including camera misdirection, almost subconscious levels of sound design, lurking dread and jump scares but, as I’ve mentioned before in regards to these films, the people involved in these really know how to do these things well and it works in spades in this one. This is touted as a last hurrah for the main characters and, although I said I’m not ruling out another one, the ending of this movie very much goes out of its way to bring some closure to the lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren, so if they do decide not to do another one, this has an appropriate ending as a jumping off point, at least. 

And, like I said, I really loved this one. I didn’t find the criticisms I’ve heard against the film hold up in any way and I was generally impressed with it. The only two movies in this whole franchise I’d not really got on with are the previous movie, The Devil Made Me Do It and the first of the three Annabelle spin offs. This one, I’m glad to say, is certainly a lot better than those two at any rate and so I was pretty happy throughout the screening. And I don’t want to say too much else about The Conjuring - Last Rites because I dont want to spoil anything so, other than to say it had some nice cameos at the end and an excellent score by Benjamin Wallfisch (which, of course, hasn’t had a proper CD release at time of writing, so I guess I won’t be able to listen to the score away from the movie again), I'll leave it there. So... yeah... I thought this one was a pretty decent demonic entity movie and I’ll definitely be in line for the Blu Ray when it gets a release.

A L I E N Romulus

Holm On The Range

A  L  I  E  N  Romulus
Directed by Fede Alvarez
USA/UK/Canada/Hungary/New Zealand
2024  20th Century Fox
UK cinema release print

Warning: There are things people need to be starting a conversation about so, yeah, there are huge spoilers in here. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Okay, before I start with this somewhat problematic review, I’ll preface it by saying that Alien Romulus is the best Alien movie since the fourth in the series, Alien Resurrection (and certainly blows away the last two terrible movies). It’s entertaining and feels like it’s part of the Alien franchise but also has a level of suspense which is up there with the best of them. So, before I cover the plot set up and then get into the pros and cons, I want you to understand that I had a, mostly, pretty good time with this ethically unsound film. But, as I said in the spoiler warning, there’s a bigger conversation to be had.

Okay, so the set up is that the film starts off with a ship picking up a certain piece of ‘Alien’ debris from the floating, exploded remains of the Nostromo, which Ripley destroyed near the end of the original Alien (how it got in that piece of debris, though, I have no idea... she was well clear of the Nostromo by the time she did that) and, a few months or more have moved on since this opening scene, is my guess but, the movie properly takes place between Alien and Aliens (yeah, their will be reviews of those movies coming to the blog at some point, when I get around to taking the Blu Ray set out of shrink wrap and revisiting them one day). So this film really is set some 20 years after the first movie... and many decades before the second one (so, sometime while Ellen Ripley is sleeping away in hypersleep).  

The film features a group of ‘young adults’ being exploited on a Weyland-Yutani colony on some planet when some of them get wind that an abandoned space station, comprising of two halves (the titular Romulus, where the action mostly takes place and Remus), is about 36 hours away from burning up in their planet’s atmosphere. Everybody wants to get off the colony and Weyland-Yutani are pulling a Catch 22 on anyone who reaches their years of servitude in their mines, upping the number of years when they get to their agreed target).

So, with the help of Rain (played by Cailee Spaeny... who I’ve seen in a few things and is a pretty good actress) and her android Andy (or synthetic human, if you like, played by David Jonsson), they stage a heist on the apparently deserted space station to try and steal the hypersleep chambers on board so they can get to a more welcoming and functioning colony.  And of course, things happen when they get up there as the station was the ship where the dead xenomorph and other things ended up and... yeah... experiments have been done. Everyone on the station is actually dead and its full of face huggers and big aliens alike. Also, something happens to up the ante because the ship shifts a couple of degrees and there’s now less than an hour before the craft burns up in the atmosphere. So the film becomes a race against time... and some other, added biological complications... while what’s left of our raggedy band try to survive the running time as best they can.

Okay, so the good stuff first because, the other stuff is going to take me a while to sum up, I suspect.

The acting is brilliant. All the cast in this are great and with a special mention for the phenomenal talent that is David Jonsson, who plays not one but two very different iterations of the same synthetic human (that’s not a spoiler, you know what he is right from the start). I won’t give away why but, yeah, he does an amazing job throughout this movie, it has to be said.

And the film looks a lot like the first two movies, somehow mixing outdated looking ‘future speculation’ technology from the first two films with modern day expectations to a degree that it does, at this moment in time at any rate, seem to seamlessly blend in with those first few earlier outings in the franchise. And Benjamin Wallfisch’s score (sadly unavailable as a proper CD at time of writing) is suitably sedate and sinister in a not dissimilar vein to what Jerry Goldsmith and, to an extent, James Horner were doing in the first two films.

Plus, it’s chock ful of suspense and ‘oh no, I can’t believe you just did that’ moments. And the full size aliens are felt rather than seen a lot of the time... only really overly used in an Aliens inspired shootout in zero gravity towards the end of the film. So this stuff is all pitch perfect and there are some lovely call backs to the other films such as sound samples, computer screen displays and even one of those nodding/drinking ducks I like so much which were prominent in the original movie. Now to the big spoilers... you were warned...

Yes, there’s an alien/human hybrid in this movie. But it is kinda terrifying this time and works a heck of a lot better than the one they came up with in the fourth film in the series (which looked more like a Casper The Friendly Ghost Alien and was the one bad thing about that entry). It retains some H. R. Gigerish details on an essentially humanoid frame and, yeah, it’s relatively effective (in the lighting they use... I suspect it looks awful in broad daylight but these kind of movies are always about smoke and mirrors anyway and it works effectively here).

Okay, lets look at the bad stuff then.

Those call backs to the other movies are not subtle (which half works some of the time) but some of them are waaay too much. Certain lines and even paragraphs of dialogue associated with other actors in the franchise seem like they’ve just been pasted into the mouths of the characters here, to the extent that it feels like those actors are stepping out of character just to get the call backs in. You will definitely know them when you see/hear them and some of this stuff was just popping me out of the movie... because that’s what it seemed the characters kept doing. Popping out of the movie to make a ‘cool reference’.

Also, ridiculously, some of those homages don’t go far enough. If you’re going to reference the long, voyeuristic shot of Ripley in vest and knickers getting into the space suit at the end of Alien, maybe hold the shot longer than a second... the whole point of the way that first one was shot in that scene seemed to be to enhance the sexuality of the actress to the audience gaze, so this small nod seems undercooked, for sure. Why have it at all?

And, by the way, future generations who decide to watch these movies in order of when the story takes place, are not going to get half of the references yet because they haven’t taken place so far in the order they are watching it in. They may well think, for instance, that Corporal Hicks’ gun tuition speech from Aliens is a call back to this movie, if they don’t pay attention to old timey release dates. It just doesn’t really work.

Then we have the other big problem with the movie... which has a couple issues tied up in it.

So perhaps the biggest call back in the movie is the return of Ian Holm as an android from the same model series (and identical looking) as the android he played in the first movie, Ash. This one is called Rook, presumably to try and link it into Lance Hendrickson’s Bishop character from Aliens, Alien 3 and, kinda, Alien Vs Predator but... well let’s put it this way... it’s way much more than a cameo. The studio has resurrected this dead actor with the use of CGI and mimicry to give a new performance (albeit one which includes some dialogue from the first film) and he’s in several scenes and is a main plot point.

So two things about this because, his inclusion makes this movie morally reprehensible.

Firstly, it looks pretty bad. This CGI actor replacement rarely works well and this looks just as bad and fake as Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher did in Rogue One (reviewed here). It looks like someone’s just pasted the face on in Photoshop and it doesn’t quite match, looking really flat and useless.

Secondly, when Harold Ramis was brought back as a ghost for a few scenes in Ghostbusters Afterlife (reviewed here) everyone was accepting of this because the usage was respectful and, heck, everyone knows that in his lifetime, Ramis was trying to get another Ghostbusters sequel off the ground for decades so, he would have agreed to it. Ditto when a computer generated younger version of actress Sean Young was used for Blade Runner 2049 (reviewed here)... she was on board with it and had been in talks with the film makers. But, honestly, I don’t care how involved his family or estate were in this decision (or how much money they were compensated... if they were, I hope... that’s another can of worms), Holm may well have decided to not take part in this one. He may not have liked the script. He may well have thought it would diminish his classic performance in the first movie (which I feel it kinda does but, that’s just me). And, no, I don’t think Hollywood should be allowed to bring back dead actors as anything more than a fleeting glimpse, or cameo. The problem here is that it’s a whole performance of a major character and, not only that, it feels really flat and unreal.

And, bottom line, did we really need him to be here for yet another call back to previous elements of the franchise when another actor/character would have done just fine and the film is already overpacked with references anyway. Bringing back a dead actor to just fizz up your movie is a really low move in my opinion and I really hope Hollywood stops this terrible practice soon. It’s one thing to see a fleeting glimpse of George Reeves as Superman in The Flash (reviewed here) but it’s quite another to create a new performance. It just feels wrong to me and, frankly, should be outlawed.

But that’s me done with Alien Romulus, I think. Good effects (apart from the CGI Ian Holm, which just looks bad), great acting, some nice callbacks (too many) and, apart from the ethical issues, which may give you pause, a mostly great time at the movies.

Hellboy (2019)

The Man Who Hell To Earth

Hellboy (2019)
2018 UK/USA
Directed by Neil Marshall
UK cinema release print.

You know, I thought a lot of the last two Hellboy movies, especially the second one so, frankly, the idea of doing a new, rebooted version of the character which didn’t involve the original dream team pairing of director Guillermo del Toro and actor Ron Perlman was pretty much anathema to me. I really wasn’t looking forward to this movie and even more so when I heard pretty much every critic weighing in with headlines saying it was one of the worst messes of a film out there. However, I thought I should witness the train wreck for myself and I had one slightly bright spark of a fact at my disposal which should have tipped me off that, maybe, this was worth a watch after all. That bright spark being director Neil Marshall, who made two of the best modern horror movies going... Dog Soldiers and The Descent.

I got lucky when I went and saw this because, honestly, this is an awesome film and I thoroughly enjoyed it... way more than I thought was possible. So I guess the bottom line from that is... don’t trust the professional critics, even if they all agree on something. This film is a great slice of exploitational horror which is not afraid to blend elements of epic, grandiose plotting with a true pulp/exploitation sensibility. In a way it felt a little like it had a kind of stylistic kinship with movies like Hansel And Gretel - Witch Hunters (reviewed by me here) and The Last Witch Hunter (reviewed here). Two movies which I think were less than enthusiastically received by audiences and which deserved more love.

As does this latest incarnation of Hellboy. I don’t think there were even ten people in the screening I went to and that’s a shame because it’s a solid and fun movie with some outstanding visual flourishes. There was even a jump scare moment which I didn’t see coming at one point.

Now, nobody can really fill the shoes of the mighty acting legend that is Ron Perlman in the role of Hellboy but David Harbour, who plays him here, actually does a really good job with the character and he manages to assuredly bypass the legacy of the role, giving us a nice interpretation of creator Mike Mignola’s comic book character. Both him and his ‘dad’, played by Ian McShane here (it was John Hurt in the last two movies), are totally brilliant and they are, pretty much, the only two regular characters carried over from the last two movies (which suits me fine as I never really got on with the Abe Sapien creature, although he is teased near the end). Instead with have a totally new support team who are working together for the first time here, played by Daniel Dae Kim and the truly beautiful Sasha Lane. They are also pretty awesome and, to round it off as the icing on the cake, we have Milla Jovovich playing the lead villain of the movie. And she does some pretty good work here too.

Now this movie is a complete reboot and is not associated with the del Toro movies. Which is a shame in a way because there was a definite direction for a third part which the director of that last one was clearly heading for. The question posed in Hellboy - The Golden Army was... just how was the title character going to bring about the apocalypse and, well, its a shame that never got resolved by del Toro. Except, it kinda does get resolved, somewhat, because I suspect, having not read the original comics, that this film is based, at least partially, on the same source material that would have gone into that third part that was never made. So, yeah, some of the questions posed by that last movie are, I think, answered here.

And the movie had me right from the start. Opening with a flashback and narrative provided by Mr. McShane which takes us back into Arthurian legend and upping the gore factor right from the outset, the film pulled me in very quickly. This is soon followed by a scene where Hellboy has to fight a masked luchador wrestler with vampire powers and, frankly, by this time I was already hooked on this movie, it has to be said. The action sequences are well put together, solid and, frankly, surrealistic, giant demons completely trashing London in the last reel really put a smile on my face. This is, as I said before, an epic piece of pulpy exploitation and it goes over the top in all the right places it needs to over the course of the story. And the special effects are handled really well too with my favourite being the ectoplasmic undead who are channeled physically from the mouth and into 3D representations via Sasha Lane’s truly epic character. I enjoyed her performance best, I think and her on-screen chemistry with David Harbour goes a long way towards selling this film and giving the emotional weight it requires at certain story beats.

Add into what is an already seductive mix, Benjamin Wallfisch’s score, which is a real corker and gives the movie a solid backbone. Can’t wait to hear this one as a stand alone listen when the CD is released in a few weeks.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about Hellboy 2019 other than... some of the little reveals are a bit too obviously telegraphed but the frenetic pacing and post-modernistic tone more than make up for the lack of subtlety in the writing. This is a fun and entertaining movie and I would expect that, if you liked the last two Hellboy movies, you should have a good time with this one. And no one is more surprised than me that I would be delivering such a positive review of this movie but, there you have it. A little masterpiece of bloody excess and another winner, as far as I’m concerned, from director Neil Marshall.

SHAZAM!

The Original Captain Marvel

SHAZAM!
2019 USA
Directed by David F. Sandberg
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some mild spoilerage.

Hmmm... okay, I’d better cut to the chase and start off by saying that, despite all the awful things I’m going to say about certain aspects of this film up front, I think it’s a really good movie and would recommend it. And you can imagine how conflicted that makes me feel now I have to write a review of it.

Okay, long story short, Captain Marvel was a character created in 1939 by C.C. Beck for Fawcett Comics (Billy goes to Fawcett School in this movie version). DC sued for alleged similarities to Superman (whom Captain Marvel outsold for a period) a while later and the comic stopped being published. The long gap before his next publication allowed rival company Marvel Comics to buy and copyright the name Captain Marvel for one of their most powerful superheroes. Some would argue that he was just a ‘Marvel remake’ even, of the Fawcett character (of course ‘Captain’ Marvel is now a girl but... don’t let’s get too complicated here, this is supposed to be a very brief history). Think about it, though... even the original Thor was a guy who banged his stick on the ground to be ‘replaced’ by Thor with a bolt of lightning. Marvel have tried a few times to rip off this character, methinks.

Anyway, back to my potted history... DC bought the Fawcett character and started publishing him again in the 1970s. He was still allowed to be called Captain Marvel in the interiors but, because of the Marvel character, the comic was called Shazam! Which is what the 1970s live action TV series was also called, whereas the 1940s theatrical serial was called The Adventures Of Captain Marvel (and you can read my review of that here). He’s been a staple of DC Comics since then but the character has probably changed somewhat over the last two decades in ways I wouldn’t like to guess.

Okay, lets get the bad stuff out of the way first. As much as I like some guy I’d never heard of called Zachary Levi  in the role here... this is not Captain Marvel. This is a mickey-take ridiculing Captain Marvel and I’m sad that DC chose to go down this path. The name SHAZAM, the name of the wizard who granted Cap his powers in all the iterations, which is almost straight out of the comics, is an acronym standing for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury and the appearance of Captain Marvel when Billy Batson speaks the wizard’s name is supposed to conjure up a Captain Marvel who embodies all the qualities of these Gods and Kings. Seriously though... it’s quite obvious that this screenplay does not include ‘the wisdom of Solomon’ into the mix with Zachary Levi here. Instead, we have the same consciousness occupying Captain Marvel’s body... which was definitely not what the original comics were about. So basically, the comedy in this version of the character... and it was always a light, somewhat comical character... is all about body switching, teenage fish-out-of-water stuff which plays like a superhero version of Big (it even has a blatant reference to the Tom Hanks comedy in it) and it does really belittle the character.

Now, I have seen DC do this with the character in the 1990s but I stopped reading after a few issues of that awfulness and I’d hoped that they’d stopped treating the character like that (basically jettisoning the Captain Marvel personae completely). Perhaps they didn’t, which might explain why the movie has taken this track. It’s a travesty and insult to the character and I suspect C. C. Beck (who has a shout out in the movie) would be turning in his grave. Unfortunately, it’s also immensely entertaining and I loved a lot of the performance here. Which leaves me very conflicted now people.

Okay, so another thing is that... and we’re getting into slight spoiler territory here folks... most of the characters look somewhat like their original comic counterparts, except for maybe Billy Batson (Asher Angel), the kid who says SHAZAM! and SHAZAM himself (Djimon Hounsou) who... I’m not going there. But the casting is pretty good. Levi looks somewhat like the character whose looks were originally based on actor Fred MacMurray and Mary Batson (sorry, Mary Bromfield... I guess they’re saving that revelation for another movie) looks just like her, especially when she becomes the unnamed Mary Marvel in the final showdown (she’s played nicely by Grace Fulton here). Similarly, Freddy Freeman looks just great (and Jack Dylan Grazer does really good stuff in the role) although, when he does transform to an unnamed Captain Marvel Jr, he doesn’t look the same as he did in his real life incarnation, like he did in the comics. Although you can tell exactly who he is supposed to be from the colour of his costume.

There are some great moments for followers of the original comics including an early appearance from Mr. Mind, the evil, talking earthworm who controlled the Monster Society Of Evil. He gets freed later on in the movie and this kinda tips the audience off that he’ll be back for a bigger moment later in the story (if you stick around after the credits). Also, Billy Batson says 'Holey Moley!' a lot, which is just a huge point in favour of this movie. Mark Strong as arch nemesis Sivana is, as usual, a truly villanous villain and although he’s too tall for Sivana, he looks quite like him (barring they've given him super powers, which he didn’t have in the comics). Alas, he plays him nothing like Sivana and it’s a shame he doesn’t let out either of that character’s prime Sivana-isms... the constant repeating “Heh! Heh! Heh!” laugh or the perpetual referring to Captain Marvel as “The Big Red Cheese”.

But, despite all the differences and insults to the original characters, the film works really well as an entertaining feature with a heck of a lot of heart and warmth in it. It has some surprisingly dark moments (especially in Sivana’s ‘origins’) but it does some nice new stuff too. For example, using the Seven Deadly Sin statues from the wizard SHAZAM’s lair, which were always a constant in the comics and using them as more of a plot element is nice. Also, Cap’s old ‘double cape’ with the smaller cape at the top does kinda have an equivalent here but, although he doesn’t actually use it, they’ve found a way to make it nicely functional by having it as a hoodie which lays down on top like a second cape. So that was really great. Alas, they don’t have the original button down top from the 1930s version of the character there but, you know... modern movies, you can’t have everything.

There’s also an appearance, kind of, of one of the other DC superheroes in the movie, not to mention a fair few props and reference to the other characters in the current DC Extended Universe films. Also, the first half of the end credits takes the form of a kind of cartoon (and perhaps as a bizarre homage to the end titles of Spider-Man Homecoming, which seems to be definitely the equivalent vibe that DC are going for with this movie) and a few of the regular DC characters appear in this animation. Also, there are two post credits sequences here... the first is mentioned briefly, earlier on in this review and appears mid way through the end titles. The other is right after the credits are finished and, well, it’s a nice little joking potshot at one of the other DC superheroes.

At the end of the day, despite the terrible treatment of the title character, SHAZAM! is still a fun and very watchable DC movie with a lovely supporting score by Benjamin Wallfisch. Easily one of the best films they’ve done. Well... I say title character but... not once is Captain Marvel referred to by his actual name in the movie and that’s very interesting because, in the recent Marvel movie Captain Marvel (reviewed by me here), Brie Larson’s character is never once referred to by that name either. It’s like both companies didn’t want to open up old legal wounds... very strange. I’d definitely recommend SHAZAM! to fans of superhero movies and, despite a few very dark sequences, it’s pretty much an out and out comedy which works fairly well. Die hard admirers of the original character, such as myself, may have a bumpy ride with this one but, at the end of the day, the artistry behind the film certainly helps DC get away, to an extent, with reinventing the character for a modern film going audience. Hoping for a sequel which would hopefully feature one of my favourite characters from the comic, Mr. Tawky Tawny The Talking Tiger, at some point soon.

Blade Runner 2049

Morphology. Longevity. Incept Dates.

Blade Runner 2049
2017 USA/UK/Canada
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I could have written a spoiler free review here but I decided I wanted to address the issues that this film throws up a little more freely. So, fair warning, all the big spoilers will be covered here. If you don’t want to know this stuff then don’t read until after you’ve seen the movie. Lots of spoilerage per paragraph and you won’t see them coming until I blindside you with them so, seriously, if you don’t want to know, don’t read further than this warning paragraph.

To paraphrase another famous movie, this was not the sequel I was looking for.

That being said, I really wasn’t looking for a sequel to Blade Runner at all and I’ve always dreaded, even back in the 1980s when the subject first came up, that anyone would ever get around to doing one. I’ve already made clear my thoughts on the first film, which I first saw at the cinema in 1982 in its most perfect cut (as far as I’m concerned), the original studio cut. You can read my Blade Runner review here where I look at the various cuts of the movie and also detail my personal relationship with the film, helping to keep the movie alive long after it expired as a box office flop by going to see it with my friend at various midnight screenings before it suddenly started to gain popularity again in the 1990s. I must have seen the first movie somewhere between 50 and 100 times by now and so, yeah, I have a lot to be compromised by a bad sequel to a perfect movie which, lets be honest, doesn’t really need a follow up anyway.

So the first and most positive thing I will say about it is... it’s not a terrible movie. It’s actually, in fact, a pretty well made, modern science fiction film which harkens back to the 1950s or earlier for its central themes... themes which writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote the original source novel pillaged by the first movie, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, explored on a number of occasions in his writing career. So, for a nice, adult themed, science fiction movie... yeah, Blade Runner 2049 is quite successful in that sense.

As a sequel to the original film both in look and in spirit though... well that’s another matter and, much as I like Villeneuve as a director, I don’t think he does either of those things justice here.

For example, the film does, indeed, look spectacular but, honestly, compared to the look of the original movie which, it seemed to me, was much denser and more coherent in its portrayal of a crowded, urban environment in meltdown... this film felt a little inconsistent and sketchy. Maybe it’s because none of the establishing shots or fly bys of the various environments are long enough but... it didn’t really hit me the way it should do, I think.

The director eschews the classic opening titles of the first film and cuts to the intro text. At various places in the film we get text highlighting the various locations but, I can tell you, I was sitting fairly close to the front with a giant screen and those titles were so small I could barely make them out. The white type just about but the red type just above them... no way. Goodness knows how this would play in a home environment with a smaller screen. We then get a vista of landscape and, while its set in a different environment and we still get the giant eyeball shot to echo the first movie, it just all feels a bit ‘by the numbers’ to me. I’ve seen the first movie a gazillion times on some great screens and, almost without fail, the opening shots of the city on that old one flip flops your stomach over and dazzles with the sheer spectacle. Alas, this movie doesn’t have anything nearly as close as that opening and... yeah... I really felt it.

One thing this film does have which is similar to the original in terms of positive stuff is a cast of very good actors. Ryan Gosling is amazing (as he pretty much always is), Harrison Ford is... well, he’s Harrison Ford (so that means he’s always watchable), Ana de Armas  is pretty great as Gosling’s virtual companion, Sylvia Hoeks as a ‘bad gal’ replicant is actually more like the ‘andies’ in the original Dick novel than Ridley Scott’s movie (in that she’s actually genuinely evil rather than the like the morally superior replicants of the first movie) and Mackenzie Davis looks stunning as a working gal replicant who slinks about and is dressed similarly to Daryl Hannah’s Pris from the first movie. The film does, indeed, try and echo a lot of the beats of the first film and the gait of this particular character is one of the things which actually works as an homage here, I thought.

And then you have two genuinely outstanding performances which I think were worth the entry fee... although they are both fairly small roles. One is Robin Wright as Gosling’s boss. She really knocks it out of the park here playing an equivalent role to Deckard’s old boss Bryant from the first film in terms of inherent species-ism. She was great in Wonder Woman (reviewed here) and she is truly, old school, hard boiled, tough as nails here. Her final scene in the movie opposite Sylvia Hoeks is pretty memorable. And then we have David Bautista playing a truly sympathetic replicant. He shines in, literally, his only scene in the movie which is the opening sequence. I’m beginning to really like what this actor can do and this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen him perform so... yeah, very impressed with his performance here. So those two were the stand out performances for me in this film, it has to be said.

About that opening sequence though?

Well, it’s something I’ve been half wanting to see since 1982 in that it’s a throwback in spirit to an early draft of Blade Runner, as a way of establishing what the central protagonist does in an action sequence. Here it further serves to establish that Ryan Gosling’s character 'K' is also a superhuman replicant... so it proves useful. It also kickstarts the story when certain ‘clues’ are found on the farm residence where Bautista’s character is working. Instead of pulling the retired replicant’s jaw bone out and revealing a serial number as in that old draft screenplay I am referring to from the first film, Gosling just harvests one of the characters eyes as proof of something he already knows from what amounts to a mini, portable Voight Kampff test replacement he carries in his pocket. It’s actually a pretty good scene and plays with a lot of tension... Villeneuve using that ‘old chestnut’ of the boiling pot in the corner as a way of enhancing the suspense of the scene. And it works really well here. Here’s the thing, though... I remember back in the early 1980s, Phiilp K. Dick complaining about that scene when he read it in the script and saying that it was one of the worst things he’d read (or words to that effect), condemning the tone of the film Ridley Scott was about to make (although I understand that, from what footage was available of the original that Dick actually saw back in 1982 before his untimely death, he really liked the final film Ridley was making and praised it wholeheartedly). However, I can’t help but think that, with the reintroduction of a variant on that opening (which I kinda guessed they would be doing here, to be fair), he would be turning in his grave.

One of the things which I’ve always loved about the original is the fact that Deckard is never portrayed as being a replicant... something Scott tried to change on all subsequent versions of the movie. There are lots of reasons why he actually wouldn’t be a replicant (quite apart from the fact that Philip K. Dick’s original novel explores the same issue more implicitly and categorically states that he’s not an android)... for instance the weakness of him against any other replicant in the film (newer model or not). In fact he actually gets rescued from death by two replicants in that first film... admittedly by one who is trying to, at first, kill him at the end of the picture in the case of one of them. I’ve never believed for a moment that Deckard could ever be a replicant, despite Scott continuing to say he is... because the evidence just doesn’t stack up. My biggest worry would be that this film would paint him as a replicant but the writers are quite clever here. We have a scenario where Jared Leto’s Niander Wallace character... a more evil equivalent of Doctor Eldon Tyrell from the first movie... kinda assumes that Deckard is but poses the question to him because he isn’t certain.

And... I still think he isn’t. And here’s why...

Villeneuve has gone on record that the original studio cut is his favourite (like me) but that he’s made this one as a sequel to the Final Cut. I think not, actually. This film seems to me to be a sequel more to the original studio cut than people might, at first, realise. The story involves Gosling’s ‘K’ hunting the child of Deckard and his replicant lover from the first film, Rachel (played by Sean Young back in 1982 and again... wait, I’ll get to that in a minute). The back story here is that Rachel died about five years after 2019, in childbirth, due to a C-section. So there you go, if I got my timelines correct, already the film is sequelling the original ‘drive off in to the sunset’ ending where Rachel is deemed a special replicant with no built in, four year life span. Secondly, if Deckard was a replicant then how could he have impregnated Rachel? One or the other sex would surely be manufactured as impotent? Especially since a lot of them were destined to be ‘pleasure models’ and engage in sexual activity. After all, if you’re making replicants, you surely don’t want your male replicants running around shooting anything other than blanks in the reproduction department, do you? So, yeah, I’m happy to say that, as far as I’m concerned, this movie categorically proves Deckard is not a replicant. Finally. End of discussion and we can finally return to seeing that original ending with the origami unicorn fashioned by Edward James Olmos’ character Gaff (who returns in a brief scene with another origami animal here), as the metaphor for Deckard believing in a myth, for what it was. Thank goodness.

Okay... so Rachel. Just under a year ago I complained about the bad job the computer graphics guys had done with resurrecting Peter Cushing’s character in Rogue One (reviewed here). Something I still  stick by now. Well, we have a similar disappointment here where Niander Wallace has created a new version of Rachel who looks somewhat similar to what she did in the original (presumably voiced by Sean Young? It doesn’t say in the IMDB). Except, like Cushing in Rogue One, the CGI character looks really dodgy to me and if I didn’t know she was a recreation of a younger character, I would still see that something was really ‘off’ about her here. This just doesn’t work for me and although the way the character bows out of the film is quite dramatic, it kind of takes the edge off any emotional response to the character I might have had, I think.

One last thing...

There’s a scene in Dick’s original novel emphasising the lack of empathy the androids have which is where, after finally saving enough money up to afford to buy a real animal (a sheep which Deckard names Groucho), one of the female androids throws it off the roof and kills it. There’s a similar incident going for the same emotional beat here, where Gosling’s virtual companion has deliberately put herself in a situation where she has become... for all intents and purposes... mortal. The lead replicant villainess destroys her in a similar throwaway moment and this, at least, is something which I think Philip K. Dick might have been able to appreciate. So there’s that.

Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s new score is trying hard to be like the Vangelis original but it gets way too overbearing a lot of the time. I would have preferred to hear what Jóhann Jóhannson would have done with the movie before he ‘left’ the project. Interestingly, there’s a moment at the end where, from what I can tell, ‘K’ dies from his wounds. As he lets go of his life, we get a new version of the Vangelis Tears In Rain music from the original movie, which underscored the death of Rutger Hauer’s character. However, since the replicants don’t seem to die from injuries too seriously unless shot somewhere vital, it seems to me that you could interpret this moment as 'K' just having a rest for a while. After all, there’s no visual metaphor like the release of the dove from the replicant’s dying hands as in the 1982 version. So it’s interesting that, unless you know the music, you may not realise the character has died at the end, I suspect. However, I could be wrong and placing too much emphasis on the strength of the original score, to be fair. The soundtrack is filled with lots of similar (and in some cases identical), ambient sound effects as the template movie and sometimes, just like the original, you may have a hard time trying to work out where the music ends and the sound design kicks in.

The thing which the story did really well is to actually fool me with the twist reveal of the child of Deckard and Rachel. I was pretty sure who it was all the way through the movie until this moment it’s spelled out and it gives the character in question a new beat, as it were, in that the person is obviously ‘recruiting’ a replicant army by giving memories to various artificial characters. It’s a nice moment in a film which looks great (although not nearly as good as the original) and is full of nice moments such as this. However, for me, even though it’s trying, it just doesn’t feel anything like a sequel to Blade Runner. It doesn’t quite get there... but it does get close on the odd occasion.

One last piece of symmetry with the original, though, was the audience size. When the film came out and flopped back in ‘82, I remember being in a cinema with my parents and there were literally maybe just over ten people in the audience. Well, quite surprisingly, since this new movie has had such high praise, I found myself in the same situation in a 3D screening on opening night, where there were again just over ten people. Which puzzled me and, I can tell you, I saw two couples walk out of the movie at various points. Which I find quite interesting because, whether it lives up to the original or not (and I’m siding with ‘not’), it’s still quite a nice piece of cinema on its own merits.

My friend, who I have been seeing screenings of the original film with since the mid 1980s, was with me for this performance and I think his reaction to the movie pretty much sums it up the best for me. As we both left the cinema, he looked in about as pretty much a state of mixed irritation and dejection with Blade Runner 2049 as I was feeling. He turned to me and said six words... “What was the point of that?” Other than to point out the studio were going for some cash again, I really couldn’t think of a good answer or disagree with his sentiment. For me, I’m afraid, it’s too bad this sequel won’t live... but then again, who does?

Annabelle: Creation

The Doll Monty

Annabelle: Creation
2017 USA Directed by David F. Sandberg
UK cinema release print.

Well Annabelle: Creation is a fun film.

Much more entertaining than I was expecting given that I wasn’t all that into Annabelle (reviewed here). That being said, it does spend all of its time wallowing in the most obvious ‘horror movie clichés’ you can imagine but, although there are no real surprises throughout the movie (barring a couple of nice moments), it at least executes these conventions in a concise and joyous manner and, while there’s almost a deliberate absence of character depth to the movie, it really succeeds in one of the main intents of a horror film... it’s a fair bit scary in places.

Annabelle: Creation is, of course, actually the fourth film to feature the title character after a quite important set of appearances in The Conjuring (reviewed here) which was, in my humble opinion, probably the best horror movie of the last decade and a brief glimpse of an appearance in The Conjuring 2 - The Enfield Case (set in my home town here in the UK and reviewed by me here). Now, I have to admit I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for this movie since the stories themselves are obviously no longer relying on the real life events that are alleged to have taken place in The Conjuring movies and I’m guessing this is Hollywood totally doing its own thing with the ‘character’. To be honest, there was already a ‘creation’ scene in terms of how the doll came to be demonically possessed in Annabelle so I couldn’t possibly see where this thing could go without contradicting itself. Well, if that’s what you are thinking too, fear not, there’s actually a pretty good tie in towards the end of the movie with a little segment which takes place twelve years after the main body of this one... where you get to see certain events you’ve seen before in another movie from a different point of view and which ties it in, quite neatly, to the canon as a whole. No real continuity problems there.

The film starts off with a doll maker putting the Limited Edition brand on the wooden packaging of the first Annabelle doll and it introduces us to his wife and child. However, as in the trailer to this movie, it’s not long before their daughter meets with a tragic and untimely death. The child’s sudden death is handled quite jarringly in a masterstroke of build up and editing, much more intensely implied than as seen on the film’s marketing campaign. The film then jumps on a number of years to a nun and her six charges as they move into the big house with the doll maker and his wife, setting up as a new orphanage. Of course, right away the haunted, demonic shenanigans begin with the children and the director then spends the rest of the time trying to pile on the fear. Which he does quite well but, like I said, clichés...

And I do mean clichés. One of the main child protagonists is partially crippled by polio and right away we are introduced to a chair-lift which can only move up or down once the occupant is seat belted into it. So there’s a situation just rife for a horror chase scene right there and you can bet the director sure uses this set up later. Similarly, we have a ‘dumb waiter’ in one of the rooms with a door which keeps sliding open. Yeah, right. No possibilities for haunted, horror escape routes there then, right? We even have a sinister scarecrow and a big, scary well on the property so, you know, the writers and director are taking no chances in throwing potential horror tropes at you from the word go here. I’d be super critical of all of this if it wasn’t for the fact that the director knows he isn’t fooling anybody and milks the horror elements with almost perfect timing while utilising some strong performances from the kids. One of whom I was especially fearful for, played by Lulu Wilson... due to her similar appearance, in my mind, to a young Hayley Mills.

Now, the film is quite intense but that didn’t stop me from seeing the humour in the film and kind of laughing at certain ‘fright moments’ due to their manipulative obviousness, it has to be said... although certain members of the audience were certainly freaking out right from the start here. Don’t know what that was all about... it wasn’t that scary.

The film certainly plays with the conventions of horror without doing much that’s original with them, I’m sorry to say but, the possible unintentional humour of a few scenes certainly doesn’t go against it and I think most lovers of the genre will be happy with this one. Despite the lack of surprises, though, it does have one very surprising moment in it which isn’t pertinent to the main plot... at least not of this movie, at any rate but, certainly of a movie which is coming to cinemas next year. Keep a sharp eye out for a little scene near the start of the film where Sister Charlotte (played by Stephanie Sigman) is showing the doll maker (played by Anthony LaPaglia) a photograph of her last diocese. There’s a beautifully done, shared universe moment here which I’m sure we’ll get the back story to in 2018. Actually, there’s another nice little moment which may catch people off guard during the film, also using a photograph. I won’t go into too much detail but let’s just say “the eyes have it” and leave it at that.

Benjamin Wallfisch provides a score which, while not exactly a million miles away from what other composers are doing within this genre at the moment, is an effective bit of blood curdling "sound design seeks atonal ferocity with GSOH for scary scoring". It’s appropriate and effective when he pulls out all the stops which he does frequently because, despite the conventions being solidly delivered by the director of this movie, Sandberg also does something which you can’t usually get away with if you want to produce an effective horror movie. This being that there are actually very few rest moments between the various horror set pieces. There are some, obviously but... they are very short and so the horror sequences are almost just piled one on top of the other with very little time for the audience to calm down and pause for breath. This really shouldn’t work as effectively as it does here though so, again, it doesn’t really harm the movie. I suspect the pausing beats that are in here might well have been longer in the first assembly of the movie but were maybe whittled down to up the pacing on this one... who knows, the film might have been even more effective for some longer ‘downtime’ sequences but, as it stands, it seems to manage to hold up nicely without them so, no worries there.

Eagle eyed fans of the real life horrors behind the haunted Annabelle doll will get a little treat too. It’s not exactly a secret that the scary Annabelle doll used for these movies looks nothing like the real life counterpart made famous by the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren. When one of the characters is given a new doll right at the end of the movie, that rag doll is actually a copy of the ‘real’ Annabelle doll so, you might want to keep an eye out for that. Just don’t leave that eye out for long though or you, too, may become the subject of a real life horror filled event.

And that’s me done on Annabelle: Creation. I really wasn’t expecting to like it but, although I did have moments where I was more comically amused than scared at certain points, it’s a pretty intense, single minded ride which horror fans should really get on with. A word of warning though... if you leave when the credits starts rolling then you are going to miss out. There are two post credits scenes on this movie... one half way through the credits which is pretty much what you were expecting the film to do as its last shot anyway but then, hold on because there’s a more substantial appearance of another character once the credits have finished. I won’t say anything about this now but I’m sure I’ll be mentioning it again in a future review, if you catch my drift. In the meantime though, this ones a minor but effective horror concoction that genre fans will not want to miss.

A Cure For Wellness

At The Mountains Of Wellness

A Cure For Wellness
Germany/USA 2017
Directed by Gore Verbinski
UK cinema release print.

I’m not the greatest fan of Gore Verbinski as a director, it has to be said, although I did like his very first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, at least. I would never had bothered with this one if I’d only heard the title, A Cure For Wellness, which isn’t the most inspiring title in the world. However, I was lucky enough to catch a trailer for this a few weeks ago and what I saw appealed to me very much... looking on the surface like something H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up if he were alive today and writing screenplays. As it happens, although this film isn’t without its little problems, I was pleasantly surprised by this B-movie horror yarn built with A-list production values.

After a brilliantly designed and shot, low key “big city America” skyline opening credits sequence, taken at a much slower and meticulous pace than we are used to seeing this kind of thing and significantly rendering it one of the greatest architectural opening montages in recent cinematic memory... we have a short prologue to the movie and shortly after we meet the newly promoted, totally unsympathetic protagonist Lockhart. He is blackmailed/tasked by the board of his new company to bring back a former employee who has gone to a clinic in Switzerland for their ‘hydro treatment’ and not returned. Lockhart is played by an up and coming actor who I have a lot of time for called Dane DeHaan. I’ve only seen him in two other movies, the brilliant Chronicle (reviewed by me here) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here), where he played a sort of good person turned evil in both films. I’m actually worried he’s going to get type cast playing unsympathetic characters if he carries on like this but, you know, he does it so well. And he does it again here in a less black and white way, as his character is definitely the ‘hero’ of the piece but, simultaneously, not someone you would really want to give the time of day to, in all honesty.

The rest of the movie, after the first ten minutes or so, takes place at the castle sanatarium in the mountains of Switzerland and the neighbouring village... both, curiously, shot in different locations in Germany. The film details a story arc pitching him up against the head of the sanatarium, Doctor Volmer (played by Jason Isaacs) while befriending a mysterious girl there, Hannah (who is played by an amazing actress called Mia Goth). He also encounters a puzzle loving lady who is joyfully played by Celia Imrie in exactly the kind of role I wouldn’t expect to see her in. She is absolutely excellent in this too... as are pretty much all of the cast.

The film details a complicated, in its untangling, mystery about the fall out of something which happened at the previous version of the castle three hundred years ago. My overall impression of this, even after it was explained to me, was that it was a little impenetrable in terms of its convolutedness. At the same time, though, it gives the piece a nicely ambiguous feel and my title to this review really fits here, I think, as it’s ultimately a very Lovecraftian affair and has more of the atmosphere of one of his tales than many ‘straight’, actual adaptations of the writer’s work over the years.

Now there are a few problems with the movie, as I see it, and I’ll detail those now.

One is the continuity in some places. Since the film focuses, for good reasons, on people drinking various fluids, there are a lot of shots of half filled glasses and, I have to say, a lot of the cuts between long shots and close ups did have some discrepancies in the level of the top of the fluid in proportion to empty glass, it seemed to me. There are also some discrepancies, I felt, in the timing of sequential scenes and moods of characters in some sequences where the film almost looked like it was heading for a completely different kind of denouement. In some scenes, to me at least, felt like they were completely contradicting each other in tone and character progression and there was, I felt, at least one crucial 'escape' sequence missing. I am wondering if there were two versions of the script as the shoot went on and stuff was shot for both, with the director maybe not wanting to lose certain scenes. So things may have been kept in which screw up the linear flow of the movie, maybe? I’m guessing here but it would make sense to me if that were the case. It would also maybe explain why I was left a little unsure about certain elements of the mystery as it played out. The ending did feel kind of ‘tacked on’ too, to be sure.

One other thing I might say is that, at almost two and a half hours, the film seemed very much overlong in its execution. An hour could have been chopped out of this and it might have played as a much more satisfying and succinct piece. That being said, though, it does have it’s own, European pacing and I’m also quite a fan of this kind of slow burn kind of affair, which didn’t drag at all throughout the course of its length. So, not too worried about this and perhaps one of the reasons it all held together so well was because it has a very nicely put together score by composer Benjamin Wallfisch, which is quite striking and appropriate for the film. Indeed, one of the first things I did when I got home was to pre-order the CD soundtrack and congratulations to the label for actually putting it out in a proper format... so many movies these days are coming out as download only which is a truly horrifying treatment of music.

And that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about A Cure For Wellness. It’s a great little horror movie with an ambiguous, lurking horror filled with some nicely grotesque set pieces involving eels and dentistry which might test the resilience of some audience members but it all makes for an unusual experience at the movies and I would definitely recommend it to certain types of horror film fans who are okay with a slowly developing story arc. The cinematography is beautiful and the shot design meticulous. It’s a little muddled, perhaps, in its editing but more in what was kept in the movie, I think, than in anything jarring on any other level asides from content. I don’t think it will play at cinemas for very long so maybe it’s one to catch sooner rater than later, if you’ve a hankering to see this one. A flawed but intriguing movie which I will probably take another look at some day. If I don’t, there may be eel to pay.

Lights Out

‘Fraiders Of The Ghost Dark

Lights Out
2016 USA Directed by David F. Sandberg
UK cinema release print.

And so on to Lights Out. I’ve not seen the original three minute short film by the same director, which he has chosen to expand into his first feature film, but this is certainly a horror movie which had an effective trailer and kinda lives up to ones expectations of it, to a certain extent. It’s the old horror cliché of 'things' which can’t be seen doing what they’re doing until it’s too late, which is on display here.. as seen in a gazillion horror movies when the monster lives in the shadows and intrudes on the fractured reality of the protagonists when they, but not the audience (who are already in a heightened state of tension), least expect it.

The ghostly and very real, in terms of the harm it can do, monster in Lights Out is an entity which can only function in the dark. Perhaps the most recent cousin to this creature is the invention, by writer Steven Moffat, of the Weeping Angels in the British science fiction series Doctor Who. In that show, those specific creatures appear as statues and are quantum locked so that they are not able to move if they are being observed. Once a person's attention or line of vision isn’t focussed on them, however, such as when a person blinks or is in a dark room, they move very fast and "come to get you." The creature in Lights Out is pretty much another variant of these creatures in that she, her name is Diana, can only function in places where light, or at least most forms of light (as it happens, without spoiling an obvious moment which a few of you might not see coming), reduces the creature's functionality and, as importantly, visibility, to zero. So... you know... watch out for those shadowy areas of a room... which reminds me of another Doctor Who creation called the Vashta Nerada but I don’t think this is a direct homage or steal... just two different writers finding common ground in the way they approach their, genuinely suspenseful, horror tales.

One of the more impressive ingredients of Lights Out is that the main characters in the movie don’t fall into the old cliché of disbelief until proven otherwise, for the most part. Indeed, it’s shown quite demonstrably that disbelief leaves you ill prepared and ready for a body bag in one sequence where a couple of characters enter the haunted lair of the Diana-monster and don’t return in one piece. So it’s nice that the main characters consisting of Martin, played by Gabriel Bateman, his ‘mentally challenged’ mother Sophie, played by Maria Bello, his step sister Rebecca, played by Teresa Palmer and her boyfriend Bret, played by Alexander DiPersia... are all on each other’s wavelengths from pretty early on in the movie. Asides from a pre-credits sequence which features prominently in the trailer for the movie, people fall into their roles in finding out how to best defeat Diana fairly rapidly in this and, it has to be said, I found this a much more refreshing approach to the ghostly shenanigans on show in this movie.

Of course, one of the biggest clichés going in horror films since they first began, the wandering around a place in the dark, is neatly circumnavigated by the writer and director by turning it into one of the main ‘rules’ of this creation. Indeed, the various protagonists in the movie spend almost their entire time trying to keep the lights on in whatever environment they find themselves in and this, of course, means that the audience doesn’t question the movie so much when they find out that, once again, Diana has found some way of disabling all the lights. So, naturally, the writer and director take full advantage of the way the spooky shadows and shapes, as our heroes and heroines wander around with candles, flash lights and whatever else they can find, are cast against the audience’s collective peripheral vision in an attempt, quite often successful, of wringing the full amount of suspense and fear they can out of them.

If it fails, sometimes, to provoke the necessary reaction, I thinks it’s down to how seasoned some horror film watchers are and their relationship with other recent films of this ilk which are, perhaps, done a little more expertly in some places... although this movie certainly makes up for it with its enthusiasm. Where it falls down a little, though, is with the origins of the character which, while seeming to be all out in the open for the dissection of the main characters and those of us watching them, are actually a little more hazy and shrouded in mystery than you might at first realise. For instance, the science fiction concept which has created Diana is something not entirely unlike what happens to the Dr. Manhattan character in the comic book Watchmen and, of course, the movie counterpart. However, while the movie doesn’t go into specifics about the ‘incident’ which caused the creation of this malevolent apparition, allowing one to infer the rest as something which is best left to the imagination, it does tend to gloss over some pretty essential information surrounding the relationship between Diane and Martin’s mother, Sophie. Since the ending of the movie absolutely hinges on this specific relationship, it has to be said that I quite often found myself questioning the ‘up and down’ status of this ‘ resurrected friendship’ in terms of the credibility of the main premise. Without this central relationship, you can’t have the ending which this film seems to tell us is the solution to everyone’s problems... but it did feel bereft of common sense in terms of the mother, for a lot of the time, so it didn’t quite ring true to me in that regard.

However, this is a really minor grumble and, although it’s not exactly the scariest of this year’s horror movies, it’s certainly a nicely executed one in general and, even though the genre rules are mostly adhered to, it does so in a way that doesn’t necessarily make you feel like you’re covering the same old ground again in terms of movies designed to make you jump out of your seat. I mean, yeah, alright, we absolutely are covering the same old ground again... but it does it in a way that makes it seem less important in terms of the variations of the characters you usually get in this kind of movie. There’s also a nice moment involving an electronic car key and its use as a means of survival at one point that was certainly worth the price of admission, as far as I’m concerned. That and the wholly appropriate and unsettling, at times, score by composer Benjamin Wallfisch, which I thought was pretty good.

So is Lights Out the most terrifying movie you’re going to see this year? Not even close. It will, however, certainly give you an entertaining night out at the cinema and, although I personally don’t need to see it again, I don’t have any qualms about happily recommending it to anyone who is contemplating going to see this one... even if they are already fans of the genre.