Tornado

Scottish Katana

Tornado
Directed by John Maclean
UK 2025
Tea House Pictures

Warning: Some spoilerage in this one folks.

Well let’s jump right in here then.

The British Isles, 1790... presumably somewhere in Scotland, which is where Tornado was shot. Tim Roth plays bad guy Sugarman, who has a small bunch of hoodlums with him.. and they have just stolen a lot of gold from a local church. He seems to be well known and unchallenged in the various small communities dotted around the area local to the forest, where the film’s title character is running from him... so I would assume he also collects protection money from those nearby. Also, he has a very casual and no nonsense way about dealing out death, which is presumably something else the locals know. 

Indeed, the film starts off with the film’s central protagonist Tornado, played by Kôki, running from him and his gang, while also being kept an eye on by a young boy. It’s during this opening when we see Sugarman casually and quickly slit the throat of one of his own men as he passes on by him, which is obviously done to create a certain shorthand tension within the audience as to his character but, as it later turns out through way of a back story flashback, also makes a bit more sense later on. Because Tornado has stolen the gold from the young boy, who originally stole it from Sugarman’s thieves. And now the two are being hounded by them in a narrative which, probably lasts for only 24 hours at most, including the contents of that back story. Tornado’s father (played by Takehiro Hira) is killed while he was trying to protect her and now she is trying to get distance and shelter from Sugarman, before she then goes on to avenge her father’s death. 

And that’s all I want to say about the specific story set up but, I will say that this film, the first Scottish samurai film that I personally know of, had me before even the first visual image of the story came on screen. And this is because the film starts off with an on screen, typographic quotation of an extract from a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky. Now, Arseny’s son, who was outlived by his father by three years, is my second favourite movie director Andrei Tarkovsky, so I figured that if the movie has anything like the beauty and poetry of the younger Tarkovsky’s works, well then I was in for a treat.

And I really was, it turns out. 

The film is lensed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan and, I have to say the whole thing looks absolutely stunning. Beautiful colours and locations shot in such a way that the frames just pop out. In the opening shots of Tornado trying to find a way to somewhere where she can hide, the films uses a lot of things seen between the camera and the principle actors, such as branches and tree trunks etc, which really gives the shots some depth. And all shot on 35mm film rather than just digitally, which is a treat in itself and would go some way to explaining why the thing looks so darn good. 

The colours, too, as I mentioned earlier, are terrific. One wonderful sequence, for example, where Tornado’s small caravan has been set ablaze by Roth’s crew, has the inners of it burning a wonderful yellow/orange while the forest canopy and dark blue night sky envelope it. Just spectacular artistry. 

There’s some beautiful foreshadowing going on too. Such as the travelling puppet show put on by Tornado and her father, depicting a samurai fight with some proper gore and splatter coming out of the marionettes themselves... as limbs and a head are sliced off. This, of course, foreshadows the fight scenes between the avenging Tornado and her antagonists towards the end of the picture, when things have taken a turn. 

And as if to doff the cap to samurai director extraordinaire Akira Kurosawa, this director acknowledges Kurosawa’s own influences of the American westerns of John Ford on his samurai films by having a very lethal bad guy dressed in, pretty much, the kind of outfit you would find in a specific style of Western. During scenes such as these the violence, which has been relatively held back and kept in check until now, catches up to the kind of visceral carnage foreshadowed in the puppet show earlier on in the film. 

One beautiful piece of action choreography, for example, features Tornado duelling with the cowboy dude while another bad guy on the floor is trying to painstakingly reload his flintlock pistol... all the while the fight is in progress. As soon as Tornado sees he has finally reloaded his weapon, she twists around and slices off his arm, which lands on the ground still gripping the pistol... then, as the muscles of the severed arm tighten, the flintlock discharges its load into the other guy she was fighting... really nice stuff.  

Another interesting sequence, where Sugarman’s gang have invaded a mansion house where Tornado is hiding, has one of the gang sitting down to play the piano and this is an interesting incident of the non-diegetic music doubling up as diegetic soundtrack for the film. This is just before the actual soundtrack of the film is properly introduced which, again, is absolutely stunning work, this time by Jed Kurzel who is a composer I’ve not been all that fond of in the past but, yeah, this one is absolutely beautiful. And I think, if I’m not much mistaken (but, you know, I might be) that the score also makes good use of my second favourite instrument the cimbalom so... yeah. A shame this score hasn’t been released on CD, for sure. It would be getting quite a few spins in my player right now. 

And added to all this, along with some wonderful editing, is some amazing acting. Even from supporting actors such as the always magnificent Joanne Whalley. But Time Roth is especially good in this, paring down on the words and using his facial expressions and attitude to really bring a sense of gravitas to the situation. This is especially well capped off in the final... let’s call it a ‘showdown’... between Sugarman and Tornado, which was funnily enough, almost exactly what I’d imagined it would be but, the way the scene plays out is absolutely wonderful and so, I can’t begrudge the lack of surprise in terms of the final denouement, so to speak. 

The film also continues in the spirit of Kurosawa (and Tarantino in a scene in Kill Bill Part One, which I imagine must be inspired by Yojimbo), when Tornado lets one of the gang off the hook and allows him to leave with his life (a tactic she also tries a little earlier in the film, with a much bloodier outcome). 

And that’s me done on what is, honestly, one of the best movies I’ve seen all year. Tornado is an absolute masterpiece as far as I’m concerned and I will be lining up for the Blu Ray the first week it gets released (fingers crossed it gets one because I’m having to buy an awful lot of unauthorised Blu Rays from other countries these days, to compensate for the inability of the studios to realise that physical media is actually the best way for their consumers to catch this stuff). I need to see this one again soon, I think. 

Overlord

Horrors Of War

Overlord
2018 USA Directed by Julius Avery
UK cinema release print.

Cry havoc... and let slip the dogs of war. Or, in this case, let slip the reanimated corpses of French villagers given a substance which turns them into crazed, mixed up super soldiers.

When I first saw the trailer to Overlord, a month or two ago, I found it interesting that J. J. Abrams was producing what looked to be a new entry into the ‘zombie nazi’ subgenre but I figured, at the very least, that meant there would be some money thrown at it so it might be worth taking a look. It could go either way in terms of quality and the trailer wasn’t really giving a good flavour of what the final product might be. So I went and saw this the opening night of its UK release and... by golly I’m glad I did.

Overlord is one heck of a well made horror movie, directed by Julius Avery and, well, it’s just extremely competently made and is entertaining as you could hope for. As far as it being a zombie Nazi movie... well technically it’s not. Most of the reanimated people in this are not actually German soldiers and the one Nazi officer who does benefit greatly from the effects of the super serum that the typically stereotypical ‘bespectacled German war scientist’ in the movie is developing isn’t... well, he isn’t dead. There are a few reanimated corpses of note though so, while not absolutely a ‘zombie Nazi’ film in its absolute correct definition, the juxtaposition of those two elements certainly throws it into roughly the same kind of area, if genre categorisations are your thing.

The film tells the story of a unit of soldiers flying into France to blow up a communications jamming unit on top of a Nazi controlled church (more like a fortress, truth be told). However, after they are shot down, the few survivors of the incident manage to find each other and regroup to carry on the mission. The main protagonist is Boyce, played absolutely wonderfully and with a fine mix of both confidence, righteousness and vulnerability by Jovan Adepo. Now, the only big problem I had in terms with suspending disbelief in a film about reanimated corpses taking a super serum is that, heck, you would not get that racial mix happening in the US army in the 1940s. The soldiers would have been segregated into different units but... if you can get past that, Adepo really owns the character and gives the audience someone to believe in and care about.

Another member of the troop is Ford, the tough and slightly enigmatic member of the unit. He also brings a nice quality to the film and all the way through I kept thinking how much this character would have been well played by Clint Eastwood back in the 1960s or 1970s. Now I knew it wasn’t Eastwood’s son playing this role (for my thoughts on him, read my review of Pacific Rim - Uprising here) but, once I’d stayed behind for the end credits and found out the actor’s name was Wyatt Russell, it all made sense. Closer investigation showed his full name to be Wyatt Hawn Russell and he is, in fact, the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn... so looking back I must have been picking up on a vaguely Snake Plissken vibe to the character. He does really well in this movie too.

Now, it has to be said, the film is pretty intense and brutal in places, even before the surviving troops befriend one of the local French women, Chloe (again, played quite brilliantly by Mathilde Ollivier) and get embroiled with a triple mission of blowing up the tower, stopping the mad experiments which are taking place in the basement of the fortress and rescuing Chloe’s younger brother. One of the reasons it is so intense and, for once, had me on the edge of my seat, is because the whole ‘war is hell’ angle is played up so well that it more than holds its own against the horror element. Scratch that, I would go as far as to say the way in which the conflict between the Nazis, the American soldiers and the occupied French villagers is handled is absolutely what gives this film its edge over a lot of others where they might not necessarily take up the amount of time to pitch the setting right. In fact, apart from a gooey mess of a body found in the early stages of the film, the horror B-movie (with an A-movie budget) doesn’t even start to emerge until about a third to a half of the way through the story. When it does it’s equally fraught, as Boyce finds himself on his own midst the enemy in the compound for a while... something the director really ramps up by using a lot of hand held camera during these passages. Heck, even Boyce’s parachute jump at the start of the movie is an absolutely drawn out, nerve stretching suspenseful sequence and it just keeps getting more intense from there.

The other thing about this is that the film doesn’t skimp on is showing the brutality of war and what both sides are willing to do in the conflict. There’s one sequence in the middle of the movie, when the German officer who is built up as the main villain of the piece is being ‘interrogated’ by the Americans, where Ford is seen to be almost as brutal as the Nazis in his methods of acquiring the information he needs to know. To be fair, you’re definitely rooting for Ford again by the end of the film but this movie really takes no prisoners when it comes to being fair about what people are capable of doing for their respective side of the conflict. For example...

The film is full of clichés such as the soldier who is perceived as nasty but then turns out to redeem himself and have a heart of gold by stopping a bullet for the child he pretends to hate. The soldier in question is played by John Magaro and, like any of these actors, you could see them holding their own in some of the great war movies such as Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Ditto for the cliché of the war photographer who’s not really a soldier but ends up going through hell (played here by Iain De Caestecker from Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD). The thing is, though, because the film is so dark and raw when it needs to be and doesn’t really flinch in the ‘horrors of war’ department, I really didn’t mind the clichés inherent in some of the character types. Indeed it’s kind of comforting that they’re there in a way and, of course, it makes for really useful shorthand in telling the story quickly. And with Jed Kurzel’s wonderful score backing up the visual intensity... sadly unavailable as a commercial stand alone release when I tried to buy a copy of the soundtrack, CD or otherwise... you really do feel it when the action gets going and things get a little insane.

One other thing about this movie I should probably warn you about, if you’re not a die hard horror fan... there’s a lot of blood and viscera in the film. You will see a person, for example, shot in the head and then, with his face half hanging off, dose up on the serum before beating everybody else up. This is war and when the bullets start flying, sometimes when you least expect them to, then the director doesn’t look away when it comes to throwing in the guts and gore. Not necessarily an element which I particularly look for in a film but, if the story atmosphere calls for it then I don’t think you should skimp on it and this seems to be the view shared by the film makers on this one, to be sure.

So that’s my take on Overlord, a movie which I wasn’t too hopeful about but which I’m really glad I saw. This is quality B-movie exploitation shocks done just right and with, for once, a big enough budget to be able to pull it all off credibly. If you are into horror movies, or war movies or, as like this, a thrilling combination of the two, then you should definitely put Overlord near the top of your list because it’s all put together extremely well. Oh... and if you have already seen this and you were in the 8.20pm screening at Enfield Cineworld in Row E on the opening Wednesday... get a life. You don’t need to be texting on your phone all the way through the film. Turn the damned thing off and watch the bloody movie.

Alien: Covenant

Xenomorphing Cower Strangers

Alien: Covenant
USA/Australia/New Zealand/UK 2017
Directed by Ridley Scott
UK cinema release print.

Warning: There’s a clearly marked SPOILER ZONE in this article. So I’ll warn you when you get there.

Gosh... this is kind of a difficult film to process. I really liked the ALIEN films up to and including the fifth in the series, the first ALIEN VS PREDATOR movie (despite the glaring continuity error in that last one and not including their cameo appearances in any solo Predator movies). However, the last two in the franchise, ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM and the so called A L I E N prequel Prometheus (reviewed by me here) really didn’t sit well with me. AVP: REQUIEM pretty much reduced the beautiful Alien Xenomorphs to the level of a teenage slasher movie and might better have been called 'Aliens Meet Jason' or some such dreadful thing (although, it has to be said the movie did have one thing going for it... an outstanding score by Brian Tyler)... and Prometheus, which I and pretty much everyone I know had high hopes for, suffered from some really bad artistic choices.

In Prometheus the three biggest sins were the reduction of the beautiful space jockey designed by H. R. Giger for the very first film... transformed into tall men wearing bone suits (known as Engineers), the absence of the actual Xenomorphs themselves and, finally, the absolute lack of actually leaving us in a place where the first movie could actually pick up from in the first place. The film was beautifully executed and absolutely gripping during the first half and then it just got really disappointing very quickly, not long after the crew went on board the alien ship.

This new film in the franchise, once again directed by Ridley Scott, is pretty much more of the same combination of awesome movie making coupled with some disappointingly poor artistic choices as far as I’m concerned. I’d rate it a definite improvement on Prometheus but this is very much a sequel to Prometheus than it is a prequel to A L I E N, it has to be said.

The film starts off, after a scene with Michael Fassbender reprising his role of David, which is set some time before the events of Prometheus, before fast forwarding past the previous film by a good ten years. My first danger signs that made it feel like Ridley was trying way too hard and, more importantly, too clumsily, to win franchise fans back came with an opening credits sequence that tried to mimic the first film badly in terms of the typefaces appearing in sections but with the twin mistakes of having them appear way too fast and also going to a second line of the same for the film’s subtitle at the bottom of the screen. This already felt a bit rubbish but then having the composer Jed Kurzel, who does an appropriate job for a lot of the time, using a new variant of Jerry Goldsmith’s famous, unused opening titles for the original A L I E N to play out over them was just a little bit too much.

Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Kurzel’s score to this and am looking forward to acquiring the CD of it at some point soon, the first third to a half of the movie seems to be intent on parodying various moments of Goldsmith’s original score for A L I E N. Now, this maybe wouldn’t have seemed so out of place if the Alien franchise had a very definite musical identity grounding it. Alas, as far as I am aware, every single movie in the Alien series (including the Predator versions and Prometheus) have had a different composer and, while some of the orchestral textures shared a commonality in some of the movies, there is no underlying style which has given them a consistent, coherent musical identity (the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe films are guilty of exactly the same crimes against musical filmanity, by the way). So, much as I appreciated hearing all of this pseudo-Goldsmith pumped through the cinema speakers... it just seemed a little misplaced here.

Although the film makers have tried to at least retrofit the space ship Covenant to the Nostromo of the first movie, they somehow neglected to remember that they never had a load of hologram style technology in A L I E N, which was obviously set some time after the events in this film (although a big shout out to the set dressers for the return of one of my favourite things to the series, the drinking duck). We also have the continuation of the synthetic David character, portrayed so brilliantly by Michael Fassbender, who is, in himself, something of an anomaly. In James Cameron’s ALIENS, we had the idea that a synthetic crew member as part of the family, so to speak, was a normal thing to take with you on board a spaceship. However, people should maybe remember that the second film was set quite a long time in the future from the original A L I E N movie so, you know, things had moved onto where it became normal to have a synthetic on board. Before that, though? In A L I E N, Ian Holm portrayed Ash, a synthetic who was not known as an android to the rest of the crew. He was a secret plant by the Weyland Yutani company. So... and Prometheus had this problem too... how come that before the events of A L I E N, having a synthetic human on board seems to be par for the course already? It kinda makes no sense.

Okay... this is where the spoilers start, people.

Also, while I’m on the subject, it also makes no sense that he would posess superhuman speed and strength. Certainly Ash and Bishop in the first two movies displayed none of that and yet, here, they are hurling people around like action figures. So... yeah, the continuity is screwed. And the continuity is also screwed when it turns out that the Alien Xenomorphs we are familiar with through the original Giger designs are, in fact, engineered by David. Because this is still set many years in our future folks so, if this is the case, how in heck did they come to the planet Earth many years in our past, as established in the first ALIEN VS PREDATOR movie? None of it is really making much sense. Honestly people, we laugh at how screwed up the continuity is from film to film on those old 1940s sequels to Universal’s The Mummy but modern franchises like the X-Men films, the Resident Evil films and this ALIEN franchise are just as bad, if not worse. Future generations of film fans will look at these movies and laugh at how quaintly people of our time must have forgotten what was going on between films.

Okay, so I was hoping for a reappearance of Noomi Rapace as the sole human survivor of the last movie... Dr. Elisabeth Shaw... but she really doesn’t get anything more than an illegible visual recording and a sound recording in here. Which is a shame because, opening credits aside, the first half of the film is quite strong, leading all the way up to an attack by alien life forms of some sort, not long after the spaceship Covenant touches down on the Engineers planet. What’s left of the crew are ‘rescued’ by a hooded figure and I was really hoping the rescuer would be Shaw but, alas, it was Fassbender as David. Now Fassbender also does double duty here as a later model of the same character called Walter but, it has to be said, the story is really crude and obvious from this point on. Once we are shown that a synthetic human can grow hair (seriously?), we have two almost identical looking characters, one who is a good and loyal android and an evil/mad version of the same. So I have to say I defy anyone who doesn’t know what’s going to happen towards the end of the movie here. And when David starts cutting his hair it’s pretty much spelled out long before we ever get to that point in the film. It’s a crude plot device which wouldn’t seem out of place in the early days of TV but to still be using this whole ‘evil twin’ surprise thing here (and this franchise is not the only modern franchise using this tired, over played, intelligence insulting template) really shows how sloppy and uninventive modern movie writers have become.

End of spoiler zone.

Another bad thing about this movie is the xenomorphs themselves. For most of the film the key alien monster is a whitish pink thing not unlike the terrible ‘Casper The Friendly Ghost’ looking Alien at the finale of Alien Resurrection... it’s not quite as crude as that but... yeah, really not impressed, in all honesty. The smaller, ‘just hatched’ versions of these are much more effective here in terms of suspense than the grown versions. The xenomorphs do feature in this eventually... just not very much and, it has to be said, they looked really clunky in some scenes. In fact, they looked almost more like a man in a suit (which I’m told they’re not, here) than the original version in A L I E N and, it has to be said, are far less effective. The face huggers are way better used here but... well... remember when the acidic blood of these creatures could eat through several hulls of a spaceship? Well here it can’t even eat its way fully through the front of a human face so... seriously some major continuity errors here, I feel.

Well that’s all the bad stuff.

The good stuff is... it looks and sounds awesome. Ridley Scott makes beautiful looking films... of that there is no question. The cinematography is amazing and although a fellow movie goer was complaining that it was too darkly lit (especially compared to the same scenes in the trailer), I think this works in its favour to cover up some clunky CGI in some parts and allow the audience to bring their imagination to the party... which is always more effective. I think Scott really knows what he’s doing visually and it certainly shows here.

We also have a cast who are quite brilliant. Michael Fassbender always brings a lot to the party and seems to be extraordinary in anything he puts his mind to. His costars are all great in this too and with a special mention for Katherine Waterston who is the ‘strong but emotionally vulnerable female’ Ripley surrogate of this movie. She does some good work here, especially when it comes to one of the film’s key themes... how characters deal with the emotional loss of a loved one when they are suddenly taken from them with no warning. There’s a fair bit of that in this movie for several of the characters and I suspect I know just why that theme is touched upon quite so often here but, due to my own, admittedly slightly twisted, moral compass, I don’t want to point it out here because it’s an issue which may be sensitive to at least one of the artists involved with the making of this film.

There are a lot of things I could be saying about Alien Covenant, many of them bad and some, probably, fairly good but I don’t want to labour the points and I think I’ve touched on the key things I wanted to cover in this review. The more I think about this film, the more disappointed I am in it... although it was a heck of a lot more focused than Prometheus, that’s for sure. While I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to non-Alien fans, I would certainly shout it out to all of those who do love the majority of the previous movies. It’s going to make some money, I hope, because I really want to see Ridley finish it up with a link back ot the original A L I E N movie (which it gets nowhere near doing here) but, in all honesty, I think the xenomorphs are a little played out now, to tell the truth. Not a terrible film... not a great one. A kind of a quaint, almost 1950s style sci-fi/horror yarn with a few little shout outs, in some moments, to Scott’s greatest masterpiece, the original studio cut of Blade Runner. Glad I saw this one but it’s not a repeat watcher for me.

The Babadook

Yabba Baba Dooooook

The Babadook
2014  Australia
Directed by Jennifer Kent
UK cinema release print.

Well okay then... The Babadook. 

This movie is one of those films that kinda comes out of the blue and then you’re instantly showered with a load of pre-publicity via trailers and tie ins. Arriving just in time for Halloween, it’s one of those films where you really hope the movie is going to live up to the promise of the trailer at least a little and that it’s not just another teenage stab-you-in-the-groin-and-run-away horror movie for sensation seeking, underage kiddies who have no experience or love for the history of the genre.

Well, I can say quite happily that The Babadook does not disappoint on that level, at least, although I was aware of a lot of disappointment and frustration at the end of the movie with the audience I saw it with last night. All I can say is... I’m glad it doesn’t do what you’re expecting it to do at the end folks... there’s enough of those kind of movies around already.

I’ve not seen anything directed by Jennifer Kent before but this movie was pretty well helmed. It would be unfair to say it’s a totally original film as it absolutely does use, and milk, all the standard horror clichés that you get as part and parcel of this kind of “haunt and scare” movie, to be sure. However, it would also be fair to say that these genre clichés, which are so much the bricks and mortar of movies of this ilk, are absolutely treated with both respect for the rules of the genre and Kent manages to shoot, edit and time her scares and mini revelations as the film progresses with absolute stylishness and panache, allowing the audience to both know what’s coming but to feel it too... just how she wants us to.

The film is a simple two hander about a strung-out-to-the-end-of-her-rope single mother, dealing with the death of her husband and the son he left behind in the aftermath of a horrible car crash. The lead protagonist Amelia, played assuredly by Essie Davis, was carrying her child inside her on the way to the hospital when the car crash happened. Consequently her seven year old son Samuel, played with much competence and brilliance by Noah Wiseman, never knew his father. What he does know, though, like all kids in general, is that he’s being stalked by a monster who sneaks into his room at night. When he finds a book which enables this fear, called The Babadook, for his bedtime stories, the nasty creature in the book takes on a life of its own and comes to try and claim the “handful of a kid” and drive his mother insane.

The film is well set up and it’s also a character piece in many ways, more so than most movies that succeed or fail in this genre. All of the other characters in the film serve to add texture, contrast and stress to the central characters and they seem to be there purely for that purpose... which works really well as you begin to get a feel for Amelia and Samuel and come closer to them as people while the film progresses.

The director approaches The Babadook with a lot of slow, leisurely paced camera shots and this works really well. There don’t seem to be many fast cuts in this one and there is some nice inventive stuff thrown into the mix of the already clean shot designs. One such sequence where the mother kinda falls from a height at the foreground of the camera looking down at her springs to mind, used as a metaphor as she falls onto her bed and lets sleep embrace her.

Actually, sleep is one of the things that is the language of fear in this movie. The writer/director (both Jennifer Kent) has already set up some nice, possible foreshadowing when the book shows her a glimpse of herself and what she is becoming. I won’t say too much about that because I want to keep this spoiler free but there are clear sign posts all the way through the movie that the director wants to make you very aware of. However, when it comes to the currency of sleep it becomes a battlefield because, on the one hand, the mother needs sleep. She is absolutely exhausted a lot of the time and it’s obviously throwing her judgement and behaviour off. However, she’s also painfully aware by the last third of the movie, and so is the audience, that sleep is something to be equally feared because, obviously, sleep is when The Babadook usually comes to do its work and she fears what the book has shown her. What this gives us, of course, is a typical horror character of the mother who, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, is possibly being possessed by the thing she fears most, as opposed to the possibility of an outside intruder. As the movie goes on, Kent does start to blur the lines a little more with both of her main protagonists and there are times when the audience does question the motivations and attitudes of both of them.

Thrown into the mix with this is the fact that the director can also slip effortlessly into “dream” mode at any time, as she does a few times... that is to say, she uses the surrealistic syntax of dreams when the characters are drifting in and out between sleep and wake. There’s a lot of silent film imagery drawn upon in this movie for certain of these sequences too... George Melies stuff is obviously a blatant influence on the film, and ties in nicely with Samuel’s interest in being a magician of illusion, but it’s quite clear that she’s a fan of German Expression too. Especially in terms of the design of the creature, although the majority of the specific references worn on the sleeve by the movie as such seem to harken from other countries, such as Lon Chaney’s well known turn in The Phantom Of The Opera.

At the end of the film we are caught in a place where the director really has rendered it impossible to tell whether we are in a dream, a waking nightmare, or the reality as the characters experience it. Astonishingly enough, the dream language mostly seems to be used to prime us and a lot of the really awful stuff, which I won’t reveal here, is actually really happening to the characters... so that does tend to show someone who is a master of their craft. The smoke and mirrors approach really begins to pay off.

The final denouement is all fine and ties in with the past of the characters... at least in terms of the Babadook finding a way into the inner workings of Amelia’s mind, but it was the aftermath and final end scene which I think disappointed a lot of the audience at my screening... although I found it to be a welcome breath of fresh air, myself.

My own personal false note in this came from the composer of the score, Jed Kurzel. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a humdinger of a score... completely appropriate to the movie and it fails to give in to the modern horror scoring attitude of “sound design trumps melody” (although there’s a lot to be said for that kind of scoring too). There are some very strong melodic passages in here but this is where my specific problem lies. Anybody remember David Lynch’s Dune? It had a score by Toto which was “allegedly” a rip off of the four note theme composed by Ronald Stein for Roger Corman’s pseudo Poe picture (it’s actually based on an H. P. Lovecraft story) Haunted Palace. Anyone who listens to the scores will certainly question the necessity of writing “allegedly” in that last sentence, but I don’t want to get myself into trouble. The score was quite notorious at the time and for decades to come with various soundtrack afficionados wondering how Toto got away with it. Well, there’s a prominent four note them in The Babadook which, as far as I could tell, is exactly the same four note theme again. Now to be fair to the composer, who did a wonderful job on this movie, the arrangement is quite strikingly different and that just leads me into the argument about the thin line between arrangement and composition in scoring... which is somewhere I frankly don’t want to be. I’ll leave that argument for the John Barry and Monty Norman fans to have again, thank you very much. But I was surprised to hear such a notoriously famous melody being picked up again for a movie. Not unwelcome just... well... surprising.

All in all, though, I found The Babadook to be a really interesting horror movie with, perhaps a little less punch in some of the scares but very much a film with a certain depth to the characters which helps the story and attitudes explored through this one a great deal. Definitely a good watch if you take your Halloween celebrations seriously and something I could recommend for a dazzling variety of reasons... some of which I touch upon above. The Babadook is playing at a cinema near you now if you’re in the UK so, if you’re a fan of the supernatural horror movie in general, this one’s definitely worth some of your time.