Archive 81

Portal Combat

Archive 81 -
The TV Show
Stream date: January 2022
Eight Episodes.

Warning: Meticulously restored spoilers jumping out of the screen at you here.

Archive 81 is an eight episode streaming TV show which is based on a 2016 podcast. Now I’ve not listened to the original podcast (although I may well do at some point) but, considering this show was raved about when it hit the airwaves in January and had very high ratings and positive critical feedback... you kinda have to wonder why Netflix has cancelled it after one season. Especially since, although a part of the story has a conclusion, there’s definitely a cliff hanger to lead into a second season.

The show follows Dan, played by Mamoudou Athie, who is a top tape and film restorer for a firm. Then a powerful, wealthy, faceless corporation owner named Davenport, played by Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan, hires him to work in solitude in a compound by himself in the Catskill Mountains, for which he will pay a princely sum. His job, to restore a bunch of old, burned video cassettes which were rescued from a fire in the Visser Hotel in the 1990s. A woman called Melody, played by Dina Shihabi, was convinced the hotel had a clue to her mother, who abandoned her in a convent when she was a baby. So we have, at first, two levels of narrative running, as Dan works to restore the tapes and piece together just what happened in the Visser in its final weeks. Meanwhile, the found footage videos Melody made are augmented by the audience eye going into those scenarios and also following her story as she shoots the footage, also filling us in on the bits in between the various tapes that Dan is restoring.

Fairly quickly in the show, though, Melody’s reality starts bleeding into Dan’s reality and it’s not long before the two, aided and abetted in about equal measure in their own times by Dan’s friend Mark (played by Matt McGorry) and Melody’s sometime girlfriend Annabelle (played by Julia Chan), start almost working together to solve the mystery. And when I say together, I mean just that, as Dan and Melody keep overlapping and meeting in dream state versions of each others world. At first Dan thinks he’s just gone crazy due to his history of mental illness but, pretty soon, he starts finding evidence of his encounters with her decades before, on the tapes he’s restoring, not to mention finding that his dad was somehow involved in the mystery too... his family all burned in their home one day when he was out walking the dog as a kid.

And... it’s okay. I actually started watching this and getting quite into the first two episodes but, yeah, it does get a bit formulaic and the mystery takes its time to unfold and is pretty much spelled out in every episode before it’s all finally revealed in the last two. It’s pretty obvious that there is witchcraft actively taking place using human sacrifice to open a portal between dimensions at certain points in time... well, it was not much of a surprise to me, at least. I think it might be because I’d recently just watched some great TV shows like Invasion (reviewed here), Yellowjackets (reviewed here), From (reviewed here) and the absolute masterpiece that is Station Eleven (reviewed here) so, coming off the back of those, the pacing and ‘page turner’ quality that so many were giving it good reviews for may have been lost to me.

That being said, the acting by all concerned in the show was great, with a special shout out to Mamoudou Athie on this one for fleshing out the slightly distanced Dan as an unflappable and confident character that the audience is willing to keep tuning in for (although ‘tuning in’ my not be the correct turn of phrase that the kids are using these days, i suspect). Also, since his character has a love of old fantasy and science fiction serials and movies, such as Flash Gordon (although, dude, Flash Gordon didn’t release in 1940... you’re confusing it with the third serial, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. Not to mention his home studio is kitted out with framed prints of Criterion Collection covers such as Hausu and Solaris (although, when he puts Tarkovsky’s Solaris on his television in one scene, the aspect ratio seems to be a lot less wider than it should be so, I don’t know what print he’s watching a transfer of at that point).

Add, yeah, it’s a short review and, although obviously a lot of people loved Archive 81 (which makes Netflix cancelling it seem even stranger), I don’t think I’d recommend it myself. It grabbed me from the beginning but, somewhere around the third or fourth episode it stopped feeling essential to me and more of a... well, not a chore but, I dunno, it just didn’t stray into any original territory... I felt like I’d seen it all before. That being said, I will attempt to track down the podcast at some point because, while the TV show gives the appearance that Dan has rescued Melody from another realm, it then goes to show that he, himself, has been trapped in 1994 (although, I don’t believe he is, I believe he’s still in the other dimension). So maybe the podcast will tell me what happens next... although my understanding is its already quite different from the TV adaptation, with the tapes Dan’s restoring on the podcast being audio files, not audio/visual media, for example. I’ll let you know what I find out if I do.

Ant-Man

Little Bug Man

Ant-Man
2015  USA
Directed by Peyton Reed
UK cinema release print.

Warning: The spoilers in this review are mostly small.

Okay, so I’ll freely admit to not knowing much about the Ant-Man character... but I do know that once again this ‘adaptation’ of a character I used to read, starting off with his 1962 appearance in Tales To Astonish Issue 27, has been seriously meddled with for the movie version. I also remember him when he was Henry Pym, a solid part of The Avengers as various characters such as Ant-Man, Yellow Jacket and Giant Man (and I think a couple more I can’t quite remember) alongside his wife Janet Pym, who was also a superhero called The Wasp. I remember her quite clearly, in fact, getting together with some of the other ladies in the Marvel Universe and tackling the issue of male sexism in a story from The Avengers Issue 83 called The Revolution’s Fine, which I read as a colour reprint in a British annual.

Now this movie has had some fairly high profile trouble in that the wonderful comedy writer and director Edgar Wright was attached to this for a while, before having his script rewritten and leaving the production due to creative differences with Disney, who bought out what I call the ‘Marvel’s Own’ brand a couple of years ago... already successful in their incredibly good run of Phase One and Phase Two movies. This film, in fact, finishes Phase Two before we go into the next movie, Captain America: Civil Wars which will start off Phase Three. People who want a quick lead in to that film will need to stay for the second of two post-credits sequences in Ant-Man. I believe Joss Whedon, who successfully wrote and directed the two massively successful Avengers movies for Marvel, was quite overt in his praise of Wright’s original script and, from what I can gather, thinks Marvel/Disney made a mistake letting it go.

While I was saddened to hear of Wright’s departure from the project, I loved the idea of the film being directed by Peyton Reed, as he had directed one of my favourite romantic comedies, a deliberate throwback to the old Doris Day/Rock Hudson films called Down With Love. However, with a rewritten script and the messing around with the old 1960s and 1970s version of the Ant-Man character, the film is not without it’s problems... but it’s also not a terrible mess and it certainly doesn’t let the side down in terms of the new ‘Marvel’s own’ movies... it’s a damn sight better than Guardians Of The Galaxy (reviewed here), The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2 (reviewed here), for example.

In the movie, the Hank Pym character, played by acting legend Michael Douglas (son of Kirk) takes more of a mentor role to Scott Lang... a character from comic books from much later, when I wasn’t reading them, played by Paul Rudd. Pym’s wife Janet is missing presumed dead in a realm of the microverse which fans of Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man are left to ponder at the end of that story, which is also actually shown in a nice scene towards the end of this one. Instead, we have someone called Hope Van Dyne, played by Evangeline Lilly, actually Hank Pym’s daughter but who really looks the absolute dead spit of Janet Pym as she was portrayed in the 1960s/70s comics I used to read. So much so, in fact, that when I saw the trailers for the movie, I just assumed she was playing The Wasp... which is something she might well be doing, in future Marvel movies, it’s hinted at here. My one hope is that, eventually, Marvel will take it into their heads to explore the Microverse a little closer and do an adaptation of their 1980s comics The Micronauts... I would love to see Commander Arcturus Rand, Biotron, Baron Karza, Bug and all the others brought to the big screen. But I digress...

This film is mostly okay although, its obvious I have some problems with it. I’ll get to those soon enough but there’s good stuff too. I actually started to get interested in the way that some of the earlier scenes of Scott Lang were shot from slightly above the level of his height... giving him a somewhat diminished feel in certain shots. So, for example, we’d watch him from the camera viewpoint of a hill above a level that he is walking towards. Alas, this tactic doesn’t stay with the film for long but it would have been nice if they’d have kept that up throughout the whole movie, I think.

There’s a couple of wonderful montage sequences where one of Lang’s friends is telling him a long “he said, she said and then this guy said” structured kind of story involving many characters and as the shots progress, including the usual cameo by Stan Lee in one of them, the lines the various characters are saying are replaced and lip synched to the character telling the story. It’s quite inventive and exactly the kind of thing I would expect from this director following his inventive visual approach to Down With Love. I don’t know how well those scenes will play in foreign dub versions but in the English versions, they certainly give the two sequences a little push.

The actors are all pretty fabulous, including Michael Douglas who does an absolutely brilliant job as Pym, the guy with the brains behind “the suit” and former Ant-Man himself, which is nicely acknowledged in the movie. And he looks so young in this too... how does he do that? And they’ve got the great acting genius Martin Donovan in here in a minor bad guy role. Sadly wasted in terms of screen time but he makes a truly unsympathetic villain and, if you like him in this, you should definitely check out the work he’s done in various Hal Hartley movies over the years. He’s a legend.

There’s also a nice thematic edge in this in that everyone’s character seems to grow a little as they learn more from each other. This is a really neat touch and it even applies, to some extent, to the main villain of the piece, Corey Stoll as Yellow Jacket... hey wait? Wasn’t Yellow Jacket just another heroic incarnation of Henry Pym... oh, okay. Whatever, Marvel. You destroy your legacy as much as you like, it still all kind of works in the movie to some extent so I’m not too much bothered by it at this stage of the game, after seeing so much that was good in various Marvel comics thrown away in their dumbed down screen versions.

What I was bothered about was the science. Yeah, it’s okay to have a completely incredible science breakthrough that lets you put a man in a suit and shrink and enlarge him without doing harm to him because of the way the suit houses you. However, it’s then necessary to have a certain amount of logic to your ‘crazy science’ and not have it contradict itself, otherwise it loses the ‘fantasy credibility’ you have fought so hard to have the audience suspend its disbelief for. So, if you then introduce discs which are little bombs which can safely shrink and enlarge people and objects without causing any harm... then why the heck did you need the suit to begin with? This is kinda lame, it has to be said. However, if you don’t think about it while you’re watching it, it kinda almost makes sense at the time and it’s good to see the various visual gags that this rogue shrink/enlarge effect brings to the movie... despite totally losing any respect for the writing in the process.

Also, another little real world feature as a tip to the people who put these movies together. We’re not living in the 1940s anymore. If you shoot someone in the arm, for instance, there’s going to at least be a modicom of blood. I know, blood means more likelihood of a higher certification but, the fact that you are completely ignoring the consequences of violence to get something past the censors is... well, it’s not good for the young and impressionable audience is it? They need to understand that violence is ugly and bad. Now, you can get away with this kind of stuff, maybe, if we are talking about a character in the back of a shot just falling down and playing dead. However, when you go in for lengthy close up shots and there’s no blood... not even a hole in the material of the clothes the bullet was supposed to have torn through... your realism just took a serious nose dive and is hurting the film. Seriously... if you can’t show it, then alllude to it in a creative way... please don’t fudge it like this.

I think people’s biggest problem with the movie will be that there is so much time dedicated to the story arc and characters to set the Ant-Man up as a bona fide Marvel superhero, that the film feels a bit ‘ant’iclimactic at the end. There’s a bit of a battle scene which you see a fair amount of in the trailers and when that’s played out in the movie you are left thinking you’ve seen a small battle which is going to lead on to the real spectacular set piece of the movie... it takes a little while to process/realise that you actually just saw the film’s big, final battle and that the main villain is already out of the picture. That being said, though, it’s more than made up for by smaller set pieces in the movie including a guest appearance by a character who I won’t reveal here... but lets just say that there’s a sequence in here which allows composer Christophe Beck to bring in Alan Sivestri’s Avengers theme at one point. There are actually a fair number of cameos or comic book fan pleasing moments throughout the film, such as a nice little line about Tales To Astonish... but I won’t start listing them here.

Ultimately, Ant-Man is a fun movie and it’s not going to disappoint too many fans of the Marvel franchise, I suspect. Inventive but a little uneven in places in terms of its pacing, is the way I perceived it. Possibly, like Avengers: Age Of Ultron (reviewed here) it’s a film which will grow on me a lot more with subsequent viewings (I ended up seeing the aforementioned movie four times and got more out of it on later re-watches... so maybe Ant-Man will get better the more familiar I get with it). Definitely something which needs to be seen before the new Captain America movie is released, that’s for sure, and something which is a relatively good time at the cinema. It may be a film about a small hero but I’m pretty sure the box office on it won’t be that minimal. Ant-Man is definitely a character I think we’ll be seeing more off as the on-screen Marvel universe continues to expand and interpenetrate with itself. This is possibly a small film leading to bigger things.

Ned Rifle

To Hal And Back

Ned Rifle
USA 2015
Directed by Hal Hartley
DVD Region 2

You know, it’s always quite hard to review perfect films like the ones Hal Hartley tends to make. For many years now I’ve been citing him as my favourite living writer/director and, though I found a couple of his later shorts and one feature of his that I didn’t like as much as the others... it has to be said that he rarely disappoints and is the last word in US independent film making as far as I’m concerned. So much so that this particular movie was even funded by a Kickstarter campaign and, since I’m unaware of any screenings in this country, I had to wait for a DVD to become available from his website before I was able to see this.

Ned Rifle is a very interesting name for a feature from Hartley as many fans will know the name. He’s more often than not written the musical scores for the majority of the movies he’s directed and, again, more often than not, they’ve always been absolutely appropriate to his subject as well as being pretty good listens away from the movie... if one is actually fortunate enough to come across a release of any of them. The point is, before everybody caught on and realised it was Hartley “pulling a Carpenter” and doing the scores for his own movies, he used to use the name Ned Rifle as his compositional pseudonym... sometimes playing as part of a group with the further deviation of the name, called Ryful. Of course, everyone’s wise to all that nowadays but it was truly a full circle kind of feeling watching the opening credits of a movie called Ned Rifle with Music by Hal Hartley. Kinda made me chuckle.

Ned Rifle is a bit of a miracle for an independent movie maker because it’s actually the final part of a trilogy which he started back in 1997 with his most popular feature Henry Fool, which I saw and loved at the time of its release, either at the Lumiere Cinema in London (if it was still just about open by then) or maybe at the London Film Festival one year... I can’t remember. It was pretty self contained and had a lovely, ambiguous ending which really didn’t need any closure heaped on it. So it was pretty unusual to find that, indeed, closure did come nine years later in the form of a follow up focusing on the further adventures of Henry Fool’s wife, Fay Grim, in the movie... um... Fay Grim, in 2006.

Now, going back to my first paragraph here, it has to be said that Fay Grim was about the only feature film by Hal Hartley that I didn’t really like as much as his others. It was, as I would expect from “the greatest living director”, well made but I didn’t chuckle as much as I usually do during Hartley’s movies and I was less impressed than I’d hoped I would be. By then, though, I believe some people were saying that Fay Grim was Hal Hartley’s The Empire Strikes Back... in that there would hopefully be a ‘concluding’ part to what was shaping up to be the Henry Fool trilogy. And here it is now, in the form of Ned Rifle... another nine years after the last one.

One of the things which had impressed me about Fay Grim was the casting. In the original Henry Fool, a film where the titular character played by Thomas Jay Ryan is, maybe, a modern philosophical genius or a perverted degenerate... probably a compelling cross between the two... Fool is a catalyst for change on those about him. He eventually marries Fay Grim (played by Parker Posey), the sister of the film’s other main protagonist Simon Grim, played by James Urbaniak (you might also remember him playing comic book artist Robert Crumb in the excellent American Splendour). About three quarters of the way through that first movie they have a son, Ned, and he’s played for the last bit by a then 7 year old actor called Liam Aiken. Startingly, he returned as the 16 year old version of the same character for Fay Grim and, oh yeah... with the character’s second name changed to Rifle as part of his witness protection programme after events in that second movie, he’s back here playing the same character at 25 years of age (I guess, although he may be playing slightly younger in story years... couldn’t really tell). So he, and a lot of the regular cast from the other two, are all back for this one. Which is no mean feat.

Aiken has, of course, always been a pretty good supporting actor and he easily handles the main protagonist role in this movie, aided by Hartley’s often criticised but much loved (by this humble movie watcher), less than naturalistic dialogue. And as usual, Hartley’s writing is wonderfully performed by the various actors who, this time around, include a much loved and frequent Hartley collaborator from his early days, appearing for the first time in one of the Henry Fool films, the always watchable Martin Donovan. Here he plays a priest, which is kind of a step down in religious terms, I guess, after playing Jesus opposite Thomas Jay Ryan’s performance as the devil in Hartley’s amazing millennial movie The Book Of Life.

So this film is Ned’s story and it starts off with the revelation that he’s “found God” and so, being an unshakingly religious person, he decides to seek out the man responsible for the incarceration of his mother... his father Henry Fool... and kill him. Yeah... I guess that’s the problem with religious types, isn’t it?

Of course, this then becomes a little bit like a road movie as Ned follows the clues given to him by various old characters (and actors) from the previous movies in the trilogy, such as his mother Fay and his Uncle Simon. He’s also simultaneously aided and abetted by a character called Susan Weber, played by an actress called Aubrey Plaza, who is new to the Hal Hartley universe and seems pretty suited as a typical Hartley character... reeling off long and overtly complicated passages of his brilliant dialogue and still managing to make it all sound just about acceptable and highly comical, just the way it’s written. Actually, this character has a surprise twist revelation which, and this is my one slight criticism of this film, I feel Hartley reveals too early on in the storyline. I’m obviously not going to spoil this and tell you what it is here but what I will say is that, fans of the character Henry Fool will get a little surprise about a story element from his past turning up to haunt him... it’s a really nice touch and explores the kinds of problematic issues which are less talked about in mainstream cinema... if one can exactly call Hartley a representative of mainstream cinema these days. Though goodness knows he should be... I’ve never understood why this guy isn’t a more lionised and celebrated writer/director in his own country. The man is such a vital artist.

The film itself is typical Hartley, with crisp, witty images and the kind of strong, clean compositions you would expect from this man’s work. Beautiful, even colours create their own blocks and shapes and the director and cinematographer tend to section parts of the images off using these various shapes so that everybody gets their own little section of the screen to cleanly fit into. There’s an absolutely amazing and extreme, almost audacious culmination of this visual style at one point where the amazing Martin Donovan is sitting in the foreground of a shot in sharp focus next to a ladder. As his daughter is talking to him in the background, she moves to fill a square formed by the rungs and sides of the ladder as she does so, also in deep focus. Wow. Visual orgasm or what?

Another example is where Ned Rifle is sitting on a bed on the right of screen and Weber is lying at the other end talking to him, the shot split in half by a lampshade dividing them visually in the centre of the frame. This is great stuff and also, of course, can be seen as a visual metaphor for the divide between the lives of the two characters. The dialogue is less clever here but certainly tugs the heart somewhat as Ned says, “I have to...”. Weber finishes the sentence for him, “Pray?” “Yeah.” says Ned. Weber continues, “You have to tell me about that one day.” “What’s to tell?” asks Ned. Weber concludes the scene by responding, “How it feels to have someone listening.” The almost split screen created by the lampshade is a nice touch to augment that dialogue and it’s little moments like this which allow me to conclude, with this movie, that Hal Hartley is still a cinematic genius or, to put it another way... yeah, he’s still “got it”.

Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle is available on iTunes and you can watch, stream and grab the DVD from the director’s website www.halhartley.com If you’ve never seen a Hal Hartley film before then this may not be the absolute best one to jump on with, being as it’s technically a sequel to two of his other movies... but you can check out a load of his other films at the website and others are available from the usual channels. If you are already a fan of Hartley you’ll definitely want to pick up a copy of Ned Rifle in whatever format is your poison... if you’ve never seen a Hal Hartley movie before but are a fan of cinema in general... well, just pick any one and get to it. I’m sure you’ll soon want to watch them all.

Nurse 3D (aka Nurse 3-D aka Nurse)

Clear As Blood

Nurse 3D
aka Nurse 3-D aka Nurse
USA 2013
Directed by Douglas Aarniokoski
Lionsgate Blu Ray Zone B

Well this is a refreshing little movie. I took a chance on this because I loved the two promotional posters which were put out... painted impressions of the title character, played in the movie by an actress I’d not come across before called Paz de la Huerta. One poster depicted her totally nude, asides from her nurses' hat and high heeled shoes, but not showing too much because the majority of her body is covered in blood. The other shows her in her nurses' gear and riding a giant syringe. Now, neither of these tableaux are quite in the movie, although the first scenario does have a kind of equivalent moment... but I’m happy to say that the two, quite striking pieces, do sum up the spirit of the piece quite well and I was really pleased by this bloody and sugary confection.

And I’m also, it has to be said, quite baffled by the strangely split response from the target audience.

It’s actually a little more like I was expecting American Mary (reviewed here) to be like, to be honest and, while neither American Mary or Nurse 3D have anything like the kind of levels of grotesque shock and goriness implied by both the content and marketing of those two films, Nurse 3D wins out, for me, by having a very strong sense of humour shot through it which I found sadly lacking in American Mary, to a certain extent... although I notice that exactly the opposite conclusion has been drawn by some reviewers.

Let me start by saying that both the beautiful cinematography and the editing of the film hooked me in right away which, bearing in mind it starts off with the old birds eye cityscape kind of opening which I’ve seen gazillions of times in gazillions of movie, is pretty impressive. It’s not like they’ve even added any new camera movement to the effect, but it’s just so sharp and got so many beautiful colours in even this mundane style of  shot, that I was pulled right into the following sequence of the title character talking to herself and the audience, in a voice-over internal monologue, before I even knew what had hit me. It’s a very fluid sense of camera movement throughout the whole film and it has extremely breezy pacing. Honestly, it feels like it’s a Disney movie or something, right from the opening and all the way through. Like a big, toffee lollipop that Disney might have made, if Disney were in the business of constructing movies around the inner thoughts of a homicidal serial killer posing as a nurse and gorily righting what she sees as wrongs.

The rest of the cast, including Katrina Bowden as the main ‘hero/victimised protagonist’, Kathleen Turner in what amounts to a cameo, Judd Nelson (Remember him? “Don’t you... forget about him...”) and, unbelievably, the great Martin Donovan (who should have won every oscar going by now) are all astonishing but the real star of the show is Paz de la Huerta. She’s really interesting and I think maybe the film’s split focus between the obvious Hollywood main protagonist Danni (Katrina Bowden) and Nurse Abby Russell (Paz de la Huerta), may be one of the reasons people have had a kind of torn reaction to it. The tone is uneven because, frankly, half of the time you are on the title character’s side and are rooting for her, even when you know you probably shouldn’t be... but de la Heurta plays her serial killer role with such a sense of fun and cuteness that you can’t help but be split between the two. However, that’s really not a bad thing and I would suggest that maybe the core audience don’t always enjoy examining the way they feel about their reactions to characters in cinema, perhaps?

Anyway, the film opens with a dazzling scene of us witnessing Nurse Abby Russell in action, as she picks up a man who has no qualms about cheating on his wife (with her) and then slashing his femoral artery before pushing him off the roof of a multi-story building. So, right from the start, Russel is set up as a vigilante, avenging sex bomb and, frankly, strong women like that are always hard to resist and, I’m concluding,  a good thing in cinema in general (even if the constant shots of her naked form  suggest the male-gaze motivation behind the way some of it is written).

At first I thought Paz de la Huerta (full name María de la Paz Elizabeth Sofía Adriana de la Huerta) was a bad actress but then I realised the way she was playing the role was actually, given the fact that it gets quite obvious that the character is definitely a few bandages short of a full medical kit, with a kind of unbelievable, projected intensity and investment in the role. She’s actually quite amazing and very deliberate with the way she both reacts and pronounces things... it’s almost as if she’s done what Bela Lugosi used to do and learn the scripts phonetically... which of course, in Lugosi’s case too, makes you prick up your ears and really listen. Now I’m pretty damn sure that isn’t the case with this particular actress but I do know that something about her means I pretty much couldn’t take my eyes off her whenever she’s on screen. It’s like the camera is radiating towards her all the time and I also couldn’t help but think about Marilyn Monroe, and the way she would deliberately project a personae into the camera lens. It’s almost like Paz de la Huerta is channelling Monroes style of performance in the psycho babysitter role from Don’t Bother To Knock (reviewed here) but totally stripped of any vulnerability and in full, self confident mode... and it’s actually quite a dazzling performance which underpins the whole movie, to an extent. So I need to see more films with her in, for starters, to see if she has this kind of presence in other movies or if it was just something that kind of came together for this role.

Either way, the movie is astonishing in terms of mise en scene, which is a big help, and there’s even a nod to the great Dario Argento in the scene where Nurse Abby injects Danni’s step dad, played by Martin Donovan, and we cut to an expressive and audacious fake shot of the action from the inside of the syringe... which is exactly the kind of thing Argento started doing back in the late 1980s and early 1990s in films like Opera, for example. I would be really surprised, actually, if a director of Aarniokoski’s attitude, who shot second unit on films like Resident Evil: Extinction (very briefly reviewed here), wasn’t in any way influenced by Argento but it’s certainly nice to see him putting his influences up there on the screen like that.

Another interesting thing about the movie is the music, which for the first half of the film doesn’t really do much Mickey Mousing or, indeed, even reflect the psychological landscape of the film to any extent than of being in Abby’s mind... so it just kind of plays through in a very light, poppy, ambient way until, suddenly, things don’t go quite Nurse Abby’s way for a while, which is when a little dissonance and sinister vibrations start flavouring the music. Now, if the composer would have only kept the score doing that, then that would have been a noteworthy choice for this artistic voice because it would mean that the score is only reflecting Abby’s thoughts... enhancing the character’s presence on screen through the style of the scoring. Alas, very soon after the score turns into this area, composer Anton Sanko also starts using it to describe the threat to Danni’s character too... which is a shame, I think. That being said, it might not have been the composers choice that the music does this at various points in the movie so I have to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

All in all, though, I was really pleased by the way Nurse 3D turned out, despite the lack of goriness implied by the marketing. I think this movie should certainly be a little more appreciated than it seems to be and I’m really surprised to find that, since it was actually completed in 2011, it was wallowing in distribution hell for two years prior to its release. This is a movie I would recommend to pretty much anyone who likes a good serial killer movie, especially because the narrative viewpoint of the story is actually from the killer herself... and that’s not all that usual in these kinds of films (although there have certainly been a few famous examples of this in cinema over the years). As a result of this movie, I definitely need to start looking out for films featuring Paz de la Huerta (I think I can see one I’ve not seen sitting on the shelf opposite me as I write, actually) and I’ll certainly give this movie another watch sometime in the future. A charming serial killer movie, as far as I’m concerned.

The Haunting In Connecticut

Haunted, Dead Or Alive

The Haunting In Connecticut
2009 USA/Canada
Directed by Peter Cornwell
Lionsgate Blu Ray Zone B 

I think I managed to miss this film when it came out at the cinema because it was released during a particularly stressful time in my life. I didn’t think much of it until a sequel was released last year... which I figured meant the first film was at the very least a competently made horror movie. So, when I came across a very cheap blu ray copy, I picked it up and gave it a go.

The Haunting In Connecticut is certainly a competent horror but it’s also nothing new. It purports to be a true life story and that particular conclusion is somewhat in question, as far as I can tell, although I understand that Ed and Lorraine Warren (who were the lead characters in The Conjuring, reviewed here) did investigate this particular case in real life. So there’s that.

The film has a few good things going for it though. The cast, for example, are all spectacular and includes three of my favourite performers Virginia Madsen (Sideways, The Prophecy) playing Sara Campbell, Martin Donovan (Trust, Simple Men, The Book Of Life) playing her husband Matt and Elias Koteas (The Prophecy, Crash) playing the clichéd, but no less effective, “true believer and keeper of wisdom” character who comes in for the last act, once everyone in the main story are finally accepting that they are under attack by troubled spirits of the dead.

The main protagonist, Sara and Matt’s son Billy (played by Ty Wood), is suffering from cancer and the family take a bargain home near a hospital where he is receiving new, untested treatment for his condition. There’s a nice moment during a montage near the start of the movie where Sara is seen driving and it’s cross cut with footage of her son getting his first dose of treatment. In this scene he has a kind of mesh mask put over his face and this is beautifully reenforced in the next shot as Sara drives past a mesh fence, which immediately echoes that.

Now then, the usual horror film rules and ways of scaring the audience apply here but the writers give themselves an extra but obvious edge by having the doctor in charge warn the boy that if he starts to hallucinate as a side effect of a new drug, the new experimental treatment for his cancer will have to stop. This, of course, blatantly allows the director to throw all kinds of scary imagery at the boy, and of course the audience, while also assuring that the character won’t be saying anything about his experiences to anyone for at least half the movie. So I guess that’s handy.

And throw it at us he does. Using all the old tricks in the book such as things glimpsed in the backgrounds of a shot, incongruous reflections in various shiny surfaces such as mirrors, windows and television screens and he even goes down the old tried and true “ghostly point of view shots” route to let the audience know that the family is... well... is not alone. Added to this are a few games of hide and seek, something often used in scary movies and you can perhaps see why I was beginning to question the formula a little as the movie wore on. Quite often I would find this kind of clichéd bag of scare tactic tricks more than a little lazy but, like a lot of horror films released lately, to be honest, the direction and editing here is just right and it’s a very competent sense of timing employed here, throughout a lot of the film. I know this is so because, although I was feeling kind of “middle of the road” during a lot of the running time, there came a point in the last 20 minutes or so of the movie where I leapt up and shouted “Ughhhh!” while waving my arms about. So I respected the director a lot more after that moment, I can tell you.

Another nice thing he does is use montage sequences, and there seem to be a lot of those kinds of sequences in this movie, in such a way that he’ll crosscut them with something else in the same character’s future or past so he’s able to speed the pace up while still giving us all the relevant shot content. So, for example, he runs a montage sequence of Billy’s sister researching the history of their new home while simultaneously crosscutting backwards and forwards to a conversation between the two of them discussing the results of that research. Now I remember I picked up on this exact same technique in another movie I recently watched and reviewed but I just can’t remember which one. However, the director manages to pull this kinda stuff off quite neatly and it definitely helps keep these exposition scenes moving along quite speedily... so that’s good.

Added to all this, of course, is a fairly typical, but no less effective because of it, example of modern horror scoring by composer Robert J. Kral. I’ve not heard of this guy before but he seems to have done a lot of scoring for TV (with things like Angel and Scooby Doo) and it seems to have proven a good training ground for the effect heavy dissonance kind of scoring which seems to have become almost a pre-requisite for these kinds of features... along with some nice melody work, as well, utilising choir at some point. Whether this works as a stand alone listen away from the movie or not I’m still not sure (I’m still letting the soundtrack album grow on me) but it’s certainly both an appropriate and effective force within the context of the movie so... no complaints here.

At the end of the day, this is a film which I suspect would have been much more effective in a darkened cinema with a load of unsettled teenagers but it’s not a bad attempt at a modern scare movie and I can see why it was popular enough to warrant a sequel. If you’re a fan of modern ghost story movies then, although it’s not the best, it’s certainly one which should still be on your radar and it’s a relatively fun watch for most of its running time. Just be careful you don’t squeal too loud.

Silent Hill: Revelation

A History Of Silents

Silent Hill Revelation
France/USA/Canada 2012
Directed by Michael J. Bassett
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: From early on there will be at least one big spoiler lurking in the fog of this review to allow me to discuss the movie properly. You have been duly warned!

The original Silent Hill game was always a dark and scary experience, but just too subtle in terms of game play (not mood) for someone like me to be able to stick with for any length of time (that goes double these days... I can’t remember the last year that I played a console or computer game, too busy writing this blog). I was never a one for survival horror games like this or Resident Evil because they involved stealth and subtlety and, in all honesty, just not enough damn ammo to do what I wanted. I wanted to shoot things in a gory hail of steel tipped ballistic carnage, not sneak around quietly when a zombie (Resident Evil) or newborn baby with a carving knife (Silent Hill in its original pre-censored version) wasn’t looking in my direction. This is why I stuck to first person shooters like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Or platformers like Tomb Raider, Lego Star Wars and Lego indiana Jones... the other stuff just wasn’t my cup of freshly ground pixels.

Ironically though, I quite like the movies which are based on these games.

The first Silent Hill movie came out in 2006 and it was actually pretty good. It managed to capture the surreal... oh heck... just ‘plain bugnuts crazy’ atmosphere of the most imaginative evil coming your way to take you to a fate far worse than death, which is consistent with the source material. It starred Sean Bean and Radha Mitchell and ended on a pretty big down note... with Radha Mitchell and the daughter of her character trapped in the alternate reality of Silent Hill while Sean Bean is left in the real, physical world.

And then everyone waited for a sequel...

And they waited...

And they waited...

And then recently there came news of another movie based on the game, this time called Silent Hill: Revelation and I have to say that the publicity that I saw from this made it look like a reboot. Although Sean Bean was touted as being in it, it certainly didn’t look like it was, in any way, a sequel to the first shot at it and even Bean’s character name on the IMDB is different (there’s a fairly good reason for that, which is sorted out within the first ten minutes or so). Since I know this will make a difference to whether people will bother with the new one or not, let me just say that Silent Hill: Revelation is definitely a direct sequel to the 2006 movie... but I would add that, if I hadn’t played the game a little or seen the first movie in the series... I probably would have been a bit lost or at least, would have been less understanding of what was going on in this one.

Silent Hill: Revelation is a film which, because the marketing campaign seems to be a little dishonest, to say the least, doesn’t go out of its way to explain the various elements which make up the town of Silent Hill. It’s got a fairly basic plot, which relies on what is presumably the ‘revelation’ of the title as to the true identity of one of the characters from the first film (although it’s less a revelation and more a “ho-hum, whatever” kind of moment, it seems to me), and you won’t need to be doing much thinking about what’s happening on screen... unless, of course, you are unfamiliar with the dark and twisted territory which is Silent Hill. If anything, the plot kind of resembles the first Transformers movie, but with a mystical symbol replacing the ‘all spark’ of those films.

It’s good that you don’t have to think too much about the plot, though, because Silent Hill almost lives up to its name in that the majority of the running time is almost treated like a silent movie... but, you know, with “scary as ****” sound design. That is to say, once the basic set up is out of the way, the film becomes one long series of extended horror explorations/set pieces folding into each other like a set of Russian dolls. There’s very little let up as you are asked to pay witness to one dark, surrealistic vision after the other and, in some ways, this is the movie’s main flaw. A lot of horror or action directors will realise that to enhance the emotional weight of the action/horror sequences... you need fairly frequent breaks between these kinds of set pieces with which to contrast against. There are a few short breaks between horrors, especially near the start of this movie, but mostly it’s just 'eerie' followed directly by 'spooky', 'bloody' and “what the buggery ****” all piled on top of one another.

There’s no question the film makes you anxious and dread filled for the majority of its running time, and after all that’s what a good horror film tries to do, but I felt that a lot of the scares in this one could have benefitted by a few more scenes of ‘down time’ to make them seem even more potent when they happened. Still, it’s hard to argue that too much when the pacing in this one is so blistering.

The acting is kinda bizarre and wooden in places. I can’t work out if it’s a deliberate ploy by the film makers to echo the typical style of a standard computer game ‘cut scene’, or whether it’s just badly written dialogue in places. There are actually some real, animated sections typical of 'in game' footage shown interacting with the live action at a couple of points in the movie, so maybe that’s why. It’s kind of strange but seems to work in its own way. I just hope the animated sections weren't dropped in because the director didn't have all the footage he needed to make sense of the edit, though.

The girl playing the grown up ‘daughter’ from the first movie, played by an excessively cute actress called Adelaide Clemens, is especially likeable in the role and someone you can easily cheer for when it comes to it. Major acting talents such as Martin Donovan and Malcolm McDowell turn up in what amount to extended cameos and Sean bean has a little more to do in this one. Not loads, but he comes out better than he did in the first movie. Radha Mitchell and Deborah Kara Unger are also back in cameo scenes, reprising their roles from the first film... so you are in good hands most of the way.

The dark twistedness that is a trademark of the series is handled pretty well, including an amazing chase through a stockroom full of dolls where a tremendous CGI’d ‘pseudo-stop-motion’ animation chases the main protagonist around for a bit... although the ‘scary but sexy’ nurses from the first one are neither as sexy or scary as they were the last time around. The big knife guy seems to be treated as a less important player in this one too, although he is still quite intimidating at times. He’s pretty much similar to the big knife guy in the last two Resident Evil movies... so it’s not as effective as it could have been perhaps. I don't know which of these two games used that kind of character first.

The 3D works well in this one, the cinematography is clean (even while roaming designer grunge and decay) and the score by Jeff Danna is as effective as his score for the last one was, again drawing on themes and elements from the series of games on which the films are based. There’s also still the odd nods to sci-fi and horror genre buffs in terms of names used for places which aren’t as blatant as the last film but are still there to bring a smile to the face.

If you want a scary night out at the pictures and you were a fan of the first movie, or if you’ve played some of the games, then Silent Hill: Revelation probably won’t disappoint you too much... if however, you’re not in familiar territory walking those foggy streets, you may want to rent or buy the first movie from 2006 first in order to get a better understanding of the underlying plot references. A good little entry into the series, however, and I hope we don’t have to wait as long for the sequel to appear this time around.