47 Metres Down

Eat Metres

47 Metres Down
Dominican Republic/UK/USA 2017
Directed by Johannes Roberts
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Here be spoilers...
but I will warn you again before I get there.

There came a point around about halfway through Johannes Roberts' new shark bait movie, 47 Metres Down, when I realised I was sat in a dark room spending an awful lot of time watching dark water, floating bubbles and not much else. I chose to see this on a weekend where I just had to see the almost perfect movie Wonder Woman for a fifth showing (and counting... my initial review is here)... so that just left me one slot with a choice of two films which, quite frankly, seemed like a slow cinema weekend. It was either yet another teen killing, spooky haunted something or other presentation (which I may yet still manage to catch) or it was a shark movie. Since there haven't been that many shark movies in cinemas in recent years I opted for the latter but, in hindsight, that may not have been the wisest choice.

The film though, I'm happy to say, is certainly not populated by the vacuous, over-teened characters that the trailer makes out. Although my concerns over whether to two leading ladies were destined to be shark fodder or not was hard to judge, they at least weren't the kind of bratty, empty headed young party goers you maybe might have been expecting from something like this, I'm pleased to say. They weren't exactly greatly drawn characters either, for sure and the usual 'move fast, ask questions after the movie' Hollywood style short hand does still apply here but, at least I could imagine hanging out at a bar with the two main leads, played by Mandy Moore and Claire Holt, without making my excuses and leaving early. So that was okay. And as for the rest of the characters in the movie... barely traced outlines of shades of people, even in the case of the one 'star name' in the movie -  Mathew Modine as Captain Taylor - who spends most of the film as a disembodied but authoritative voice on a headset radio.

The plot set up is two sisters, one just coming out of a relationship break up, who go on holiday and end up meeting two guys who persuade them to do the latest, semi-legal tourist activity, being lowered in a human cage a few metres down at sea to look at the passing sharks. At this point, though, I was pretty much in the camp of... anyone who would put themselves in that kind of semi-risky situation in the first place deserves to be eaten.

So, yeah, the inevitable happens and the dodgy bit of string holding the cage in the water breaks. The girls and cage go tumbling down to the bottom of the ocean floor (or at least a ledge in his case) with only 30 to 50 minutes of air left in their tanks and with various obstacles other than just the man eating (and in this case I guess I should call them woman eating) sharks which are making periodic drive bys to see if their packed lunch has come out of the wrapper yet.

It's not the most boring of films and the director keeps things lively but, it's not the most intense either and it wasn't long until I came to that point which I mentioned earlier where everything was just dark (clearly shot in a tank) water and fizzy bubbles. In fact, the teal tension and unease in the movie, and it's not without those specific elements either, come from Tomandandy's score. Like the recent movie Dunkirk (reviewed here) the music is pretty much everything in adding a layer of menace to the proceedings and the scoring is, at the very least, a well functioning water beast that plays its part maybe more than it might honestly be expected to, truth be told. Apart, that is, from the terrible songs in the early parts of the film, both diegetic and non-diegetic, which almost made me want to swim to the nearest exit.


Spoiler Warning. Miss out the next
paragraph if you don't want to know.

Perhaps the most inspired part of the movie is the fake ending but, alas, the introduction to this sequence much earlier in the movie is clumsily handled in that it's badly telegraphed to the audience. There's a point where the good captain drops a couple of oxygen tanks for the girls and we hear his warning to the particular lady who has swum in range of his signal, that the reason he didn't drop them before is because there's a possibility the overuse of these may give them oxygen psychosis hallucinations. Now, come on, there's no way that would have been written into the script unless the writers were going to use it as a feature of the film later on in the 'story' and, sure enough, as I watched the girls float to their rescuers and get back on board the ship, albeit with some nasty but implausibly gentle (for a shark) wounds... I was thinking, yeah this isn't real... and it isn't. There's a nice effect with some blood on the hand wound of one of the leading ladies and it’s beautifully done as a reveal that half merges the hallucination she is having in her head with the reality of her situation (which is vaguely reminiscent of the ending of the original British cinema and home video cut of The Descent) but, like I said, you kind of know it’s coming so... nice idea but failed to make much of an impact on me, I’m sorry to say.

End of spoilers.


So there you have it.

According to the IMDB there seems to be a whole slew of technical inaccuracies, some of which, from what I could make out, would stop the possibility of the way this story might play out in real life in it’s tracks. I was interested in the fact also, that at the depth the main protagonists are in here, there is no light to give certain things the colours we know them as... so the blood should apparently look green to the human eye at this depth. I wouldn’t have known that unless I’d read it though because, clearly, the blood in this film is pretty red. This includes a ‘close but no cigar’ opening sequence where one of the leading actresses spills her red cocktail into the swimming pool beneath her as a not so subtle visual metaphor for what we are going to see later on. It doesn’t really work all that successfully as a moment of tension, however (which is what I suspect the director was going for there), because once you realise the girls are in a swimming pool, you know there’s no possibility of a shark attack happening at this moment.

And that’s about all I can say about this one. 47 Metres Down is a nice idea but it’s a limited one and the exploration of those story limits throughout the fairly short running time doesn’t serve to help put any real bite in the picture. It’s maybe a little better, or at least more credible, than the shark movie I reviewed last year, The Shallows (reviewed here) but ultimately I left the cinema a bit disappointed with it, I have to say. I’ve not seen any movies which truly measure up to the king of all shark movies, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and, in all honesty, this one comes nowhere near that in terms of quality and entertainment, as far as I’m concerned. Not the big fish I was hoping it might turn out to be.

Sinister 2

Sin-Aesthetics

Sinister 2
2015 USA
Directed by Ciarán Foy
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very slight spoilers on this one... I suppose.

You know, for a movie series which highlights a supernatural entity who sows terror by getting people to document brutal deaths and using the aesthetic properties of a specific medium such as film, music, radio etc to do it... and then hold that exact same thing up to the audience as a form of entertainment, reflecting the very method the sinister perpetrator of these films uses to perpetuate his own mythology in a post-modern, ironic manner... is really something that I should probably find very appealing, interesting and comforting within the context of a modern horror movie.

Alas, the Sinister films, it seems to me, take this promising premise and then just throw it away, ham-fistedly, in an attempt to chase a specific kind of horror audience which probably hasn’t existed in truly profitable numbers since maybe the late seventies or early eighties drive-ins. I honestly was hoping for more from the second part of this franchise but... this film delivers something far less palatable and, while it does still have a few nice things in it... I really would have been cursing the studio for turning out this film following the last one...at least if I’d have had more of a liking for the first movie which, luckily, I really don’t.

When I reviewed the first Sinister movie here, I pointed out that the only truly good things in it were the performances (including one by the always outstanding Ethan Hawke), Christopher Young’s score and a very surreal scene of ghost kids running around a house. These were pretty much the only things of any interest the first movie had going for it so... well... you might well ask why I bothered seeing the second one. And the answer to that, dear reader, is because I really didn’t think much of... Insidious.

I reviewed the first Insidious movie here and it really wasn’t anything to write home about. However, when I ended up seeing Insidious 2 (reviewed here) and Insidious Chapter 3 (reviewed here) I found both the sequels to be much more interesting movies than their original counterpart and so... I was kinda hoping the same effect would kick in with the Sinister franchise but... yeah, it seems not.

Sinister 2 doesn’t really have a lot going for it, it has to be said.

Like movies such as Jurassic Park (reviewed here) and Wild At Heart, Sinister 2 moves you straight into a traumatic event taking place. This opens with supernatural occurrences being visited on the audience straight away with both a ‘film’ of people being burned alive on crosses... followed by one of the film’s main child protagonists hanging out with a set of ghost kids. Unlike both Jurassic Park or Wild At Heart, however,  it doesn’t frighten you or set you up to feel really afraid of the possibility of certain things happening... it just makes everything feel a lot less creepy because there is no slow burn lurking terror to help along the ‘scary bits’... and the timing of those kinds of scenes and the way they are handled in this movie just makes them... well... they’re just not effective, you see them all coming and you certainly won’t be frightened of them. All the best scares in this movie were in the trailer and... they’re really not any scarier within the context of the movie as a whole.

Another thing is that the majority of the characters are just not in any way sympathetic... I’ll get to the ones who are in a minute. The two kids are not someone you’re really invested in saving from the possibility of their horrible fate and the abusive father figure in this film is really just setting you up so it’s okay by you if he dies a gruesome death... even if the end result of that particular scene completely contradicts the opening of the movie. Yeah... so there’s no logic in this movie anymore because they jettison it in the final act. Really, there were very few characters who I wanted to see survive this movie anyway and since, as it turns out, they’re going to show us that things we’ve already seen really weren’t as were presented and then alter how the events turned out then, by that point, I really don’t care anymore.

Thirdly, the murders committed by the various children in this are brutal to the point of just making for a really mean spirited film. I really don’t enjoy seeing the documentation of atrocities such as the ones on display here and it smacks of just being gruesome for the sake of it... rather than feeding into what could have been a great, supernatural movie.They even use the old medieval torture of having a live rat gnaw its way through someone’s body to escape a heated prison trick... except they do it to five people in one hit here and this, along with a couple of the other murder variants in this story, make the movie really uncomfortable to watch and, though that’s probably the point, the irony of the central premise becomes lost because it’s really no fun to see this stuff shot and presented the way it is here. This is meant to horrify and it does... but that very literal interpretation of what a horror movie should be doing really does harm/cancel out the supernatural dread which the film is, obviously, also trying... and frankly, failing... to create for the audience.

Fourthly... they’ve tried to expand on the eerie ghost kids sequence in the first movie way too much and ultimately, the whole scariness of that is shot down right from the word go, here. It’s like half the movie is trying to be a less effective version of that scene and, really, it doesn’t work even once... especially at the end where we get the POV scenes of characters who can’t actually see the kids reacting to what are presumably, to them, poltergeist like disturbances. This obviously completely erodes any logic of having the main antagonists having to use living people to do their killing in the first place. Seriously... what is the point?

I said there were a couple of good things in this too. Well the unnamed deputy character played by James Ransone who was so good in the first film returns in a much larger, main protagonist role as the equally unnamed ex-deputy character from the first film... and he, for some reason, has some great lines and seems incredibly well fleshed out compared to everyone else in the movie... even though we still don’t know anything much about him. His scene with a character called Dr. Stromberg, played by Tate Ellington, which links things more back to the first film, is the standout scene here... mixing genuine spookiness with some great one liners, relying very much on Ransone’s comic timing. And most of the way through the film... you will be rooting for him until the dreary miasma of general nastiness dulls everything down, leaving this particular audience member weary and uncaring.

Similarly, the main female lead played by Shannyn Sossamon, is equally interesting and works really well with Ransone’s character. She’s not quite as well written as him and, at the end, when she really does metamorphose from being a strong, resilient character to a full bodied damsel in distress... well, I kinda gave up on her too, to be honest.

Tomandandy’s score to the movie is serviceable, highlights a certain creeping dread and does what all good modern combinations of atonal stinger and ‘lurking in the realms of sound design’ horror scores do... but it’s trying to imbibe the movie with a certain amount of terror which, alas, the film just really doesn’t have in abundance. I’d listen to it away from the movie... and probably will if it comes out on CD as opposed to a stupid electronic download... but it really seems to be trying to score a film the director and producers wanted to make, as opposed to the one they ended up with. At least it feels like that to me.

So that’s that, I think. Unless any future sequels... and given the box office take on this so far that’s possibly in doubt now... are actually great works of art, then this is the last time I’ll ever have to watch Sinister 2 and, really, I’m not unhappy about that. If you go to see horror films to see demented goriness which makes no sense and which pales in effect due to the way its presented... then this is for you. If, however, you go to horror films to see how the director can both use and bend the rules of the horror film to evoke an emotional response in the viewer and to see if anything new or interesting can be brought to the table... well... Sinister 2 is definitely something you can miss out on. The only sinister thing about this one is how they could manage to make a sequel worse than the first movie.

Resident Evil: Retribution 3D

Vile Bodies Of Evil In War

Resident Evil: Retribution 3D 
2010 Germany/Canada
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Screening at UK cinemas now

Warning: Here be evil spoilers!

So here we are again. This is the fifth movie in what I think I’m right in saying is the most popular and lucrative series of films to be based on a computer game series ever. On the other hand, the original games are so overloaded with cultural references to various horror movie classics over the years, the most obvious being the large influence of George A. Romero’s zombie movies, that it’s sometimes hard to realise where the line between the two formats and their various homages blur, in actual fact.

What I am certain of, is that this film, while not as good as a lot of the others, is still a solid and respectable entry into the series. It’s walks a very risky tightrope between trying to correct things and undo things which have been added to as elements as the series has progressed, while at the same time driving those knitted together components to give the series new directions in which to continue. That it manages to do this actually quite well, while still managing to pack the flick with what is extensively wall to wall action, is somewhat good news.

The trailers for this promised the return of many characters who had died in previous episodes of the film series, which I’ve reviewed here (1, 2 & 3) and here (4). Although I had some idea in the back of my mind how this could work, the explanations for the reemergence of characters (played by Michelle Rodriguez, Colin Salmon, Sienna Guillory and Oded Fehr etc) who were sliced, diced, defected to the umbrella corporation or exploded, and so forth, in the previous movies... was actually better handled than I expected. It was good to see these faces again and, for anyone else who thinks they’ve figured out what the deal was here, all I’m going to confirm is, yes, these actors do have multiple roles in this installment.

We also get answers, of a sort, or a least a little more elaboration, of the non-sequitur of the giant sized hammer dude from the last movie and also this film goes some way to give more context to the brilliant “Tokyo in the rain” opening credits sequence of Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D. Interestingly, the sequence in this film where this opening was addressed has the added musical attraction of using the same composers' music for that sequence, layered in over the top of this one. The music in this one by Tomandandy (literally, a two man team of composers called, um, Tom and Andy) is quite serviceable, although I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did their last one. But congratulations to them because I think I’m right in saying that this is the first Resident Evil movie to retain a composer over from the previous film. So while this movie, as all of the sequels, feels like a reinvention of the last, it has the musical glue to keep continuity with the last one more, finally, and that’s helpful because this one starts off exactly where the cliffhanger ending from the last one left us.

Talking of which, the credits on this one are quite nice and also fairly arrogant in that they show a slowed down action sequence which runs backwards (in excellent 3D for a change, just like the last one) until it gets back to where we left it... we then have Mila Jovovich’s Alice character (yeah, this one continues with the slight allusions to Alice In Wonderland in it, with the Red Queen once again popping up as the computerised villain of the piece) recapping the previous installments... like she always does. We then catch back up to the last film again and see the action sequence ran back at full speed this time, but going forwards to propel us into the rest of the movie proper... it lasts maybe less than a minute this time, though.

The performances are all good again, (especially Michelle Rodriguez in the non-villainess version of her, um, character) and the action sequences all excellent and, it has to be said, unrelenting... although I did find some of the passages in the movie a little light on emotional context and thus a bit dull. This film also undoes, right at the end when they’re setting up the sixth film in the series, my main concern about the last one... by reintroducing the “T-virus” back into Alice’s system and returning her “super powers” to her... although one of Michelle Rodriguez’s characters also has those super powers, so she will obviously be back as a villain at some point, I suspect.

For a movie which reunites so many cast members, it seems unusual that Ali Larter was not in this one properly. I can’t quite remember, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t die at the end of the last one, did she? The absence of this character is conveniently circumvented right at the start when Alice is literally blown out of the action on the ship from the last movie and thus we don’t know the final fate of her companions. I’m pretty sure they will bring Larter back when they do the next one though... at least I hope they do.

Another and, frankly, much bigger loss to the series is that there’s no “Alice Versus Zombie Dogs” fight in this one. This is the first Resident Evil not to have a little scene where Alice fights off zombie dogs... and that kind of disappointed me to be honest. Their inclusion in the last three were so obviously forced in their because the fans love them... so it’s a shame they’re absent here.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about this one. If you’ve not seen the last one, even though this does have a handy recap, you’ll probably be lost in it and even if you aren’t, you won’t have any emotional set up to the characters. If, on the other hand, you’re already a fan of the series in general... well it’s not as good as some of them but, even so, it doesn’t let the side down and serves as a good set up, I assume, to whatever the next part of the arc is... which seems to look like it’ going to include some kind of war with flying dragonish looking things (I don’t think they were zombie Pterodactyls anyway... hard to tell). So, no worries if you’re into the Resident Evil movies already... this one’s still a hefty installment. You can watch without peril.