Violent Night

Slay Ride

Violent Night
USA 2022
Directed by Tommy Wirkola
87 North

Warning: Very slight scene detail spoilers.

Violent Night is the latest movie from Tommy Wirkola, the director behind three of my favourite, gory films of the last 13 years, namely Dead Snow, Hansel & Gretel - Witch Hunters (reviewed here) and Dead Snow 2 - Red Vs Dead (reviewed here). This film sees David Harbour from Stranger Things... see various series review links in the TV section of the index... the third Hellboy movie (reviewed here) and Black Widow (reviewed here) take on the role of Santa Claus... the real Santa Claus.

The film starts off with Santa hanging out and getting drunk in a bar on Christmas Eve, disillusioned with what the spirit of Christmas has come to mean and thinking that this might be the last year he does this. However, one of the houses he visits, a rich mansion belonging to the multi-billionaire grandmother of a little girl on his ‘nice list’, Trudy (played by Leah Brady), is having a Christmas gathering attended by the whole family, including Trudy and her estranged parents. However, a villain played by John Leguizamo (who’s always great as a villain but I wish they’d give him some proper ‘nice guy’ roles for a change), kills the security team in the mansion and his team hold the family while they break into the main safe. Santa gets caught up in the events and, before you know it, he becomes a brutal ‘action Santa’, intent on saving the little girl from harm and, due to various things that happen, as you kind of know will transpire, he ends up believing in the spirit of Christmas again and, of course, his important role in it.

And it’s a great movie, it has to be said. The whole thing plays out just like a 1980s action movie, it would be fair to say, with Dominic Lewis’ Christmas music infused score sounding a little like one of Michael Kamen’s old action scores for a movie like Die Hard (reviewed here) or Lethal Weapon. The only difference between this and an 80s action movie would be the ramped up brutality of the violence, which fully keeps up with Wirkola’s earlier movies, in terms of the goriness on offer, including the inventiveness behind it. For example, when Santa attempts to take out a thug with a Christmas Tree star through the eyeball and he’s still coming for him, there’s a definite nod to the face off between Odd Job and James Bond in Goldfinger (reviewed here). Looking for a way out of his situation, Santa notices the star is still plugged into the tree lights and flips the switch, electrocuting the guy and setting his head on fire.

There’s also some nice stuff, just a couple of moments, where this version of Santa’s backstory is explored from many centuries ago. Let’s just say that, if such a thing were around then, he would definitely have been on the ‘naughty list’, with the aid of his favourite hammer skull crusher. What’s more important though, is the beating heart of the movie in both the relationship between Santa and the little girl and, also, the hard side swipes at the greed driven commercialism that Santa is, in fact, aiding... in his delivery of the Christmas spirit. Also, although I’ve not seen the Home Alone films myself, there’s a nice homage to these in one sequence in the movie which I think will resonate with people who liked those flicks.

I have two things which are less easy to forgive but they certainly aren’t deal breakers. One is the ‘science’ behind Santa’s supernatural magic not being exactly consistent in places. However, Harbour delivers a certain ‘get out of jail free’ line in regards to the ‘Christmas magic’ which just about manages to cover the inconsistencies in the script and, since it’s such a joyous movie... I’m gonna go with it. What’s more worrying though is the sound mix. One of the more enjoyable lines of the movie, one which featured heavily in the trailer, in fact, is so overwhelmed by the Christmas song playing in the foreground that it’s barely audible. I mean, I guess it could have been the sound system at the cinema I was watching it in but... yeah, I suspect not.

Still, all that being said, fans of 1980s/90s action movies and those still happy enough to maintain the myth of Santa and the spirit of Christmas should find a lot to love in Violent Night which, in spite of the obvious, unorthodox surface detail of the genre, actually buys into the spirit of the season a lot more than it detracts from it... which is what I was hoping for when I saw the trailer and, fortunately, that’s exactly what I got. I hope this one does well at the box office and, yeah, I can’t see this one doing badly at all. This one’s a definite crowd-pleaser and has all the earmarks of being a franchise starter. I’d be surprised if a sequel to this one wasn’t already being prepped and I hope we see David Harbour back in this role again soon. Well worth a visit to your local cinema, for sure.

Dead Snow 2 - Red VS Dead

Dead Mobs N’ Boom Sticks

Dead Snow 2 - Red Vs Dead
Norway/Iceland/USA/UK 2014
Directed by  Tommy Wirkola
Entertainment One Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some comedy spoilers in this one.

Okay, so Dead Snow 2 - Red Vs Dead is Tommy Wirkola’s follow up movie to his fun nazi zombie flick Dead Snow. In between that movie and this one, he also found time to direct an amazing Hollywood movie called Hansel And Gretel - Witch Hunters starring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton (which I reviewed here). Both of those films were pretty great and I was very happy when I heard that he would be doing a sequel to the latter of these two movies. Alas, something threw a spanner in the works and that proposed sequel to Hansel And Gretel - Witch Hunters, which I really wanted to see, seems to be dead in the water. So after this he went back to his big breakout movie and has come up with a sequel to Dead Snow instead.

Like both the aforementioned movies, Dead Snow 2 is pretty violent and gory and, like the original, is definitely bleakly comic in tone. Although, saying that, it seems to be a much broader comedy than the first, from the little I remember of the original.

The action starts off right from where it left off with the one surviving member of the original movie, Martin (played by Zegar Hoel), sans arm which he had cut off to presumably stop zombie infection, getting the audience up to speed with a voice over narrative as images on screen recap the first movie for us. We then carry on straight from the moment with the zombies attacking him in the car for the very last coin of the discovered nazi gold which caused all the trouble in the first place. After a big tussle where the zombie leader, Herzog (played by Ørjan Gamst) also loses his arm in a car vs zombies chase, Martin gets clear of his enemies but loses consciousness when his car takes a bad tumble down a mountain. When he wakes up, he is in a hospital in police custody... suspected of killing all his friends. Worse yet, the team at the hospital have assumed that the arm found in the car with him was his and have successfully managed to graft it onto him in an operation.

The zombie arm causes some trouble but, after many more deaths, he escapes and manages to get his homicidal zombie arm under control... mostly. It’s also established that a zombie bite doesnt turn you into a zombie at all... so I’ve got no idea why he cut his own arm off in the first movie, to be honest. It might well make sense but I just can’t remember and it does seem quite illogical here.

Meanwhile, Herzog and his nazis don’t return to the ground after all. Instead, Herzog decides they will complete his final mission to travel to and wipe out a town in Norway. Meanwhile, at a war museum where Herzog’s men go nuts killing tourists while Martin and the curator hide in a corner, Martin eventually meets up with a small American group who have flown over to Norway to help him. Known as Zombie Squad, they consist of three nerds known as Daniel (played by Martin Starr), Blake (played by Ingrid Haas) and Monica (played by Jocelyn DeBoer). Monica is pretty fun, actually, because she tries to get as many Star Wars quotes in as possible, wears an “It’s A Trap” t-shirt (quoting Admiral Ackbar in Return Of The Jedi - reviewed here) and has a genuine replica pair of macrobinoculars modelled on the one that Han Solo uses on the planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here).

Our heroes also discover that Martin’s new left arm, which does keep giving him many Dr. Strangelove moments, it has to be said, can also raise the dead to do his bidding so, while Herzog steals a tank and proceeds to take his zombie army towards the town that Hitler originally ordered him to destroy... Blake, Monica and the curator are left behind to distract him en route while Martin, Daniel and their new zombie sidekick go back to the snowy mountains to raise an army of dead Russian prisoners of war that Herzog killed back in the 1940s, their bodies still preserved in the icy, cold ground.

As zombie movies go... it’s not a bad one. It’s quite gory although the gore isn’t as in your face or visceral as what I remember of the first film. As I said earlier, there’s definitely more emphasis on out and out, slapstick comedy in this one and it’s kind of a trade off between that and taking any of the main characters seriously. It somehow manages to de-tooth everyone just a little bit here but, at the same time, it’s still pretty good so you are not going to leave this one without at least being entertained.

Such comedy set pieces include a husband getting turned on by a girl in the newspaper and shouting out to his wife to get herself ready because he feels like ‘a little head’. The next thing you know, one of the nazi zombies has appeared and has literally thrown his wife’s dismembered head into his lap. Another piece of grizzly humour comes when two Nazis each pull the innards out from either side of a man’s stomach and, while he is still connected, use his intestines to siphon petrol into their newly acquired tank. We even have a zombie doctor who patches the soldiers up in the midst of battle during the final showdown scene, replacing zombie innards with bales of straw to keep them going and sticking a sink plunger where a leg is missing on another to allow him to stagger back into battle. So, yeah, lots of comedy moments in this one.

Ultimately, though, I somehow felt kind of let down by this one. Maybe it’s because there’s actually not much snow in this second movie... and I really like movies which feature a lot of snow. Saying that though, the characters are all pretty likeable and well acted and, although I didn’t actually care what happened to any of them, I still found myself fairly amused by various scenes as they played out in front of me. It’s not exactly the best nazi zombie movie out there and, truth be told, not nearly as good as the same director’s previous two films but, having said that, I’m pretty sure that if you’re a fan of the first movie then you will probably be okay with this second one. If you do watch it, though, wind to the end of the credits because the film gives us a little scene which sets up the possibility of yet another sequel. I don’t know if that’s been planned but, yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if the director goes to revisit this genre for the third time at some point in his career. In the meantime, Dead Snow 2 - Red Vs Dead, keeps the nazi zombie sub-genre of film fresh and alive in a decade which is in danger of forgetting that this was ever a genre at all.

Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters 3D

Every Witchery Way

Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters 3D
Germany/USA 2013
Directed by Tommy Wirkola
Playing at cinemas now.

Alrighty.

So now we have the big gingerbread house of a movie that is Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. It’s an intriguing concept, in that it’s something I’ve not expected to see in terms of using a source material to inspire a gung-ho action flick and the writer/director’s certainly taken a good stab at doing something which is almost as irresistible as the succulent confection of a witches abode that features so heavily in the source fairy tale (and also at certain points in the movie). It’s certainly a lot of fun, that’s for sure.

There are also a few problems with it which I’ll also highlight a little as I go through my personal witch hunting experience.

If you don’t already know, this film is a kick-ass action movie in much the same camp as the badly received Stephen Sommers movie Van Helsing, from almost a decade ago. This may be, I suppose why a lot of people don't seem to be that turned on about going to see it... which is a shame because it’s got some nice things to offer. Now, I happen to have really loved the Van Helsing movie so, when I saw the trailers for this film featuring crossbows, gatling guns, flying witchery, Famke Jannsen, Jeremy Renner (who I like a lot as an action hero, ever since I first became aware of him in 28 Weeks Later) and, as the lovely icing on an already rich cake, the fantastic UK actress/glamour puss phenomenon who is Gemma Arterton... I was already kinda full on gagging to see this particular movie.

The film starts off with a pre-credits recap of the fairy tale version of the story (or “a” version of the story) for people who don’t know it, which neatly leads onto an ultimately expected but still nice little revelation about the main protagonists later on in the movie. It’s a pretty cool sequence and, the young girl in particular, looks very much like Gemma Arterton, who she grows up to be while the opening credits sequence plays out. This particular title sequence is a real masterpiece in itself (especially in 3D) with “newspaper” articles which trace the path of the two witch hunters as they grow up and make a name for themselves in the... ahem... “Witch Hunters For Hire” business. The nature of the illustrative drawings used and the way they are presented in 3D make them almost look like those old, Victorian, Pollock’s Toy Theatre cutouts (black and white for a penny, colour for tuppence) and this helps lend a certain sense of larger than life theatricality to the proceedings as we then plunge into a “witch trial” which is stopped by the title characters in their grown up form.

These characters are quick and easy to be established through some verbal and physical shorthand and then the basic plot (and it is pretty basic, it has to be said, though there’s nothing wrong with that) is out of the way and everyone can get on with the witch hunting and general “beating-upness” of the movie in some set pieces which are half way between dazzling and, unfortunately, bewildering. Yes, this movie suffers from some confusing editing during the action sequences, it’s true, but I’m hoping when (and that is a when, not an if) I watch this movie again, on DVD, some of the - fight/chase/run/fight a bit more - sequences will make more sense. To be fair, it might have been that my brain was trying to cope with all the 3D effects and, in tight juxtaposition with a fast action sequence, I was just not processing the information fast enough.

There are some nice supporting characters in the shape of Hansel’s red headed love interest played by the very beautiful Pihla Viitala and also “Hansel & Gretel’s biggest fan”, played by Thomas Mann (who turns in a really likeable performance and who is not to be confused with the German geezah who wrote Death In Venice). The film also features Peter Stormare in a minor villain role but, although he is more than worthy of the character, he never really gets the chance to let rip with his particular kind of craziness and I think this is a case of the specific casting choice raising this viewers expectations of the character via the baggage of his previous roles... which is a shame but, hey, he’s still excellent and credible in it, so I need to temper my expectations a little, maybe.

There’s some nice business with a troll character that I really liked and he really drives home one of the things that I’d kind of subconsciously noticed right from the outset but which was then pushed to the front of my mind when I watched the first big sequence with this character... this film is not for little kids. It’s violent, for sure, but I was kind of expecting it to be the Marvel comic book style of turning violence into a bloodless ballet, which the majority of large budget films over the last decade or so have been guilty of, primarily because of censorship issues and the fears said censorship would have on the box office. This, however, is quite gory all the way through, with loads of decapitation, head pulping, bodies torn apart, bodies exploding and, you know, all the gory stuff. It wasn’t until after I’d seen the movie, when I looked up the director to write this review, that I realised it was written and directed by the same guy who wrote and directed Dead Snow (aka Dod Sno), the excellent, tongue in cheek nazi-zombie movie which was on everyone’s radar a few years ago. This explains a lot. I certainly can’t say I prefer Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters over Dead Snow (which I loved) but now i understand why this movie was refreshingly, for the kind of movie it is, blessed with a penchant for gory bloodletting when it could so easily have bypassed that aspect of the production.

I also think there may have been script issues along the way too... which is a shame. There are some nice details and little character props put in the film and one of these is the fact that, due to Hansel’s childhood experience at the original witch’s gingerbread lair, he has to inject himself with a substance every couple of hours or die... which could have made for a suspenseful scene towards the end of the picture but, alas, all references to this facet of the character seem to fly out of the window by the end of the movie and he goes for long stretches of time without even once “pulling out his plunger” after a certain point. There’s one scene which may explain the reasons for this in terms of story logic, except if that is what was going on, it wasn’t made implicit enough, for me at least, to register. What I think, is more likely, is that the film was originally a much longer cut and the sequences explaining just what is going on in relation to this story element were lost in the edit somewhere along the line. Personally I’d like to see a longer version of this movie where stuff like this is addressed at some point in my near future. Oh well... maybe with the blu-ray.

Another script issue might be the language, which seemed a bit too modern in a lot of places... specifically when it came to the use of swear words in whatever the time period of this film is supposed to be covering. I remember reading an article when I was a kid about “controlled anachronism” in the context of fantasy fiction but, frankly, there’s a lot of reference to “those f*cking witches” throughout the film and this did seem to lessen the credibility of the central characters somewhat... I would have personally gone with a more antiquated set of swear words to run through the film but, all in all, it doesn’t really spoil the movie too much and the pacing is such that you never really have too much time to think about it before being yanked into the next set piece.

So, in essence, what we have here is a movie which is a rollicking action fest, if that’s your thing, and has some pretty cool actors playing some characters with a fair bit of heart and depth (although, it is a shorthand sketchy kind of depth, to be sure) tearing through an adult fairy tale at a fairly fast pace with a good amount of gore thrown into the mix. Some nice scoring, too, in the few places you can actually hear it properly (it does tend to get buried in the mix in places) which I’m looking forward to grabbing for a “stand alone” listen when it gets released towards the end of next month.

This is not the best action movie going, by a long shot, but it is trying something new and it is, by and large, a fairly enjoyable romp in the cinema if you’ve got nothing else to do one night. I’d recommend it to most people but don't go into it with really high expectations... this director is in better form with nazi zombies than he is with twisted fairy tales.