Demons

Screening Doom

Demons
aka Dèmoni
Italy 1985
Directed by Lamberto Bava
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Mild spoilers I guess... but it’s not that kind of film.

It’s been a while since I first saw Demons, which was one of the first Italian horror movies I saw when I was catching up on Dario Argento’s gialli (and his very occasional foray into horror with films like Suspiria, reviewed here and Inferno, reviewed here). I remember I purchased this when all the international barriers were dropped at the dawn of the ‘DVD age’, and acquiring it bundled together with the sequel along with two other Argento double features on the US Region Anchor Bay releases. Not that this film is directed by Argento but, he did produce it in a very ‘hands on’ fashion (from what I’ve been able to find out) and also co-wrote the final screenplay version. The film was partially shot in Berlin but it’s interesting that, in Germany the films were released back to front... so Demons 2 was released as Demons and it was followed by this first movie, released over there as Demons 2. Which is strange but I remember loving this one a couple of decades ago and thought I’d revisit it on the latest of Arrow’s double bill Blu Ray releases of the movie, which has even more extras on it than their previous release.

The film is actually directed by Lamberto Bava, whose father was the great Mario Bava and, while you may say that the bright, coloured stylistic lightning could be seen as an Argento signature on the production, it’s more than likely inherited from the very strong lighting schemes used by Lamberto’s father, who Argento was also heavily influenced by.

The film starts off with Claudio Simonetti’s addictive Demons theme, which also incorporates elements of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue and D Minor (if I’m not mistaken) and Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King as part of the driven synthesiser melody, playing on the soundtrack as one of the lead characters, Cheryl (Natasha Hovey), is given a couple of free cinema preview tickets after a train ride, before meeting up with her friend Cathy (Paola Cozzo). There’s a nice replica of said ‘golden ticket’ in the latest Arrow box. Incidentally, the guy in the mask who gives her the ticket is played by future director Michelle Soavi and, there are actually three masks in this film which help drive the plot. One on his face, the one in the Metropol cinema where Cheryl, Cathy and a load of other customers converge to see the new horror film preview (and which, importantly, one of the customers cuts her cheek on) and the one in the ‘movie within a movie), where one of the characters on screen also cuts their face on a mask and subsequently turns into a demon. Something which also happens to the audience member who cut her cheek, as she’s examining the cut in the bathroom. Then, we find that the scratches and bites of the demon infects other people and turns them into demons (much like the bite of a zombie in a zombie movie, which the demons in this film are just another iteration of really, except they obviously move a heck of a lot faster).

When the second victim, trying to tend to the scratches on her neck from her friend, stumbles behind the screen, a sequence is playing in the movie where a demon is trying to cut through a white sheet and, of course, victim number two promptly rips and stumbles through from the other side of the screen at the precise moment the on screen demon tears through. Panic soon ensues as the surviving customers, who aren’t able to get out of the cinema which has bizarrely walled itself up (at least, that’s the way it appears from the inside) attempt to fight off the demons and then attempt to escape the auditorium somehow. It’s a simple enough plot and the film did huge business when it was released, prompting one true sequel and a fair few others which were retitled as Demons sequels in various territories (and which were not actually connected to the Demons films in any way... although I heard very recently that the original director is currently working on some kind of reboot of this one).

And there’s lots of things worth noting about the film. Such as a whole host of posters in the cinema lobby, for films like the Giorgio Moroder recut of Metropolis (if I’m remembering it right, the timing would be around then for that version of the film), the Werner Herzog version of Nosferatu and even one of Dario Argento’s classics, Four Flies On Grey Velvet (which I reviewed here). Also in this and a fair few other scenes, we have the smartly dressed cinema usher played by none other than Nicoletta Elmi, who played the nasty little girl in Argento’s Deep Red (reviewed here) as well as child appearances in other famous gialli like A Bay Of Blood and Who Saw Her Die? The film also features one of Argento’s daughters, Fiore, in a small role (his other very young daughter, Asia, would have a lead child role in the sequel).

Another nice little joke is that there is a gang of thugs driving around outside in the city and one of them is sniffing cocaine through a straw from a Coca Cola can. So it’s definitely ‘the real thing’ but I can’t imagine Coca Cola being that happy with that particular piece of product placement.

Demons is a nice enough, entertaining film and it has some cool photography plus a certain ‘teen horror’ vibe to it. However, now I look back at it, I can’t help but feel that the photography is harmed quite a lot by the rapidity of the editing. It feels really choppy and some of the cuts back and forth are quite jarring now, it seems to me. Also, this time around, I was noticing a lot of the long shots and closer takes just weren’t matching all that well.

The choppiness isn’t helped much by the gang of thugs riding around the city who do finally make their way in to the cinema but, well, they needn’t have bothered, it seems to me. Their only real purpose in the narrrative seems to be to drive around in the car so we can cut back to them with a different pop song by the likes of Billy Idol or Motley Crue playing on the soundtrack, so the record company can make a killing on the tie in album. But the songs sound atrocious most of the time and don’t help the film. I’ve had at least two versions of the soundtrack over the years but none of the ones I own have ever featured the songs... just Claudio Simonetti’s brilliant score.

Bits of the film work but bits really don’t, such as Urbano Barberini ridiculously riding a motorbike over the cinema seat backs and somehow still staying upright (they must have built a hidden ramp to do this... which is a cheat as far as I’m concerned because there’s no way, surely, you could do this in real life) and the bizarre non-sequiter of a helicopter crashing through the roof of the cinema and providing a convenient escape route for the two surviving (up to that point) characters.

So, yeah, mixed feeling on this one. Demons is not quite the film I remember but it does have a certain something in that the gore effects are all practical effects and the photography is great. I’d still recommend it to certain ‘horror friends’ but I had less of a good time with it now than I did 20 odd years ago. It will be interesting visiting the sequel soon as I remember being very disappointed in that one from the outset... what’s the betting that I like it more than the first one now? I shall soon see, I guess.

His House

The House
That Roared

His House
UK 2020
Directed by Remi Weekes
BBC Films

His House is the feature length directorial debut of Remi Weekes and it’s quite a nice, morally uplifting film, in a way. After some brief footage of the two central protagonists... Rial (played by the wonderful Wunmi Mosaku) and Bol (played by the equally watchable Sope Dirisu)... escaping from Sudan, we get wind that something has happened to their child as they are crossing the ocean to England. We then join them waking up in a holding cell in the UK, being released ‘on bail’ and given a fairly big house (though it’s extremely dilapidated). Their conditions on staying in the UK are that they must not work or supplement their income, which is provided them by the government to the tune of £74 per week. They have a case worker assigned to them in the form of actor Matt Smith (yup, The Doctor himself) and they are told that they need to stay out of trouble, aren’t allowed any guests etc.

However, when the two start to try and fit in and begin a new life in their shoddy but spacious new home, it becomes clear fairly quickly that either the house, or at least some spiritual presence residing there with them, is not all that friendly. So that’s the set up... a haunted house story, of sorts, where the victims cannot leave because, if they do create a disturbance, they are faced with being deported back to Sudan.

And... it’s very well done, actually. There’s a certain atmosphere of foreboding in the earlier parts of the picture which is sustained for just a tiny bit before the director brings on the big scares. This is not the kind of ghost story that focuses on the shadows in darkened rooms... I mean, okay there certainly is a lot of that but it’s coupled with what I should maybe call a more practical, physical manifestation of the supernatural. So what we have is a bunch of ghosts/demons etc seeming to come from behind the walls (which by the end of the picture has loads of holes banged out of it for reasons I won’t get into here) and getting actually quite aggressive. These are not ghosts gently pursuing a suggestion of a soul in a state of unrest. These are aggressive, ‘coming to slash your throat with a sharp knife when you least expect it’ kind of demonic manifestations, for sure.

Now, quite honestly, this kind of practical, hands on approach to the way in which the evil present around Rial and Bol is handled can often kill a film stone dead and, truth be told, the last 20 minutes or so of the movie do seem a little less scary than anything that comes before it but there are some effective jump scares (and a nice double jump scare in one place early on in the running time) that help the movie come alive and are extremely effective.

Now one criticism I did have of it... and perhaps this is a big contributing reason as to why the scares faded away to nothing by the last act of the story... is that there’s a strong suggestion that there’s a twist coming and the opening shot of the movie is a big heads up to that, it has to be said. Indeed, there are a couple of sequences at the end which fill in the blanks and gives more fuller disclosure to the ‘highlights version’ of the trip from Sudan to the UK and, while it’s a nice reason for the hauntings which are manifesting themselves in the house, it does tend to pack less of a wallop than it might have without all that extra telegraphing.

That being said, it does have some good actors in the leads (and, honestly, does Matt Smith never age?) and it’s also aided by composer Roque Banos’ interesting score... sadly not released on CD at time of writing (which is a shame... I like this composer and I won’t now be able to listen to the score as a stand alone experience). There are also some nice touches lurking in the background which help re-enforce the sense of alienation the family are feeling... such as a security guard in a local store keeping an eye on Bol in the background when he’s shopping  or various local kids being pretty much as unhelpful as they could be to Rial when she’s trying to find her local doctor’s surgery.

And, that’s that. A short review perhaps but I quite liked His House and thought that, for the most part (especially the first half of the film), it’s a nicely made scary movie and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a ‘must watch’ for a lot of people, fans of the genre should certainly get something out of it so, if you are into some of the less subtle manifestations of supernatural dread in movies, you might want to check this one out, for sure.

Annabelle

Adoradoll

Annabelle
2014  USA
Directed by John R. Leonetti
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Ever so slight spoilers on some of 
the scares but not really story spoilers as such.

Annabelle is a prequel made in the wake of the popularity of the film, based on a real life tale of demonic possession investigated by The Warrens, Ed and Lorraine, called The Conjuring (reviewed here). Although the doll, known as Annabelle, does have some part to play in the opening of The Conjuring (as a scene setter for the central characters) and final parts of the former movie, Annabelle is never really anything than a scary bonus which has nothing to do with the basic plot of that film.

While the makers of The Conjuring are in the midst of trying to get a sequel churned out, possibly involving the Enfield Poltergeist (although I’m told The Warrens didn’t have a heck of a lot to do with that particular case), New Line have decided to throw this film out in the meantime to strike the box office coffers while the iron is hot, so to speak. So this film is based on the story of Annabelle before she came into the final possession of Ed and Lorraine, although the producers have gone to some lengths to connect it to The Conjuring by using Ed’s voice and a replay of some of the early scenes from the first film pertaining to the misadventures of the doll... again, to set the tone at the start of this new movie.

Now, if you’ve read my review of The Conjuring, you’ll know I absolutely loved it and proclaimed it among the best horror movies ever made.. for a number of reasons. So I was kinda looking forward to seeing Annabelle until I started hearing very low key things about it not being very good. In fact, all the tweets and reviews I read on it, bar one, said that it was a pretty dreadful film. The one good review I read started with the admission that the reviewer in question never really like The Conjuring all that much and so I figured I might be setting myself up for a fall looking forward to this prequel.

As it turns out, Annabelle isn’t a terrible film, on the face of it. It’s clichéd, for sure, but then again so are most horror movies that are all playing with a similar set of rules and this movie certainly had a fair few scenes which are going to make viewers, at the very least, a little anxious.

One of the strengths of the first movie is that pretty much all the cast were likeable and someone you felt you could hang out with. Certainly, the lead protagonists of Annabelle, a newly pregnant wife called Mia (played by Annabelle Wallis) and her husband John (played by Ward Horton) are pictured as very nice people to be with... although they don’t seem to have the same kind of appeal as the characters in the first movie and the film possibly doesn’t take enough time to explore their personalities. Things start to go wrong for them not so much later after John buys Mia, a doll collector, a hard to get piece for her collection... yeah, that’s right, the Annabelle of the title. Pretty soon after that, Mia and John’s nice n’ comfy next door neighbours get a visitation from a formerly missing daughter and her culty boyfriend. They’ve come home to slash her mum and dad to tiny pieces and then, once they’ve seen to that, they come for Mia and John. The daughter is from a satanic cult (we know as much because of the news broadcast in the background in a scene prior to these events which is pushing the Manson Murders as being a current thing) and she dies at the hands of the police but, not before she’s dripped some of her blood into the eyes of the Annabelle doll. Our heroes don’t escape unscathed but, after enough bizarre visitations by scary occurrences, our two main protagonists move to another town and start again, leaving the troublesome doll behind in a trash can.

Things start to happen not long after the Annabelle doll turns up in their new house again and Mia, and her new daughter, ar both targeted by the usual manifestations you get in these kinds of movies. It’s all done very competently and some sequences will make you jump, I suspect. That being said, there doesn’ seem to be much new on offer here and there are a lot of big scripting signposts which point to future events in the movie in several places. Like the family befriending both the local priest with an expertise on evil (evil, I tells ya) and the lady who runs the second hand bookshop... who also happens to be knowledgable about demonology etc. Most of the time it’s pretty obvious what roles these people are going to play in the movie so I can understand why people have been expecting more from this one. That being said, from the swooping and luxurious camerawork and the jump/cut/scare editing (which does need split second timing, to be fair) to Joseph Bishara’s usual sound design versus melody scoring style, in which he already seems to be getting an old hand but which does what it does when it needs to... this film is, at the very least, competently put together and should give a fair few of you something like a good time at the cinema.

There’s some really nice stuff going on too.

Annabelle herself, for example, is a classic piece of audience driven suspense in that, apart from when she’s being manipulated by someone or something else, she doesn’t once move by herself. The camera quite often holds shot on her in a close up of her face because the director knows you are waiting for the doll to either move her eyes or perhaps just blink at some point. But that jump scare never comes and this means the director can keep delivering certain, suspenseful close ups of the doll (and don’t worry, he does) while simultaneously playing on our imagination to provide the scares and, like most directors working in this genre, Leonetti knows that our imagination is often stronger than anything he can conjure up for a movie like this.

There’s a brilliant sequence about two thirds of the way through where the writer and director appear to break their own rules about the doll, which you may have already twigged isn’t going to be doing anything on her own, by now. As Mia is in deep focus and facing out to the audience in the foreground of a shot, we notice the Annabelle doll getting up on her own as Mia then turns to stare at it. The doll begins to appear to levitate and it’s only after a little more of this that both the audience and Mia come to realise that, through the sheer chicanery of movie effects and editing, something is actually holding the doll up, back there in the darkness. Scary stuff.

There’s a nice Rosemary’s Baby kind of vibe going through the movie too. Not in terms of Mia and John’s child so much, although Mia is an obvious reference by the writer, Gary Dauberman, name checking the actress who portrayed Rosemary in the movie version of Ira Levin’s famous novel... Mia Farrow. The similarity is more in terms of atmosphere and the apartment block that Mia finds herself inhabiting mostly on her own when John is away at work. You also get the feeling that many of her acquaintances, perhaps even her husband, are in on whatever is haunting Mia... although we all know that it’s Annabelle, the daughter of the dead neighbours, who is inhabiting the doll. Or is it, exactly? There’s something of a mixed story idea, I think, because there’s also a demon coming visiting at odd hours that also seems to be using Annabelle as a conduit to our world.

The last act of the movie lets the film down somewhat, for my money. The obvious characters who our main protagonists have met over the course of the film both fulfil their very obvious roles and the ending is somewhat of a comedown given that there was a lot of subtle work throughout the majority of the rest of the movie. There’s another nice nod to The Conjuring at the end and, though there could be room for a sequel to get squeezed in here if the box office on this spin off is big enough, I suspect this is probably the last we’ll be seeing of Annabelle, descended from both real life and a series of cinematic and television “sinister dolls with minds of their own”.

If you loved The Conjuring as much as I did, then you’re certainly going ot want to watch this just to see how it fits in with things. If you are a horror fan in general then just remember that Annabelle is not exactly the greatest horror movie ever made. This is an okay and competent attempt at a fairly jumpy but ultimately slightly less than satisfying genre film and, if that’s enough for you, and for most of us that would be, then this one is definitely worth a gander. However, like I said before... it’s not The Conjuring.

Season Of The Witch

Witch Black

Season Of The Witch
2011 USA
Directed by Dominic Sena/Bret Ratner
Momentum Blu B

Warning: Spoilers of the witch in this one...

A few years ago a movie called Black Death came out at cinemas and I was hoping it was going to be a nice little tale of swords and sorcerers in medieval England. Instead, although skillfully put together and certainly quite gripping in places, I was disappointed in the film because the whole thing took on a certain ‘scooby-doo’ aspect when it came to the actual witchcraft element of the tale and, tonally, the film bore more resemblance to films like Witchfinder General than anything that could have been conjured up as something ‘not of this world’. I reviewed it here and, though I can appreciate it on some level, it’s really not my kind of thing in terms of things I’d watch for entertainment. That kind of subject matter really needs to be treated in a more ‘fun’ fashion I feel, otherwise it becomes fatally serious.

Not too long after, Season Of The Witch got released in cinemas over here having suffered, it turns out, severe release delays and a load of reshoots by “rescue director” Bret Ratner. I was kinda interested in seeing it to see if it did the same thing as Black Death or actually gave my b-movie monster passion a work out but, alas, the film only lasted a week at my local movie house. However, I have a friend who has been persistent that Season Of The Witch was a nice bit of film-making so, despite having been critically reviled the world over (I found this out after I’d seen the movie), when I chanced upon a copy for “the right price” (Cash Converters Blu Ray for £3.99) I decided to give my friend the benefit of the doubt and take a look at it.

I’m kinda glad I did.

The film stars Nicholas Cage and the always watchable Ron Perlman as two long serving knights who have become disillusioned with the Holy Crusades after being asked to slaughter women and children for God’s cause. They desert the army but, two months later, find themselves once again allied with the church when they are tasked, with a guide, another knight and a priest, to escort a witch to a far off monastery (requiring several days travel) to put her on trial and read from the last copy of The Book Of Soloman... as a solution to ending her witchery and lifting the plague from the land. Here, of course, it gets a bit tricky because Holy Knights and bubonic plague are two completely different time periods but, in deference to Sergio Leone’s use of the IRA in his Western A Fistful of Dynamite (aka Gui La Testa aka Duck You Sucker) I’ll turn a blind eye since it makes for a good story and in our postmodern times and attitudes I seem to be the last person upholding that kind of “finger pointing and wagging” at the sight of anachronism anyway. So I won’t spoil the party here... although it would be good if writers and directors of historically set dramas could read the odd history book once in a while.

So far, so good. We have, basically a medieval road movie with witchery, which turns out to be not just witchery, and lots of fighting and moralising and so on. Cage and Perlman make a heck of a double act as the two larger than life heroes and with various creatures to be slain, especially in the last third of the film, this is about as entertaining as any old relatively well made B-movie can get... so that’s all good. There's even a cameo by Hammer Horror stalwart Christopher Lee although, it is such that I completely failed to recognise him when he was on screen.

I especially liked that the film doesn’t scrimp on letting you know that there is truly something supernatural going on either. The opening prologue, which I suspect is a result of one of the reshoots, certainly makes it known to the audience that there are demonic forces at work here when the aftermath of a triple witch hanging ends up with one dead priest and a burned copy of the book which our heroes are later going to seek out. Followed up by a nice and exciting opening montage of Cage and Perlman fighting and drinking their way through a number of Holy Crusades, its a genuinely good set up for the movie and, although the pace slows a little to make way for things like plot and... um... well a bit of a plot anyway, the film makes good on its promise and offers up exactly the kind of movie you’d expect from taking the main quest at the heart of this film to its logical confusion. That is to say... never mind the witchery, they’ve got full on demons and possessed dead bubonic reanimated zombie priests to deal with.

Some of the photography is really beautiful and, even when it’s not, it is at least competent and this also goes for the editing in this one too. The action is not as confusing as a lot of modern Hollywood movies and you can follow it fairly well. Add in discussions by the various characters about the confusion as to whether their prisoner is a witch or not and recollections of “the good old days”, when you could be sure that a good head lopping was being administered to the proper recipient, and you have a film which is just about entertaining enough to not get boring. Add some CGI demons in the mix and you start venturing into Robert E. Howard territory too for a while.

The film ends in a way diametrically opposed to how most Hollywood films end these days... that is to say, there is some significant sacrifice on the side of the just, and I found this to be a bit of a relief to be honest, although I suspect this is one of the things that has helped the movie garner the bad reviews it has. People do not necessarily want to see their films ending this way, with fallen heroes and voice-over narrative. But I liked it... it reminded me of a crude version of the closing of Seven Samurai in some respects, although this film is truly not even close to the same league as Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece, to be sure.

But the main ingredients are here for a good time with a movie. Knights in armour, swords flashing, heads popping, zombie priests and big as f*** flying demons to boot. It may not ever really rise above the “quite entertaining” level but, compared to some modern Hollywood movies, it’s got a lot more going for it than a fair proportion of them. Give it a watch if you have nothing better to do, maybe.

The Last Exorcism Part 2

Nell To Pay

The Last Exorcism Part 2
2013 USA
Directed by Ed Gass-Donnelly
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Very light spoilers possessing
the soul of this review as you read...

Well this movie came as a bit of a surprise when I finally saw it.

A number of years ago now there was a “found footage” horror movie called The Blair Witch Project which was made on a shoestring budget and which went on to conquer the box office and scare people silly. While the iron was hot, a sequel was commissioned by the studio but this dispensed with the dodgy 1st person camera eye view that had so impressed people in the first movie (although this film far from pioneered that style of directing, it certainly repopularised it and the aftermath of that is still with us today) and instead was presented as a straight, linear movie narrative. The seeming touch of brilliance, though, was the fact that it was the so-called found footage from the first movie which inspired the characters in the sequel to proceed into similar territory and get themselves into so much trouble.

Unfortunately, for everyone involved, the second Blair Witch movie turned into “just another teen horror movie” which was dull and uninteresting and it seemed that the filmmakers had been so intent on reaching that easy pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that they had forgotten to make sure that the film turned out to be any good.

Cut to a couple of years ago and a similar “documentary style” footage movie called The Last Exorcism that some people didn’t really go for but which I’d really loved opened in cinemas (my review of it can be found here). When somebody other than the original creative team announced that they would be doing a sequel (so what would that be... The Laster Exorcism?) and that they would be dispensing with the first person camera style in this one also, I was getting a strong sense of deja vu that this was going to be going the same way as the Blair Witch sequel... especially as it comes to pass that “found footage” from the first movie turns up as a youtube video in the second film.

However, where The Last Exorcism Part 2 scores over the Blair Witch Project sequel big time is that, this time, the new creative team actually put together a pretty entertaining movie. I know I’m probably going to be in the minority on this one but, I have to say, I really liked this installment.

Ashley Bell returns to this film in the same role which she played so dazzlingly well in the first movie and this one indeed picks up pretty soon after the last film ended in what I can only call a “blaze of Wheatley”. Only this time she’s not doing hardly any of the “twisted body” thing she did so well in the first movie... this film is not like that. It does its own thing.

Her character, Nell, is “discovered” in the pre-credits sequence, which is another little exercise in jump scare horror, and this pretty much sets the tone for the whole movie and her adventures in a girls orphanage in New Orleans is all about becoming a normal girl who is gradually feeling her recent past catching up with her.

Nell is a name which echoes deep for me in the legacy of cinematic horror. It’s the name which Shirley Jackson gave to her heroine (short for Eleanor but written ghostly on a wall as Nell) in her novel The Haunting Of Hill House which became, and still remains, my favourite movie in the genre when Robert Wise made it into a film in the early sixties, The Haunting (so much so that I’ve never been able to contemplate seeing the remake). Nell in this and the previous movie in The Last Exorcism franchise has fair hair and an innocent to the point of blindingly naive demeanour, just like Jackson’s original heroine, played so well in the sixties movie by Julie Harris and maybe that’s why I have such an affinity with the Nell character in this franchise. More likely, however, it’s probably more because Ashley Bell is such a fantastic actor who really knows how to use her body language to put her character across when the character’s voice leaves her words often unspoken. She’s a really interesting actress who tends to hold your attention whenever she’s on screen.

There’s also another actor back from the previous movie but... I really shouldn’t tell you who. It might spoil the sequences that character is in a little too much for you.

To be honest, the movie proceeds throughout most of its running length to be a series of cheap scares piled on top of yet another sequence of cheap clichéd scares which I can sometimes be critical of as a technique in modern horror... except this movie executes these fright moments so well. It had me jumping at everything... dogs barking and hurling themselves at fences, radios doing spooky volume tricks, birds flying into windows... it’s all there but the director knows how to time it so, even though in most cases you know exactly when and how the scare will be coming, it still manages to give your heart a little rush when it comes. At least, it did that for me.

Nell’s gradual maturation from an innocent little girl through to a point when she is anything but an innocent little girl is both touching and satisfying to watch. There’s a scene in Sam Raimi’s excellent M.R. James retread Drag Me To Hell (reviewed here) where an attempt is made to trap a demon in a goat and then kill the goat before it gets loose again and a similar kind of sequence (in a slightly differently presented way) is played out towards the end of this movie but, where Raimi tends to play his scenes for laughs, this one is played for keeps and the shift in strategy by the exorcist and his secret society in here... their kind of end game last resort... is something which makes you think, oh yeah, this was the devils plan all along, to force this battle right here and now. I don’t want to spoil the final outcome for you but I really loved the last sequence of the movie (as i had the movie before) and, without giving too much away, I would have loved it if somehow a time machine could have been invented to let Bernard Herrmann score the last shot as a backwards xylophone hit over a jump cut. If you know the film I’m referring to here well... when it comes up in this one you’ll know it when you see it.

There is prominent use of CGI in this little end sequence but I just loved it and although there will probably be a lot of detractors to this movie, because it doesn’t do exactly what the first movie did and for a heap of all kinds of other reasons, I know a skillfully put together motion picture when I see one and the performances and standard, but astonishingly effective, horror score straying into the realms of sound design by composer Michael Wandmacher mark this movie out as a much worthy successor to the original film than, say, Damien: Omen 2 was to The Omen (and there’s a good reason I refer to that film series in particular here).

All I can say is, if you liked the first movie and were as astonished by Ashley Bell as I was, here you get to see a less physical but equally enchanting side to her characterisation of Nell and I think you might want to go along and leave your expectations at the door. I know I did and I’m very pleased at that.

[REC]: Genesis (aka REC 3: Genesis)

Wed or Dead

[REC]: Genesis (aka REC 3: Genesis)

Spain 2012
Directed by Paco Plaza
eone Region 2

I loved the first two parts of the [REC] franchise and was really looking forward to what would be happening next in the series. I’d heard that the two directors were splitting up to make the next two entries in the series back to back... one a sequel and one a prequel, with [REC]: Genesis being the prequel. I wanted to see this in the cinema but, as is par for the course in this country, the only cinema I could find showing this was in Central London with only 9pm screenings for a week, with the DVD release coming out only a few days into that run... if that could be called a proper cinema run. It was so well hidden that I couldn’t even find the cinema showing it until the few screenings I might have been able to attend had already been and gone.

So rather than risk lack of sleep and bad performance at work the next morning for a film journey at the heart of the city to see something I could buy on a home video format for less than the price of the ticket (let alone rail fares) I did the simple thing and bought a copy. I put it on last night and was immediately pulled in to what I assumed the style was going to be for a while. At least three characters are set up within the first few minutes of the film, who are all armed with cameras which are capturing what you, the audience, sees... ready to cover the wedding of the two main protagonists... Clara and Koldo.

All hell breaks loose at the wedding reception when the groom’s uncle, who is feeling “unwell” after a dog at his surgery bit him, starts to get a little peculiar... presumably he’s the vet from the first film who was treating the dog mentioned as having carried the religious zombie/demon virus (so I don’t think it’s fair to be calling this film a prequel, since it seems to be taking place around the same time of the year as the other two movies and it certainly doesn’t cover any of the back story we know from the previous films). When he goes all chompy-chompy on the crowd of wedding guests, it doesn’t take long until you have the various revellers running around eating each other, spreading the virus, and the few survivors are inadvertently split up and looking for each other... mainly the bride and groom who are trying to get back together again.

However, there’s a big “sea change” here and I’d have to guess that this is going to really divide the fans of the series at this point. One of the cameras recording the action is destroyed by the groom and suddenly we break free of the first person shooter style of movie making which has served the [REC] films in the past (and, to be fair, given them their brand name) and into the world of standard, third person viewpoint camerawork, much the same as you’d get in most other films.

I suppose if you’re a talented director whose most well known films internationally are co-directed and shot in a jerky, hand held, camera-eye style... I’m guessing they’ll come a time at some point when you’re going to want to prove to people that you can make great movies without the gimmick of “the characters are actually shooting this themselves” angle getting in the way. So one can hardly blame Paco Plaza from going down this route in this third installment. I do, however, think this was kind of a bad move in that it really gets the film away from the spirit of its predecessors and takes it away from the rough and ready, raw and in-your-face signature of those earlier, horror masterpieces.

It really does kind of amount to a dumbing down of the narrative style, in some ways, too. The first two films, especially the second, found very creative ways to use the camera eye and make it work as an effective, almost interactive at some level, experience. Here, with the camera free to tilt, pan and cut from shot to shot... it’s almost like the film-makers are making it too easy on themselves to just follow bits of the action without challenging themselves to make clever use of scripted meetings and timelines where the “camera operators”... or at least their equipment, can catch up with each other and reveal something new about the narrative.

What’s happened here is something that’s gone from unscored, cinema verite to something which looks very smooth and suddenly has an underscore that, to my ears at least, sounded way inappropriately scored for the imagery it was accompanying. This was especially noticeable after the switch from first person to third person, though, and so I could well have been responding to the juxtaposition of the two styles and the consequences of that in terms of contrast. Even so, I would have thought that this effect would have been self evident in the editing suite or whenever the music track was put on, so perhaps the director should shoulder a little of the responsibility for this one.

Another thing which I thought was a mistake for this style was the fact that, like most directors in many works, some of the shots were using a hand held, shaky cam style to convey certain moments of dramatic tension and, even though the quality of the third person footage is better (way better) than the camera work of the characters, this did give me a funny feeling at times because I found myself trying to figure out which person the camera I was looking through belonged to, in a few places. Again, I think a little more restraint on the director’s part may have ironed out some of this first-person-jitters hangover from the opening 20 minutes.

Okay... so I’ve mentioned a few negative things about the film but, let me fill you in on what else this movie is.

Well, disappointed as I was at the direction this movie took, I’d have to say you need to cut this movie some slack and see it regardless because, in terms of the production design and the beautiful compositions that fill the screen for the next fifty or so minutes of the film, after the character’s camera has been destroyed, [REC]: Genesis is one of the most beautiful, visually stunning movies I’ve seen in a while. I was absolutely gobsmacked by the sheer artistry and talent in this one. Bearing in mind that there are some truly gory sequences and some grim irony pushed to the forefront of this movie (love the hearing aid gag), it’s amazing how gorgeous and inspired the mise-en-scene (bar the music) is. If you’re a fan of well crafted movies in general, whether they be horror films or not (and let’s face it, generally they’re not), then you owe it to yourself to get hip-deep in the gore and see just how good looking this movie experience is.

The acting in this one is first rate, as it is in all the movies in this series, but once the film breaks free of it’s original aesthetic, the director also finds time to throw in some comedy moments which were more subtle, or at least less obvious, than they have been in the past.

The downside of having such a well shot, beautiful film, however, is that, unlike the first two movies in the franchise which were a rarity for being zombie movies which were actually scary for a change, as opposed to just being body count movies, [REC]: Genesis fails in the one thing which you really needed it to be to live up to the reputation of the first two... it just isn’t frightening!

Not that it really matters these days. No great worries. Horror films aren’t usually that scary at all, only the rare handful of scary movies live up to the scare implied by their genre. And unfortunately, [REC]: Genesis isn’t one of them. However, as I said, it’s got an awful lot going for it in terms of the overall look of the film and, with the added bouts of light comedy touches and grim irony to be found here, there’s an awful lot to offer fans of cinema, especially horror cinema, in this one.

There are, to be fair, a lot of cliché moments added to the mix too and the film is, I’m afraid to say, quite obvious about where it’s going to be going next from scene to scene. This is something that I think a lot of people will find kinda off-putting but if you soldier on through it, and it’s not a hard thing to do with such sumptuous photography, then you might find yourself bowled over by the film at a somewhat technical level. In terms of being a well made, fairly memorable horror movie, this one passes with flying colours... and when I say flying colours I mean red with flying body parts, obviously. Genre fans should love this if, unlike me, they’re not too attached to the previous installments and will possibly hail this movie as 2012’s horror masterpiece and, even I, was very taken with it... certainly enough to recommend to my readers, although you’ll need to watch the first two parts to understand what’s really going on in this one and why the infected act like they do at some points in the narrative.

I just wish it had the visceral power of the first two movies though.