The Alpha Incident

Take The A Strain

The Alpha Incident
USA 1978 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: An incident or two of spoilers.

Well, I finally saw a Bill Rebane movie that I really liked. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still quite cheaply made but, since not a great deal of large budget stuff happens, it doesn’t matter if we don’t see any of it on screen because this kind of script is perfect for low budget.

The film starts off with a credits sequence over footage of blood cells, cueing you in straight away that this is going to be one of those viral movies like The Andromeda Strain (reviewed here) or The Satan Bug (reviewed here). Indeed, like The Andromeda Strain, this particular type of virus comes from space, specifically brought back from Mars via a Martian probe. A team of scientists are studying it in a lab and trying to figure out what causes it to kill their various rats and mice, in some instances forcing their brains out through their heads. About a fifth of the action takes place here, crosscutting from the main focus of the story and back to these labs every so often but, once again it is man’s folly which brings about the ‘incident’ of the title (although what the heck ‘Alpha’ is supposed to be isn’t really made clear... I couldn’t find mention of it in the movie).

The film even has a real old-school Hollywood star in it, in the form of Ralph Meeker, who you may remember in such parts as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer in the outstanding Kiss Me Deadly, or as Kolchak’s buddy in the original TV movie of The Night Stalker. He was just recovering from some kind of heart attack when he made this so he doesn’t do much more than sit around, get up and talk a little while using a load of facial expressions for the most part... but that’s fine. That’s pretty much everyone’s role and, that’s part of the beauty of the film.

Anyway, the majority of the martian virus is being transferred by train to another lab for military experimentation, so it’s shunted into a siding by a small town railway station one morning. However, what the government guard on the train didn’t realise is that one of the curious train guards, played by George ‘Buck’ Flower, allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and he snuck a look at the mysterious cargo, accidentally breaking it and absorbing the virus through the broken glass lodged in his hand. Still not knowing what it is, he greets and has contact with the three workers in the station’s office the next morning and then, when the government guard, who may or may not be infected, finds out, he quarantines the place and the government evacuates the town and puts the national guard out. The government guy wounds one of the three, to stop him from leaving and also wounds Flower, who manages to make it into the surrounding forest to die.

And from here on in, the film becomes an intense, claustrophobic study of four people... the old timer (Meeker), the obnoxious one, the sexy lady and the government’s man... as they are forced to be in lockdown together. Later on, as new things are understood about the virus from the scientists working around the clock to find an antidote, it transpires that the thing activates and kills you when you fall asleep (which may or may not be a nice nod to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers). So the army send a helicopter to drop off coffee and amphetamines and, yeah, things get intense with the four people, who happen to find themselves in a Bill Rebane film... and, as I mentioned in my reviews of Rebane’s Monster-A-Go-Go (reviewed here) and Invasion From Inner Earth (reviewed here), Rebane seems to be all about mutual dislike and confrontation.

The film even has some really nice cinematography throughout too (probably from the director or one of his family) and includes some nice frame compositions. Such as a wonderful moment when two scientists are talking halfway up a stairwell. We see them from the side, framed in a kind of artificial diamond shape made from the tops and bottoms of the flights of stairs above and below them. It looks pretty good.

Or another moment when two of the men at the station are having an argument just outside the office. As they verbally spar in the foreground, we can see Ralph Meeker through the glass door quietly observing them from inside, his head perfectly framed in the top panel of the door.

There’s also a wonderful scene in a laboratory in the third part of the film where the colours are all slats of oranges and reds, which really lift the humdrum nature of the scientist sequences at this point.

Somehow, through all of this, the director manages to squeeze in a shot of Jenny, the female member of the station office workers, played by Carol Irene Newell, as she undresses and, believe it or not given the scenario, shoots a sex scene with her in it too. I guess it’s as good as any way to stay awake although, she seems a bit reluctant, to tell the truth.

And if you’ve read this far... here’s where the spoilers reside so, if you’re looking to see this anytime soon, skip the last couple of paragraphs. Fair warning.

Unlike some of Bill Rebane’s earlier movies, which often had a small but positive silver lining behind the ending... this movie is unflinchingly pessimistic and bleak in its outlook. Meeker is the first to go and suddenly throws a fit after he doses off, followed by a nice practical effects shot of his rubberised head with its eyeballs popping out and his brain making its way out the back of his skull (this is the most graphic I’ve seen Bill Rebane get, thus far). This is followed by the sad and lonely Jenny blowing her brains out in her car and then, when the government man and one deliberately obnoxious character are the only two left, the audience gets the news that the government is giving up on them as no cure has been found. So they helicopter drop off an ‘antidote’ for the people, not realising they’d not all take it at once. The obnoxious fellow does and they find out, to their dismay via his death, that the antidote was a cyanide capsule. Then the government man falls asleep but then, the next morning, he wakes up unscathed and he realises he was never infected by the virus himself... which is a bit of a waste because, well, lets just say that fans of George R, Romero’s classic Night Of The Living Dead will recognise that this has pretty much the same ending and leave it at that. So, yeah, pretty bleak.

All in all though, I have to say I really enjoyed this one. The film even has an original score this time around by Richard A. Girvin. He puts one foot wrong early on with some overly comic music for when Flowers goes to investigate the cargo in the train but, mostly it’s very cool, understated work which goes well with the chilling tone of the movie.

As I write these words (probably at least six months* before this review gets up on the site... I have a bit of a backlog of reviews to publish) I’m still in the newly extended coronavirus half-lockdown shilly shally which the government have lengthened rather than put us in proper lookdown and closing the borders. So The Alpha Incident was kind of a comforting watch in terms of having a situation I could directly relate to. Ralph Meeker’s character sums it up nicely when he’s talking to the government man... “I sure never expected anything like this’d happen in my life.” Yep, I think that goes for all of us in the world at the moment, to be honest. The Alpha Incident is a really cool movie and I’m happy to have been acquainted with it, thanks to Arrow’s Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection. I hope some of the others I haven’t watched yet are as good as this one.

*More like 18 months, it turns out

The Sadness

It’s A Sad,
Sad, Sad,
Sad World

The Sadness
aka Ku Bei
Taiwan 2021
Directed by Rob Jabbaz
Machi Xcelsior Studios

Let me say upfront that, The Sadness was filmed using both crypto currency (I still don’t understand that stuff) and the proceeds from the producer’s cam girl business. So, yeah, kinda old school alternate funding methods which might suggest a grittier, grainier product but, I have to say the whole film in terms of the shooting of it looks pretty spectacular and clean (the kind of clean I’d associate with someone like Hal Hartley or Wes Anderson). Even the hand held shaky cam moments in this look positively polished in regards to not pulling the audience out of the movie due to any overt stylistic expressions... at least as far as camera movement goes, at any rate.

However, in terms of the content of those frames, clean is not a word I would readily jump to when describing The Sadness. Once past the basic set up, it’s possibly one of the all time goriest films which I’ve seen in a long time... right up there with movies like, for example, Ichi The Killer... which was even cut on it’s Cat 3 video release... I know because I’d seen it uncut at its only unaltered UK screening at the London Film Festival and had to track down a Dutch DVD of it in the end, to get the full thing. Apparently, the same fate has been meted out to the physical home video release of The Sadness in its own country, where it’s not been released uncut... only at cinemas.

The set up tells of a country who have had their fill of lock downs since the coming of the Coronavirus and so, when a health official is trying to warn the public about a new virus... the Alvin virus... people don’t believe him. It’s all a part of the slow background build as we meet loving young couple Kat (Regina Lei) and Jim (Berant Zhu). They wake up and get into a slight disagreement about holiday plans... then Jim gets on his motor scooter and drops her at the station to go to work. And, as soon as they part ways, the Alvin virus hits and makes itself known in no uncertain terms, as the illness blackens the eyeballs of every infected victim, gives them a disturbing rictus grin and turns them into violent, crazed psychopaths wanting to violently kill, torture and rape anybody and everybody around them, indiscriminately... the act of which also infects the victims (if they’re not already infected) and it very quickly decimates the city... indeed, the country.

So, yeah, an obvious nod to George A. Romero’s The Crazies with the sexual undertone to the killings being an obvious ‘difference’ to maybe differentiate somewhat from both the Romero film and it’s subsequent remake (I’ve not seen the remake but the original Romero is not one I really took to when I first saw it). This one, once the craziness hits, is quite intense and almost continuous gory carnage with the director doing two things to not overload the audience too much and therefore let things get dull.

Firstly, he picks out a few ‘character’ victims and antagonists to repeatedly come back to... giving the audience someone to identify with or be scared of. Secondly, it’s obviously a story that’s mainly focused on Kat and Jim and how they are somehow going to find each other to come together again over the length of the movie (with a fairly predictable outcome, it has to be said)... so he gives both protagonists moments of calm amid the carnage where they are just wandering or existing at the periphery of the events, before taking them back into each new gory set piece.

And what set pieces. It’s fast and ferocious and, honestly, feels very dangerous. There’s an occular destruction moment on board a brilliantly executed  blood bath on a tube train carriage that Kat is riding, initially oblivious that there is any virus in the air, that I totally didn’t see coming due to the way it’s shot and edited... where a recurring, creepy old businessman puts his umbrella through a woman’s eyeball. It’s pretty grim and surprising stuff and, very early on, the director uses the trick of showing that one of the main protagonists is not safe from injury so, yeah, the atmosphere is thick with suspense.

That being said, one of the sequences (which reminded me of a scene that maybe inspired it, in the The Big Nowhere, the unfilmed second novel of James Ellroy’s LA Quartet) where the same creepy guy catches up with the same victim in a hospital and proceeds to vent his virus inspired sexual urges through repeatedly penetrating her eyeball socket with his penis, is kept curiously out of shot. Which seems strange at this point when the audience has already been exposed to a catalogue of fairly imaginative and grotesque violence... although saying that, the way it’s not shown in this sequence means you almost feel it more, as your imagination starts to fill in the gaps.

Another thing the director does, which is quite nice, is to give the same antagonist a moment where, for all intents and purposes, he breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience as he approaches the camera, axe slung over his shoulder. As it turns out, he’s really talking towards where he assumes the general direction of the fleeing Kat is but, it’s obviously a deliberate moment where the director wants to pop the audience from possible passive disengagement from the violent assault into another level within the frames, so to speak. The director also has a few other tricks up his sleeve such as using a shower curtain to both hide a very grim moment while doubling as an aid to Kat hiding her next move from a potential threat... I could go on about certain aspects of this film in relation to this kind of story telling cunning but, the review would have keep going for a while.

And, of course, the film is fully conscious of the satirical slant of the way in which the authorities are handling (or rather, not surviving) the outbreak, in light of the coronavirus pandemic within which the film was shot (the station and hospital you see in the movie had to be constructed within a studio set, apparently, due to not being able to film in these kinds of locations during the recent outbreak). Absolutely nobody believes anything the doctors are saying about the virus before it hits and everybody in the film seems aware that each new virus outbreak will now be a ‘politicised event’ and utilised by an untrustworthy government who don’t want to instigate another lock down in an election year. Which is, I suspect, pretty much where we are now with things in the UK, even as we are assaulted by a fifth wave which nobody in power wants to acknowledge, while millions are infected (including me, due to our own slack and nefarious government).

And that’s me about done on The Sadness. If you are a fan of zombie movies (which this really isn’t an example of at all, although there is some common DNA in presentation) or viral people turning into rage fuelled aggressors (such as The Crazies or Mom And Dad, reviewed here) then you are probably going to really like this movie. I’m not sure I can say I’m totally sold on the repeat value of this one but, it was kinda fun and it’s technically well put together, especially considering there’s apparently hardly any CGI in the movie and it’s mostly done as practical effects work... outstanding. And not really a horror film either... more science fiction but, I suspect it would play well with a horror crowd, for sure. Worth a look.

The Satan Bug

Bug’s Bonhomie

The Satan Bug
USA 1965 Directed by John Sturges
Kino Lorber/20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone A

I mentioned recently in my review of The Andromeda Strain (which you can read here) that The Satan Bug was another of those great virus themed movies I’d never seen which, given that I am writing this in a semi-lockdown status in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic, is perfect viewing for this time. I also didn’t realise that Alistair MacLean, under a pen name, had written the book on which it was based and nor was I aware that one of the co-writers of the script was none other than famous novelist James Clavell (who also wrote the screenplay to the original version of The Fly, if memory serves).

So I managed to get a US Blu Ray sent over and, I have to say that, while the film isn’t exactly perfect, I was much more impressed with it than I thought I would be.

One of the reasons for that is Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the film, of course, which starts the movie off just right as we go into one of those animated title sequences which could almost have been designed by Saul Bass (but wasn’t, it was by DePatie-Freleng). It’s edgy and sinister with the perfect music to push the kind of expressionistic simplifications of an animated virus depicted and certainly gives you a sense of foreboding before going into the main film...

And then, once we start the movie proper, we get some fairly typical clean looking but interesting 20th Century Fox style art direction and cinematography. I don’t know why all films in this widescreen aspect ratio by this company at the time felt like this but it certainly has a recognisable style and it actually helps with the sterile, laboratory settings of the opening movie.

The plot is simple. We start off with an extremely restrained, almost abstract in what it doesn’t show, heist on a lab (relocated to America for the movie version). After a diversion as special agent Lee Barrett (as played by George Maharis) is recruited to help out as a consultant on the robbery and its fall out, we are made aware by co-star Richard Basehart (who you might remember as the Admiral in the TV version of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea) of just how dangerous The Satan Bug of the title, which the robbers have escaped with, is.

After this, the shenanigans begin, as a psychopathic terrorist holds the world to ransom unless all war research finishes (or some such) and Lee, aided by such great actors as Dana Andrews, Anne Francis and Simon Oakland, has to try and track down where the various lethal viruses have been taken before, after witnessing the death of everybody in Florida by a milder stolen virus, Los Angeles is taken down the next day. At this point the movie kind of devolves into a standard track and chase adventure as the 'good guys' rush to keep this from happening but it keeps up the atmosphere of slow burning anxiety for most of the film although, I’ll be honest, the film does start to drag somewhat before its conclusion.

However, there is a lot which is brilliant about the film. Jerry Goldsmith’s pulsating and driven score is one of those things. Like a lot of his films where the director actually listened to him, the film is quite sparsely ‘spotted’, Goldsmith was a master of knowing when to hold the silence and only bring the music in when it was really needed... it’s mostly great stuff and you can totally hear how he would develop into his brilliant Planet Of The Apes score just a few years later. He uses those wonderful musical phrases throughout too which, I can’t really pinpoint in terms of an accurate musical reference, since I really don’t know much about music but I always think of it as his ‘bouncing ball drops’. Little musical phrases of repeat notes which last a few seconds but which get faster as they go and which remind me of a ball dropping and the thuds getting faster as they hit nearer the ground on each bounce. Sorry, that’s the only way I can think to describe it but he uses this kind of musical phrase on a number of his scores from around the period and I can always tell it’s him when I hear them.

Also, those shot set ups early on in the first twenty or so minutes of the film where everything is confined to the labs look absolutely gorgeous. It’s all so well lit with lots of pinky oranges in the lighting schemes to add contrast to the dull, clinical whites and, on occasion, the shots will cut to offices with wooden panels which pretty much mirror the same colour scheme. Since the majority of the labs are made of glass walls, we also have shots mostly made up of vertical struts which Sturges uses to split up his canvass and highlight various characters in their own slats of the screen. Again, he does this with other environments too and where a glass door may slide open to push the emphasis of one of these rectangular slabs that comprise the frame design, he will sometimes cross-cut to a shot of a solid door (such as a vault door) in another room being opened in exactly the same part of the screen. Nice stuff and it was this ‘crowded verticals’ pitched against the later shots of lone or small groups of standing figures against a sterile, US highway desert landscape that kept me interested throughout.

So... lots of visual hooks and musical candy to engage the brain for most of the film.

There are a few clunky bits too though and I especially got annoyed with something George Maharis says into a phone at one point. Interestingly, the two deaths at the start of the movie in terms of the heist sequence show no bodies or aftermath... it’s all alluded to by other characters and the focus of their attention is kept out of shot. However, when Maharis and Anne Francis find a dead body sunk and weighted down (presumably) in a swimming pool a little later, Maharis reports that they found someone... “floating at the bottom of the pool.’ Seriously? If they’re at the bottom of a pool then they’re really not floating are they? And this was written by James Clavell?

One thing which did cause me delight though was spotting some of the smaller actors who would later become much more well known. For example, a young James Hong plays one of the doctors seen at the start of the movie. It doesn’t amount to much more than a cameo but it’s nice to see how he looked back then. Similarly, one of the agents who is following George Maharis and Anne Francis when they have been captured by ‘the bad guys’ is none other than James Doohan, literally the year  before he would become a household name playing Scotty on the very first incarnation of the Star Trek TV show. It’s interesting that he has a bit of a role to play but, since actors are payed more if they have any lines to say, he manages to remain silent throughout... even though he both gets into a gunfight and then has a dramatic moment where he drops dead when exposed to a virus. It was nice to see him in a pre-Scotty role though. And, yes, a waitress in a jazz bar near the start of the film is a young Lee Remick.

And that's pretty much all I’m going to say here about The Satan Bug (or risk getting into spoiler territory)... nice shot design and lighting, a highly competent ensemble cast, some truly catchy music and, as it nears the end, maybe just a little bit dull in places. I loved it though and am planning to be watching this again some day. A good slice of mid-sixties cinematic treasure which is well worth the time of any fan of the cinematic arts... so check it out when you’ve got a moment. Watch it during a pandemic for an extra sense of authenticity.

The Andromeda Strain

Express Strain

The Andromeda Strain
USA 1971 Directed by Robert Wise
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

The Andromeda Strain is a movie made in 1970 which had a delayed release in 1971 and it’s one of those films which was always on television when I was a kid in the 1970s and which I’ve been meaning to catch up to now for years. It’s also a film which I confuse with another super-virus film I’ve not seen but which also played on 1970s television with alarming frequency, The Satan Bug. Now I have the scores from both these movies but I’ve never been able to give either of those scores context until now... with the release of Arrow’s Blu Ray restoration of The Andromeda Strain (I’ll have to pick up the other movie at a later date).

I hadn’t even realised it before picking this new version up but the film is directed by Robert Wise... one of the most famous and accomplished of American directors, in my opinion, who never really seems to have much of a signature style from project to project that I can detect. So he edited Citizen Kane and directed such famous films as The Sound Of Music, West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Star Trek The Motion Picture and, of course, my favourite horror movie, The Haunting (which I reviewed here). So, by the time I had the disc in the machine, I was really looking forward to this one.

And... it’s a film that starts off strong but, although it has a lot of suspense built into it... does kinda run out of steam towards the end, I feel, for reasons I’ll try to make clear later.

It starts off with some textual information that the film is based on true information etc, which is completely false since Michael Crichton, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, freely admits to making it all up and the jargon written for the scientists to talk about in this is, it would seem, equally imaginative. Following this we have a very in-your-face opening title sequence where various bits of typography giving ‘document information’ is collaged with the various credits bombarding the audience while composer Gil Mellé’s melange of crashing electronic tonalities come hurtling in to create an equally violent but appropriate assault on the ears.

This is followed by a sequence in a desert where two men go to check out a small village (with a population of 62 people) where something is obviously very wrong. After they start heading towards the community, Robert Wise does a very smart thing and we then cut to the military outpost where the two are radioing in all that happens to them. We don’t see these two men again... just hear them as they encounter body after body before they die themselves, victim to an alien virus which has crashed down to Earth on one of our satellites. However, because it’s all done with the sound of their voices and we just observe the various men in the room receiving the broadcast and their reactions to it, the scene is rendered a lot more dramatic and scarier than if you had just seen two men collapsing.

Then, after a mad scramble as four crack scientists, all strangers to one another, are commandeered by the military, we see two of them, played by Arthur Hill and James Olson, go into the dead village in special suits and we see them explore the corpse ridden community. The director keeps splitting up bits of screen and has moving, fragmented images showing you what the two are seeing as you also follow them on separate, simultaneous windows... like a huge split screen sequence gone wrong with portions that slowly move around on their own... this is quite an experimental, expressionistic film on Robert Wise’s part, I would say.

After finding two survivors... a crying baby and an old, drunken man... the two bring them back to the base station which makes up the setting of the majority of the rest of the film (apart from the odd insert sequence). It’s here they are joined by the other two scientists played by David Wayne and Kate Reid. There’s another nice bit of expressionism as these two go down in an elevator and the screen splits to show each of them on either side of a diagram of the elevator tracking their progress.

The facility they are in takes the form of five big circular floors underground, each one at a different level of decontamination as the last. I’m surprised no mention of Dante’s five rings of hell is made in the script, to be honest. Especially since the next 15 to 20 minutes shows them spending almost a day going through five separate sets of decontamination procedures (including a six hour rest break) to ensure that, when they arrive on Level 5 (the deepest level) where they will do their job to determine the nature of the virus and just how to deal with it, they are as germ free as possible.

Now the film is interesting because it does its utmost, despite the quite expressive use of split screen and constant reference to diagrams and recorded images, to present the film as almost a fly on the wall documentary and... it’s a neat tightrope that Wise manages to walk to actually get the film to succeed on this level for so long. Indeed, it’s where the dramatic story set ups are introduced early on in the film that really let things down because, frankly, it just keeps telegraphing itself in the most obvious ways. For example, it establishes fairly early on that the character played by Kate Reid has trouble with red, flashing lights so you just know that, at some dramatic point in the film, she’s going to throw an epileptic fit.

Similarly, a lot of fuss is made about James Olsen’s character (who I last saw being similarly deadpan as the main hero of Moon Zero Two... reviewed here) being ‘single’ and so being the one entrusted with the special key which disarms the nuclear device when the base goes into self destruct mode to stop any virus from spreading (which in the case of this one, as it turns out, would only make the virus stronger). So you kinda know there will be a dramatic countdown chase as Olsen is trying to stop the self destruct sequence from running and, sure enough, this sequence serves as the climax of the movie. By this point, though, the transparency of these dramatic devices coupled with a lack of real tension in the last third of the story kinda makes for a dull movie by the end. Which is a shame because lots of this movie really works... it just doesn’t maintain the tension towards the finish line and seems somehow anti-climactic.

That being said, though, Gil Mellé’s score, which I mentioned earlier, is really great. There’s not much of it and it’s sparsely spotted, with the score kicking in to highlight the odd bit of drama or ‘information’ but it’s effective and also, as far as I’m concerned, a great listen away from the movie. As far as I know the original, full movie masters have been lost to time for this score but the short 10 inch, hexagonally shaped (as is the virus when magnified) vinyl release from 1971 must have pretty near to all of the music on it anyway and the limited edition Intrada CD from a few years ago uses this recording. It’s a wonderful example of synthesised abstraction with the occasional stab at melodic backing and rhythm... it’s pretty good away from the images (and is probably still my best take away from the movie).

Not much more to say about The Andromeda Strain other than Robert Wise certainly provides us with an interesting film and the use of extreme contrasts in sound and some interesting image choices still make for an enthralling experience for a lot of the running time. If you are a fan of this director’s work then I would certainly recommend you check this one out. Especially in this nice Arrow Blu Ray restoration which has the usual plethora of good extras (which, alas, I haven’t had time to watch) thrown in with it. Certainly if you are going to grab a copy of this film, the Arrow version is the route to go down so, if you have a hankering for an alien super virus movie in this time of government lockdown and self isolation, grab this one while it’s hot, would be my advice.

[•REC] 4 aka [•REC] Apocalypse

Ship[•REC]ed

[•REC] 4 aka [•REC] Apocalypse
Spain 2014
Directed by Jaume Balagueró
Entertainment One
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers for all the [•REC] movies occur in this review.

So here we have the fourth in the successful Spanish horror franchise, this time directed as a solo venture by Jaume Balagueró, after his directing partner on the first two movies directed the third entry in the franchise, [•REC] 3 Genesis (reviewed here). According to the Spanish title of the movie as found on the straight to BluRay print released this week, the actual title of this movie on the opening credits is [•REC] 4, so it’s somewhat bemusing that the subtitle which translates this title card reads REC: Apocalypse, for some reason. Maybe the UK marketing people thought we were allergic to numbers although, it becomes quite evident right from the outset of the movie, that this is not in any way a stand alone movie... you need to have seen the previous three to get the most out of this one, for sure.

Like the third movie, which jettisoned the ‘camera eye, found footage’ horror approach after about twenty minutes into that movie, [•REC] 4 makes no attempt to bring us back into that style and is told in third person mode right from the start of the story... although much of the various plot twists do make use of surveillance camera technology and even the ‘found footage’ shot during the first film... so it at least keeps the idea of the titles of these movies going, at least.

This movie is, however, still shot mostly with jerky, hand held footage... the difference being that it is not once shown to be footage from a character’s camera. The camera is very reactive and follows various characters at close range to ensure bringing us into the situations with them but, unusually, chooses to often cut away to master shots and establishing shots, right within the same scenes and at a rapid pace. This style doesn’t in any way jar, though... especially since a lot of the long shots looking on in a more voyeuristic manner are equally jerky in comparison, to ensure that all the footage cross cuts effectively, I expect.

[•REC] 4 starts off towards the end of the first (and therefore also the second and third) part in the timeline, with a small team of soldiers going into the original building, one of whom “rescues” TV reporter Ángela Vidal... played once again with much presence and cuteness by Manuela Velasco. However, you may remember from [•REC] 2 (reviewed here) that, contrary to being killed as was implied by the ending of the original [•REC], Angela is now inhabited by the parasitic creature who lived in the “Medeiros girl”, who started the original ‘Religious virus’... and the film keeps iterating this over and over, even though she says she can’t remember anything about the previous events. After the pre-credits rescue, both her and her rescuer wake up on a ship which is quarantined out at sea. The scientists on the ship are trying to perfect an anti-virus and it becomes clear in the narrative that this is still set only a short time after the events from both the first two films, in the apartment block, and the third movie... as the mother of one of the main protagonists of [•REC] 3 also finds herself on the ship.

As you would expect, the virus gets out of control again and the ship is isolated from outside help, quite deliberately in this case, by the very people who are trapped on board the vessel. Obviously, this enclosed space kind of setting is a bid to go back to the general claustrophobic shenanigans of the first two [•REC] films but, alas, without the “found footage” camera eye and the slow crawl kind of lurking dread found in the first two entries, it doesn’t matter what setting you put the action in... it’s not a scary zombie movie like the original and instead, it’s more in keeping with the common and garden variety of zombie movies which the original entry in this series made such a refreshing change from. So basically it’s a shoot and run picture... but it’s not an unimpressive one, once you accept it for what it is.

The main problem I have is that the trick of this one relies quite heavily and single handedly with the audiences belief that Ángela Vidal is the evil element working against all the other characters but, without wanting to give too much away, it proves to be the undoing of any logic to the film because there is another factor which the audience may or may not be aware of but, in terms of the choices made by Ángela during the movie, her actions prove to be much more consistent with her mental state in one situation and, it turns out, pretty much inconsistent with what is really going on. It’s like the director is deliberately feeding the audience red herring after red herring without worrying that in order to follow these kinds of steps, the character would have to be acting in an entirely illogical manner. So it’s a bit of a problem, for me at least, in terms of character motivation in the way in which Vidal works and interacts in this movie.

All that being said, though, it’s still a really nice little horror piece. Despite it being touted as the last in the series, there is a least a little wriggle room given for a sequel although, it would need to be a complete reset to make that work, methinks. However, in terms of being a nice, standard, formula survival horror movie, it does pretty well. It helps that you care about the characters somewhat and, even though it’s somewhat predictable, it is a genre which can thrive on this kind of repeat variation and it’s shot with a certain style and has a much more, low key and appropriate (though possible not as much fun) musical score than [•REC] 3 supporting it throughout... yeah, we’ve come a long way from the franchise’s roots as found footage, that’s for sure.

For all its faults and successes, I think that overall it’s no better or worse than the third film in the series and that’s still pretty good. It’s such a shame though, that the intense scariness of the first installment and the smart, playfulness of the format of the second installment, have been abandoned in favour of more standard “zombie cinema” attractions in the third and fourth in the series. For anybody who loves the [•REC] films, though, and the horror genre in general, then [•REC] 4 (aka [•REC] Apocalypse) is still a good, solid genre entry and shouldn’t disappoint too many horror fans, I should think. I’d have much preferred it to get a cinema release, like the first two movies did, though... audience reaction in films of this nature are always a good thing to look at.

Mission Impossible II

Treasure Of The 
Chimera Mardre

Mission Impossible II
2000 USA/Germany
Directed by John Woo
DVD Region 2

Okay, so on to the next review as I watch the Mission Impossible films for the first time, courtesy of my dad (see my review of the first one here).

So four years after DePalma’s first movie hit cinemas, famous Chinese action director John Woo was called in to direct the second in the ongoing series and, as you would expect, delivered a much different film to the first one. I actually remember the trailer which ran for this in cinemas at the time, of Tom Cruise getting all ‘Kirked up’ and climbing a mountain and a nice quote from Anthony Hopkins along the lines of “Mr. Hunt, this isn't mission difficult, it's mission impossible.” I must say, the trailer looked quite good but there was no way I would be going to the cinema to see it because I hadn’t seen the first one. 13 years later... I’ve now fixed that issue.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, I‘ve not seen that much Woo... but I know he makes some of the most respected ‘kinetic action ballet’ style of movies out there. I’d seen only four of his other films before this and I remember three of those - The Killer, Hard Boiled and Paycheck - being pretty good... unfortunately this man also made a terrible movie called Face Off which, to paraphrase a great writer once again, I only managed to survive the tedium of by gnawing one of my own legs off.

He seems to have a couple of trademark features to his films that I can make out... one is a white dove which always seems to get in there somewhere (a little like director John Glen’s pigeon obsession), this film being no exception and the other being that there’s usually a fair amount of slow motion footage during action sequences which, in all honesty, I do find kind of dull. Woo uses these to highlight certain details of a sequence he wants to stick in your mind... much like Eisenstein would take an isolated shot of an individual in close up, isolated away from the crowd he or she is in, to emphasise the emotion or detail of a scene... that is, if Eisenstein had been filming people driving high speed vehicles and shooting about a gazilllion rounds of ammunition a second at each other.

Well there’s plenty of his slow motion stuff in here too... especially in the end fist fight between Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character and the main villain of the piece, played by Dougray Scott (who I previously saw in the Doctor Who episode Hide, reviewed here...). However, there is one use of slow motion right near the opening of the picture, which introduces Thandie Newton’s “lovable thief” romantic interest character and throws her into the mix of things as Tom Cruise first catches her eye while they are both observing some Spanish flamenco dancing... and the flamenco steps are slowed down. This "dance" of these characters’ opening encounter is something which does catch the imagination somewhat and it’s also something which the director takes great pains to emphasise as an echo within the body of the rest of the movie... and which I think is a good thing because I’m guessing that emphasis wouldn’t eccessarily have been something which was actually written into the script. It’s done almost subliminally during key moments, by the use of Hans Zimmer’s fairly interesting scoring, which every now and again will reference back to that flamenco music to remind us that Cruise and his new leading lady definitely have... “a thing” for each other. And this works really well.

I say it’s a different kind of film from the first one and certainly there’s a lot more sweeping elegance to the shooting style but, although John Woo had the script written around the action scenes he already wanted to include as set pieces (and not the other way around as most traditional directors would do), the film is not exactly an action fest in terms of content and I’m afraid to say that, while I prefer good writing over high speed action pieces any day, this second outing suffers from exactly the same problem tht the first film did. That is to say, the story and events depicted are really obvious and predictable all the way through.

It’s very obvious, given the parameters of the Mission Impossible branding, that various twist scenes are just not going to work. The whole plot being centred around a sample of a deadly virus called Chimera, for example, almost screams out for one of the Mission Impossible team to get infected, causing a 20 hour time limit to that person expiring unless the virus can be obtained. Of course, way before the time this actually happens in the movie, you will have figured out who, how and certainly why this happens... which is a shame because I suspect that could have been rewritten as a really strong and dynamic part of the plot.

Similarly, a good five minutes before we see the leading actor ostensibly shot by one of the bad guys (so “bad” he went on to play Dracula in Stephen Sommer’s Van Helsing), it’s pretty obvious by the way the scene is shot, even before either of the characters are through the door in a particular scene, that Cruise has switched their identity with the aid of the “not very convincing” face masks people use to steal each others personae with in these films.

But, as the first entry in the series, there is some good stuff going on here too, with a great "bath/robbery" scene between Cruise and Newton near the start of the movie and a truly poetic, wire work fist fight at the end which isn’t anything new (even for the time) but is certainly more than watchable, especially when pitched with Zimmer’s effective choral and percussion music which does a lot to elevate a fair few of the action scenes to a certain level of quality... much like Elfman’s did in the first movie although, to be fair to Mr. Elfman and in hindsight, having now heard the music as a stand alone experience, Elfman’s score did suffer a lot more in the mix than Zimmer’s does here, where it gets a fair amount of highlighting against the inevitable bullets, bikes and bangs.

A lot of people have said to me that the second and third movies in the four to date are a lot worse than the original. I don’t think the second movie, at any rate, is any worse than De Palma’s opening salvo... I just think it’s a similar film done differently. So, honestly, if you liked the first one and haven’t seen this one, I’m guessing this will be a far from intolerable experience for you. Check it out sometime.



Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout

Contagion

Bugs N’ Kisses

Contagion
2011 USA/United Arab Emirates
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Warner Brothers Blu Ray B 

Warning: Spoilers slowly mutating and spreading 
throughout this review as you read it.

Okay, so Contagion was a movie I really wanted to see when it came out in cinemas at the end of 2011 but I was already well into my 3-4 month Christmas preparations by then so I just couldn’t claw back any time to get out and see this one. I forgot about it after that, in all honesty, but when I saw a copy of the 2 disc Blu Ray/DVD edition in my local exchange shop going for a fiver, I finally remembered I’d wanted to see this one.

It’s interesting because, at the time it came out, I don’t remember this one being particularly marketed on the strength of the director and, considering it’s got a very big cast of ‘movie star’ actors like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslett, Lawrence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Elliot Gould in it, it’s no wonder that the movie was kinda sold on its cast rather than any of the non-acting crew. In fact, because there are no credits at the start of the film, I managed to go all the way through the movie without knowing who directed it... although I did pick up right from the outset that the way this movie was shot was definitely something above average. I’d just assumed it was an old Hollywood director from the 60s and 70s come out of retirement to get that kind of ensemble piece going... but now that I know it’s Soderbergh and compare it to the last film I saw by him at the cinema, Side Effects (reviewed here), it all makes sense now.

Contagion is, for the most part, a quite impressive beast of a movie. It manages to look and feel epic in scope without really becoming too bloated by its own ambitions, although the second half of the movie did drag just a little in some places... but for the most part, especially in the first half, I was absolutely riveted.

Since I hadn’t known who the director was before I watched it, my main attraction for actually giving some time to this “virus movie” (yeah, it’s Outbreak without the monkey, but that’s okay) was actually Gwyneth Paltrow, who is an actress I seem to rate a lot higher than most people do. I rarely watch the kinds of films she’s in so I was looking forward to seeing what she was like in this one but, unfortunately, it turns out that she doesn’t make it through maybe even five minutes of the movie before dying from the virus she’s contracted on the day before the opening scene. There are some scenes with her later on in the movie where Soderbergh cleverly uses standard film footage and then freezes it at specific moments as a metaphor for the long distance security cam footage of this character that Kate Winslett’s character is reviewing simultaneous to this... but for the most part her quick death and the subsequent death of her son while Matt Damon is away having to deal with her dying in hospital, is merely used to make an opening point.

Matt Damon is not the main protagonist of this movie though... or, to put it another way... Matt Damon is one among many main protagonists throughout the film (as indicated by the actors playing them in the cast above) and as a result, no person stays as the focus of the film for very long. It’s also a film about the way characters can drop out of the narrative when you least want them too and it all meshes together to present an experience which is very much about a disease and the effects that disease has on every one (whether they have contracted the disease or not) and so, for instance, Kate Winslett’s World Health Organisation employee who is working for Lawrence Fishburne becomes this film’s Marion Crane character (Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho) as the story strands you are following with her character come to an end when she ends up being a customer in one of the big triage sites she has set up to deal with the onslaught of the virus. Her death works really well and, although you obviously have some warning of the end coming with her character, the slight shock value is not really deadened all that much by the inevitability of her situation.

However, in some scenes, this tactic about the film being about the effects of a disease rather than the people, backfires somewhat when the characters are maybe a little too fully explored than necessary (which is why I believe the second half of the movie loses it just a little) and while it’s very interesting and brilliant to explore just how Lawrence Fishburne’s character manages to get himself into trouble with the government just by showing a little empathy or the way in which Marion Cottilard’s character is kidnapped and used as a bargaining chip specifically because of her relationship with the World Health Organisation... or even how Jude Law’s unsympathetic (for the most part and dependent on your view of homeopathy and greed) blogger gets taken down by the CIA, I think we didn’t really need to have such closure on the ends of these mini stories because they detract from the “virus sweeping everyone along in its wake” kind of sensibility which a lot of the rest of the movie has in spades.

Actually, Lawrence Fishburne has to get an extra mention from me because he has been given some of the best lines (the dialogue is very 1970s “Hollywood crisp” in some sequences) and because his character is just so righteous and sympathetic that you would always want to be fighting in his corner. He is portrayed as a boss who actually does care about his workers and their personal physical and mental health as much as the jobs they need to carry out for him.

I said I knew right away that this movie had been directed by someone special. Well there’s at least two interesting things going on with this movie which I think I’ve got Soderbergh pegged on now. One is the way in which the colours go from very neutral to quite colourful (especially in the sequences with W.H.O workers in their more natural office environments, which are usually accompanied by some bright warm yellows and oranges) as opposed to the washed out greys and blues of the rest of the film and then switch back again from scene to scene. Even a bright green used to desaturate the feel of the shot at the start looks very drab because, as you probably know, green lighting usually kills off or neutralises flesh tones and this is used to give the usually glowing Gwyneth Paltrow a real visual sense of being someone who is feeling run down which, coupled with her excellent acting, works really well, of course.

The other great thing Soderbergh does is to have the camera lingering on little details in the shots... which is a tactic I’ve seen him use before to highlight certain details but which, in this movie, is used almost specifically to allow the audience to reflect on how something might be carrying the killer virus that is the main subject of the film. A folder left on a desk, for example, suddenly makes us think twice after the owner has walked off and we stay at the desk with a file. Or the way in which, instead of following Matt Damon and his daughter out of the hospital environment, our camera eye stays behind to linger and watch the door to the outside world slowly shutting, to make us think of the possible consequences of Matt Damon maybe being a carrier of the infection. That kind of thing is done at suitable intervals and it all raises this movie up and gives it a certain lift and entertainment value where another director might have made less of a point of it.

My only real complaint about the film, other than it trying to bring too much closure on certain scenes (the Stockholm Syndrome style reaction of Marion Cottilard towards the end after she has escaped and then goes back to warn her prior captors is something which stretched credibility just a little and which I could honestly have done without), is the score... which is quite wonderful in it’s own right as a score by Soderbergh regular Cliff Martinez but which seems to give us a little too much of a high in some scenes, where it deviates from it’s quiet, sinister tone into something more like techno dance in certain sequences. It’s a valid way of scoring the scenes in which it does this, I think,  but I kept asking myself if I should have been tapping my feet when everyone was fighting for their lives against a killer bug. It maybe works more appropriately in Italian giallo or horror movies than it did here but, still, it managed not to stretch things too far, maybe, and all in all it’s something I’d like to hear away from the movie if I get a chance. So that can’t be bad.

The ending scene was a slight disappointment, perhaps, only because you knew how this film was going to end from the first shot. The movie catalogues the number of days the virus has been active and we start the opening of the movie on Day Two and carry on from there... so it’s really not rocket science to figure out that with such an important moment remaining undisclosed, we will flash back to Day One for the finale and it certainly doesn’t play badly. Just might have been nice to be a little less predictable there, maybe.

So, anyway, my verdict for this movie is very much that it’s a film which is an impressive piece of screen art. It takes what is ostensibly a big name, Hollywood style cast and manages to pitch them against each other in the service of the story and main messages rather than use them as performances to just hang big movie moments on. This is a film which is put together as a creative and expressive piece, as much as a film like this could be, with the kinds of funding modern movies need and I was really pleased to have seen it. Definitely worth your time if you like big disaster movies or Soderbergh movies in general.