Don’t Breathe

Rooms Of The Blind Head

Don't Breathe
2016 USA Directed by Fede Alvarez
UK cinema release print.

I was quite up for seeing Fede Alvarez’ new movie Don’t Breathe when I first heard of it because the title, at least to me, implied that it was a horror movie. As it happens, a few weeks later I found out that it is not, in any way, an example of the horror genre... more of a ‘home invasion’ movie. Now I’m not a big fan of home invasion movies, as it happens. They tend to be nasty and sadistic in the intent of their main protagonists but... you know... not nasty and sadistic in a good, wholesome fun way. More something else. However, while there are some caveats in terms of the morality on display in this movie, it’s actually more of a heist goes wrong story than anything else. So that’s kind of cool and, once I’d understood that after seeing the trailer, I figured I might as well give it a go. Especially since it seems to have taken America by storm a few weeks ago.

Okay, so the film is about three burglars, one of whom 'borrows' the keys to various houses from his dad’s security firm so they can let themselves in and help themselves to people’s belongings when they’re out. Some minor character stuff is set up so we can get the idea that... not all of the criminals are bad. Some of them have just fallen on hard times and have other responsibilities. Yeah... okay that didn’t really work for me, to be honest. It’s much like the first time I saw Attack The Block (reviewed here), in that the film asks me to choose between a bunch of thugs (or burglars in this case) and another, possibly, depending on your point of view, even worse character or set of characters.

And that's one of only two real problems with the movie... I didn’t really care too much as to who got killed or didn’t make it to the end of the movie. They’re all as bad as each other so, that takes the heat off in terms of worrying about what’s going to happen to anybody, to be honest. That’s not to say, however, that the film is lacking in tension. Indeed, the film is to be praised as being unbearably taut and intense the entire way through. So even when you don’t care who gets what done to them, you will certainly be on the edge of your seat as the movie progresses.

To ratchet up the tension, the director uses the very simple trick of shooting the film almost as if it’s a certain kind of modern horror film. As I said, it’s not a horror film, it’s a straight thriller, but the director does his best to make you jump throughout the movie and he does so quite successfully, as far as I’m concerned. I must have reacted more jittery to this movie than most genuine horror movies I’ve seen at the cinema and even one of the ‘jump scares’ that is included to little effect in the promotional trailer, works so much better in the finished product, especially with some ferocious sound design kicking in, that it’s a brilliant set up to help make the audience feel uneasy, even before our three looting protagonists/antagonists (take your pick) have even made their first attempt at breaking and entering into the main central antagonist’s home.

The trick here is that the owner of the house is blind but he's ex-military... so he’s fast, tough, ferocious and agile when it comes to protecting his 'millions of dollars pay off' which a court of law awarded him after his daughter was killed in a car accident. So he not only wants to defend his home, but he bears a grudge against anyone who goes after his loot. He also has a ‘creepy secret’ in his basement which further enhances the moral slant of the story... just in case you were having any trouble with siding with 'heroes' who want to rob you of your money. Yeah, okay, there are a lot of clichés in this movie, including killing off one of the ‘so called’ good guys early on in the proceedings to show how tough the main antagonist is and just how much trouble the others are in, as he locks them down in his home with him.

At this point the film turns into a survival movie, relying heavily on what I call the cinema of predetermined chaos. Everything gets turned around in the confusion of a constant battering of intensity and people go back for objects or people they shouldn’t, drop things which will help the opposition, and just generally make silly mistakes so the writers and director can manipulate your emotions even more when those particular threads are pulled. However, like I said before, it’s a really well oiled example of this kind of cinema and, as I alluded earlier, my heart was pounding in my chest throughout a lot of this movie.

The film also has some nice little set pieces too and one in particular comes to mind, when the director tries to ‘out-Spielberg’ Spielberg’s work on one of his more inventive sequences in The Lost World (Jurassic Park II)... but I won’t say what that is because I really don’t want to spoil this one for you. There’s also an interesting sequence involving grey filters/overlays and some black contact lenses to make certain character’s eyes look like they are dilated but, again, I’ll leave that for you to discover for yourself.

Don’t Breathe opens strongly with a visually arresting sequence which, again, is something I won’t describe here but, in this particular case, I’d have to say that it was possibly a mistake to put this opening sequence in here. It’s basically a flash forward to a sequence right near the end of the movie, before the final act is played out and this means that it gives away certain truths about which characters are still in play in the main body of the film at this unspecified point in time. So the tension gets diminished somewhat by having that reveal play early on in the picture. But, there are still a few spills and chills left once the movie catches up to this point and, despite a little ‘sleight of hand’ in terms of one of the characters who keeps seeming to come back from certain death, one can only respect the writer/director’s call here in that the trade off between that opening and the majority of the rest of the movie was obviously worth it to him so... yeah, may have been the right call.

Also, more so, perhaps, than a lot of movies, this film owes an incredible amount of its tension and excitement to the beautifully unsettling score by veteran composer Roque Baños. I’ve admired his scores on other movies and this one is quite heavy and is dialled up in the mix a lot of the time, allowing some beautiful percussion effects to come to the fore and help to move the story along. There is supposed to be a CD release coming towards the end of this month and, I have to say, this one is most certainly ‘on the list’ of required purchases.

And that’s about it. I thought the ending of this film in terms of the very last scene was a little weak... with producer's eyes firmly looking towards the possibility of a sequel but, ultimately, this is absolutely cracking movie making and I would recommend Don't Breathe as a great, if jumpy, time at the cinema. Don’t miss this one if you enjoy films which genuinely make the blood pump faster and your hands grip the arms of the cinema seat. A very punchy and morally ambiguous film which will make you think for a while after the final bolt has been shot, so to speak. Catch it while you can.

Nightmares Come At Night

Lorys Slain?

Nightmares Come At Night
(aka Les Cauchemars Naissent La Nuit)
Liechtenstein 1972 Directed by Jess Franco
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Well this is going to be a somewhat short and hard review to write, methinks. I always find Jess Franco a bit hit and miss although, I think I’ve been lucky in that the majority of the reviews of his movies found on here have been quite favourable. However, Nightmares Come At Night is a bit of a miss as far as I’m concerned.

The film stars Diana Lorys as Anna, a woman who used to work at a strip joint although, also, she might be a princess. She might also, as it happens, be losing her mind but it’s so hard to tell one thing from another in this movie, to be honest. The film also includes legendary Franco star Soledad Miranda... although the date of ‘release’ is a good two years after her tragic death (for more information on her, see my review of Vampyros Lesbos here). However, I should point out that Soledad really isn’t in it very much... I’d guess much less than ten minutes in total and there’s a reason for that which I’ll go into later.

After an opening credits sequence highlighting stills from the ‘film’ against a groovy soundtrack by Bruno Nicola, we are introduced to naked Anna as she sleeps and dreams of a threesome with her ‘employer’ Cynthia, played by Colette Giacobine, and a man whom she promptly stabs in the throat. When she awakes there is blood on her hands and after she has a shower, she has a conversation with her doctor who is treating her for her mental health issues... or is he?

Not a great deal on offer here in terms of fans of Franco’s work, to be honest. There’s not that many ‘still’ shots in the film and Franco often zooms in or out of a shot before panning around to follow the action, sometimes culminating in another zoom in or out. It’s colourful in places but the compositions are not as clever as some of the ones I’ve seen him use in other movies from this same period which were, obviously, shot much earlier, from when Soledad Miranda was alive (that comment should make more sense if you continue reading). There are some slight pleasures to be found in Franco’s eye for a pretty girl and the sheer amount of nudity on display, no doubt. There’s a long, very slow strip sequence with Diana Lorys which is so slow it’s almost static, something which is justified by some dialogue at the start of the sequence  but which, like a lot of the movie, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Now, if I was being really kind I could call this Jess Franco’s stab at capturing the mystery, puzzle box nature of a movie like Resnais’ Last Year In Marienbad... only in colour and with a fair amount of nudity. Which is a description which would absolutely sell the movie to me but it lacks the clinical rigidity and continuity in the presentation which make Marienbad a masterpiece and this film... much less so. There’s the occasional interesting thing which crops up such as a conversation between Anna and her doctor in a car where all the close up reverse shots of her seem bleached out while the doctor is at full strength in terms of colour... but moments like these are few and far between. Indeed, I’m guessing that last thing I mentioned was a deliberate artistic choice because of the way the footage is edited together but I could easily be mistaken for thinking it is just the print which has gone wrong here because, frankly, for a Blu Ray presentation, it has to be said that the print on this is truly terrible to the point of being almost unwatchable in certain sequences. There’s a reason for this, though, as there is for the fact that the story, such as it is, is a real hodge podge of impenetrable nonsense and the answers to the questions raised in the viewing experience are cleared up, to a certain extent, in the excellent extras which are also included on this Zone A US Blu Ray disc.

As it turns out, this is not a single film, as such. It never had a real release and this is a patchwork job done by Franco to make sense of at least two unfinished projects which have been, I would say almost haphazardly, spliced together and presented as one piece. The footage was never actually released on this ‘lost’ film apart from a few screenings, from what I can make out, and it only exists as an ‘answer print’... which is the first test done with colours and sound synched. The producers of the Blu have obviously done their best with he material on offer and cleaned it up as well as they can while having to keep a lot of stuff on there because of not wanting to loose what detail there is. The various bits of footage were also in different aspect ratios so they’ve gone for the ratio they believe Franco would have presented this in if he had created a ‘release print’ from the material but that’s handy, as it happens, because the existence of some footage on an ‘ending’ shows that it must have been shot to make some kind of warped sense of the narrative (although the resulting talk of a hypnotised killer makes no sense either) and maybe explain why the footage with Diana Lorys doesn’t ever match up contextually with the fairly fleeting ‘spying neighbours’ footage of Soledad Miranda and her lover/partner in crime. So at least it’s possible to deduce for these, and a few other reasons, why we have this ‘lost’ or ‘ghost’ Franco movie in the shape it’s in.

All in all, though, I personally would have said that maybe this would have been best presented as an extra on another Franco package. It’s a real mish mash of a film and, as entertaining as it may sound, it really wasn’t remotely entertaining to this audience member. Bits of it are well shot and bits of it are less easy to decipher from the print. Nicolai’s score is good, as it always is, but doesn’t really help the picture out much, if truth be told. This is not the least favourite of the Jess Franco movies I’ve seen, and he’s a director who’s made some incredible, visually addictive movies... but it’s definitely down there in the lower depths of his work as far as I’m concerned so I can’t really recommend this one myself. If you’re a Francophile and a completeist, you’ll almost certainly want to check this one out. If not... I’d maybe proceed with caution.

Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD

Mills And Boom

Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD
UK 2014 (released December 2015)
Directed by Paul Goodwin
Metrodome DVD Region 2
When I heard there was a (relatively) new documentary focusing on the story of “the galaxy’s greatest comic” I got quite enthusiastic. I haven’t picked up an issue of 2000AD in about 14 years but, up until then, I had every single issue they published (and still have those boxes full of the first 1000 plus issues to this day).

I remember back in 1977, I was recovering from a fairly brutal car accident (long story and I’m not going to bother going into it here) and the first issue came out. It had a new feature on an important new movie I was just hearing about in those days. Something called Star Wars, which was due out in cinemas at the end of the year over here in the UK. However, this was not the main selling point to me or my dad. It wasn’t even the free Space Spinner (aka cheap frisbee) stuck to the front cover. We’d seen an advert on television, I think, for the comic which was basically a cartoon including some of the characters, referred to even then as ‘hyper heroes’ (presumably to avoid copyright issues with DC and Marvel) and among them was... the new Dan Dare.

I’d been hearing stories from my dad about how good Dan Dare in the Eagle comic was all my life (I was 9 years old) and so we both decided that this comic was something we should have. I read it first, loved it, and then passed it straight on to my dad to read... which was pretty much the way it was for the more than 20 years we were buying it... at first as a standing order from the local newsagents and, later, as a subscription direct from the publishers. I remember how cool the second issue was with its “biotronic man” stickers which you stuck on your arms and legs to show your machinery innards... it was one of the most painful free gifts to remove from young, hairy arms ever... even in the bath. We already had some cool strips presented to us from the comic’s host alien, The Mighty Tharg, such as Dan Dare, MACH 1, Invasion, Flesh and Harlem Heroes but, the second issue also debuted a comic book character fairly important to this day... Judge Dredd (which also crossed over into Harlem Heroes on occasion). It was all good and the cool Summer Special, out around the same time as the first couple of issues, was also pretty amazing.

I stuck with it for years but my absolute favourite strips all coincided at a period in the early to mid 1980s... Sam Slade - Robo Hunter, Ace Trucking and, the absolutely brilliant, stupendous literary masterpiece... The Ballad Of Halo Jones. It was a great time to be reading comics but the quality did dwindle by the time I gave it up, that’s for sure.

So, yeah, I was positively salivating to see what truths  and ‘behind-the-scenes’ stories to some of my favourite strips and certain famous incidents would be in Future Shock - The Story of 2000AD and... this documentary only half delivers as far as I’m concerned. Which I hate to say because there are some great talking head interviews in here with some of the great comics creators including Pat Mills, Grant Morrison, Brian Bolland, Neil Gaiman and even a quick nod from the last Dredd actor, Karl Urban.

Now the main problem is not the abundance of interview footage... far from it. There are some nice illustrations to split these up from time to time with comics either brought to life by panning around a multi-planed version of various panels (either done for real or digitally) and even some animated sections. These were quite cool although... I think there should have been more of them, to be honest.

No, my main problem is just the wealth of stuff not covered in this documentary. There were some key moments in the early history of 2000AD which I think weren’t covered here. Also, although it does at least have a few minutes on the comic’s predecessor Action (in many ways it could be seen as that, I think) and the subsequent banning of that comic by the British government, I think it could have done with a lot more exploration of the British comics scene before 2000AD to really bang home the context of how important it was, at the time, to the people reading it.

And then there were some pretty big incidents that I really would have liked to have seen covered with a little more knowledge of what was really going on that the public didn’t know about at the time.

For instance, when the second Judge Dredd multi part epic The Cursed Earth ran in the comic (if you count The Robot Wars as the first but not counting the Lunar City One stories as a multi-part tale), it got into a whole lot of trouble. Why? Well there were issues where you had Kentucky Fried Chicken's Colonel Sanders sadistically beating or killing other advertising slogan characters like Speedy the Alka Seltzer boy. There was the Jolly Green Giant, a famous frozen brand’s mascot character, who would yell “Ho! Ho! Ho!”, just like he did in the adverts at the time.... but then eat people in this particular incarnation. Or the infamous Burger Wars chapters... where rivals Ronald McDonald and Burger King would whip and kill their employees until they got it right etc. I remember a few weeks after the Jolly Green Giant stuff there was a small strip in the comic by way of a retraction, with Judge Dredd and character Spikes ‘Harvey’ Rotten eating the frozen food products and saying how good it was. I still have all these issues of course, although I haven’t read them in decades. They’ve never been allowed to be reprinted and trade paperbacks of The Cursed Earth have always been pretty light in content up until... as it happens... July 14th this year, when an uncensored reprint has finally been allowed to come out in a new hardback edition.

However, this whole incident was not covered in this documentary and it would have been nice to have known just what was going on behind the scenes at the time... how the many varied companies responded to these stories and also, how were the artists and writers allowed to get away with it by management in the first place. We loved it at the time but... I just don’t know how they had the gumption to even try to get cynical satire this dark published in a popular, weekly comic.

Another thing which seemed to go completely unmentioned in this documentary were the comic’s other related publications. For instance, they talk about, or show, characters like RoJaws and Hammerstein from RoBusters and Johnny Alpha from Strontium Dog but they actually originated in the comic StarLord. The comic was cancelled and folded into 2000AD which took on the name 2000AD and StarLord for a while. Similarly, sometime after the comic had reverted back to its lone 2000AD title, the newish comic Tornado also failed and then it became 2000AD and Tornado for a while. None of this stuff was mentioned even once in the documentary. Nor was their more mature sister publication, which I also used to love, called Crisis.

Various people in the interviews here were quick to point out how much they hated the alien editor of the comic, The Mighty Tharg but... most of the readers loved him and I would have liked to have heard more tales of how he came into being. Also, again, I would have liked them to say a few words even about the two companion comic’s hosts StarLord and Big E (Dave Gibbons in a ridiculous costume, as I recall) but there's nothing about them on here. Nor about any of those cool ‘free gifts’ the comic used to sometimes have in the early days... like the aforementioned Space Spinner, the Biotronic stickers and the Red Alert Survival Wallet! Would have been nice to have heard about this stuff, to be honest.

Then again, the documentary does give us some interesting stuff, like the ego clashes between Pat Mills, who comes across as very professional and easily ‘the man’ to be talking to in this film, and various other editors who worked on the comic later. It also charts the dip in quality, which I suspect is when I decided I’d finally had enough of the mediocrity which was going on under the name of 2000AD at a particular time, and how it’s been subsequently bought and rescued by a publishing company that understood how the comic worked and why it was so successful in the first place.

The highlight for me, in this documentary, is Neil Gaiman telling us why Alan Moore walked away from the comic and that, after the first three books of The Ballad Of Halo Jones, he had a load more books planned and how he’d once told Gaiman the story of where it was going, ending up with Halo as an old woman. Gaiman says there were tears in his eyes when he heard it and, remembering how powerful and influential to me that strip was, I still can't believe that Moore has never been offered gazillions of pounds to carry on with it.

One of the good things the documentary does do is highlight the poor working conditions, in terms of basic, decent rights for the various writers, artists etc. It also dovetails that into the time when the American comics basically poached all the best of the talent from British comics to work over there... with 2000AD being a primary source for top British talent. It talks about the big talent "defection" to the successful DC "adult brand", Vertigo Comics, and even talks to their most famous editor/nurturer of talent, Karen Berger. It spends a while on this subject and this is all fascinating stuff but, again, while I was watching all this, I was wondering why there wasn't less of this stuff and more about 2000AD itself... especially when there was so much essential stuff missing.

The purloined Tharg's Future Shocks short story that became the basis, unofficially, for director Richard Stanley's classic sci-fi movie Hardware is touched upon, especially since it really highlights, again, the poor working conditions the staff were having to suffer at the time. Of course, this leads in nicely to the obvious but perhaps often overlooked fact that 2000AD has been a major influence on all kinds of film, literature and even music in the intervening years since its inception. However, what it really doesn't touch upon too much is the amount of shameless rip-offs the writers and artists of 2000AD perpetrated themselves. Practically every time a new issue would arrive,  me and my father would read the comic and we would trade "references" we'd spotted in the issue and marvel at how these creator's were getting away with nicking it week after week. It's touched on very obliquely in a blink and you'll miss it sideways look at the reflection of the media at the time but when it comes down to mentioning things like Strontium Dog, pretty much, being a futuristic Spaghetti Western, for example, it just doesn't go there at all.

The only extras on the DVD are digital reprints of single episodes of some of the strips but the quality didn't seem that great to me and most of the double spread openings are badly split between two screens and, in the case of The Ballad Of Halo Jones, for example, doesn't retain the colours of those first two pages as they originally appeared as the colour centre spread of the issue... so not very good as a historical document either, I reckon.

All in all, this is not the best review of Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD, I know. I guess I could half recommend it to people who are totally unfamiliar with the comic but, really, it seems light on the more interesting chapters in the comic's history. Comic book  readers will no doubt find it at least, in some ways, interesting because a fair few good creators are included in the interview footage. For old school fans of the comic, however, I would say this may not be a film which covers what you would be wanting to see here. Still, at the moment it's the only documentary movie I know of that at least tries to cover this material so, not exactly a recommendation, maybe, but well done for giving it a bash, at least.

Morgan

Guten Morgan

Morgan
2016 USA Directed by Luke Scott
UK cinema release print.

Typical. You wait ages for a movie to play at your cinema with Michelle Yeoh in it and then two come along within seven days of each other (see my review of Mechanic Resurrection here for the other).

Morgan is the feature length debut of Luke Scott, son of Ridley (and I promise I won’t mention that fact again... there’s a lot better things to be than someone living in the shadow of somebody else). After the totally chilling teaser trailer and the somewhat less scary full trailer for the movie, I was pretty much hooked on seeing this and went on its opening evening. I have to say that, although I do have some big criticisms of the movie, for the most part it’s a quite compelling, well oiled machine which would probably bear repeat viewing well.

The trailer makes the film look a science fiction tinged horror movie but... it’s not quite. There’s a lot of punch, chase, stunt work in the last third of the movie and so it’s more along the lines of a sci-fi fuelled action movie in some ways. The strength of it is... even though it’s “not quite a horror movie”, it’s kind of shot in the cinematic style of one. The director is pretty great in keeping to that methodology too and, although some of the editing seemed a little choppy in places, the shorter shots dovetail nicely into the longer ones, delivering an overall satisfying experience, at least in terms of story content and the visual and audio style in which it’s executed.

He also does some nice things with the design of the compositions in places, making full use of the widescreen aspect ratio to present characters on opposite sides of the screen, often leaving the middle of the shot bereft of movement and nicely forcing the collective eye of the audience to work at it and, thusly, propel themselves into the immersive experience a little better. That kind of tactic doesn’t always work for directors, to be honest, but it does in this movie and, at the very least, makes for some real eye candy in terms of the look of some of the scenes.

More compositional retinal soda pop comes from Scott’s decision to use surrogate visual planes to frame important parts of the action... such as putting the focus of a scene as something playing out on a screen somewhere or using reflections in panes of glass to enhance the look of the shot. Indeed, some of the work he does with reflective surfaces in the movie reminded me of some kind of enhanced “Ingmar Berman on acid” style of composition, in the way faces are superimposed either next to each other or directly over the top of one another... which in the case of certain shots I’m thinking of actually are a clue to something which you’ve probably already guessed but which isn’t finally spelled out until near the end of the movie. More on that ending in a few paragraph’s time.

Morgan also has a terrific cast and they are all working very well together. It’s very much, until the last third, an ensemble piece and hardly anyone gets more screen time than anyone else. Here you have the likes of Kate Mara, as company Risk Assessment trouble-shooter Lee Weathers, Anya Taylor-Joy  as the titular created superhuman... and other wonderful performers such as Toby Jones, Rose Leslie, Vinette Robinson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, the aforementioned Michelle Yeoh, Boyd Holbrook, Chris Sullivan and even Brian Cox, among others, all playing corporate employees in one guise or another. And everyone is turning in amazing performances... especially Toby Jones, whose role may get a bit overlooked but who I believe gives one of his finest and understated performances as Dr. Simon Ziegler.

The film tells of Kate Mara’s Lee coming into a locked down facility where a home grown product, the now five year old Morgan of the title (although at five years old she already has the physical appearance of a late teen and a keen intelligence much greater than a lot of grown adults), has been confined to her quarters after an incident involving Jennifer Jason Leigh. In this incident, which is executed in a single, top down view and which comprises the pre-title sequence, Morgan is sullen and then, as seen in one of the trailers, suddenly compelled to leap into action and stab out one of Leigh’s eyes. Kate Mara’s character is there, seemingly, to see if the company product needs to be ‘terminated’ or if, in fact, Morgan is, indeed, a suitable case for treatment. Something which the company psychiatrist, played by Paul Giamatti, will be able to evaluate when he comes the day after Lee’s arrival at the facility.

As I said before, Scott pitches the movie to the audience couched in the trappings of horror/suspense films and he does it pretty well, ratcheting up the tension to the sequence where Giamatti arrives and interviews Morgan... something the well prepared audience will already guess goes horribly wrong from the indications in the trailer. From here on out, the film is a hunter/prey kind of movie and the action sequences come to the fore... there’s even a car chase at one point. The director keeps these action sequences playing out in the same visceral but low key visual style, though, which means that the change of pace in the last act doesn’t jar with anything you’ve seen before... which, again, is deftly handled.

However, one of the problems with the movie, and one that I alluded to earlier, is that one of the characters you are introduced to in the first few minutes is obviously holding some kind of secret and... it’s pretty obvious what that secret is liable to be. One of the other characters, more or less, partially calls it out early on in the film too and we really didn’t need that hint so early on. Also, the story seems to treat this minor revelation as some kind of ‘twist’ at the end of the movie when, in fact, you already know this half an hour into the procedings, if you’re paying attention. And with absolute certainty by the time the aftermath of a slightly grizzly impalement scene kind of proves a point. This, in itself, is kinda forgivable because, really, that’s one of the few places the script could logically go to anyway. However, the really big problem with this movie is the “post ending”, which seems tagged on as a “let’s bring Brian Cox in to re-explain it for the exceptionally slow people in the audience too” kind of conclusion. This ending is completely false and it doesn’t just insult the intelligence of the audience, it bludgeons their intelligence repeatedly over the head and then pokes it again with a sharp stick just to make sure it’s done. I was really offended at the way everything was recapped at the end and I think the film would have been a much stronger experience if the last five minutes was just scrapped and the film ended as one of the characters gets in a car and drives away. This really did put a dampener on a film that was, really, pretty great up until this point.

The other aspect of the movie which I found a little disappointing stems from my expectations raised by the trailer campaign. In the first teaser, the Morgan creature starts repeatedly humming a little fragment of melody and its really quite chilly and creepy. Somewhere in between that first trailer and the second, I’m guessing, where this was not heard again, the people behind the film must have decided to eliminate that creepy character quirk from the final product. Now, I can almost understand this as it maybe it’s too pointed about certain aspects of Morgan’s psychological profile but... I honestly think the trade off would have been worth it because that humming sent a real shiver down the spine.

Another thing that those trailers promised was a Morgan who “is still evolving” and, possibly by sheer editing alone, hints at an almost psychokinetic ability from the title character. Now, this idea seems to have been eliminated mostly from the final product too. Certainly there are still big trace elements of this character’s meta-human powers, such as the fact that the character can tell when she is being watched through a video camera or the revelation that she knows all about various people who are coming to visit her for the first time. However, I suspect there might have been a much different cut of the movie originally delivered and the character was somewhat toned down or reshaped in the final cut, at some point. Possibly when that terrible post-ending explanation scene was added into the mix. I’m not sure if this possibility of a more invincible version of Morgan would have been a good thing or not but... well I guess we’ll find out over the next few decades if there was, in actual fact, a different slant on the character... as stories get told about the production over the years, maybe.

As it happens, despite that awful ‘explanation ending’,  which nearly ruined the whole movie for me (note to studio heads... if you don’t spell it out for the audience, some of them might pay admission a second time so they can work it out for themselves and you get more profits), the film is actually a great piece of work and a startling full length feature debut from Luke Scott. Amazing performances aside, there’s a lot to recommend about Morgan and, even if it does have a kind of Ex Machina (reviewed here) meets Splice (reviewed here) vibe going for it, it’s also a better film than either of those and well worth a visit to the cinema with a possible Blu Ray pick up at a later date. I only hope Max Richter’s score for this thing gets a proper CD release at some point. He’s a great composer and seriously under-represented in soundtrack releases. Either way, though, give Morgan a go... it’s a nice little movie.

The Purge - Election Year

Purging On The Rocks

The Purge - Election Year
2016 USA/France Directed by  James DeMonaco 
UK cinema release print.

And so we reach James DeMonaco’s concluding (possibly) part of what is, at the moment, his Purge Trilogy. If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while you’ll know that, although I wasn’t completely taken with the first installment, The Purge (which I reviewed here), I liked it enough to try and defend it from some pretty stupid and critical comments at the time. I much preferred the sequel, The Purge: Anarchy (which I reviewed here) and likened it to being much more in the mould of the kinds of sci-fi films that Yul Brinner and Charlton Heston were making back in the late 1960s and early 1970s... a comment I’d already made about the original movie but which fit the sequel like a glove, even more so.

Part of the charm of that second one was the single minded quest of the anti-hero, played by Frank Grillo, who I’d only seen as a bad guy before in the Captain America films (he sets political events in motion as his recurring villain at the start of Captain America: Civil War too - reviewed here). His cynical and ultimately righteous approach to the annual purge, the night of permitted murder and crime in the future United States of America, hit home in all the right places and it was a perfect part for him.

Well, what we have with the third installment in the trilogy, The Purge: Election Year, is pretty much more of the same in regards to being a similarly styled entertainment to the second movie... it just has higher stakes that all the key protagonists and antagonists in the movie are playing and killing for. Frank Grillo is back as Leo Barnes and this time he’s now the personal security chief (bodyguard) for Senator Charlie Roan (played by Elizabeth Mitchell). Senator Roan has been on a mission since she was a teenager when her family were slaughtered in front of her in the annual purge and she is fighting for presidency to put a stop to the lunacy of this atrocity. Especially since, as was revealed in the last movie, it’s all about rich politicians making money off the backs of their voters anyway.

However, her political opponents, who are the ones profiting from the annual purges, are fixing the rules of the game, so to speak, to be able to take out the Senator and her opposing views... even going so far as to change the laws slightly so that the normally untouchable echelons of The Purge, such as the politicians, are no longer exempt from being victims in said evening of violence. So it’s up to Frank Grillo’s Leo to protect the senator as best he can. Unfortunately, even after he’s turned her personal home into an almost impregnable shelter, he doesn’t bank on traitors within the senator's organisation selling them out and it’s not very long before the Senator and Leo are on the streets and fleeing for their lives. Fortunately, they meet up with, as you know they’re going to, characters from a parallel story about a small grocery owner and his friends protecting the place from the people who want to get back at them for stopping their shoplifting. And so...

Yeah. It’s more of the same but it’s not completely a rerun and the plotting of the story, although predictable in its many twists and turns, is nicely done and they are leading towards a conclusion, one way or another, to the continued existence of the annual purge. And, no, I’m not going to tell you how that all works out here. Suffice it to say that the opposition to the Senator aren’t the only people using the cover of purge night to push a lethal, political agenda... whether the Senator wants them to or not.

The film is pretty much a fairly brutal actioner like the previous films but, for the most part, the main protagonists and antagonists are running around the city to try and achieve specific goals. Director DeMonaco keeps the spills and chills coming and he even manages to add the occasional world building tweak to continue to paint a very specific vision of a twisted future gone mad while, at the same time, not being all that far from the politics of many countries at the moment. What stuck with me in particular, is the idea of foreigners coming to America for purge night so they can take part as ‘murder tourists’. This is something which really boils down human nature in a quick little concept and it fits in with the cynical but frighteningly near the mark world view depicted in these movies.

Again we, the audience, are put in a position where we have to juggle the very strong anti-violence message which the film embraces, packaged up in just the exact kind of violence used as entertainment that is the very subject at the heart of its message. As an audience, we are being kept amused by a load of on screen violence and brutal action and the irony is, I hope, not lost on the majority of people watching these movies (or we’re all in serious trouble here folks). Personally, I have no problem with enjoying on screen violence as an exciting part of movie watching, as long as nobody carries it beyond the film and into their own personal reality. Since I personally believe that, as powerful as the medium of cinema is, most people who are inclined to resort to, or revel in, real life violence are always going to be set off by some catalyst or another (if it’s not one thing then its another... and I think there’s been a lot of evidence of this over the years), then I certainly support any anti-censorship campaign which continues to allow films like The Purge series to be made. Especially when they’re written with a certain amount of intelligence and are actually about ending the violence... whether they are having their bloody cake and eating it at the same time or not.

Once again, the score to the movie is quite interesting but since none of The Purge scores have ever been released on CD, only as a stupid electronic download, I haven’t had the opportunity to listen to them away from the film. Maybe some enterprising CD label will get onto these some day?

At the end of the day, if you liked the previous entries in this franchise, then you are not going to want to miss The Purge - Election Year. Although it’s not quite as compelling as the second, the moral heart of the film is still in the right place and there’s action aplenty in this one. Probably my second favourite of the three and, now that we have them as a trilogy, maybe it’s time to give these things another watch when the inevitable boxed set gets released. An entertaining and occasionally suspenseful time at the cinema.

Mechanic - Resurrection

Kill Life

Mechanic - Resurrection
2016 France/USA Directed by Dennis Gansel
UK cinema release print.

Mechanic Resurrection has less of a useful title than if it had been a sequel to the original Charlie Bronson film The Mechanic, rather than Simon West’s sequel starring Jason Statham. That being said, the title does at least hold some relevance in that an assassin who wishes to retire from the game wants people to think he is dead, I would guess. So there's that.

The footage from the last movie of Statham rolling from his car just as it’s about to explode at the gas station is used as leverage in the early stages of this movie... but not to as good effect as the second bait to lure him in to do a ‘three hit job’ for an 'old acquaintance'. And that’s basically the plot, pretty much all of it, with Jessica Alba as the lure and Michelle Yeoh as the person who falls for that lure, more so, than Statham’s Arthur Bishop character does... thus yanking her friend Bishop into the trap set for him.

This film is a completely different kettle of fish to the first movie, The Mechanic (reviewed here) and the fact that it’s not bound to being a remake from a specific source material, like that first one, is both this movie's strength and weakness. Weakness because the various characters seem a little less detailed and less intricately drawn in this one and, although the script does pay lip service to the Arthur Bishop character by having the lead still be a vinyl junkie, in a brief scene at the start (although the classical music is gone for this second outing), everything seems less ‘set up’ and less credible in terms of back story and that does kind of hurt it a little, I felt.

However, it is also this movie’s strength because, free from the constraints of any source, the film becomes much more explosive and fun in terms of the action and, although many people will possibly see this as a bad thing, it was kind of what I was expecting and what I was hoping for, to be honest. I like Jason Statham as an actor and, also, I believe he’s one of the few modern era performers who can safely be called a genuine movie star in the same way that greats like John Wayne, James Stewart or Cary Grant might be seen as that. True, the actors in question will bring their own fictional baggage with them to the films and Jason Statham is certainly no different in that respect... but it didn't hurt their careers much and neither, I suspect, does it do Statham any harm. So, for me, he joins modern, larger than life movie stars like Stallone, Schwarzenneger and Harrison Ford and, like them, he’s also a pretty darned good actor. So what I’m trying to say here is... without being a remake of something else, the film is free to be a typical Jason Statham action movie and, frankly, that’s just what I wanted to see.

The film starts off strong with a shorthand series of scenes showing us Arthur Bishop’s life direction after the end of the last movie before going into a wonderful and quite intense action sequence with nice little pieces of Mickey Spillane style brutalism, such as  pinning one antagonists hand with a dagger onto the back of another antagonist during a fight. Because of Statham’s experience in these kinds of roles, you believe he can do it and even his ludicrous, unplanned escape route takes on a layer of credibility as the writers and director pull off a stunt sequence that wouldn’t look out of place in a James Bond movie. It’s all good stuff.

Now, the plot is extremely simplistic, just like the first one, perhaps even more so. Statham is honey trapped into doing three impossible kills and to make them look like accidents, for someone in his past with a grudge against him. The second of these kills is extremely obvious but, like all in this movie, incredibly fun to watch and so I really don’t mind that the film is, in almost every way possible, predictable as hell. There are no surprises from the fate of Tommy Lee Jones character, the third on Bishop’s hit list, for example. In fact, the only surprising things about this movie is that a) Jessica Alba’s character didn’t turn out to be a little more complicated than she at first appears and b) the wonderful Michelle Yeoh doesn’t get in on the action stuff herself... which is a shame because I really like her when she does the action stuff. However, Yeoh brings the plausibility of someone a character like Bishop would trust with her to the proceedings because, heck, who’s not going to believe in someone like Michelle Yeoh. She’s a great actress and although she’s criminally underused here, she does bring a lot to the table in terms of getting certain messages across quickly, so a lot of character building stuff can be waived credibly. Jessica Alba is also great but, again, quite underused since she’s a pretty good actress too.

Now, the movie is directed by Dennis Gansel who, as far as I’m concerned, directed one of the few truly great vampire movies of the last ten years, We Are The Night, which I reviewed here. The film doesn’t look nearly as slick or decorative as that earlier film and he seems to have made a conscious decision to frame the shots and have them edited in a more ‘raw and edgy’ way. In fact, the film completely eschews those nice colour palettes and contrasts from scene to scene that were a deft touch on Simon West’s The Mechanic. So it would be true to say, therefore, that Mechanic Resurrection feels a little more Hollywood in its approach to the product but, honestly, for this kind of movie, that doesn’t hurt it either.

Mark Isham returns to score this sequel , which is less jazzy but equally cool with its emphasis on action music to match the on screen shenanigans of the lead character. I only hope the score gets a proper CD release from Lakeshore Records and doesn’t languish in electronic download hell for people who have the necessary virtual space and matching tin ears to be able to enjoy it compressed into such a package. After all, we got two different CD scores for the first movie so... I just hope this comes out in a proper physical medium sometime and, if it does, hopefully not just the kind of vinyl recording that the film's main protagonist would obsess over. As it is in the movie, though... great bit of scoring. I’ve always had a soft spot for Isham and he certainly provides a nice, action oriented soundtrack which is a succinct and appropriate match to the visual style of the film. Some nice work here.

So there you have it. A nice sequel to what was an okay remake. It’s certainly a film I’d watch more than the first and Statham and his costars certainly don’t let him down... including a slightly different kind of characterisation from Tommy Lee Jones than you may have seen him do before. I can see exactly why he took this part. Without giving too much away, I’m hoping that there will be a third ‘Mechanic’ movie before too long and, if they do go ahead with that, that it’ll have room for some of the characters invented for this second installment to return. If you like Jason Statham action movies then there’s no question you should go check this one out. Also, although it’s a sequel, there’s not too much reference made to the previous movie, so you can probably watch this as a stand alone without needing any info from the first one. Any blanks are quite easy to fill in and are all set up for this movie anyway... meaning that the back stories of every other character in this movie and their relationship to Arthur are not referencing the first one. So seriously give Mechanic: Resurrection a try if you like your stunts and action with a veneer of Stathamesque credibility. This one’s a good ‘un.

Sadako VS Kayako

Ringside Grudge Match

Sadako VS Kayako
2016 Japan Directed by Kôji Shiraishi
First European Screening at London FrightFest
6pm 27th August 2016

I’ve been a fan of the Ringu (Ring) and Ju-On (The Grudge) movies since they first came out in UK cinemas at the tail end of the 1990s. When I first heard of the incredibly silly idea of a movie pitting the two ghostly apparitions from these two J-horror franchises against each other, I was very much into the idea in the same spirit as, say, I love all those old Gojira (aka Godzilla) VS “insert appropriately bizarrely named kaiju eiga monster here” movies. If I was going to see something this ludicrous put on screen then, frankly, it’s the Japanese who I want to see doing this stuff.

What I didn’t realise at the time is just how many Ringu and Ju-On films have been made in the series over the years. I’ve seen maybe five Ringu movies, which includes the Chinese Ring Virus remake and also the actual book based sequel Spiral (which is a bizarre oddity in terms of both timing and cast and I’m really not going to go into an explanation of why that is here... I’ll eventually rewatch all these movies for this blog in the next 30 or so years, I reckon... so I’ll get into it then). I’ve also seen the first two Ju-On movies. What I haven’t seen is the abominable US remakes of these franchises... another of which will be upon us very soon with the movie Rings, apparently.  Nobody, really, does J-Horror like... well, like the Japanese, obviously, so I really am not, at this point, interested in the US remakes (unless somebody would like to jump on here in the comments section and persuade me otherwise).

I also didn’t realise the movies had kept on going with various entries in either cycle coming out over the years (I believe the latest Ringu reboots in Japan were more based on the Sadako character as she appears in the books?). What I do know is, in a nice bit of symmetry, that this is the twelfth movie in each of the franchises’ history. So that’s pretty mind blowing and I really blame the UK and US marketers and distributors of such things for these not being on my radar quicker. Still, a line about uploading the viral movie from the Ringu series onto the internet in this movie makes me realise that this is not a continuation of the last two although, that being said, there are also some differences in the manifestation of Sadako in this that I can only assume are a hangover from the previous few films.

What I will say is that I had an absolute blast with this movie. The idea of two or more monsters from separate horror franchises pitted against each other is at least as old as the 1940s Universal pictures monster mash ups which I loved so much since seeing them as a kid (Frankenstein VS The Wolfman, House Of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein etc), probably older, and it’s a tradition which has continued into many horror franchises to this day and also, just lately of course, superhero movies too. The fact that this ludicrous idea of two of the most terrifying Japanese creations in modern cinematic history having a pop at each other came from fan pressure is interesting too. The company had put out an April Fool’s joke that they would be making a movie about the two characters fighting and... the fan response was so strong that they actually decided to go ahead and make the thing. So that’s really cool.

If you’re not familiar with the basic premise of the two characters, this is it in a nutshell...

In the Ringu films, a cursed video tape is the cause of problems. When you watch the short, surreal movie, a phone call will ring you and Sadako will tell you that you have two days to live. After two days, the movie will then start playing on your TV and this time, after she crawls out of the well and comes towards the camera, she actually crawls out of your TV, fixes you with her evil eye, barely glimpsed out of the profusion of hair which covers her face, and you die of fear. The only way to stop it is to make ‘a copy’ of the tape (something the writers of Sadako VS Kayako seem to have forgotten or are deliberately ignoring) and then pass it onto somebody to watch it before your time is up. Thus spreading the curse like a virus while increasing the number of copies of the tape in existence.

In the Ju-On films, a house is haunted by the ghost of a cat, the little boy and the mother who were horrible murdered by the husband/father. The cat sounds that the little grey boy Toshio make and the death rattle clicking sound the crawling, awkwardly moving mother Kayako emit are eerie and disturbing. Once the ‘grudge’ has touched you, after you enter the house, it will haunt you and beckon you to return to your death.

Now the idea of teaming these two up in a grudge match, if you will, is admittedly kinda cheesy and, to be honest, this film really is a lot of cheesy fun with lines like “My curse must fight with your curse” and the sometimes inappropriately deadpan delivery of various bits of bad news such as “Your parents will not return” (because they both just died horribly), did raise some chuckles from the audience, myself included. However, at the same time, the director manages to balance the laughs by treating the two subjects very seriously and getting a lot of the look and feel of the characters just right. Sadako is still a mess of straight hair and makes an imposing figure on screen when she is unleashed. Kayako and Toshio are, perhaps, even more imposing in their ability to make you feel uneasy and so the really fine line which the director might have crossed to turn this into an out and out comedy is deftly navigated and he really does a service to the fans of both characters.

He’s also added a fair few supporting characters, most notable of which for me are a magically powered exorcist and his blind, pre-teen sidekick, who also happens to be a psychic medium of some kind. Both are quite deadpan in their line delivery, completely ridiculous and help lift the movie when you think it’s shot all of its bullets out in the last third of the movie. There are also some surprises in the film in the number of deaths and just who it is who happens to get killed at any given moment. There’s one character, for example, who you know has two days to live and you assume they will continue to be an ally of the young ladies who have got themselves into so much trouble by watching the cursed video but, in an amazing exorcism sequence, the body count goes off the chart and this character I’m thinking of also has a vaguely comical but surprising death... when you just don’t expect it to be coming yet. So that was cool.

There are some nice compositions and lighting schemes in the movie... and that’s especially true of the first post-title sequence, after the names Sadako and Kayako have appeared in nicely animated type, enhanced with bloody effects and sounds. There is so much vertical segmenting in this early scene of a social worker visiting a house that there is one shot in this beautifully crafted design where there must have been as many as 20 to 30 elongated rectangles in the perspective of the shot from different layers in the background... the social worker beautifully framed in one set of vertically slashed sections. Excellent stuff. This opening sequence is also a bit of a surprise moment because of the environment she’s in, as you are expecting to see the victim of one of the two major entities that give the film its name... only to realise it’s the one you were least expecting to be making an appearance here.

And, yeah, I did have a blast with this movie, even if the writers did make me feel old by having their young protagonists treat VHS video tape as some kind of ancient relic from the dark ages. It’s not exactly a scary movie in any way, shape or form. More of a ‘comfort horror movie’ to be sure. But the strength of the writing and the film’s ability to surprise me, even to the extent of the ending of the movie, which I really didn’t see coming, certainly kept me entertained throughout. All of the actors and actresses in the movie, all of whom I thought I knew from other movies but, almost all of whom I didn’t, are all very strong here too. They are, for the most part, playing typical J-horror stereotypes but that’s fine, it’s just what you need for a movie of this kind and I can only commend the actors, writer, director and everyone else involved with making a really cool and slick product.

And about those surprises. If you get a chance to see this movie, make sure you stick around for a post credit scene at the very end of the film. A lot of people at the screening were out of their chairs and off to the next movie as the credits rolled but there’s a cool Easter egg at the end here. Now, admittedly, if you didn’t sleep through the entire movie, you will have already seen a version of this post credit scene in the last ten minutes of the film. However, the way in which it is reiterated in this last little add on is just how you want to see it and fans of the Ringu franchise, in particular, will want to witness it restated in just this fashion, I’m sure. 

All said and done, Sadako VS Kayako is a huge slice of J-horror fun. It’s fairly Ringcentric, which kinda makes sense as that’s got more potential to riff plot spins on, and if I was being extra critical, I’d say some of the manifestations of Sadako, in terms of both timing and her ability to keep popping up well before the two days are expired, are just a little bit of a cheat to try and get some extra scare scenes in. That being said, there are a number of Ju-On scenes which are pretty great, including a crowd pleasing sequence where some school bullies are lured into the house, and there’s enough respect payed to both the separate franchises that fans of just either one shouldn’t be disappointed.

I saw this movie at this year's FrightFest on the earliest of its two screenings and it was the first time the movie had been seen outside of Japan. In an introduction by one of the organisers, we were told that this movie was, in fact, due to get a commercial release over here later in the year (which, had I known that, I probably wouldn’t have pulled out all the stops to secure a ticket). However, they also said that was all up in the air now because the movie was being distributed over here by Metrodome. If you’ve had your ear to the ground on film news you will have heard that the firm went bankrupt a week or so ago so... not sure that this film will get a release over here now. We shall see. All I know for sure is, this movie is bound to be in my top ten for the year and, if you’re a fan of either of the two franchises in the title (and more than likely, if you are, then you already love both), then you really shouldn’t miss this great little movie. So much fun.

Doctor Who - The Dalek Invasion Of Earth

Hello, Dalek!

Doctor Who -
The Dalek Invasion Of Earth
21 November - 26th December 1964 BBC1
BBC DVD Region 2

“One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.”
The Doctor, The Dalek Invasion Of Earth

Well, it’s been a while since I personally watched the original version of the Doctor Who story The Dalek Invasion of Earth. My previous experience of this classic William Hartnell tale dates back to the days of VHS, when I probably borrowed it off my cousin. Of course, this 1964 adventure was remade two years later by Amicus studios as Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150AD, following the success of their 1965 remake of the 1963 Doctor Who serial The Daleks, entitled Dr. Who and the Daleks, for the big screen.

Now, while I quite like this original version of the story, I have to say I much prefer the big screen version a whole lot better with its crazy music, vibrant colours and more condensed, pacey version of the plot points. However, this version runs for six, 25 minute episodes instead of the 84 minutes of the movie version, and both have good things and bad things to offer the casual watcher of a story like this.

The first episode starts off strong with a slightly disturbing moment as a robo-man’s brains are finally scrambled enough by the device he’s wearing so that he throws himself in the river to drown, his floating body used in this and subsequent shots. Then the TARDIS materialises, not with the sound we know these days but with much less fuss. Interestingly, it’s not a model but a life size prop and... it’s looking a hell of a lot more authentic in this incarnation than it has done on many occasions in the intervening years. It even has two of its windows tilted open... not something I remember seeing before (or should that be since?). The TARDIS is still carrying its original crew who first set off in their adventures the year before, namely William Hartnell as The Doctor,  Carol Ann Ford as his grandaughter Susan, Jacqueline Hill and William Russell... as Coal Hill School teachers Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton. Of course, we shall be hearing more about Coal Hill School later in the year when the BBC launch their new Doctor Whoniverse spin off Class.

The four seperate into two groups after Susan sprains her ankle (no, really) and the TARDIS is accidentally buried under a falling bridge. Ian and The Doctor go to a warehouse, where they encounter the robomen while Susan and Barbara are picked up by the resistance. They soon discover that they are in the year 2164... which is 200 years after the episode was broadcast, of course. For some reason unknown to me, the big budget movie remake was set in the year 2150 so... I don’t know, maybe the producers of the movie version just liked rounded numbers.

At the end of the first episode, where Ian and The Doctor are cornered by robomen alongside the Thames, we get treated to the famous, classic reveal, cliffhanger shot. As they turn to hurl themselves into the river Thames and escape, not the best choice anyway if you don't want to get killed by the polution (in any century), we see a ripple on the surface and then a Dalek reveals itself as the main enemy of this story, slowly trundling out of the water and onto the bank of the river. Good stuff. This was only the Daleks second appearance, the first being just under a year before this in the second Doctor Who adventure but... I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to conclude that if series producer Verity Lambert hadn’t broken from her 'educational, history programme’ brief for the show in the second story... the series may not have continued running for too much longer. The Daleks were a huge hit on their first appearance and even more so with the release of more Dalek stories... as Dalekmania shook Britain in much the same way that Beatlemania had a year or two before.

It’s an interesting story and, as the groups of protagonists get further divided and find each other over the course of the six episodes they, independently of each other, all make their way with other characters to a mining operation using human slave labour in Bedford, to uncover the Dalek’s master plan of destroying the Earth’s core so our planet can be piloted around the galaxy like a huge spaceship. Fair enough, I guess.

There are quite a few differences from the film other than the obvious cinematic shorthand used in the later production. For a start, there’s certainly not an abundance of posters in post invasion London which are advertising the popular breakfast cereal Sugar Puffs like there are in the movie... where you can hardly look at any exterior shot without finding a Sugar Puffs poster at some point. The film version is, of course, very much an example of exclusive product placement gone mad and shattering the illusion of reality... unless mankind in the future really are subsisting on a diet of Sugar Puffs like they’re chowing down on Soylent Green.

The robomen are a very different beast here too. In the serial here they’re wearing very cumbersome, top heavy helmets and whatever clothes the human who was converted was wearing at the time. In the movie version it’s a much more military, deliberately Nazi-like affair with black, shiny uniforms and a sleek helmet not entirely unlike a German stormtrooper from the Second World War. It’s safe to say that the movie is pushing a slightly different commentary on the robomen than the no less sensitive but, certainly less demonised, versions in the serial. Also, I know these were being primarily watched on small, fuzzy screens which showed none of the detail you get these days but... it’s kind of hilarious when you realise the actor playing the roboman who throws himself into the river at the start of the first episode plays a roboman in various locations throughout the six episodes... and dies a fair few deaths too. Great stuff.

Other takeaways I got from this show was that, while the Daleks do say their trademark “Exterminate” a few times, it hadn't quite got the status it later achieved and, more often than not, they’ll just talk about people being killed instead. I also noticed one of the resistance fighters talking about striking a blow to give Europe a hope... so I guess by 2164 we must somehow be on very good terms again with our fellow Europeans after all this Brexit fuss... at least according to Doctor Who.

The ending of the final episode is quite dramatic and, surprisingly moving. The Doctor’s grandaughter has fallen in love with one of the resistance fighters but she has to leave him to carry on with her travels. However, The Doctor gets wind of this and locks her out of the TARDIS, abandoning her to a more stable future away from all his time travelling shenanigans. This is where the famous, farewell, ‘no regrets’ speech which I quote at the top of this review comes from. Even if you’ve never seen this episode, you’ve probably seen the speech because it is always used in documentaries about the show and in flashback sequences within the show itself. This was the very first time a companion had left the show but Carol Ann Ford would, of course, briefly return to the role opposite Richard Hurndall (standing in for the long dead Hartnell) in the 20th anniversary show, The Five Doctors.

And that’s that, I think. Doctor Who - The Dalek Invasion of Earth is something of a classic of the Hartnell era and definitely one to contemplate watching if you ever feel a hankering to watch a First Doctor adventure. Dated but kinda fun... but don’t count the movie version out just yet.

The Mechanic

Gunning Up That Kill

The Mechanic (2011)
USA 2011 Directed by Simon West
Momentum Blu Ray Zone B

I have to throw my hands up in the air with this one and say that I haven’t seen the original 1972 Charles Bronson movie on which this one is based. I will try to take care of that at some point, though. Now, the reason why I find myself watching this version of The Mechanic at this particular time, especially since it’s a movie that I deliberately ignored at the cinema due to its being a remake, is because I saw a bus side advert the other day for a sequel, Mechanic Resurrection, and... well, I like a good Jason Statham action move as much as the next person.

This one actually isn’t bad. Director Simon West is not a director I have had any problems with in the past, unlike some high profile critics who seem to be allergic to him. I’ve only seen a few of his movies but I’ve quite enjoyed them. This one is no different and although I’ve seen at least one movie where Jason Statham wasn’t able to save the picture (that would be War), it’s hard to actually waste an actor of this talent and neither Statham or the director drop the ball here.

The movie tells the story of a professional, elite assassin called Arthur Bishop, played by Statham. He is depicted as a sophisticated killer who tends to take out especially nasty people when called for by his ‘supplier’, Harry, played by Donald Sutherland. We know he’s a cultured man because he listens to vinyl records of classical music and works on his vintage Jaguar in his spare time.

As Statham’s voice-over narrative tells us, among other things, there are various ways to kill people and different kinds of hits required, depending on the kind of message you want to send. This is demonstrated in a somewhat clichéd opening sequence which follows Statham killing a man who the writers have already implied, via visual short hand, is not a nice person. The man drowns in a cleverly baited kill by Arthur and there’s a nice sequence where he swims under the corpse of the man he just killed, using the arms to swim so that it looks to the target’s body guards that he is still alive.

We then have the similarly clichéd moments where Sutherland’s character pays Arthur and we see that the two have cultivated a genuine friendship over the years. All this is just another set up by the writers, of course, because Sutherland becomes the subject of the next hit, which Sutherland’s partner asks Arthur to carry out, showing him how Sutherland sold out his colleagues and had them killed. Arthur doesn’t want to do it but he takes the job before somebody else does and gets Sutherland to ‘escape’ from his own building's security system, thus luring him into the open as a target for Arthur. Sutherland doesn’t try to stop what’s going to happen and says he’d rather it was Arthur than someone else.

Yes, I know it’s all very obvious and you know exactly what’s going to happen next, pretty much all the way through the movie, but Statham is such a charming actor and the movie is packed with enough set pieces, both action led and character led, that you kind of forgive it its faults and let it run through without really questioning it, I think. At least that's the spirit that I watched it in.

However, Sutherland’s death leaves a loose end... his thuggish son Steve, played by Ben Foster. Arthur Bishop grudgingly takes him under his wing and teaches him how to be a professional hitman, although Steve tends to mess things up a lot and almost paints a target on their backs in terms of the way they are being perceived by the rest of the profession. Arthur has a good piece of advice which I’ll share here because, although it seems to not mean much at first, it does push an interesting point in terms of why someone should actually listen to what their mentor tells them... “Good judgement comes from experience... and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.”

The story goes on to then expose the sell out by Donald Sutherland as a faked plot to gain power by the partner who sent Arthur in to kill his boss. So Arthur and Steve have to find a way to take out the man who set Sutherland up but... will Steve find out that it was Arthur who killed his dad? And, if he does, how do you think he’s going to react.

Well... somewhat predictably, it has to be said, although as I mentioned before, this doesn’t matter much when you have an action filled script with the likes of Jason Statham, Donald Sutherland and Ben Foster making it all come to life as skillfully as they can. The director utilises some nice colour schemes in different sections of the movie and he uses the juxtaposition of them to good effect throughout the running time. For instance, a bar that Statham hangs around in is bathed with a yellow light while a parking bay in a multi-story tower block is painted and lit in neutral blues and whites. There’s some really nice lighting in this movie and the director keeps these different colour schemes coming which, in turn, keeps everything relatively fresh and watchable.

At the end of the day, the film is about betrayal and the way it leads to similar betrayals, of a kind. It’s about friendship and the complicated stuff that gets in the way and, although it seems like it should be quite weighty... it really isn’t. It’s a light piece of fluff but, even so, it’s the right kind of light fluff, to be fair and it also has a nicely put together score (released on CD in two different, complimentary versions, apparently) by Mark Isham that is quite listenable away from the film, too, I suspect. It has almost an old, silver age sound to it, which is quite refreshing, while still retaining a modern edge that keeps it relevant and, more importantly, appropriate to the on screen shenanigans of these two, scallywag assassins.

Ultimately, The Mechanic is not as wild or addictive as other Statham action movies like The Transporter and Crank films but it’s not too far off in tone and if you like those, then you will probably have an okay time with this one. As for me, 'mission accomplished' and I’m all geared up to see the sequel, which opens this Friday in the UK. I’ll let you know how that one goes.

Lights Out

‘Fraiders Of The Ghost Dark

Lights Out
2016 USA Directed by David F. Sandberg
UK cinema release print.

And so on to Lights Out. I’ve not seen the original three minute short film by the same director, which he has chosen to expand into his first feature film, but this is certainly a horror movie which had an effective trailer and kinda lives up to ones expectations of it, to a certain extent. It’s the old horror cliché of 'things' which can’t be seen doing what they’re doing until it’s too late, which is on display here.. as seen in a gazillion horror movies when the monster lives in the shadows and intrudes on the fractured reality of the protagonists when they, but not the audience (who are already in a heightened state of tension), least expect it.

The ghostly and very real, in terms of the harm it can do, monster in Lights Out is an entity which can only function in the dark. Perhaps the most recent cousin to this creature is the invention, by writer Steven Moffat, of the Weeping Angels in the British science fiction series Doctor Who. In that show, those specific creatures appear as statues and are quantum locked so that they are not able to move if they are being observed. Once a person's attention or line of vision isn’t focussed on them, however, such as when a person blinks or is in a dark room, they move very fast and "come to get you." The creature in Lights Out is pretty much another variant of these creatures in that she, her name is Diana, can only function in places where light, or at least most forms of light (as it happens, without spoiling an obvious moment which a few of you might not see coming), reduces the creature's functionality and, as importantly, visibility, to zero. So... you know... watch out for those shadowy areas of a room... which reminds me of another Doctor Who creation called the Vashta Nerada but I don’t think this is a direct homage or steal... just two different writers finding common ground in the way they approach their, genuinely suspenseful, horror tales.

One of the more impressive ingredients of Lights Out is that the main characters in the movie don’t fall into the old cliché of disbelief until proven otherwise, for the most part. Indeed, it’s shown quite demonstrably that disbelief leaves you ill prepared and ready for a body bag in one sequence where a couple of characters enter the haunted lair of the Diana-monster and don’t return in one piece. So it’s nice that the main characters consisting of Martin, played by Gabriel Bateman, his ‘mentally challenged’ mother Sophie, played by Maria Bello, his step sister Rebecca, played by Teresa Palmer and her boyfriend Bret, played by Alexander DiPersia... are all on each other’s wavelengths from pretty early on in the movie. Asides from a pre-credits sequence which features prominently in the trailer for the movie, people fall into their roles in finding out how to best defeat Diana fairly rapidly in this and, it has to be said, I found this a much more refreshing approach to the ghostly shenanigans on show in this movie.

Of course, one of the biggest clichés going in horror films since they first began, the wandering around a place in the dark, is neatly circumnavigated by the writer and director by turning it into one of the main ‘rules’ of this creation. Indeed, the various protagonists in the movie spend almost their entire time trying to keep the lights on in whatever environment they find themselves in and this, of course, means that the audience doesn’t question the movie so much when they find out that, once again, Diana has found some way of disabling all the lights. So, naturally, the writer and director take full advantage of the way the spooky shadows and shapes, as our heroes and heroines wander around with candles, flash lights and whatever else they can find, are cast against the audience’s collective peripheral vision in an attempt, quite often successful, of wringing the full amount of suspense and fear they can out of them.

If it fails, sometimes, to provoke the necessary reaction, I thinks it’s down to how seasoned some horror film watchers are and their relationship with other recent films of this ilk which are, perhaps, done a little more expertly in some places... although this movie certainly makes up for it with its enthusiasm. Where it falls down a little, though, is with the origins of the character which, while seeming to be all out in the open for the dissection of the main characters and those of us watching them, are actually a little more hazy and shrouded in mystery than you might at first realise. For instance, the science fiction concept which has created Diana is something not entirely unlike what happens to the Dr. Manhattan character in the comic book Watchmen and, of course, the movie counterpart. However, while the movie doesn’t go into specifics about the ‘incident’ which caused the creation of this malevolent apparition, allowing one to infer the rest as something which is best left to the imagination, it does tend to gloss over some pretty essential information surrounding the relationship between Diane and Martin’s mother, Sophie. Since the ending of the movie absolutely hinges on this specific relationship, it has to be said that I quite often found myself questioning the ‘up and down’ status of this ‘ resurrected friendship’ in terms of the credibility of the main premise. Without this central relationship, you can’t have the ending which this film seems to tell us is the solution to everyone’s problems... but it did feel bereft of common sense in terms of the mother, for a lot of the time, so it didn’t quite ring true to me in that regard.

However, this is a really minor grumble and, although it’s not exactly the scariest of this year’s horror movies, it’s certainly a nicely executed one in general and, even though the genre rules are mostly adhered to, it does so in a way that doesn’t necessarily make you feel like you’re covering the same old ground again in terms of movies designed to make you jump out of your seat. I mean, yeah, alright, we absolutely are covering the same old ground again... but it does it in a way that makes it seem less important in terms of the variations of the characters you usually get in this kind of movie. There’s also a nice moment involving an electronic car key and its use as a means of survival at one point that was certainly worth the price of admission, as far as I’m concerned. That and the wholly appropriate and unsettling, at times, score by composer Benjamin Wallfisch, which I thought was pretty good.

So is Lights Out the most terrifying movie you’re going to see this year? Not even close. It will, however, certainly give you an entertaining night out at the cinema and, although I personally don’t need to see it again, I don’t have any qualms about happily recommending it to anyone who is contemplating going to see this one... even if they are already fans of the genre.

The Red Dragon

Justice Ink

The Red Dragon
USA 1945 Directed by Phil Rosen
Monogram/Warner Bros DVD Region 1

So it’s been a little while, again, since I reviewed a Charlie Chan film... mostly because of lack of availability of the few movies left in the series that had never been commercially released on a home video platform. Now, a pricey division of Warner Brothers called Warner Archives have finally released the remaining few Chan titles on DVD in a two disc, three movie set... comprising the remaining two Roland Winters titles (don’t worry... I’ll get to those in separate reviews) and this one, The Red Dragon, a missing gap from the Sydney Toler portrayals of the famous detective from Hawaii. Of course, regular readers will probably know my absolute favourite actor to portray Chan was Warner Oland, and there are actually a few of his earliest appearances in the character which are still not available. However, this is because those first few to star him are pretty much missing in action and, unless a bunch of film reels show up in some odd location someday... it looks like they’ll be lost forever. Still, I remember the unbelievable resurrection from the ashes of the, more or less, full original cut of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis a few years back so... you know... never say never.

The film starts off promisingly with an opening credits painting which is the most expressive and interesting I’ve seen used in the series. Depicting Toler’s head and shoulders in the bottom left and a big dragon taking up the rest of the frame where the credits overlay. It’s pretty great but, alas, even with late series regular Phil Rosen returning to directing duties, the quality of the rest of the movie does little to live up to the magnificence of this title card. However, from a film historian’s perspective, as opposed to just kicking back and enjoying the movie, this has its little bonuses too. I must ask a film historian to verify this, next time I see one.

So, yeah, there’s good and there’s bad and I’ll get to the worst thing first because it’s the very thing that reveals the silver lining in this one...

The acting is really terrible. Seriously, it’s so wooden at times it creeks and although these films don’t always have the best players, they’re usually better than this. Now, it may, to an extent, be something to do with the staging of the action because... well, there’s an awful lot of chance encounters which lead to conversations to drive along the plot. For instance, man comes out of lift, bumps into other man who happens to be waiting for the lift, and the two talk, standing statically, for the next minute or two. This is a really flat and less than dynamic way to fill the audience in on the plot details, it has to be said. But so is the line delivery of the majority of the actors, so I’m not letting them off the hook here, either.

The good thing though, from a historical viewpoint, is that the main regular cast are all very natural and comfortable and run rings around the rest of the players. Take Toler himself, for instance. You really do get a sense of just what a consummate and professional actor he was here. When you see how stilted almost everyone else is in this, you get the chance to compare him and realise just how good he was at bringing the Charlie Chan character to life. I got a real appreciation of Toler above and beyond the usual assumption that he will play the role as best he can, with this one.

Benson Fong returns here as number three son and, although he acquits himself quite well, he’s not given too much more to do than look puzzled and interested at his ‘Pop’s’ conclusions and deductions here. He also has the usual two hander comic relief moments but this time, instead of Mantan Moreland playing his ‘funny black man’ role as chauffer Birmingham Brown, Fong gets to partner up with Willie Best as Birmingham’s cousin Chatanooga Brown, who played in at least three Chan films and played Chatanooga at least twice. The difference between Best and Moreland is not too great, however. He comes across as a maybe slightly younger, slimmer version of Moreland himself, given exactly the same kinds of lines and scaredy cat actions to follow but without the occasional added wit of Mantan Moreland’s two man stand up comedy routine that the writers occasionally drew from and threw into the mix. Best is fine, however and, though his lines are pretty forgettable in this, he doesn’t let the side down when it comes to playing the part of the Chan family chauffer here. Of course, Moreland would return to the series again later.

We also have a lady who was joggling at my memory as I was watching her all the way through the film. She’s not exactly outstanding in this but I knew the face and I somehow managed to miss her name in the credits. Turns out she’s Carol Hughes, who Flash Gordon fans will recognise as being the second of the on-screen Dale Ardens, appearing in the third of the three initial Buster Crabbe serials, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, for Universal. This means that both of the serial actresses who played Dale Arden have appeared in a Charlie Chan film and both opposite Sydney Toler’s version of the character. Jean Rogers, who played Dale in both Flash Gordon and Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars starred in an earlier picture in the series, Charlie Chan in Panama. I know what you’re thinking... A Chan, A Plan, A Canal, Panama but... no, it doesn’t quite work like that.

The film is kinda hum drum in a lot of ways but it does, at least, have a genuine mystery at it’s heart and Charlie Chan flies to assist a character who has a history of solving cases with him but whom, in terms of actor and character, I could find no trace of within the history of the Chan movies. In this case, the first murder is committed in a room full of witnesses, as the victim gets a bullet for his troubles. It’s quite comical to watch him as he, in his final moments he takes the time to type a dying clue on his nearby typewriter. The trick is, though, that although one shot is heard, two bullets have been fired, on slugs which have never been rifled down to be fired from a firearm. And what is the significance of The Red Dragon Chinese ink at the scene of the first crime, which gives the movie its name? Is it something to do with the papers which tell of the mysterious, newly discovered,  ‘missing element’ that can cause even more widespread atomic damage than the recently exploded atom bomb?

Only Charlie Chan can work out the answers to this Chinese puzzle, which, of course, he does in the short running time of the film. The mystery behind the double shot bullets with no visible firearms is a bit of a dreary one but the idea of that particular challenge is a good one. The only other outstanding thing I noted in this viewing was that, once the killer has been unmasked, so to speak, by Chan on a staircase, he breaks free from the police and has a go at Chan himself. It’s unusual for Chan to get in on the action in these kinds of movies... that’s why he always has either number one, two or three son with him... because they’re young enough to get into fist fights. Here, Toler deftly grabs the leg of the killer and throws him downstairs. So a little unusual but welcome bit of mild action shenanigans for Chan in this one.

And that’s me done here. The Red Dragon is nowhere near one of the greats in terms of the Chan movies but people who like these films will no doubt want to check this one out. I’ve always liked the Charlie Chan movies and so this new Warners set is an unmissable release as far as I’m concerned. If you’re into the Chan then make haste and purchase honourable DVD collection before bird is no longer early enough for worm!