BLOOD SPECTRUM
TONY LEE ON DVDS/BLU-RAYS
Irish haunted-house movie THE CANAL (DVD/Blu-ray, 14 September) is essentially just another found-footage variant. Film-archivist/protagonist David discovers silent documentary reels about murders in his own home. When his adulterous wife is drowned in a Dublin canal, David is a suspect. His widower’s life of grief and guilt (and single-parenthood) quickly spirals down into a replay of that earlier tragedy.
Writer-director Ivan Kavanagh tries for grisly atmosphere but only a plodding retinue of rent-a-ghosts – borrowed from Amityville, The Shining and most notably The Ring – emerges from the drains under his property. Although the spectral audience for a bedroom strangling provides at least one startlingly uncanny image, and the climactic encounter with the dead wife in the sewers scores highly on the gruesomeness monitor, The Canal sinks its appeal with a mumble-gore effect. Its finale of revelations (which most viewers should easily predict anyway) needed to run like an express train but the movie’s loco-motif gears remain stuck in Hornby fiddle yards.
“I’m afraid of the stars. Is it a sin?” Based upon a political SF novel by the Strugatsky brothers, Aleksei German’s magnificently impenetrable Trudno byt bogom, aka HARD TO BE A GOD (Blu-ray/DVD, 14 September), is a remake of sorts, as the Strugatskys’ novel was previously filmed by Peter Fleischmann as Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein (1989), which looks like a colourful adventure with at least some conventional Euro sci-fi content. German’s version is in b&w, exploring darker fantasy in a fetid landscape of swamp fogs and medieval cruelties mixed with Pythonesque farce. Intro narration tells of a scientist visiting a pre-industrial world, but German has opted for a more intimate take with a grotesquely claustrophobic intensity coupled with some hellish spectacle in the epic manner of Herzog on acid.
Unlike the bombastic space opera of Fedor Bondarchuk’s Dark Planet (Interzone #257) this Russian horror seems closer to anarchic Jodorowsky than artistic Tarkovsky. As knight Don Rumata wanders a sprawling realm of castles, the roving documentary camera is faced randomly by a variety of characters. There’s tireless provocation in montages of disgust/beauty, but all so frustratingly pointless that it’s frequently mesmerising. Make no mistake, this is an obscenely twitching mess of sudden violence, intrusive attention-seeking walk-ons, and clusters of psycho-porno details, so often dank as old boots, and yet also marvellously imaginative with melancholic visual poetry and mystic perspectives within smoky burrows and squelchy foxholes.
The morning’s piper stands under a dumb bell, as if it’s a dunce hat. There’s much ado about ears and noses, and the spilt guts of hanged men or casualties of war. Horses and geese strut about, signifying no particular differences to Earth’s own history. An impaled dog sniffs a rubble patch on a battlefield. An orphan of war seems to be a place-holder for some future atrocity. Away from the mud and rain, Don Rumata finally rides off across painterly snow-fields, as if towards an infinity of symbolic white-space.
Hard to Be a God is three hours of potent and graphic cinema, with an overabundance of extraordinary images. Just don’t expect it to make any sense whatsoever in terms of Star Trek’s prime directive.
What is it about dogs and cars that elicit overpowering emotion? Dogs are often adopted as family, while cars apparently define freedom! Alex Cox’s cult favourite Repo Man has an irate vehicle owner deprived of his wheels issue his ultimatum “You gonna give me my car, or do I gotta go to your house and shove your dog’s head down the toilet?” It is a throwaway one-liner, but a threat against a pet has the desired effect, and so repo’d keys are reluctantly but promptly returned.
Directed by ex-stuntman Chad Stahelski, action thriller JOHN WICK (Blu-ray/DVD, 21 September) starts with a spat over a car and results in a puppy being killed during a home invasion. Keanu Reeves is great as the titular assassin with a Leon style proficiency for violence. Legendary Mr Wick is retired but, of course, not for long in this exhilarating tale of vengeance. John Wick is so outrageously excessive in its NYC bloodshed it becomes an exemplary case of rough-justice with a distinctive comicbook appeal. Channelling Tony Scott, borrowing from Michael Mann, Luc Besson, and John Woo, the filmmakers have created a glossy mythical underworld, a slick urban western of modern noir visuals where dialogue is ridiculously portentous, but car chases, fist-fights and gun battles are rarely less than mesmerising against colourful backgrounds. Any fans of Marvel’s Punisher movies will enjoy this.
“Your eyes…what’s the matter with your eyes?” Based on Barre Lyndon’s play, Hammer vehicle for Anton Diffring THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH (Dual Format, 21 September) was made in 1959, and benefits from great co-stars like Hazel Court and Christopher Lee. Clearly inspired by Dr Jekyll and Dorian Gray, it’s about new medical immortality treatments. Initially, romance complicates the crazy scientist’s experimental research, which has remained unpublished for pragmatic and moral reasons but, of course, love is considered a terrible weakness in this particularly uncompassionate scenario. Terence Fisher directs this urban gothic period (Paris in 1890) picture with his usual workman-like skill. The ripper-like serial-killer mystery is moody gaslight drama rather than lively thriller, all about rejuvenation with a looming deadline for a gland-transplant op. “Let’s not think about the future,” says Dr Bonnet (typed ‘Bonner’ in subtitles!) and yet, paradoxically, a continuance of hedonistic life beyond his first century is really all this obsessive narcissist and callous immortal addict does think about.
Whereas the comicbook action of DC TV multiverse shows Arrow and Flash is a largely bloodless affair, the stylised not sanitised GOTHAM (Season One, Blu-ray/DVD, 5 October), as developed by Bruno Heller, is a drama of the years before Batman. Gotham begins with the apparently senseless slaughter of Bruce Wayne’s parents, a headline crime first investigated by rookie detective Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie, previously the voice of Bruce Wayne in animated movie Batman: Year One).
In 22 episodes of noirish policier, this is like a ‘GCPD Dark Blue’ with scary violence and psycho brutality. As one mobster says, “You can’t have organised crime without law and order”. Jim’s a fiercely moralist fighter of crooks and corrupt officials, a capeless crusader whose ambitious target of becoming commissioner gets a shaky start here. With so many cheaters and liars on both sides of the legal grey areas, even Jim’s veteran partner Bullock (Donal Logue, Blade, Ghost Rider) is an unreliable narrator of this secret metro history about sociopaths versus idealists.
Top crime families backstab, bribe or blackmail their way to feared positions. Gotham is a damned city on the verge of street warfare, where “a mask hides the face but frees the soul”. Supporting characters such as jinxed limping stooge Cobblepot (“When you know what a man loves, you know what can kill him”) and CSI novice Nygma (“What I want the poor have, the rich need, and if you eat it you’ll die”) escalate from oddballs to sinister to dangerous instability. The weakest link is obviously panto-reject Jada Pinkett Smith (always an inexcusably poor actress, with the charisma of a shop-window dummy) as matriarch caricature and prattling bore Fish Mooney, a silly creature of malevolent pretence and coagulated attitude. Even the newcomer playing young Selina ‘Cat’ Kyle is a better performer.
On the upstanding but duly concerned front, Sean Pertwee makes a fine job of Alfred. Orphan Bruce (David Mazouz, the autistic/psychic in TV show Touch) is also eminently watchable as the sheltered boy struggling to cope with his new social position as heir apparent to Wayne’s world.
There’s a baleful Dollmaker kidnapping homeless teens, but Gotham weirdness really starts with a weather-balloon vigilante. Stabster also has a novelty weapon. New drug viper gives junkies super-strength, launching bio-terror nightmares. Episode Spirit of the Goat features a hooded serial killer. He’s only one of many. Harvey Dent gets an introductory tale as the Waynes’ murder case develops from an eyewitness report. When Jim visits a touring circus we meet the Graysons, future parents of a wonder boy.
Guest stars with genre cred include Morena Baccarin (of TV show V), Christopher Heyerdahl (Sanctuary), and Allyce Beasley (Moonlighting). There’s also campy Carol Kane doing a batty-biddy turn as Penguin’s proud mum Gertrude. The source of fearsome hallucinations, Julian Sands is Dr Crane, Scarecrow’s dad, while Mark Margolis (TV series The Equalizer) portrays a blind fortune teller, and Colm Feore’s mad scientist performs Frankenstein surgery on a hapless Jeffrey Combs.
In its designs and drama, the show manages to avoid many obvious clichés of the urban gothic, even on trademark dark-and-stormy nights at Arkham Asylum where, of course, the inmates take over. A strong whiff of The Untouchables and The Godfather is evident beneath salted layering of comicbook legends. This is 1970s and 1980s Manhattan mafiarama, which retells the origins of DC comics’ gallery of rogues. These human monsters are diminished to malcontents, depicted as social outcasts subjected to, if not always victims of, long term abuse by peers and rivals rather than (as is usual for heroic counterparts) being seen as blameless citizens tragically affected by freaky accidents or extreme traumas.
This radical humanisation process does not reduce the role of evil in shaping or reshaping tortured souls, but it does mean that we are invited to view character arcs as understandable from the inside, still very creepy but comparatively sympathetic – just before all the rage and killing begins. Good news: the awful Mrs Smith won’t appear in season two. Oh, and the answer to Riddler’s puzzler? Nothing!
BONES (Season 10, DVD, 12 October) begins by dealing hurriedly with the FBI conspiracy that ended season nine (Interzone #255) and prompts a bout of blackmail and brief imprisonment separating Booth and Brennan, until her forthright genius and his stalwart patience solves the government corruption case that dates back to legends about Hoover’s secret files. The casualty is one of their own team, and the line-up’s replacement character brings immediate but subtle changes to group dynamics.
Dr Brennan’s expertise in forensic anthropology makes a crime show of sometimes gruesome discoveries and equally icky lab investigations by an eccentric team of “squints”, almost guaranteed to put viewers off dinner in a way that rival TV show C.S.I. never quite manages. Its dual dramatic/comedic appeal ensures the series’ combination of science and horror wins over genre fans. Like other procedurals with plenty of gory scenes there is grim humour in the language used, so “animal predation” is the official and polite term for what happened to a fat man’s body half-eaten by stoats.
Trouble finds our heroes almost as often as they are called to attend crime scenes. At a science convention as keynote speaker, Brennan meets her professional rivals and solves a murder case where the victim is fused, by fire, to concrete steps. The 200th episode of Bones offers a celebratory pastiche of classic 1950s Hollywood as framework romp for the stars’ 10th anniversary. It’s a mini-movie that’s obviously great fun for the main cast, all playing very different roles in a period whodunit.
Psychic in the Soup features a stew of body “decomp” found inside a tree, and guest star Cyndi Lauper returns as spirit medium Avalon, whose ‘gifts’ amuse/irritate atheists like Dr B. Another episode starts as religious farce when Satan appears to attack the penitent during a river baptism.
Among the grotesque products of violent rage, that mask anomalous events or complex motives, there are skin jigsaws where Frankenstein-like stitching jobs are required to identify victims, illustrating that Leatherface was just a fiendish amateur when compared to forensic doctors. Although the clinical purpose is obvious, an unsettling aspect of skeletons arranged on table-top displays is that human life/death is reduced to diagrammatic answers to Sherlockian puzzles.
Brennan’s second pregnancy impacts on her emotional state but she insists “that in no way compromises my mental acumen”, even though she becomes obsessive about reviewing files on a convicted serial killer who is due for execution. It’s a story that demonstrates the scary responsibilities of matching clues to apparent facts when (inconveniently) new evidence is found, and questions the morality and political ethics of the death penalty, with familiar but pithy arguments from both sides. Is killing as punishment ever truly warranted?
Fleshy remains are frequently in close-up for study and the practical make-up effects render many ghastly corpses with such acute realism that rotting bodies on Bones match the artistic grue of the best horror movies.
“Sure it wasn’t just a bad dream?” INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 3 (DVD/Blu-ray, 12 October) is actually a prequel set in the haunted house before the Lamberts owned it. Motherless teen Quinn (Stefanie Scott) visits a psychic biddy (Lin Shaye), and then gets hit by a car. Soon she’s possessed by big bad and causing havoc in her own bedroom. Creator of Saw and Insidious’ writer Leigh Whannell (who acts in this as blogger Specs) makes his debut as director here, conjuring pop-up/drop-in frighteners, like phantom arms and legs that crave poor Quinn’s company in darkness.
A faceless crawler embodies otherworldly forces with a stranglehold on domestic reality, but horrible clichés of night-vision POV-cameras spoil the atmosphere. Exorcist and especially Poltergeist are the obvious genre touchstones and this merely routine spook fest is a major disappointment.
A documentary style works against William Brent Bell’s French-set oddity WER (DVD, 19 October), in which a defence attorney leads the hunt for a werewolf to clear her big hairy client of murder charges. A bear shot in the woods near a crime scene brings ambiguity to the lycanthrope theory, and medical tests must confirm a case of porphyria (never mind obvious genre evidence) to be admissible in court.
The overuse of video surveillance, jitter-cam (adding confusions, not depicting chaos) and split-screen visuals during hectic main action scenes does nothing to help this typically hysterical storyline. A.J. Cook is good in the leading role and the ever reliable Sebastian Roche is fine as a co-star, but after five years of playing witless Lester in TV spy-fi series Chuck it is hard to accept Vik Sahay in a straight drama, and so almost impossible to take his efforts here to portray a legal investigator very seriously. Sahay is still (forever?) half of naff-pop duo Jeffster, and perhaps rightly so.
Werewolves are really too deeply rooted in the gothic and historical uncanny, and so rarely work in modern/clinical settings without the benefit of a keen sense of humour as found in popular movies by Landis and Dante. At times, Wer strives for a hirsute super-antihero effect but this is a movie that lacks the character background of a Wolverine or the weird mythos of Wolfen to plug into. The finale’s night chase, creature dual, and helicopter crash are just an overwrought flub of artless intensity and messy wolfman clichés that are too often unintentionally hilarious.
Cornel Wilde’s chase movie THE NAKED PREY (Dual Format, 19 October) was made in 1965, and it’s about the lone survivor of a South African safari group. Director Wilde portrays the nameless protagonist who is stalked by tribal warriors after they have slaughtered the others in his hunting party. What begins as a kind of National Geographic torture porn flick, produced fifteen years before the infamous cycle of Italian cannibal shockers, becomes a particularly grisly version of genre classic The Most Dangerous Game.
An exercise in psychological and physical endurance, against endless plains environments and some authentic animal savagery (stock footage is often used, and is obviously of inferior image quality), this drama features an educated/cultured westerner forced at spear-point into an unforgiving wilderness, with only his wits and belligerence to save his own skin from a pack of skilled bushmen and the dangers of assorted wildlife. A soundtrack of drums adds a novelty aspect to notably energetic pursuit scenes, while the atmospheric use of landscapes and rugged terrain is exemplary.
Despite this picture’s quite rampantly artistic pretension, the lack of very much English dialogue or even character narration is an asset to the fierce drama about survival of the fittest. However, there’s still an element of racism (“Hey, you devils!”) in this raw adventure’s depiction of a single white man easily outwitting so many blacks in their own territory. In lieu of a proper making-of featurette, there is a 30-minute interview with film historian Sheldon Hall that offers details about the production’s roots in a western tale (previously filmed as part of Sam Fuller’s Run of the Arrow) and the hardships faced by the star (suffering illness throughout shooting) and his crew on location in the veldt.
Nicolas Cage has not been doing so well lately. The apocalyptic failure Left Behind and Paul Schrader’s CIA thriller Dying of the Light did not match up to Cage’s earlier efforts like fun-fuelled road movie Drive Angry and the under-appreciated Ghost Rider sequel Spirit of Vengeance.
Based on Tim Lebbon’s story, PAY THE GHOST (DVD/Blu-ray, 26 October) is directed by Uli Edel – the maker of Shakespearean TV western King of Texas and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon – and it’s a slight improvement on Cage’s recent pictures, but hardly seems likely to win him any new fans. Cage plays a teacher whose young son vanishes on Halloween night. Although missing for a year, the boy remains the subject of his dad’s fanatical searching as, after discovering a 17th century witch’s curse linked to abducted children, our typically rational professor becomes desperate enough to consult a psychic.
A passable drama of distressed parents with a burned marriage that was sparked by the loss of their only child, Pay the Ghost is a basic haunted-house mystery, albeit with fogbound access to an otherworldly realm. This doles out almost random scares, and Celtic mythology, without much thought for building up familial tensions or urbanite suspense. Lacking big frights beyond a couple of sudden deaths, its effectiveness as genre chiller with a literary source is limited to just a few potent nightmare images along the way to a fairly lacklustre climax. The ending, though, is pure Disney.
“Anyone must be barmy who collects things like this.” Bloch’s story about the malignant influence of the Marquis de Sade was filmed by Freddie Francis as THE SKULL (Dual Format, 26 October) for Hammer’s chief rival Amicus (“Latin for low-budget” – Bloch). Made in 1965, it’s a modest horror, but it clearly inspired Hellraiser. Obviously there are no Cenobites but the first scene’s auction-lot is a set of four demonic figures. A death’s head is not a puzzle box, but de Sade’s skull is a cursed artefact which affects the mind of those in possession of it.
Maitland (Peter Cushing) is an occult researcher enjoying a macabre hobby. He buys a book bound in human skin and, despite sinister legends, pursues a shady dealer’s offer to acquire the Sadean skull. “You really are superstitious,” Maitland gently chides his wealthy friend (Christopher Lee). Sleepwalking into a nightmare, Maitland endures disturbingly Kafkaesque hallucinations of his imminent demise. Although he struggles to resist dark temptations of violence in his quiet world suddenly gone so weird and wonky, he becomes resigned to his ultimately tragic fate and so, with Bluebeard’s knife, Maitland’s last act in life is to nearly stab his own sleeping wife.
POV shots from inside the skull and its habit of floating in shadows enhance the surrealistic qualities of this eerie tale. A moral fable about the fall from grace of a relatively innocent man, it helps along the transition of genre horror from gothic traditions to present-day chills where an eruption of forces repressed by modern society brings doom upon a fascinated-but-unwary soul. Maitland dares to gaze into the abyssal depths and the abyss swallows him. So beware! All it takes to die horribly is a couple of gloomy nights alone reading.
UTTER MATTERS: ROUND-UP
The Most Dangerous Game meets revenge slasher in FINAL GIRL (DVD, 7 September), a numbingly generic suspense thriller except for juvenile attempts at vaguely surrealistic/hallucinatory visual styling. Sadistic boys hunt blonde Veronica (Abigail Breslin, Zombieland, Ender’s Game) through woodlands, but they are unaware that she’s been specially trained to kill them with a Nikita-like expertise, or (warning: disposable one-liner!) they “could just get married”. This is a tepid often sadly silly teen-bait exercise.
Jeremy Woodings’ BLOOD MOON (DVD, 5 October) is western lunacy and desultory horror with a hackneyed plot. From ghost town to hostage crisis and werewolf siege, this talky gibberish is riddled with cowboys ‘n’ outlaws clichés not gunslinger bullets.
Originally titled The Houses October Built, Bobby Roe’s THE HOUSES OF HALLOWEEN (DVD, 5 October) is a scrappy bogus documentary about “haunted” attractions gone awry.
David Campbell’s Lemon Tree Passage is foolishly re-titled THE PASSAGE (DVD, 5 October). Based on a true story (lacking any claim to originality!), it’s Ozploitation with ghostly menace where scares are blurry gibberish or fast-cut montages and noisy barrages. Its unwary US tourists are killed by passing yawns of genre mediocrity.
Shatner plays radio host, unwitting link for seasonal tales of black comedy with middling chills and childish gore in A CHRISTMAS HORROR STORY (DVD, 9 November), a witless anthology flick that centres on yet another version of the Krampus legend. Complete with a revolt by workshop elves, fright-wise this is basically the same old sadist Santa gift box we received in previous years.
Ate de Jong, the director of cult comedy Drop Dead Fred and horror spoof Highway to Hell, returns with dismally low-budget British home invasion “shocker” DEADLY VIRTUES (DVD, 28 September). Pretentiously feeble-minded attempt at rope bondage fantasy, this misogynistic mess is far too kitchen sink for its own good.
Richard Johnstone’s dull British clunker Bloodless is thoughtlessly re-titled VAMPIRES (DVD, 12 October). Medical tests in a country retreat are the cover for un-spooky goings-on and mostly dopey acting that soon goes off the rails. Dare you watch it without yawning with dismay and/or laughing in scorn?
“It’s free pizza!” Eli Roth’s lazy idea for a middle-class American seduction fantasy, KNOCK KNOCK (Blu-ray/DVD, 19 October) is Hard Candy meets Funny Games minus amoral play-time or any genuine psychopathology. It has a couple of daddy’s wet-dreams vandalise his life in a weekend assault on happy family values but, sadly, even top quantum hippie Keanu Reeves (did he lose a haircut bet?) fails to rescue this overly angsty black comedy misadventure from its comprehensive failings.
LET US PREY (DVD, 19 October) is Assault on Precinct 13 meets Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy. Intensely violent, extremely gory, but humourless, this is a UK-Irish production with a blatantly Carpenterish score. There’s a striking main-title sequence but it’s a shame about the rest of the movie.
A chamber siege with hairy menace, HOWL (DVD/Blu-ray, 26 October) is about a night train stranded in country fog where passengers are attacked by werewolves. Paul Hyett, director of misogynistic sleazer The Seasoning House, makes a botch of black comedy opportunities. While achieving zero suspense Howl isn’t saved by Dog Soldiers veteran Sean Pertwee’s cameo as the engine driver, for which he looks to be thinking Oh fuck, not again!
British mystery THE MESSENGER (DVD, 2 November) is about a haunted depressive. David Blair directs with shameless overconfidence in subgenre conventions to intrigue and, laughably, seems to believe northern kitchen-sink melodrama is a worthwhile style for portraying 21st century angst.