Stephanie (2017)

This was an interesting one.

We're plonked down seemingly in the middle of Stephanie's story (an impressive performance from young Shree Crooks). Alone in her house and looking after herself while doing perilous things that made even a child-free person like myself wince, she talks to her cuddly turtle as if he were real, but there is clearly another entity here, too. Stephanie doesn't seem shocked about this. Scared, certainly, but not surprised. She goes about her day as normally as possible, reveling in her parent-less existence and also weeping for them to come home, occasionally hiding from a "monster" we only hear as it prowls around the little girl.

Before the story develops fully, there is a palpable sense of this being a traumatic experience told through the lens of a child's understanding and processing of something they can't quite grasp. This is one of the film's strengths, I think. It felt almost storybook at times.

Stephanie's parents (Frank Grillo and Anna Torv, freaking me out with her long, non-Mindhunter hair) seem confused and cagey around their daughter. There's a lot of talk about keeping calm. Stephanie's father is tender towards the girl; her mother less so. She's affectionate but guarded, often retreating a room of medical diagrams and Skyping with army officers. What on earth is going on?

The reveal did not come as a complete shock, to be honest. But it wasn't entirely evident, and it didn't lessen my enjoyment of the movie even so. This is a cool little story that successfully manages to convey a sense of fear and paranoia after a global crisis all while rarely leaving the upper middle class, suburban house. That the narrative ultimately pulls back so far as to leave the planet was... a choice, certainly. It's clear what they intended this to mean but I'm undecided as to how I felt about it after everything being so personal up to that point. Still, I enjoyed my time with Stephanie.

This is a Blumhouse Productions movie, directed by Akiva Goldsman and coming in at a very doable 86mins of runtime. It's streaming on Netflix at time of writing.

Ravenous / Les Affamés (2017)

Ravenous is a zombie movie that somehow manages to feel unlike any other I've seen. I was drawn to this one even before I saw some favourable chatter about it, because I live relatively close to Quebec, and if anything adds a little frisson to a horror movie, it's that sense of familiarity.

This little Netflix Original was written and directed by a Canadian actor, screenwriter and film director by the name of Robin Aubert, and it won the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Award for Best Canadian Film in 2017. I can see why :)

We join this world in the aftermath of an outbreak; long enough ago that everyone seems to know what the situation is, but not so long that they aren't still thinking about their lives before.

There's not much story to speak of, now that I actually think about it. The viewer is really just following the lives of several individuals whose paths intersect and overlap, as they try to survive in a rural town.

One of my favourite things about this film is the characters. The skill with which they are drawn for us, with such speed too - and without resorting to tired old tropes. These people feel fully developed and real, and like real people there aren't any black and white heroes and villains. Everyone is a little soft, a little hard; a lot scared about what's going to happen. These people are written so well it made me realise how we're forced to put up with poorly constructed characters so frequently.

Ravenous is nearly 2hrs long, and I am not going to say that it goes by quickly. This film is incredibly slow and considered, and yet nothing feels like padding. The moments of misty stillness over the fields and forests are important, because being quiet is important in this new world.

When the silence is shattered, it is with the sounds of bullets, bludgeoning, and inhuman screaming. In fact Ravenous uses sound to great effect, with the suffocating/protective forests deadening the noises of approach or altercation, or the empty farmhouses and hideaways; all hard surfaces and outdated decor. This movie feels incredibly... acoustic.

So with the aural taken care of, let's move on to the visual. This film is stunningly atmospheric in places.

Again, Aubert makes some simple but highly effective choices, subtle camera movements, angles, and framing choices add a visual flair that really excited me. Mist is used often but not overdone, to cloak the surroundings in a blanket that simultaneously softens and masks the threats. A world of zombie carnage is rarely shown as beautiful as this (if ever? Correct me if I'm wrong!).

In its third act, things become mysterious, bordering on the supernatural. The zombies are shown congregating and possibly even building structures. These scenes are so unsettling and they raise way more questions than they answer. To see these monsters so still and silent is baffling, almost sad?  

Opening with a short string of cheap-ish jump scares, I advise you to hold on, to be rewarded with an affecting and thoughtful tale of humans caught up in chaos, and all the bleakness and the hope that such a tale must embody. Highly recommended! 

(And being one of its Originals, hopefully destined to be streaming on Netflix for a good while 👍🏼).

Extras:

• Just gonna say it, I'm absolutely delighted when a zombie film has the zeds leaving animals alone. We have cows, horses, kittens(!) and dogs in this. Yes, in a post-apocalyptic world their lives aren't going to be great, but at least we don't see them ripped apart by zombies!
• These ghouls seem more cognizant and that's so fascinating to me. The scene in the field with the young woman looking and looking away was so good!
• Stay and watch the credits. For the director's first thank you/dedication (below) and the post-credit scene that might make you happy, if you're weird like I am.

The Borderlands / Final Prayer (2013)

2018 has been the year I don't quite understand what the fuss is about. See: Revenge, Hereditary (though that wasn't helped by a shitty viewing experience) and now that I've finally seen The Borderlands, this is the latest.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate or even dislike any of these movies. I just didn't seem to get from them what the vocal majority did. I know we're all allowed to have our own opinions, but it's pretty frustrating to be aware of a tidal wave of excitement over a movie that personally left you feeling more like "...that's it?".

So here we are at The Borderlands, or Final Prayer as it's been renamed for the US market. An English found footage flick and feature film directorial debut of Elliot Goldner (who also wrote it).

It follows a team of Vatican investigators as they set up camp in a small town to try and disprove a "miracle" that took place in the local church. The core group is made up of Deacon (Gordon Kennedy - always a pleasure to watch), Gray the tech guy (Robin Hill) and Mark, an uptight priest (Aidan McArdle).

They set up cameras all over the place and wear head-cams, so all of the footage we see is supposedly from these sources.

Which is fine... but the found footage aspect of this film seems more technique than theme, to be honest. There's no narrative book-ending or explanation as to how these cameras were found (a big question, given the denouement) or who edited it all together and/or what the purpose is of us watching it. I guess there doesn't always have to be a Blair Witch Project intro screen for these types of movies, but something to explain some context would be nice?

Nevertheless, we follow the investigations of these men as they scrutinise the church and hang out at their rented cottage. During the day there are weird happenings that Deacon and Mark, the most explicitly religious members of the group, are cynical of and try to explain away. Gray - who took this job purely for the money, and told a white lie about his faith - is way more spooked.

At night, more unsettling things happen, until ultimately the group find themselves performing a ceremony which doesn't exactly go to plan... culminating in a deeply uncomfortable final sequence. 

The main problem I had with this movie was that the gradual climb of the first two acts was too repetitive and slow. Despite definite moments of creepiness, the building of suspense just didn't hit the mark. The payoff here literally comes within the final few moments - rather than the entire film working as a whole in laying the groundwork, with an alarming finale as the cherry on top.

Perhaps on a re-watch I might feel differently?

Something The Borderlands did do successfully was make me miss the English countryside. We are shown a fair amount of it as the team drive around and traipse through fields. It gave me pangs!

I rented this one on Google Play, and I think it's available on Amazon, also. Give it a watch and tell me what I'm missing.

Spring (2014)

Relevant to this time of year, Spring is a beautiful film about love ❤

This one was recommended to me ages ago, but I've a habit of deliberately putting off films I'm certain I'm going to really like. Does anyone else do this? The timing has to be right, my mood has to be just so... I want to honour the film properly. So on the eve of Valentine's Day, I was ready. I dove in.

Spring benefits from you knowing as little as possible going in, so we're going to circle around the real meat of the plot here. We're introduced to Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci), a Californian with nothing much left to keep him there: he's lost both parents in quick succession, his best friend is wasted all the time, he has no job prospects and he's in trouble with the cops. Life is shit and he's miserable. To escape it all, he books a random ticket to Italy.

Once there, he meets a couple of rowdy Englishmen who show him the sights, and when they peace out and head to Amsterdam, Evan decides to stay and find work. He gets a job and lodging on a local farm and then attempts to get to know a gorgeous woman he keeps seeing around town.

Louise (Nadia Hilker) is at once mysterious, haughty, and captivating. The first time they talk she makes it clear she literally just wants to have sex with him. Finding this a little full-on, Evan suggests getting a drink together first: "I gotta make sure that you're the kind of crazy I can deal with."

They spend time together, and they eat, they drink, they talk and fuck. In the span of less than a week, they grow close. Louise is affectionate but evasive, sometimes unexpectedly running off or ducking out of dates early. Evan just accepts her as a tempestuous Italian woman, but we're shown tantalising peeks into her world, showing it's way weirder than that.

The layers are expertly peeled back, with the audience faintly aware of Louise's "issues", but not understanding the hows and whys. When Evan arrives at her apartment for the the most jaw-dropping scene of the movie, it starts a series of scenes of natural exposition, unfolding Louise's tale in all of its astonishing glory, and following Evan as he processes it.

I have to give special mention to the character of Evan, who is a genuinely good bloke. He wears his heart on his sleeve and he's just trying to get over some awful personal shit from back home. In his new situation we witness him work hard, have a cool relationship with his boss (an old olive farmer) and fall hard for Louise. You absolutely believe him when he expresses his feelings for her. The softness in his character is portrayed so well by Lou Taylor Pucci; he's vulnerable, but not mawkish; sensible (not just bedding Louise the minute he meets her, like she suggests) and self-deprecating. This is a male lead written in a way a lot of others could learn from!

With a story told so well, and mostly using natural locations (rather than dressed sets), this reminded me a lot of Monsters. It's a film whose location is a strong part of the story, acting almost as an additional character, and despite Spring's settings often being immense - wave-battered coastlines, churches, tombs, ruins - it all still feels so intimate. 

That feeling of falling in love, when you feel like the only two people in the world... Spring captures that.

My congratulations to directors Justin Benson (who also wrote the story) and Aaron Moorhead, and actors Nadia Hilker (who is also fantastic, please don't think otherwise) and Lou Taylor Pucci. This is a beautiful little monster and I'm already looking forward to watching it again.

Available to stream on Shudder right now ❤

Mr. Jones (2013)

Whoooo boy. Okay.

Another tagline for this as well as the one above, is a quote taken direct from the film itself: "If you see him, RUN."

That applies for when you see this come up on Netflix as a suggestion too, just fyi.

So let's begin with the plot, because it isn't half bad. Married couple Scott and Penny move to the desert so that Scott can pursue his dream of making a nature documentary. However, not long after their relocation, he's lost interest in the idea and begins to have doubts about not only the doc, but everything in his life.

When the couple discover a house not far from theirs, and decide to trespass all the way down into the basement, they find eerie scarecrow-like totems everywhere. These things are incredibly cool (if you like that kind of thing) and Penny recognises them as the work of a mysterious artist by the name of, you guessed it: Mr. Jones.

The excitement of this discovery, plus a new direction for the documentary stirs both Scott and Penny into life, and he briefly travels to NYC to interview some folks about what they know of Mr. Jones. One of the interviewees, an obviously tortured soul, is the guy who lends his words to the aforementioned other tagline. Unfortunately for our two main characters, this warning is dismissed without a second thought.

And the film continues on, with shadowy figures in the woods, more forays into deeper basements and a hell of a lot of shots like this:

Did I mention this is a found footage movie?

Now I feel like I have a high tolerance for found footage, but Mr. Jones tested those limits. It wasn't even the shaky-cam seasick thing, either. It's more the question of why they bothered to keep the camera rolling most of the time.

With all of the playing around with light and dark, and LOUD NOISES, maybe this worked better in the cinema than it does at home; but I couldn't help but think that some filmmakers need to learn that being made to jump and being scared are not necessarily the same thing.

There's only so many times you can trot out a the same kind of jump scare, or a reveal of someone standing in a dark corner before it becomes old and tired.

Ditto the characters making bad decisions. Even in horror, the genre built on a foundation of "why are you going in there" and "why are you doing that", when I'm forced to watch two chumps doing dumb shit over and over again, my eye-rolls are going to start to drown out my nerves.

The last 30mins or so of Mr. Jones really loses it, to the point where every time it cut to black - and it did this a lot - I was praying for the credits to roll. I don't even think I fully understood the ending of this film, but I really don't care!

There was also a pointless numbering of days at the start of the movie. "Day 51" it stated ominously, but then proceeded to do nothing with.

A shame that such an interesting idea, of eerie totems and what they could represent (and possibly be spreading) is squandered on cheap scares and nonsense.

This has more than a dash of Blair Witch about it, but don't be fooled. Reader, heed my warning: RUN.

Maniac remake.

Have you seen this? (skip to around 40sec in to avoid the billion boner-killing studio logos).

I am having so many feelings about it. All of them good. The MUSIC, the END to that clip. Elijah Wood doing yet another good job at creepy and fucked up. Hubba hubba, I want to see!!!

(Out March 2013 in the UK).

Død snø / Dead Snow (2009).

What with the UK being a snowy place right now, it seemed appropriate to get this posted. Watching this film and writing the bare bones of the review was how I spent my New Year's Eve. Let it never be said the life of a horror blogger isn't a glamorous one...

Aptly, for a film set in snowbound climes, Dead Snow takes a while to warm up. Once it does though, it's a lot of fun. And goo. You know I love me some goo.

A group of medical students go on an Easter break to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, Norway. They end up with a few extra house guests, however, in the form of a massive horde of killer undead Nazis!

Er, YES PLEASE.

The zombies are hungry for the Nazi gold which happens to be sitting in the cabin's basement, and they probably aren't gonna let a little thing like fragile human life stand in the way of them getting it.

It's mentioned a few times that one of the male characters, despite studying to be a doctor, is squeamish around blood - three guesses who's gonna end up the Final Boy?

But wait a minute, this is not a film to watch for displays of subtlety. Dead Snow manages to hit a very tricky mark, by being extremely derivative and yet not at all irritating with it. This is most likely down to everything being played pretty straight. There are a lot of funny moments, but with an innocence to the comedic set-ups, rather than a self-awareness.

Put simply (although doing the film something of a disservice by reducing it so) the film is a parade of horror clichés. Spot them as they appear! Log cabin. Check. Overuse of musical stings and jump scares. Check. Seemingly crazy stranger giving some unprompted back story. Yes, he's here too.

You have to admire director Tommy Wirkola cutting right to the meat with the latter, in fact. The stranger whose sole purpose is to warn the reckless young things of the potential danger they are in, is given absolutely no introduction or explanation; he just comes in, tells a tale, acts a bit weird and then leaves.

Unfortunately, once he has done his job, he becomes expendable. This image and subtitle juxtaposition made me laugh:

A glaringly obvious influence on this film is my friend and yours, a certain Mr. Sam Raimi. There are countless direct homages to his style in crash zoom suiting up sequences - which, despite being something of a one trick pony scene-wise, I never seem to tire of - and the first two Evil Dead flicks are also mentioned by name, near the start of the film.

We are in familiar but well loved territory here folks, where ghouls are nasty and super-strong and humans are nothing but vulnerable meatsacks. People get torn limb from limb with ease. It's entertainment at its best!

Like Dylan Moran before him, in a scene which marks the hysterical new levels of gore the film will reach, the geek of the group gets pulled out of the window and disemboweled before his horrified friends. Well, technically it should be "disembrained". It's fair to say that this was a 'sit forward in seat, eyes wide, smile spreading on face' moment.

I have that jelly mold.

The characters themselves are less stereotypical than one would expect, in a film so chock full of horror chestnuts. They are a bland bunch, though likeable enough. I didn't find myself particularly wanting any of them to survive... but that's kind of the point. It's not really about hoping anyone makes it, it's about seeing who's next to paint the snow red.

Correct.

And what a stunning, inspired canvas for the carnage it is. The dazzling white showing up both the gore (bloody beautiful!) and the Nazi zombs to startling effect.

This film features much intestine-specific bloodshed. I don't think I have ever been able to say that before.

Not included in these caps are the scenes of a character dangling off of a cliff using a zombie's large intestine as a bungee rope and a POV shot of a girl drowsily watching one of the undead have a rummage around in her... well, her.

Are you hearing me yet? Are you won over? No? Fine. I've give you more reasons:

• Usually in a horror film you only get one decent instance of a wound that actually pumps blood. It's a bit of a showy thing so it only tends to happen the once. In Dead Snow, it's the norm.
• There's a prolonged scene of a victim sewing up his own neck wound.
• The FX are a mix of practical and CG. Some of the latter is a bit sub-par if you are picky like I am, but it doesn't take away from the heart of the flick. It's about fun. It's about splatter and giggles and there are more than enough instances of people getting a face full of thick, disgusting-looking globs of stuff, that I can let the ropey CGI work slide, gladly.
• Sound is put to fantastic use: the crunch of snow, the animalistic noises of the dead (here they have more range than your standard groans), the power tools as weapons, splurging of guts and... silence. In key moments the soundscape is left completely empty and it really makes a difference. Think about it, if you had turned off your chainsaw for a moment, and the attacking zombies on the snow covered mountain weren't charging at you yet, it would be completely silent. Effective and realistic!
• Imagine hiding up a tree, thinking you have outsmarted your assailants, then glancing down and seeing this:

Graaarrggh! Horrible and brill!

Aaand I'm spent. Just know that you have to see this film.

I don't usually link to trailers in my reviews, but this one showcases the film perfectly. If you still don't want to see it after reading the above and watching this, then I kind of don't understand why you read my blog...