HORNS

Daniel Radcliffe has made some interesting career choices since casting off his Harry Potter psyche, and his role in Alexandre Aja's romantic/comic/horror fable is no exception. Adapted from a novel by Stephen King's son Joe, this rather bizarre but completely absorbing thriller is the tale of a young man who, after he is wrongly accused of killing his girlfriend, turns into the Devil. Literally.

With the whole of the small town baying for his blood since he was acquitted for the murder of his childhood sweetheart through lack of evidence, Ig Perrish wakes up one morning with horns literally sprouting out of his forehead.  As he tries to get them removed he is somewhat surprised to discover that instead of people freaking out at the sight of them, they all immediately feel the need to impulsively over-share their darkest secrets with him. When Perrish realises the power the horns have given him he deliberately sets out to confront people to see if this compulsion to tell him the truth will help him discover who the actual murderer is.

It's a painful journey as part of what he uncovers is the knowledge that his own parents confess that they not only believe he is guilty of the crime but they actually want him to disappear for good. 'I don't want you to be my son anymore' his mother cries.  The only 'good' person who cannot even physically see the horns is Lee, his best friend and now a Public Defender who has been on Perrish's side the whole time.

As he starts piecing the puzzle together of what really happened on the fatal night, Perrish's horns get bigger and bigger and the story takes on even more of a Biblical context with scenes of writhing serpents coming to his aid.   Then as the tale finally reaches the part where the murderer is revealed it becomes a full-on horror story with Perrish relishing his incarnation as the Devil himself.

A rather wonderful Radcliffe is really at home in the part and convincingly plays the distraught boyfriend who steadfastly refuses to be intimidated by the hostile locals.  He is supported by fellow Brits Juno Temple as Merrin the poor dead girlfriend, and Max Minghella as Lee his childhood friend, and the cast is rounded off with James Remar and Kathleen Quinan as his parents and David Morse as Merrin's distraught father. Blink and you may miss the cameo appearance of the irrepressible Heather Graham as a very sexy waitress who suffers a snake attack for making up stories about Perrish. 

Aja, best known for the very scary 'The Hills Have Their Secrets' insures that this movie too is very bloody indeed (too much for my personal taste) but he also peppers the script with some very comic scenes verging on the bizarre which lighten the proceedings at time. Its wonderful setting on the Pacific Northwest adds a level of real beauty to the piece, but with a running time of 2 hours it is at least 30 minutes too long.

★★★★★★★

ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW

The most interesting thing about this rather surreal and intensely weird black comedy is the fact that it was clandestinely filmed at a Disney Park without permission.  It would never have been granted anyway if writer/director Randy Moore had bothered to ask, as he so obviously hates Disney and everything it stands for.  According to Mr. Moore, Mickey Mouse actually has a very sinister agenda.

The story starts with Jim who’s just checked in to his hotel at the Theme Park to be unceremoniously fired by his boss over the phone. News he keeps from his overly anxious wife and his two small children, as it’s the start of their family vacation.  He does however behave badly with them being impatient and at times angry, and at the same time he develops an obsession with two young French girls he keeps coming across in the Park. His fantasies about the girls take the form of sinister hallucinations that make even the most innocuous rides like ‘It’s A Small World’ appear to him like a psychedelic trip.

Jim’s fixation with the girls, at the expense of making his family miserable, makes him appear more like a dirty old lecherous man, rather than one who is bitterly disappointed with the life he has been dealt. Moore's vision is that mega-corporations like Disney insure that the Jim's of the world really have no alternative than to go along with their squeaky-clean version of happiness that they peddle everywhere regardless of how they may really feel.

Despite the movie’s agenda it is however a rather thin story which has been stretched out way too long, although thankfully it does redeem itself in part at the end.  The actors do a fine job, but it’s the edgy black and white cinematography that Moore has twisted to present his warped view of Disney that is the real star here.  It is such good guerrilla filming that one of the main things you carry away from this film is that you cannot stop obsessing how on earth he and his team actually got away with shooting so much footage without being caught.

The movie premiered in Sundance and filmmakers rushed to see it and tripping over themselves to laud its virtues as everyone was convinced that it would never be legally allowed to be see the light of day. They were wrong as a silent Disney has sat by as it has it has played at Art-houses all over the US wowing audiences.

It is a very good audacious movie but I thought it never really fulfilled its potential, and it could/should have been a great one.  Still definitely worth a look especially if you share Mr Moore’s loathing of the Big Mouse and all his chums.

★★★★★★★
Available from Amazon DVD/VOD

THE JEFFREY DAHMER FILES

The gruesome story of Jeffrey Dahmer the infamous serial

killer and sex offender who murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, has already been the subject of several films and television programmes, and its highly questionable whether there is need for yet another take on these murders. 

Newbie writer/director Chris James Thompson,  a native of Milwaukee where the majority of the killings occurred, avoided both the sheer bloody gore and the sensationalism of the case by focusing his movie on how it affected the local community.  In particular three people : Pat Kennedy a retired Police Detective who had arrested Dahmer and took down his confession; Dr Jeffery Jensen who was the Medical Examiner at the time; and Pam Bass his next door neighbor. As they related their take on how this all impacted their own lives quite substantially, Thompson cleverly interspersed it with re-enactments of Dahmer's mundane daily existence in between his killing sprees.

There was no attempt to throw any light on Dahmer's actions and motives, or uncover anything new about the audacious crimes themselves, but just relating it all to how the people of Milwaukee came to terms with this unprecedented carnage.  It wasnt just the fact that Dahmer killed this innocent victims but also the reality that he subjected them to rape, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism.

Thompson's spin is intriguing and extremely well done because his witnesses were both articulate and interesting,  (the neighbor's naive remarks are quite engaging) but I simply cannot imagine who on earth would want to see this at all some 20+ years later, apart from people who are still obessesed with Dahmer (or compulsive cineastes like me).

If you do, and its not on at an Art House near you, its available now on VOD.
 

SIGHTSEERS

Sometimes I can be a real glutton for pain (the cinematic kind I should quickly add).  As I state at the top of this Blog one of my big no-no's are horror flicks, and yet hear I am again in a cinema (I'm back in London) to see yet another one from Brit Director Ben Wheatley just a few months after I sat through (and enjoyed?) Kill List.  I remember that movie well as it is one of the rare times that I was so utterly confused on my judgement that I avoided to even attempt to give it a rating.  (Check my review here).

The movie did remain bubbling in my mind somewhere and the moment this new one was released I was right there at the Box Office clutching both my ticket and my eye mask.  ( You really didn't think I was going to watch all that blood and gore especially during an afternoon matinee.)

This one is a black comedy ... not the laugh out type ... more the tittering kind.  Chris is a demented working class man who is going to take Tina his very new girlfriend on a caravan (RV) holiday touring the North of England.  Tina is keen to escape the clutches of her demanding and domineering hypochondriac mother who hates Chris on sight, and as they pull out of the driveway, Tina  says 'Show me your world Chris!'  Little does she know then what a really grisly adventure this will entail.

At the very first stop on their journey Tina is horrified when Chris has a sudden temper tantrum when he confronts a big bearded man who is a persistent litterer and he resolves the argument by reversing the Caravan over the man and killing him.   This is just the start of the people that they come across in the coming week that upset Chris for one reason or another and that he ends up killing them. Like a pompous middle class man who gets his head beaten in because he simply asked Chris to pick his dog's poo up.

Once the initial shock that the new love of her life is a psychotic killer wears off, Tina who obviously has a few loose screws too to say the least, pitches in and helps the death toll creep up as their Tour continues. 

All this murder and mayhem by these deranged serial killers is set  in the tranquil and peaceful landscape of the idyllic English countryside and includes such scenic beauties as the ruins of Fountains Abbey, the somewhat perculiar Pencil Museum in Keswick, and ending at the imposing Ribblehead viaduct. And at night they stop in different Caravan Sites (very British versions of a Trailer Park) where there are more people to piss them off.

The whole affair is not unlike a Mike Leigh Film, especially the detailed relationship between Chris & Tina (minus the killing of course), and if you are familiar with classic Brit TV then you will appreciate the fact that the whole film starts off just like a Victoria Wood comic sketch.   This 3rd feature from Mr Wheatley ....who is possibly a tad over-hyped as 'the bright future of Brit Indie Cinema' .... was for once from someone else's script.  Written by Steve Oram and Alice Lowe who also played the main leads, and although it kicked off so well at the beginning, it was starting to run out of steam by the end.  I really loved the actual ending, but I think I may be one of the few people that did.  It was the one time I really burst out laughing loud.

As horrors go, I'm guessing it was not that bloody, and as comedies go, it was not that funny, but as a wee edgy indie I think it worked fine.  I would happily recommend it to anyone who goes through life wanting to take out anyone and every one that so annoys them. You know who you are.

Available from Amazon
★★★★★★★

DARK SHADOWS

Dark Shadows looks so wonderful on the screen as Director Tim Burton uses his regular Oscar winning alumni: Rick Heinrick's sets and Colleen Attwood‘s costumes its just a shame that he didn't give his starring actors a better movie to be in, and us a better one to watch.  As a Brit I have no idea if Mr Burton was trying too hard to be faithful to the cult hit daytime series that ran on US TV from 1966 to 1971, or just trying too hard period. The result is a somewhat disappointing shambles of a gothic horror comedy movie that instead of provoking fear in us or making us laugh out loud, just makes for the occasional titter, but more often than not, a very long yawn.

In case you don't know the plot: in 1760, Barnabas who’s a wealthy playboy in the small town in Maine that his family created, breaks the heart of Angelique a servant girl who happens to be a witch. After Barnabas rejects her, she kills his parents in revenge and curses his family. Angelique, in an act of jealousy, puts a spell on his lover Josette du Pres which forces her to leap to her death from a nearby cliff called Widow's Peak. Barnabas jumps after her over the cliff to kill himself, but Angelique has already turned him into a vampire before he reaches the bottom. Soon after she convinces the townspeople that as he is now a vampire they should capture him and bury him alive in a chained coffin in the woods.

Flash forward to 1972, and an assorted bunch of      Barnabas’s weird ancestors are still living in the family mansion along with an alcoholic psychiatrist who had been hired to help David the youngest deal with his demons, but she spends most of her time with own her demons in a bottle. Barnabas is accidently resurrected and comes to rescue the family and save their dwindling fortune as their business has been almost ran out of town by Angelique who is still doing her hocus pocus but this time from a very fancy sports car she spirits around in.

Oh yes, Josette re-appears too in the shape of the family nanny, but she, Barnabas, and the family have to go through hell and back if they are ever to have any chance to break the centuries old curse and live happily ever after.

A very young looking Johnny Depp in Michael Jackson make-up camps up the role of Barnabas evoking a few laughs but mainly bewilderment. His highly mannered performance is a tad too nuanced this time around.  Like his take on Captain Sparrow in the Pirate movie franchise : great fun at first but wearing thin by the second installment. Yet on the other hand Miss Bonham-Carter in her ridiculous drunken role wearing her fiery red drag queen wig was the best thing on the screen.  There are subtle shades of camp that do work.

By the time the tiresome extended ‘fight’ scene between the vampires happened towards the movie's end I had completely lost my patience in exactly the same way that Mr Burton had already lost the plot, and I just couldnt wait for the final credits to hit the screen 

I will admit that I started watching this trying to keep awake because I had been travelling the day before, but by the end it was a real battle not to fall into a deep sleep as I just hankered after my bed and sweet dreams.

★★★★★

KILL LIST

I was persuaded to go out of my cinematic comfort zone to go see a new indie horror movie: a genre that I really loathe.  This British one, the second feature directed by Ben Wheatley from a script he co-wrote with his wife Amy Jump had garnered rave reviews that included ‘The most original, unsettling and cerebrally menacing British film of the decade so far’.  And that’s not the words of some obscure fanzine, but the august ‘Financial Times’.  So more than a little reluctant I sat in the dark intrepidly at ‘O’ Cinema (my local art-house theater) waiting to be horrified.  And on that level I was not disappointed, as from the whole sections of the movie that I could see when my hands were not glued over my eyes, it was the bloodiest screen violence that I have (almost) seen for years.

It opens in a very suburban home where a married couple, both ex. military personnel are bickering with other as they prepare for a dinner party.  Jay had not worked for eight months since he botched up some sort of job in Kiev and has lost his nerve.  Now broke, Shel his wife persuades him to take up the offer of Gal his best friend, and dinner party guest, to do another  job together.  As the plot unfolds we discover that the two of them are actually professional hit men, and the contract they accept is to murder three men for reasons that are never revealed.

As they start the job it becomes apparent that Jay is more than a little unhinged and turns out actually be quite psychotic.  I guess not necessarily such a bad thing in his chosen line of work, but it is one of the reasons that this very tough-to-follow plot then goes totally off the rails.

We came out of the movie terrified and completely drained but also totally confused as to what actually had happened.  Turns out that when I did my research to write this blog, we were by no means alone with this reaction.  Roger Ebets wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times ‘this movie may leave you scratching your head way too much when it’s over’… too true.  And  the critic in 'The Hollywood Reporter' summed it up beautifully when it described it as a ‘what the hell’ climax that will really baffle.

So I think in all fairness I am going to recuse myself from giving this movie a rating.  I have the impression that if this is a genre that you like, then this edgy low-budget movie is one for you.  But what do I know?  I’m kind of fixated not on the dinner party in the first scenes that lulled me into a sense of false security that I was watching just a regular domestic drama, but I couldn't stop thinking about what actually goes on at the Wheatley household to inspire husband and wife to write this script.  Hmmm!