Troubled Waters

Delving into the Catholic Church’s seemingly systemic paedophilia problem doesn’t exactly make for an entertaining watch but Mea Maxima Culpa, directed by Alex Gibney, is definitely worth the effort. Gibney initially focuses on some harrowing cases at a deaf school in America before developing the story internationally and though it begins to chart the bureaucratic incompetence and obfuscation of the Church he admirably maintain a heart breaking focus on the victims. A well reasoned, step by step damnation of the Church’s response to a most horrifying, devastating epidemic.

 

Another talented documentarian, Eugene Jarecki, takes a similarly hard yet emotionally grounded look at the War Against Drugs in his polemic The House I Live In. Starting with a story close to home Jarecki begins to chart the dubious socio-political roots of our prohibition policy and it’s rampant escalation into a multifaceted war without end. Jarecki gathers an interesting bunch of talking heads, including police officers, prison wardens, users, academics, dealers & Wire scribe David Simon to detail the severe cost of utter failure of this approach to every part of our society.

Frightfully Eighties

Scott’s smoky vampire flick The Hunger with Bowie & sapphism.

Mann’s spooky castle The Keep sports a Tangerine Dream soundtrack.

Cushing, Price & Lee unite for a horror spoof The House of Long Shadows.

Country Chillers

Low budget high strangeness is the order of the day in The Corridor a horror/scifi about a bunch of chums who take a trip to snowbound hills to scatter Mom's ashes. Not long after they arrive they discover a strange force field that appears to augment their perceptions and might explain Mom's unusual death. There's some middling acting and the script is perfunctory but it's commitment and the weird, unusual premise keeps things entertaining, kinda made me think of The Signal. A odd little film that's worth a look.

Harry Potter star Radcliffe leads Hammer's adaptation of classic ghost story The Woman in Black and it's actually not bad. Playing a widowed accountant Radcliffe is sent to a country estate to wind up some paperwork only to find himself besieged by creeping apparitions and superstitious locals. The acting is reasonable enough and the production is nicely detailed but it's strength lies in the excellent sound production which elevates the fairly predictable haunting into something a little more special. Another solid effort from the reborn Hammer studio.

Light Convention & Lively Stimulation

Ed Helms helms Cedar Rapids, an entertaining faux indie comedy about a sheltered, dorky salesman sent to represent his company at a Insurance convention. After a nervy start he slowly comes out of his shell and with some tutelage from a couple of convention veterans begins to live a fuller life but their rambunctious antics have unforeseen consequences. It's a light, amusing late coming of age film with plenty of charm and though the script could be a little funnier, maybe with a bit more of an edge it's really well acted with Helms ably supported by Anne Heche, John C Reilly and Isiah Whitlock Jnr.

Hysteria assembles a highly competent cast, including Jonathon Pryce, Rupert Everett & Maggie Gyllenhaal, for a frothy, comedic look at the invention of the vibrator. Set in the Victorian era, a young doctor joins a practice which specialises in the treatment of female hysteria through the er, digital realignment of the uterus, the popularity of the treatment leaves the doctor with a strained hand and he seeks help from his inventor friend. Beautifully produced and well acted there's plenty of laughs throughout though the inclusion of the political/social upheavals of the time dilute the chuckles towards the final act.

Some Things Seventies

Auf Wiedersehen Ken

LoFi SciFi FlyBys

Earthling is an ambitious low-budget scifi movie about a bunch of people bound together by a strange reaction to an anomalous event in Earth's orbit. The main character loses her unborn child in a car accident and struggles to put her life and mind together, it doesn't help that she's hallucinating and seems to be stalked by strangers suffering similar problems. Nicely acted and with the confidence to tease out the plot gradually there's some Cronenberg-esque body horror and some dreamy Lynchian influences throughout. It's not without it's flaws but it's a nice quiet, examination of alienation and the human experience and with a bigger budget and maybe with some extra polish this could have been brilliant. An assured debut.

Love, is another low budget/large ambition feature debut only this time set in orbit. It's the tale of a lonely astronaut stranded on ISS Mk 2 struggling to maintain his sanity after an unspecified calamity separates all contact with Earth. Despite the titchy budget there's plenty of nice looking effects, some decent set pieces and few wisps of atmosphere along the way. The film is interestingly framed by a Civil War era tale but it's woefully underused and the director prefers to punctuate both with wholly unnecessary talking head snippets discussing the nature of human relationships, life etc. I dunno it's a nice, if derivative, little film with an excellent central performance it's just shamefully squandered by the uneasy mishmash of styles, a limp 2001 inspired end and a foolish, pretentious final few frames.

Zombie Lovers & Near Dead Haters

An Italian cemetery whose inhabitants rise from their graves requires a special sort of caretaker and in this peculiar little film it's Rupert Everett that's tasked with dispatching the returners. Directed by Argento protege Michele Soavi and based on a novel from Italian comic book artist Scalvi, Cemetery Man, is a melange of comedy, horror and romance quite unlike anything I've seen before. Everett & his monosyllabic sidekick hammer away with shovels & pistols at the unliving during the night watch but both fall madly in love during the day & after Everett's love dies, returns and is dispatched again he begins to lose his mind and a series of encounters with two doppelgangers finally tip him over the edge. Despite it's disparate elements and the modest budget it's a really enjoyable little oddity with a twisted sense of humour, bags of style and a surprisingly affective plot.

Patrick is a coma patient with a evil streak of psychic juju in the schlocky 70's Aussie horror directed by Richard Franklin. When a new nurse gets a job in a barmy hospital she slowly realises her new ward is behind some of the peculiar happenings around her and it's not long before the men in her life feel the wrath of Patrick's strange abilities. The acting and script are pretty shoddy and I'm not sure it's wise for any film to have it's antagonist in a coma but there's some choice period laughs throughout and enough Australian strangeness to keep this B-movie entertaining-ish.

Island Incidents

The fictional Hebridean Isle of Fara is experiencing an unprecedented heatwave in The Night of the Big Heat. Thankfully the island includes Cushing and Lee as residents and their separate, respective investigations as local GP and roving scientists leads them to the conclusion that the extreme heat may be caused by visitors from another planet. This isn't the finest film I've ever seen with some weak effects, lame day-as-night cinematography and a rudimentary script but it has a certain charm whether that's from the tawdry love triangle plot or the alien as glowing poached egg I can't say.

Retreat stars Cillian M & Thandie N as a traumatised couple who return to an isolated island to repair their relationship but their tentative peace is disrupted when a soldier, played by Jamie Bell, washes ashore claiming a flu virus is ravaging the world and they must all seal themselves in to survive. What follows is a tense, psychological thriller about trust with 3 solid performances and a bevy of plot twists. There's nothing particularly special here but it's surprisingly effective.

Monster Mash & Muddled Hash

When a farmer yanks a megalith from one of his fields he unwittingly unleashes a pagan monster into the Irish countryside in the B-movie Rawhead Rex. Based on a Clive Barker short this low budget horror has a modest helping of arterial spray, dismemberment and rampaging but the acting is awful and the SFX is dire even for the mid eighties however on the plus side there's plenty of unintentional laughs and Rex romps around ripping the locals in half with a certain brio. Barker wasn't too chuffed with the adaptation but hey I doubt it would've worked as a serious chiller anyways and I found surprisingly entertaining in a so bad it's good sort of way.

The Sentinel sports a fairly amazing cast but reeks of tripe, cheese and bags and bags of batshit. A highly strung, attractive model moves into an apartment block with a peculiar set of neighbours including a cat mad loner, predatory lesbians, dotty old ladies and a blind priest who sits looking out the window all day, strange given the landlady claims the latter is the only other tenant. With a cast that includes Meredith, Walken, Balsam, Gardner, Wallach, Carradine and Sarandon this could have been decent but I'll happily lay the blame at chubster-director Michael Winner's feet, edited badly, poorly scripted, full of plot holes and sadly neither scary or funny enough to make it worth watching. Rare for a reason.

Indifferent Intrigues

Charles Bronson and Lee Remick are KGB agents entrusted with saving the world in Telefon, a 70's thriller from Don Siegel. Pesky wig wearing Donald Pleasance is roaming Murica activating hypnotised suicide agents forgotten in the days of detente and Bronson is flown in to hunt him down. It rolls along at a reasonable pace with bombs popping off every 20mins or so but never really gripped me and most of the cast float along in the wake of the big budget action sequences. Still with Schiffrin, Siegel and Silliphant involved this is at least above par action nonsense.


Stanley Donen tries to emulate his own Charade formula of bantering intrigue with Peck and Loren in Arabeseque a light, frothy caper about assassins and cyphers. Aging Peck stars as an academic don tasked with translating a Hittite inscription by friend and foe alike but is soon beguiled by the luminous, deceitful Loren and caught in a web of shifting allegiances. The script is dry and sharp but the action weak and offers no weight or tension to balance against the fluff. Charming if vacuous but decent enough for a Sunday afternoon.

Asbo & Astro boys Alien Assualts

Joe Cornish's directorial debut, Attack The Block, is a pretty decent alien invasion flick about a bunch of hoody yoofs thwarting some shiny toothed critters. There's plenty of action and a few laughs along the way as the motley crew use there lofi weapons and urban skills over the course of a Bonfire night to defend their tower block, enlisting mugging victims and petulant girlies to their cause. The acting is decent enough and it carefully walks the tightrope of stereotypes eventually fleshing out the gang into a fairly likeable bunch but it could have been funnier or maybe that just cause of my too high Adam and Joe based expectations.

Apollo 18 is reasonably entertaining entrant into the found-footage canon basing it's pseudo history on one of the unlaunched final Apollo Moon missions. A bunch of 'stronauts land on the lunar surface for the usual scientific endeavours and stumble across an abandoned Soviet lander and some pesky rock samples. FF features usually suffer from shaky cam overload but they mostly avoid that trap here and pile on the period detailing. It does suffer occasionally with indistinct audio in its strive towards "authenticity"and it's all fairly silly but nonetheless this is a claustrophobic horror that milks it's tiny budget for some genuine chills and the tension builds to a suitably dark finale.

Shiny Dim Bulbs

Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig star in genre mash up Cowboys and Aliens a big budget little brain Hollywood travaganza. Wanted criminal awakes in the desert with an natty wrist band but no recent memories, on wandering into a nearby town the truculent hero finds himself defending it with his newly acquired bangle & soon begins a cliche riven quest against the alien visitors. It's not terrible just depressingly formulaic and despite the insertion of some "wit" and the aforementioned actor heavyweights it never shakes off it's paper thin plotting and reliance on gaudy special effects. It gave me the distinct impression of being built around the title, probably pitched at some meeting of awful, facile minds. Sigh.

Scifi is big business in Japan so it's quite surprising they've produced so few live action space operas. Space Battleship Yamato aims to rectify this with a tale of a ruined Earth besieged by a powerful alien race, only one ship survives and begins a epic journey in search of some alien tech that might help turn the tables. Based on a cherished anime series the film is stuffed with predictably cartoonish characters and a shed load of CGI and SFX to wash it all down with. I dunno somehow the I'm more willing to accept Japanese cheese than Amurican maybe it's their innocence or naivete that makes it palatable but anyways it's a decent enough watch and certainly didn't depress me as much as Cowboys and A's . Maybe if I'd seen the original anime I might have enjoyed it more. It's big glossy fun I guess but boy is it dumb.

Tunnel & Lab Rats

The Navigator is a stylish scifi about a bunch of manic miners from a plague besieged medieval English community who start tunnelling at the behest of a child seer. The kid's vision drives them forward towards a Cathedral in need of a spire a deed which will provide succour to their village however they resurface in 20th C. New Zealand where they're split between perceiving it as hell or as heaven. Though the script and acting are perfunctory there is some lovely ideas here and the whole shebang is executed with such style that it's hard not to be swept along with their revelatory journey.

Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon is one of those rare scifi novels that transcends its genre to reveal poignant and profound human truths. The film Charly not so much, sure it's a reasonable facsimile of the book but it's swinging 60's style critically punctures it's potency at key stages and it limps towards it's tragic conclusion. If you haven't read it the plot follows a affable man with learning difficulties who becomes a test subject for an intelligence increasing procedure that's wildly successful but ultimately bittersweet. The acting is decent enough however the director's obsession with "new" techniques like slo-mo and split screen become tiresome and culminates with an unforgettable wig-out/biker scene in the final third that had me rolling about with laughter. That disastrous sequence is somewhat offset by the still pertinent and pointed address Charly gives to the assembled scientific symposium but it can't undo the damage to the heart of the peice. Book first, film only for the curious and lovers of 60's cinema.

Fraught Foreigners

The first adaptation of Graham Greene's The Quiet American features Michael Redgrave as a pompous English journalist lounging about Saigon whose life is shaken once his beautiful mistress catches the eye of a young, idealistic Yank. Set during the heady prewar era of Indochina this is an excellent sweaty thriller steeped in conspiracies and cuckolding with the two love rivals representing the differing political positions of the day. The acting, script and Mankiewicz's direction are of an effortlessly high standard and it's prophetic examination of imperialistic foreign policy is just as apt today as then. According to Wikip Greene himself wasn't too keen for this version as it excised much of the novel's antiwar emphasis and though it is does reek of propaganda it's still a highly enjoyable watch.

Kill The Irishman is a true crime thriller about some street thug turned union boss who finds himself in a murderous dispute with an ineffectual Mafia boss. There's a nicely homespun feel to the violence and the constraints of it's low budget actually assist in the realism but ultimately the main character and the actor portraying him fail to elicit anything like the charm or character as say Liotta's performance Henry in Goodfellas and the whole thing never really comes to much. A solid but unremarkable effort.

Mechanical Men

Michael Winner directs Charlie Bronson in The Mechanic, probably the campest hit man thriller I've ever seen. Bronson plays Bishop an aging assassin who takes the young handsome son of his friend/victim, played by Jan under his wing and starts to train in him the arts of discreet murdering. It's all built around the weird ambiguous master/student relationship between the two men with seemingly loving glances passing between the two throughout and I guess the florid 70's styling doesn't exactly help. Regardless it's still a good, surprisingly intelligent, film with some genuine tension as well as the requisite action and it's got a sharp, bitter finale. Ha, according to WikiP the original director & screenwriter had intended the two men to be romantically involved but they couldn't get the project greenlit with the gayness left in. Anyways watch it for yourself below.


Fast forward 39 years and The Mechanic get it's inevitable Hollywood facelift. Jason Statham kicks/punches/gurns his way through this glossy reworking and despite the contemporary trend for dumbing down there's still a glimmer of the originals intelligence. Statham plays mentor to Ben Foster's novice with Sutherland Snr cameoing and all put in admirable efforts given the slim, mediocre script but worst of all though the film eschews the ponderous pacing of the original and cranks up the action and violent death so much so it's soon an unremarkable, forgettable slice of action pie. Still if you just want some shiny fighty distraction it will suffice and Statham has become one of the more dependable leads for this sort of thing and hey at least he's not a wrestler/cage fighter or Vinnie Jones.

Cartoonish Capering

Sucker Punch exemplifies Zack Snyder's good and bad qualities as a film maker; sure the film's nicely shot and there's a handful of decent, stylised action sequences but the film is crushingly adolescent, devoid of acting ability and seriously vapid. A young woman is wrongly sent to the loony bin where she lives out her remaining pre lobotomy days in a fantastical haze of escape attempts, epic battles and a little girl bonding. I dunno, if you're just after some glossy violence set to pounding music then this will suffice, anything more and I'd look elsewhere.

Captain America is the lynch pin to the forthcoming Avengers movie so the stakes were high for this origin story film and it's not a bad effort just a bit unremarkable. The action is framed by the Captain's contemporary defrosting while the bulk of the movie flashes back to WW2 and the start to his career and his eventual showdown with the Red Skull. Unthinking patriotism personified the Captain has never been a superhero I've been very fond of but this action stuffed feature grasps for the same semi-serious tone as Iron Man thankfully cutting someway through the flag waving hooey.

Film Trash

Poster Genius Drew Sturzan has come out of retirement and produced the ad above for the famed Alamo Drafthouse.

Spike Lee looks to remake Oldboy.

Walter Hill is helming an adaptation of graphic novel Bullet in the Head starring Sly & Christian Slater. Slashfilm

Super nerdy analysis of the symbolism in Pandorum. Via Screened.

Crummy cameo heading for the next Nolan Batman film. DenofGeek.

More news of the upcoming Dredd movie. A bunch of other Superhero news here.

Io9 have a nice summation of known knowns re John Carter of Mars.

Schwarzenegger might be take the lead in Kim Ji-Woon's english language debut The Last Stand - apparently a cross between High Noon & Die Hard.

Dario Argento is working on Dracula 3D flick with Rutger Hauer. Sounds good but looks pretty cheap. From Bloody Disgusting

Batman: Year One trailer courtesy of Den of Geek.

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