The Blood Harvest (UK 2016: Dir George Clarke) - director/writer/producer Clarke’s latest movie is a solid two fingers up to people who don’t think that films shot on DV can be any good. The Blood Harvest is a tense cat and mouse thriller with creative and occasionally stomach churning gore scenes, a solid cast and great use of rural locations. It also looks way better than its estimated £10,000 budget would suggest.
A serial killer is stalking the countryside of County Down
in Northern Ireland. Not only does he wear a strange mask while murdering his many
victims, but he cuts their Achilles tendons and eats their eyeballs too – using
a fork, no less. Chaplin, a cop who has
been sacked but is still determined to solve the case, specialises in mythology
and thinks that the killings may be the work of a vampire (the truth turns out
to be odder than that).
His former partner Hatcher suspects a more prosaic motive, but it’s in his interests to put Chaplin off the scent. Separately the two cops close in on the killer’s (or is it killers plural?) country hideout, where Chaplin learns the strange truth both about the murders and his partner.
His former partner Hatcher suspects a more prosaic motive, but it’s in his interests to put Chaplin off the scent. Separately the two cops close in on the killer’s (or is it killers plural?) country hideout, where Chaplin learns the strange truth both about the murders and his partner.
I confess to not having seen Clarke’s previous films, but on
the basis of The Blood Harvest I’ll be rectifying that as soon as possible.
This is a really inventive movie which starts at a breakneck pace with the
rather disturbing murder of a young girl, and doesn’t let up even at the jaw
dropping denouement. It’s a tightly edited film which builds the tension well,
and it’s not a movie that is afraid to be out there. I liked it a lot – highly
recommended.
The Pack (Australia 2015: Dir Nick Robertson) - films about dogs who’ve had a rethink on the whole ‘man’s
best friend’ concept have been around for a while. Back in 1977 a movie also
called The Pack had a load of dogs
made angry by being abandoned by their owners. 1982’s superior White Dog dealt with a racist German
Shepherd, and of course there was rabid Cujo
who gave Dee Wallace a hard time in the 1983 adaptation of the Stephen King
book. 2006’s The Breed had a bunch
of similarly infected pooches chasing
after partying teens and 2014’s White
God had more dumped beasts getting annoyed.
The difference between those movies and Nick Robertson’s
debut feature The Pack is that the dogs
in this film aren’t programmed, necessarily abandoned or infected to the best
of our knowledge. There are just a lot of them and they’re aware that they can
throw their weight around with a bit of canine organisation.
Carla and Adam Wilson are having a tough time of it having
recently moved to their farm in the Australian outback, which doubles as the
local vets. Carla’s been treating a lot of stressed dogs recently and Adam is
getting fed up with finding butchered sheep on his land; their kids are similarly
cheesed off with their new rural existence and the mortgage company are
threatening foreclosure. It’s all rather tense. As night falls a power cut
plunges the farm into darkness and a pack of wild dogs seize their moment to launch
an attack, forcing the Wilson family to fight for their lives.
That’s about it plot wise. Robertson doesn’t spend much time
developing the characters of the family members, choosing to devote most of the
film’s running time to the canine siege and generating quite a bit of tension
in the process. The power cut makes things very Assault on Precinct 13, and he is clever not to show too much of
the beasts, largely keeping the threat in shadow. Real trained attack dogs were
used for the most of the scenes (the cast were apparently genuinely afraid of
them) combined with sparing use of model work and almost unnoticeable CGI.
Apparently attacks of this nature are a growing problem down
under, so this movie will probably have an additional frisson for Australian audiences. While I appreciate the assurance
of the direction (not bad for a feature first timer) I didn’t really feel much
of a threat - the family have guns for crying out loud - but their ethical code
initially delays them inflicting any harm, and the dogs rather unrealistically
spend a lot of time stalking when they probably would just have gone for
throats. However I liked Robertson’s nod
to the cinema of nature gone wrong (particularly the Aussie movie The Long Weekend) in his combination of
animal sounds and well photographed outback scenery, and the refusal to explain
why the dogs acted as they did.
Survivors (UK 2015: Dir Adam Spinks) - Spinks’ first full feature, 2014’s Extinction, was a valiant if overlong
attempt to do something different with the found footage genre, featuring a
group of explorers travelling deep into the Peruvian jungle (actually a well disguised
Welsh countryside) and uncovering a nest of dinosaurs. Two years on and Spinks is back with more found footage action
in Survivors, although this movie had
actually been made before Extinction,
but took nearly two years to see the light of day via a Crowdfunding initiative
which helped stump up some of £10,000 budget.
As the title might suggest Survivors tells the story of the aftermath of a viral attack, centred
around Kate Meadows, a journalist trying to get to the bottom of a story about
human drug testing behind closed doors, and the potential after effects of the
trials. This is cleverly cut with scenes clearly set following a viral outbreak,
showing that the inevitable has happened. Spinks is much less concerned with
showing us scenes of the infected on the rampage than the human cost incurred
by those left coping in the wake of the event. Similar to the BBC series of the
same name which is surely an influence here, it isn’t long before certain
people assume dominance and power, when clearly the population should be
uniting (an optimistic politician’s voice is heard on the radio talking about
how the country will be able to pull together and recover from the infection,
but having seen some of the characters in the movie that looks extremely
doubtful).
As in Extinction
some of the actors are much better than others (with so much acting talent out
there I’m not sure why directors end up casting people who are so terrible at
conveying character or emotion) but there is a sadness and fatalism in this
movie that I wasn’t expecting. Unleavened by any real action it’s quite a
depressing experience, enhanced by Buz Kohan’s sweeping melancholic score.
I’m not sure whether I
really liked Survivors but maybe
that’s the point. It certainly punches above its low budget origins though -
and Spinks is an interesting director who clearly invested a lot of thought into
this movie and is well worth watching.
The Slayers (UK 2015: Dir John Williams) - £15,000 in the hands of some movie directors will buy you
lunch and maybe half an hour in the editing suite. Given to film maker John
Williams it can net you a whole comedy feature film, as this is what The Slayers cost to make – all 1 hour
and 40 minutes of it.
Nigel and Job are both members of a cult embracing the soon
come arrival of a comet that will wipe out the world. When their Jim Jonesesque
leader advocates drinking poison and the congregation duly oblige, Nigel and
Job choose life. Faced with two weeks to go until the end of the planet, they
make up a bucket list and proceed to tick it off. This list isn’t particularly
startling though, including things like ‘going fishing’. However their life of
relative hedonism is ruined when they run into a gang of vampires and a crusty
vampire hunter.
The Slayers is
half The Inbetweeners and half Dumb and Dumber. Nigel and Job
are an Abbott and Costello for a new generation, and it took me a long time to
appreciate Abbott and Costello. Williams’s film is inventive, fast paced,
but…wait for it…not very funny. Sorry John, maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for
the pratfalls, goofiness and occasional The
Mighty Boosh touches. Sure, I bet it was a lot of fun to make, and the
enthusiasm of the cast (who include the director in five different parts, the
2014 winner of Britain’s Strongest Man and ‘troubled’ 2006 Big Brother victor Pete
Bennett) shows through. It’s nicely filmed, showing off the Stoke-on-Trent
locations well, and the special effects are amazing considering the budget. But
at over an hour and a half it very much outstays its welcome, although it does
become much more interesting once the vampires show up. Apparently fifteen
minutes of the film were trimmed after the first screening, so I’m not sure if
I’ve seen the longer version, or it originally ran for nearly two hours (!).
Ultimately whether you go for The Slayers (and I’m sure there’s an audience out there for this)
depends on how many people you’re watching it with and in what state you are
when you do. I’m sure Williams would be the first to say “Look, we’re not
making Kurosawa here!” but I didn’t find Nigel and Job a particularly appealing
pair of layabouts, and The Slayers
spends an awful lot of time in their company.
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