The Facebook reviews! Part 1

Over the last few years as well as running this site I've posted up on social media a number of micro reviews for a range of films across many genres, but mainly focusing on horror and sci-fi. In an irregular feature I'll be posting them up, six reviews at a time, on DEoL. So pull up a coffin, snap open a can of AB Negative and have a read!

Hell Night (USA 1981: Dir Tom DeSimone) Apparently the power of a very jittery MPAA severely impacted on the amount of explicit gore on show in Hell Night. But the relative lack of the red stuff actually helps this movie along. Marti (Linda Blair) is one of a gang of freshmen students who have to spend the night in a house with a macabre history as part of a hazing ritual. The grim legends turn out to be true, with one of the deformed children of the original occupant remaining hidden in the mansion, ready to prey on unsuspecting students.

The first part of the movie provides the usual studenty hi jinks as actors way beyond school years fool around fairly annoyingly. It then settles into something a lot more interesting when it's basically Blair and her BF running around the basement of the house pursued by a giant misshapen killer who in close up seems to be facially modelled on the subliminal demon glimpsed in The Exorcist.

Of particular interest is the presence of Suki Goodwin, playing Marti's friend Denise. Goodwin's English accent sounds rather odd against the rest of the US cast, and a little research shows that she is the daughter of the late Denis Goodwin, one time scriptwriter with Bob Monkhouse, who took his own life at the age of 45. Apparently Goodwin was happy to do nudity in the film, but was acting as the girlfriend of the rather more reserved Vincent Van Patten, who insisted they both kept their clothes on in the spirit of decency.

The Mutilator aka Fall Break (USA 1984: Dir Buddy Cooper) Somebody asked me why I would rewatch terrible films? Just subjected myself to what I think is the fourth viewing of this movie. It's a difficult one to answer because, well, this film is dreadful. Firstly you know who's doing all the slaying and mutilating so that fun is taken away from the viewer. And then there's the acting, which improves as the body count rises (less terrible acting to deal with) but in the opening scenes is excruciating. 

But look a little closer. This is good old fashioned independent film making, supposedly shot in 29 days, with lots of local colour (and local people fleshing out the cast). There are some terrific old school effects on display courtesy of then fledgling Mark (From Beyond, Evil Dead II) Shostrom. It's got an at times faux musique concrete soundtrack and an ace theme song. And the killer looks like a mentally disturbed Rock Hudson! An indefensible waste of 90 minutes of my life? No, no and indeed no.

Beyond Skyline (UK/China/Canada/Indonesia/Singapore/USA 2017: Dir Liam O’Donnell) For those who don't remember, Skyline was a 2010 aerial alien invasion movie directed by brothers Colin and Greg Strause. The film delivered top notch effects but bottom notch drama, an uneasy mix with much of the human cast trapped in an LA apartment building watching the CGI carnage through a telescope. The brothers Strause haven't directed anything since, preferring to fall back on their SFX skills (they also did the visuals for Skyline) for movies like Into the Storm (2014) and Geostorm (2017). Liam O'Donnell, the producer of the first film, has chosen to move into the director's seat, for the first time, for a belated and not particularly needed sequel - actually, it's more of a big budget reboot.

At the end of the first movie, the tentacled aliens had asserted their hold on New York City as well as LA, and had just perfected the art of transferring the brains of their victims into ambulatory alien but human shaped bodies, presumably to extend their invasion from airborne attack to ground combat. Beyond Skyline develops the ground combat idea, and chucks everything into the mix, including martial arts, kaiju creatures, exotic locations, a baby who grows up in two days, and some effective CGI work. It's pretty dumb but looks good, and O'Donnell leaves room for a third movie, which if it's anything like this might be worth catching.

The Possessed aka Demon Witch Child aka La endemoniada (Spain 1975: Dir Amando de Ossorio) This one sometimes gets left out of the discussions on post The Exorcist euro cash ins, but is a demented classic from Mr 'Blind Dead' himself, Amando de Ossorio. Veteran actress Tota Alba looks extraordinary as sweary old Mother Gautère, who is persecuted for her crimes of witchcraft, killing herself before she can be dealt with by the authorities. Her coven arrange for Gautère to possess the body of the police commissioner's young daughter Susan, and before you can talk about somebody sucking something in hell, the young girl gives local sailors a run for their money in the cussing stakes.

Marián Salgado as Susan (who dubbed Linda Blair in the Spanish version of The Exorcist) is as game as her American progenitor and particularly vile looking when she transforms into a pint size Mother Gautère, all wispy hair and challenging dentistry, with a side order of castration and random cackling. de Ossorio takes his usual side swipes at organised religion and the nature of good and evil, and the soapy and often wildly theological plot goes off in all directions before the final showdown. This is great value film making from a director never afraid to show his influences, but who rarely turns in a boring film.

Beyond The Door aka The Devil Within Her (Italy/USA 1974: Dir Ovidio Assonitis) The second The Exorcist knock off this week, and by no means as entertaining as Demon Witch Child. I remember this one getting blanket coverage on commercial radio back in 1975 under its UK title The Devil Within Her (much as Suspiria did a year later), which was an indication even then that it wasn't exactly box office gold. Juliet Mills, who had thus far made her fortune in rather wholesome TV roles, plays Jessica, pregnant and undergoing all kinds of disturbances both at home and in her own mind. Her husband Robert (Gabriele Lavia) seems powerless to help, and only former flame Dimitri (Richard Johnson) has the necessary credentials to battle Jessica's possessed soul and stop the creamed spinach exiting from her mouth.

This is a long, drawn out movie with very little narrative tension and some terrible performances. Assonitis' first directorial outing did not bode well for future outings - he would continue to bore with mutated Octopus vehicle Tentacles (1977) and the equally baffling Madhouse (1981) - his lumbering exposition giving way to a frankly silly climax and incomprehensible denouement. Mills is quite game and looks the part, and the San Francisco locations are pretty (all interiors were shot in Italy though) but it's unintentionally funny in places (Mills's wonky eye effects and a scene where a harassed Richard gets hassled by some serenading buskers stand out) and it's all a far cry from the movie that started it all. A sequel of sorts followed with Mario Bava's 1977 movie Shock being retitled Beyond the Door II because of its possessed child storyline, but I wouldn't recommend a double bill.

The Cloverfield Paradox (USA 2018: Dir Julius Onah) I was considering a single DEoL entry for this one but in the end couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to write more than a few sentences. Directed with hod carrying finesse (apologies to brickies) by newcomer Julius Onah, this finds a space station full of scientists from around the globe testing out a solution to a worldwide energy crisis, who all descend into stereotype when faced with an on board catastrophe, rather like an interstellar version of Mind Your Language.

Of course things go wrong (and the going wrong provides a kind of Lovecraftian 'why' to the events in the first movie). Chris O'Dowd as the Irishman of the group gets all the gags, including some limp one liners when his arm, which has been severed in an accident, takes on a life of its own. I will admit that some of the FX look rather good (thanks to what looks like the entire eastern branch of IL&M judging by the credits) and it's a blessing not to have any on board robots, but it's all really silly with a script that is more than unusually sucky for this type of thing.

American Gothic (USA 2017: Dir Stuart Connelly)

"Killing is easy. Terrorism, on the other hand, takes a bit more finesse."

Stuart Connelly's second feature is one of those films where disclosure of much of the plot is likely to spoil the viewer's enjoyment. A litter picking detail of prisoners, being transported by van, is involved in an accident. Two of the convicts survive the crash and attempt a getaway, but as they're chained together, any real hopes of escape are limited. Coming across an isolated farmhouse, the pair effect entry, to the surprise of a husband and wife couple living there. But when the prisoners menace the pair to help them free themselves from their chains, the tables are decidedly turned.

As the title suggests, American Gothic hides layers of nastiness under its veneer of respectability - there's a quote by Kafka at the beginning of the film which doesn't make much sense until recalled at the end of the movie, which subtly hints at what's to come.

Supposedly based on a true story (but I'm not entirely sure if this is based on fact or an attempt at verisimilitude by the director), the movie packs more twists and turns into its 75 minutes than features twice that length could cope with. And with a cast of five (six if you count a police officer) and a fairly mundane location, the actors have to work very hard to build levels of creepiness and surprise.

And it works! As seemingly nice couple Bill and Sarah, Ned Luke and Rochelle Bostrom carry the film, with the two prisoners Nick and Guy (Slate Holmgren and Mark Barthmeier) enjoyably morphing from hunters to hunted; the fact that they're in prison for 'white collar' crimes adds a level of sympathy to their plight. The soundtrack by the enigmatically named Caesura Institute is bleepily tense and the whole thing comes together really well, with a satisfyingly open ended conclusion, and more than a whiff of EC Comics.

Connelly's first feature, 2013's The Suspect is also highly recommended (at the time of writing it's available to watch on YouTube) and American Gothic is an admirable follow up. A tense, at times darkly comic slice of Americana - I really liked it. Recommended. 

The Carmilla Movie (Canada 2017: Dir Spencer Maybee)

So if you're over 40 the chances are you may never have heard of Carmilla, the insanely popular Canadian web based show which at the time of writing has clocked up 70 million plus views on YouTube, with a massively loyal fanbase. The series, which ran for three seasons from 2014, was created by Jordan Hall, Steph Ouaknine and Jay Bennett, and is another version of the much adapted Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu novella of the same name, featuring a centuries old vampire turning up in in a contemporary high school.

Picking up on the story's lesbian themes (although the author punished his heroine in the novella by having her beheaded for her Sapphic tendencies) Carmilla's strength is in its normalisation of gay characters and its female fronted cast being funny, strong and there for each other - this is a show which doesn't so much observe the Bechdel test rules as screwing them up into a ball and kicking them into the nearest waste paper basket.

Carmilla the web show introduced us to perennially perky Laura Hollis (Elise Bauman), a journalism student whose dorm buddy disappears and is replaced by dark and mysterious Carmilla Karnstein (Natasha Negovanlis), Laura's TA Danny Lawrence (Sharon Belle), and friends LaFontaine (Kaitlyn Alexander) and Perry (Annie M. Briggs). It's the interplay between these characters, and particularly the developing romantic relationship between Laura and vampire with a heart of gold Carmilla that really made the show consistently watchable, overcoming its major visual hurdle of being set pretty much in one room for all the episodes.

The show's themes of friendship, loyalty and courage in supernatural situations will of course bring to mind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which covered the same ground in its seven seasons between 1997 and 2003. But of course most of Carmilla's viewers were either babies or a gleam in their parents' eyes during Buffy's heyday, and it's absolutely right that they would want their own version. But Carmilla is more than Buffy on-a-budget. The female cast, producers and writers have locked into something very much 'now' - at the screening of the movie I attended (and yes, I'll get to the film in a moment) the most important thing for the largely queer audience was simply to show gay characteristations uncoupled from traditional coming out narratives. Laura, Carmilla and the gang have got all that out of the way and are just living their lives. Albeit lives that include rampaging demons, evil faculty members and of course vampires.

So after the decision to end the web shows after the third season, it was a surprise and a delight for fans that Carmilla The Movie was announced. And make no mistake, this is a film for fans. I was quite privileged to see it on the big screen as, while I liked it, its commercial draw for those who are not already fans of the show ('Creampuffs' as they are known) may be limited and it seems likely to find its distribution options via streaming than the cinema.

The film opens five years after the events at the end of season 3. Carmilla has been transformed from vampire to human, and she and Laura are living a life of near normalcy and very much in love. Except that Laura keeps having troubling Hammer horror style dreams in which Carmilla is still a vampire, and a mysterious woman called Elle skulks around in the background. Turns out that Elle is Carmilla's ex and she's a whole heap of trouble, so the new Scooby gang must travel back to Carmilla's home country to face the evil.

Oddly, although the film opens up the rather restrictive single point camera approach of the web series, the talk straight to screen approach of the show has been retained. This keeps the intimate, confessional feel that regular viewers have valued but for a new audience, unaware of the show's history, it makes the film feel rather stilted. Would viewers get much from Carmilla The Movie if they hadn't seen the web shows? Possibly not. However the cast make the transition from small to large screen well, and the script loses none of the smartness of its web origins. It's good to see the team working well together and enjoying themselves in the gothic set pieces (including a Dance of the Vampires style ballroom scene).

Carmilla The Movie probably isn't for the casual uninformed viewer; although there is some backstory, it's not enough to immerse the uninitiated, and the film's pace may seem a little leisurely for the popcorn crowd. But I loved the movie as a thank you to the fans. And if the scores of young women who queued up just to say thank you to Negovanlis (who was present at the screening I attended and seemed to embody the spirit of the whole enterprise as a smart, funny and upbeat human being) is anything to go by, the movie has already done its work.

There were hints at the screening that the show may be optioned for a more mainstream series, and there's some doubt as to which actors, if any, will be ported across from Carmilla 1.0. Hmmm.

Sweet Country (Australia 2017: Dir Warwick Thornton)

Based on a true story, Warwick Thornton's tough, uncompromising film about the relationship between indigenous people and white settlers in the rural Australia of 1929 revolves around a small group of people eking out a living in hostile terrain.

Benevolent land owner and preacher Fred Smith (Sam Neill) loans out two of his Aboriginal workers, husband and wife Sam and Lizzie Kelly (Hamilton Morris and Natassia Gorey Furber, both excellent) and their niece to help a neighbouring farmer, alcoholic and war traumatised Harry March (Ewen Leslie) for a few days. During this time March rapes Lizzie, a fact she keeps from her husband when they return home.

Smith leaves Sam and Lizzie at his farm while he goes out of town on business, taking their niece with him. A drunken March arrives at Smith's house looking for Philomac (a light fingered mixed race son of another white landowner), who has escaped being chained up. An enraged March fires on the house, and Sam, defending himself, shoots and kills the drunk man. Sam and Lizzie, the latter who is now pregnant with March's child, escape into the Outback and are hunted by the troubled and borderline psychotic police sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown) and a team of vigilantes.

"I think I'm in the family way" confesses Lizzie to Sam at one point in the movie. The phrase sounds strange, but one of the themes of the film is about the need to keep family together whatever the circumstances. The anger and disappointment of Lizzie's revelation, which comes after March's death, never leaves Sam's face from that point on.

One of Sweet Country's greatest strengths is its sense of place, locating a small but endlessly circulating group of characters within the timeless sweeping landscape of the Outback (the title is uttered genuinely in the film, but the reality is anything but). Thornton and the film's writer David Tranter both grew up in central Australia, members of the Kaytej and Alyawarra tribes respectively, which is reflected in the assured use of the film's setting; Thornton also served as Director of Photography. This is a terrain that has featured in Thornton's work before (specifically his 2009 movie Samson and Delilah) and also recalls Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Nic Roeg's Walkabout (1970). Thornton also borrows Roeg's temporal shift approach, giving the audience glimpses of scenes yet to happen, imbuing the film with an eerie feeling of prescience. There are hints of mysticism too: in one scene Sam catches a scorpion under glass, while at the same time Fletcher gets stung by a similar creature (or is it the same one?) hiding in his boot, an incident which triggers the policeman's extended bout of poison fulled mania under the desert sun.

The bleakness of landscape and narrative almost threatens to overwhelm but is saved by some very human performances by Morris and Furber, and also twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan, who intriguingly both play Philomac; it's a triumph of casting that all are acting in a feature film for the first time. If there is one criticism it's that the white characters can be little more than cyphers against the indigenous cast, although the inner demons of Harry March and Sergeant Fletcher are given some nuance by Leslie and Brown. Praise too for deciding to render the movie music free, the sounds of the natural world being the only accompaniment to the events onscreen, and for keeping the pacing slow, which accentuates the moments of sudden violence. It's a trick borrowed from the Spaghetti Western, but effective none the less.