Ham (Arifin Putra) and his girlfriend Jody (Eloise Lovell Anderson) skip town after Ham loses his job at the local garage and they can’t afford to pay their rent. Driving across country they come across a rather empty trailer park, named ‘Bogieville’, to recognise the owner’s obsession with the famous US actor.
Caretaker Crawford (Jonathan Hansler) looks after things, but after a bit of argy bargy offers Ham a job as a handyman, with the specific instructions that the pair should not leave the camp at night, or let anyone into the accommodation provided for them. But Bogieville is less deserted than originally made out; the site owner, Madison, is one of the undead, and with his acquired ‘family’ rises at night to feast on the living.
The vaguely sleazy setup recalls classic Rob Zombie movies, and the ‘all teeth and angst’ nature of the vampires is reminiscent of the undead characters in 2007’s 30 Days of Night; there’s also something of 1987’s Near Dark in the clandestine nature of the vampires’ existence. And it’s in these examples that is found the biggest problem with Bogieville; outside of the ‘homage to the US’ look of the film, credible for the most part (although some of the UK cast American accents are more successful than others), this film has very little to offer that is original. At 105 minutes it’s also overlong, particularly as the whole middle section drags before we get to the final reel vamp action.
Cronin is to be congratulated for his attention to detail but he could have paid a little more attention to the story and rather lacklustre script.
(A version of this review was originally published on the Bloody Flicks site).
It's one of those movies which slowly morphs from a fairly prosaic piece into mythological abstraction. Three crims, Eric (Alan Calton), his boyfriend Matt (Dominic Vulliamy) and Paul (Michelangelo Fortuzzi) have pulled off a valuable art theft, and have agreed to meet at an isolated coastal location prior to jetting off for a new life, complete with new identities. A fourth member of their team, Matt’s mother Denice (Corinne Wicks), fails to materialise; disturbingly Eric finds what looks like blood and matter at the water's edge, together with a single earring; maybe Denice's?
Understandably revved up and distraught at Denice's continued absence, their evening gets more problematic when, thinking they are alone, three women enter their world. Pixie (Lily Catalifo), Opal (Lara Lemon) and Noé (Sandrine Salyères) maintain that they have been shipwrecked, and before you can say 'Dionysius' (ok it's the women who mention the mythological figure) they have inserted themselves into the lives of the criminals. But as the shipwreckees begin playing mind games with the three men, there's a more sinister, and deadly, fate in store for the art thieves.
Clemens's movie remains tense throughout, from its opening scenes of a stern, focused Eric driving through country lanes with a gun at his feet, to the arrival of the three strange women and the dynamic of six people - three of whom are possibly supernatural - trapped in a small cottage. It's considerably helped by Edward White's often Philip Glass like score, which builds choral voices and an impending sense of doom, and a spare but effective script, which twists the narrative as the men realise that they're out of their depth. And while The Drowned does finally fall into abstraction (the original title makes sense in the movie's final reveal) it's a taut 90 minutes and well worth a look.
The Drowned will be available on Digital Download from 6th October in the UK, 7th October in the US & 8th October in ANZ
TCU creator Rhys Frake-Waterfield, in response to criticisms that earlier Universe entries had been weak, promised to up his game; Bambi The Reckoning is the result. And compared with early JE productions, and indeed Allen’s previous output, BTR is definitely a step in the right direction.
Opening with an animated sequence which tells of the woods as being both a magical and dangerous place, we see a stag drinking from chemically contaminated water, the driver for Bambi’s murderous impulses. We meet mum Xana (Roxanne McKee), about to ferry her and young son Benji (Tom Mulheron) off to the relatives of absent dad Simon (Alex Cooke). The family are the usual feuding types, whose domestic squabbles move the movie along until mutated Bambi turns up, which to be fair doesn’t take long.
Most of the rest of the film pits the chemically altered deer against the local populace, with some baffling psychic bond existing between beast and Xana’s dementia ridden mother-in-law Mary (Nicola Wright). The setup may be familiar JE territory, and the Bambi references tangential at best, but if you don’t think about the silliness of the whole setup there’s a lot of fun (and gore) to be had, some better than average CGI and impressive nighttime photography by JE regular Vince Knight. The man behind this of course is the company’s head honcho Scott Chambers aka Jeffrey, who once again gets to lever in some Jurassic Park homages. The credits are littered with postproduction VFX crews and there’s a slickness at work here which all suggest a slightly higher budget than the usual fare.
(A version of this review was originally published on the Bloody Flicks site).
Perhaps taking a leaf out of the Steven M. Smith playbook – ie an obsession with ‘live’ paranormal shows (a no longer au courant idea) - The Haunting at Jack the Ripper’s House focuses on a group of YouTubing ghost hunters. Their show, ‘The Haunt Hunters’, devised by friends Richard (Jack Hyde) and Jake (Jack Hoy), involves a group of influencers travelling to supposedly haunted locations and staging materialisations; the more hits they get, the wilder the hoaxes.
A creative bust up between the creators sends Richard packing, just about the same time as Jake secures the show’s biggest set up yet; Jack the Ripper’s house. OK this needs a bit of explaining; Aaron Kosminski was one of the key suspects in the initial Ripper murder investigations. Ripperolgists have tracked down Kosminski’s UK hideout, the delightfully named ‘Ripper Manor’ (in reality I think it’s a youth hostel, judging by the fire doors), currently owned by a creepy guy called Victor (Robert Hedley). Despite the proprietor’s objections, Jake’s people have managed to secure the property for a night of spook hunting. But they’re about to find out that this is one house that doesn’t need its ghostly activity to be faked.
Apart from the modern social media trappings, this is basically a rerun of the 1969 movie The Haunted House of Horror, where swinging teenagers are picked off one by one by a mysterious presence in a supposedly haunted house.
For most of the film, the ‘Ripper’ element looks tacked on as an audience pull (the title is total crowd bait) but happily things do get rather strange in the movie’s last third. But before we get there we have to go through buckets of indifferent acting, shots filmed in near darkness and, well, lots of wandering around. I was initially thinking that Staley and Tosini may have rushed to finish the film to get it Festival ready (there are some line fluffs and clumsy edits), but no, it was actually made last year. Frankly people it’s just not that good; all power to the director/producers for trying something a little different, but even so…
(A version of this review was originally published on the Bloody Flicks site).
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