On the topic of Iconic moments

I was invited to take part in a discussion of Iconic moments on film from the 80s over at Cinema Sentries.

The first question I want to ask is naturally “my 80s?” – because I have a distinct feeling there’s more than one kind of 80s out there – the curse of liquid modernity hits again, as it tends to do everytime someone starts making lists.

I wrote about Jack with an Axe in The Shining, but there are other moments I could just as easily have gone for, like Terminator “I’ll be back” or Sgt Elias death scene in Platoon or how about Roy Batty sitting on top of a roof in the rain with a dove in his hands saying “time to die” in Blade Runner?

Be that as it may you can find the collective musings on the topic here

Mule

Skinwalkers (2006) – Good Wolves and Bad … Really?

Skinwalkers (2006) directed by James Isaac stars Rhona Mitra (Rachel Talbot), Matthew Knight (Timothy), Elias Koteas (Jonas), Jason Behr (Varek), Kim Coates (Zo), Natassia Malthe (Sonja), Rogue Johnston (Grenier), Sarah Carter (Katherine), Barbara Gordon (Nana), Lyriq Bent (Doak) and Tom Jackson (Will).

There’s a prophecy (isn’t there always?) that a boy will be born who holds the mythical cure to the curse. On his thirteenth birthday the moon will go blood red for three nights and then it will all be over. Unbeknownst to his mother, Rachel, young Timothy is that boy. The small town they live in is aware of this, and they protect mother and son from the opposing forces that come in the shape of Varek and his pack: Zo, Sonya and Grenier.

This is actually a werewolf movie, hence the title Skinwalkers, though those two beasts are not necessarily synonymous. The plot is fairly straight forward. The good werewolves want to be cured from the curse and they don’t eat people. The bad werewolves want to keep going and they do eat people. The twist there is that once you eat human flesh you get corrupted to the wild side.

The basic premise is pretty thin, but it could work, given that it turns out the leader of the bad wolves, Varek, is actually the brother of the leader of the good wolves, Jonas, as well as the father of the boy he’s looking to kill and the husband of Rachel, so we get a little free Cain-and-Abel action thrown in. So the big question is: with all this, and snarling fights, and guns and knives and fisticuffs and elongated canines… why doesn’t it work?

I like werewolves. I like the idea of the Id run wild, the beast within, and I generally enjoy the working class nature of them. The problem here is that this turns into a shoot-out a few too many times and there’s not enough wolf in these wolves to satisfy me, personally. There’s blood and meat galore, a noble quest and an evil villain, but there’s still next to no dramatic tension. I’ve said before that for these kinds of movies it helps if the actors play it straight, taking their roles seriously. The actors of all this seem to do that, but there’s just not enough meat on the bone and sometimes that just makes the acting… bad. The end result is surprisingly bland and run-of-the-mill pulp horror clichées, though there’s certainly enough sex and violence to satisfy the Id-side of the myth. The actual transformed werewolves don’t really work for me either. There is a reason, beyond the influence of the moon, as to why we never get to see them in direct light.

There is a complete and total lack of pack dynamic to the interaction between the two werewolf cadres that leaves me mystified. Most werewolves on screen travel alone, so there could have been something there to explore, but there’s hardly even any regular interpersonal dynamic and that’s just too bad. The bad guys are traveling on motorcycle, so we could at least have had a little “bad to the bone” moment with all the leather and cut off denim they’re wearing, but instead they come across as four posers who can’t remember weather or not they’ve already racked their shotguns.

The most incredibly stupid plot twist occurs at the very end, though, when the cheap Sarah Connor rip-off Rachel forgives and forgets everything the redeemed and delivered Varek has done in order to travel with him and use their sons blood to cure werewolves any- and everywhere. It’s one of those moments when you have to curb your instinct to throw popcorn at the screen and let out a howl of your own. There are so many things wrong with that notion that I actually won’t bother ranting about it, it’s that bad.

Exposition is generally pretty insulting to this viewer, but even more insulting is superimposing the images of the actors over the transformed werewolves in case you can’t figure out who is who. Again, I have to rein in the impulse to hurl popcorn at the screen. All in all, this is not worth wasting your time on if you want good quality growl for your buck.

Article first published as Movie Review Skinwalkers on Blogcritics.

Stake Land Review

Just to change things up a little…

My latest review of the vampire movie Stake Land (2010) by Jim Mickle can be found and read at Cinema Sentries.

Check it out here:

http://cinemasentries.com/

Teaser:

In a parallel and immediate now, disaster strikes and a pandemic hits the world. Vampires take over, for any given value of that when they actually don’t retain any higher brain function other than the basic predator-feeding instinct. That does not mean they are not extremely dangerous, because they certainly are.

Mule

Shelter (2010) – Multiple Personalities Or Just A Hill Witch Curse? (Yes, You Read That Right.)

Article first published as Movie Review: Shelter(2010) on Blogcritics.

Shelter opens on the forensic psychiatrist Cara Harding (Julianne Moore) who seems to have a special interest in multiple personality disorder.. Her evaluation of a criminal who has obviously pleaded insanity sends the gentleman in question to the electric chair. Subsequent conversations between her and her father Dr. Harding (Jeffrey DeMunn) quickly reveal that debunking presumed sufferers from multiple personality disorder is something of a speciality of Cara’s. She is yet to be proven wrong in her estimations. That’s where David (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) comes into the equation.

Dr Harding presents Cara with this interesting patient, a young man in a wheelchair who has been found on the street, lost and without any recollection as to how he wound up where he was. What starts as an interesting battle of intellects between Cara and her father quickly turns into something else when David starts switching personalities. His alters, Adam and Wesley, make appearances and Cara is starting to have to question her iron-clad beliefs and assumptions.

So far so good. I am actually with the story up to this point. Multiple personality disorder is a very much discussed phenomena and it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked, but it makes for great entertainment in this kind of setting. The problem here is that this is where this story veers off into the supernatural. People start dying in gruesome, horrendous and very specific ways while Cara investigates the various alters of David only to find that they all existed, and that the young man is not so much disturbed, as possessed.

Okay, fine. I’ll roll with it. So he is possessed and not disturbed. It isn’t until we wind up in the mountains with a bunch of shaggy-looking mountain people and an old hag with the ability to suck a persons soul out and then put it back in that the atmospheric scenery and all-in-all pretty solid performances no longer outweigh the frank silliness of the basic plot. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that makes this too hard to swallow, but I think it’s in part the fact that we started out on fairly solid ground with sharp-witted dialogue and an intriguing concept and suddenly find ourselves in a stereotypical back-water village in the hills that seems to belong in a Tales from the Crypt episode.

David turns out to be a priest whom the mountain witch “Granny” (Joyce Feurring) has put a curse on so that he now has to provide “shelter” for all those souls that have lost their faith in god. That’s the reason why so many different personalities are living in that one body. Then, for whatever reason, David starts going after the various members of Cara’s family and some of her acquaintances as well. It ends up becoming a battle for the souls, with Cara’s daughter, Sammy (Brooklynn Proulx) as the main damsel-in-distress.

There’s a definite risk with making a movie that has a slight case of multiple personality disorder itself. It’s a mystery and a crime story and a thriller and a horror flick all in one, and it switches between these different language codes in a way that could have worked, could have been clever. The performances are strong throughout, Julianne Moore delivers, as does Jeffrey DeMunn as her father and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the various incarnations of whoever is in David’s body at the moment. The problem is more that this devolves into a fairly trite horror movie, nothing particularly original about it, and the twist at the very end isn’t surprising, or even mildly upsetting, at least not to this viewer who saw it coming a mile away.

It fails at going into some of the basic archetypal fears that could have made it truly frightening, like the inherent instability of the human psyche, something we rely no being more writ in stone than it really is, and opt s instead for a vague kind of religious gloss of the old fire-and-brimstone variety, which, again, would have been fine, if it had any kind of lead-in other than the gruesome deaths of the people occupying the preacher’s body. Even the Witch Of The Hills is an archetype that could have been unsettling, but here she isn’t even set up in opposition with the basic Christian morality she is supposed to act in contrast to. Instead it all comes down to having faith in a standard issue Christian god, especially when the chips are down, because if you don’t a rogue damned and hill-witch cursed preacher is going to come and kill you. See what I mean? It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t keep any of the promises it made in the opening. This movie is quite simply not as clever as it would like to be. I wouldn’t waste my time with this one.

Shelter (2010) directed by Måns Mårlind, Björn Stein stars Julianne Moore (Cara Harding), Jonathen Rhys Meyers (David/Adam/Wesley), Jeffrey DeMunn (Dr. Harding), Frances Conroy (Mrs. Bernburg), Nathan Corddry (Stephen Harding), Brooklynn Proulx (Sammy), Brian Anthony Wilson (Virgil), Joyce Feurring (Granny Holler Witch), Steven Rishard (Detective Danton), Charles Techman (Monty Hughes) and John Peakes (Dr. Charles Foster).

Pandorum (2009) – In Space No One Can Hear You… No, Wait, Wrong Movie

Article first published as Movie Review: Pandorum- In Space No One Can Hear You… No, Wait, Wrong Movie on Blogcritics.

In Pandorum (2009) Bower (Ben Foster) one of the crew members of the Elysium wakes up from his hypersleep only to find that the ship does not seem to be in very good shape. There are no lights, no other crew and no welcoming committee. The initial scene is surprisingly painful to watch, more like a birth than a peaceful awakening. It is clear that Bower does not remember where he is, or why, but all his technical knowledge and his mission specific skills are intact. Shortly after Bower’s awakening another crew member, Payton (Dennis Quaid) wakes up to the same confusion.

They set about trying to contact their superiors, figuring out where they are and what’s gone wrong with the ship. It’s not as easy as it seems.
Elysium is overrun with vaguely humanoid carnivores that may have started out human, but have now evolved into something more primal. They hunt in packs and they more or less have the run of the ship. Their favoured prey is the newly awoken crew members that emerge from their sleeping pods and summarily get eaten. There are still bigger problems, though. First of all, the reactor is acting up and needs to be manually restarted. Secondly, the ship has received a transmission that Earth is done, gone and over, and the ships crew is all there is left of mankind. Thirdly, there’s a space sickness called Pandorum which affects those that have been in suspended animation for too long. Or those that have been in space for too long. It starts as the shakes and graduates into full-blown paranoia and violent tendencies.

Elysium was on its way to Tanis, the only habitable planet in reasonable reach, when it launched and now there’s literally no way of telling where she is or if she’s just lost in deep space. Bower sets out for the bridge to try and open the door to the room he and Payton find themselves in when they wake up. The monsters roaming the hallways try to eat Bower a couple of times until he forms a tentative alliance with Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le) a couple of crew members that have been awake for a while and managed to stay alive. Restarting the reactor becomes a more pressing matter half-way through this little jaunt.

In the end it turns out things are even more complicated than that, of course. The maneaters are probably a result of genetic enhancement meant to help the crew in their biological transition to their new home planet. The ship is run by a madman, one of the officers present when Earth’s last transmission was received, and a victim of Pandorum. Or maybe just megalomania, who knows? The ship is where it was supposed to be and not where is was supposed to be at the same time, meanwhile; this viewer is mostly going “huh?”at this point.

The environment is atmospheric, I will give it that. The mise-en-scene is darkly gorgeous. I like The Elysium, in all it’s gloomy, overrun, beleaguered and begrimed glory. It’s not one of those pristine, white and shiny ships, which I like. There’s an impressive sense of scale to it, too, without it losing its claustrophobia. The monsters mostly leave me indifferent. They’re fast and vicious, but the actual hunting and fighting feels a little too much like a computer game for me to invest too much in it. You can probably argue that gravity is different on board a spaceship, but still.

Both Ben Foster’s and Dennis Quaid’s performances are surprisingly layered and played straight, which definitely lends this the gravitas it needs not to descend into complete pulp fiction. The movie is ambitious, but maybe that is part of the problem. It wants to scare the viewer with dark things hunting the hero through long, dimly lit corridors, supply a creeping psychological horror and question the way memory works and the effects of long distance space travel. It’s a veritable cornucopia of fears to tap into, claustrophobia, loneliness, alienation, memory loss, fear of the dark and the things in the dark that can eat you, what we are reduced to when pushed to extremes, cannibalism… The overall effect is surprisingly un-frightening, though. There are better movies in this genre, like the Alien-movies, Solaris, Sunshine, 2001: A Space Odyssey just to mention a few obvious ones.
This is still good enough to merit a viewing, but it isn’t all it could have been if it had sharpened its focus a little and not tried to overreach itself.

Pandorum (2009) directed by Christian Alvart stars Ben Foster (Bower), Dennis Quaid (Payton), Cam Gigandet (Gallo), Antje Traue (Nadia), Cung Le (Manh), Eddie Rouse (Leland), Norman Reedus (Shephard), André Hennicke (Hunter Leader), Friederike Kempter (Evalon), Niels-Bruno Schmidt (Officer).

Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You… Sort Of

Article first published as Movie Review Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You…Sort Of on Blogcritics.

Legion (2010) is a horror flick with some pretensions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it generally ensures that you can forgive minor grains of sand that could otherwise be irritating. In a truck stop in the Mohave desert a mismatched group of people seem to be gathering by coincidence. There’s the reluctantly pregnant girl Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid) and his son Jeep (Lucas Black) who own the place, Kyle Williams (Tyrese Gibson) who only stops for directions and the use of a phone, Percy Walker (Charles S. Dutton) the short order cook and the Anderson family, Howard (Jon Tenney) and Sandra (Kate Walsh) and their slightly rebellious daughter Audrey (Willa Holland).

When the television stops working and the phones die any seasoned horror movie watcher knows that something bad is coming. The first sign of how bad the bad thing that’s coming really is becomes obvious when the little old lady Gladys (Jeanette Miller) comes though the door with her walker and proceeds to smile beneficently at the gathering before she suddenly takes a bite out of Howard’s neck and then scales the wall like an insect.
Seconds later the extremely soft spoken and together Michael (Paul Bettany) shows up in a stolen police car with an armoury in the trunk and proceeds to proclaim that the end is nigh. Literally.

It turns out that Charlie’s unborn child is the only hope of all of mankind and that Michael is there to make sure that the child survives. The bad things that are coming are sent by God himself to wipe humanity out, a sort of etch-a-sketch approach to what ails the world. The archangel has actually gone against orders and come to our aid. Wave after wave of people possessed by angels attack the diner and decimate the survivors within until finally Michael’s equal, Gabriel (Kevin Durand) comes to put an end to the disobedience. By then Charlie has had the baby, so the morality of the whole thing has changed.

There are many little moments in this movie that really shine. Most of them have Paul Bettany in them. He speaks so softly and so convincingly, and he kicks some righteous behind in a way I, for one, really enjoyed. I’ve not seen him do action like this before, but he certainly has the physical presence for it. Adrianne Palicki gives a very good performance as the big-bellied Charlie, still smoking when she’s nine months pregnant, which is upsetting enough to watch in and of itself. Lucas Black does a very good job of portraying the steadfast Jeep who is actually good enough in his own way that he has managed to help Michael retain his faith in mankind as a whole, and Dennis Quaid is really a spectacularly good down-on-his-luck loser with something like a heart of gold, even when he falls asleep on the job.

All that being said, there is grit in the stew here. The director Scott Charles Stewart started his career in special effect and you can tell. There is a certain emphasis on the effects side of things, a certain love for some of the bad guys, like The Ice Cream Man (Doug Jones), and explosions and weapons and spectacular fight scenes, not that I don’t enjoy that, I do. The problem is, some things feel much too familiar, like the final scene of the movie that any fan of The Terminator will instantly clock on to. You can call that a homage, if you like, it’s certainly too explicit to be incidental. There is also hints and allusions to other general lore, of course, but for some reason the end result is just not more than the sum total of its parts, which is unfortunate. There is a lot of exposition, which allows the actors to shine, each in their own little moment, but which does not add anything to the overall story. It feels disjointed in an odd, rambling way. It also feels like the director/script writer doesn’t trust the audience to believe the motivation driving the characters to act the way they do.

The problem is that too much explanation is just as bad as not enough. The pacing is awkward, to say the least. Building suspense is not an easy thing and you really have to keep your finger on the button to be able to create the kind of unease that the waiting between attacks needs to have in order for the viewer to feel unsettled. That never really works here.

There is also the fine line between horror and splatter, one inducing the kind of creeping dread that has you on the edge of your seat and the latter just making you go “eeew” and there are a few instances of that here too, where horror would have been preferable.

It’s not a bad first effort, but it feels squandered when it could have been so much more considering the cast and the general idea.

Legion (2010) directed by Scott Charles Stewart stars Paul Bettany (Michael), Lucas Black (Jeep Hanson), Tyrese Gibson (Kyle Williams), Adrianne Palicki (Charlie), Charles S. Dutton (Percy Walker), Jon Tenney (Howard Anderson), Kate Walsh (Sandra Anderson), Willa Holland (Audrey Anderson), Dennis Quaid (Bob Hanson), Kevin Durand (Gabriel), Doug Jones (Ice Cream Man) and Jeanette Miller (Gladys).

And on The Topic of the End of the World…

T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.

There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.

The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.

“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.

In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.

The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.

Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.

Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.

We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.

Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Mule

Frailty (2001) – Dad In The Shed With An Ax

Article first published as Movie Review: Frailty (2001) – Dad With An Ax In The Shed on Blogcritics.

Frailty (2001) starts when a young man (Matthew McConaughey) walks into the offices of the FBI and starts telling Agent Doyle (Powers Boothe) about a recent rash of murders. That is the start of a long and twisted tale of the childhood of two young boys and their father (Bill Paxton).

Some of the story is told by the young man who introduces himself as Fenton Meiks. He claims to know the identity of a serial killer who calls himself “God’s Hand”. He says it is his brother Adam (Levi Kreis). When the agent asks him why he would think such a thing he starts telling the agent of his father and brother and his disturbing childhood.

The young Fenton (Matt O’Leary) grows up taking care of his kid brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) after the death of their mother. His father (Bill Paxton) is just another regular Joe working dad trying to take care of his two sons and he seems to be an honestly good father, hard working and normal. That is until one night when he wakes his two sons up saying he’s just had a visitation from an angel and he has been instructed that they are supposed to be demon killers, God’s Hand in retribution. This is very much an old testament God, one of fire and vengeance and flaming swords.

The angel delivers a list of demons to be slain and leads the father to the weapons they are supposed to use – an ax, a length of pipe and a pair of worker’s gloves. Young Fenton thinks his dad’s going nuts. Adam, on the other hand, takes to the new work with enthusiasm, supporting their father and telling his brother that he can see the demons when his father puts hands on them to reveal their sins.

Fenton resists with everything he has. He tells his father to get help, to stop killing people, but the dad just blithely keeps on reassuring him that they’re not really people at all, they are demons, and they are doing the Lord’s work. The more Fenton resists, the more dad tries to make him see the light.

Most of this is told from young Fenton’s perspective. The two young actors, and Matt O’Leary particularly, does a very good job of it. His defiance, the moral core, his fear and his loss of faith are pitch perfect and you really feel for him. He is caught in an impossible situation and he can’t get out. When he finally breaks down and goes to get the sheriff, dad kills the lawman and they bury him in the rose garden where they bury all their victims. All the while dad cries and tells Fenton it’s his fault he’s had to actually kill a human. Fenton spits at him that he’s killed plenty.

After that dad winds up locking the Fenton in a basement they’ve dug under their shed to have somewhere to take the demons when they are about to be slain. Dad keeps Fenton there until he’s weak from fatigue and starvation and that makes him see the light. When he comes out of the basement he’s completely with the plan.

Things are, however, not what they seem. When are they ever?

This is really low key, up close and personal horror, told in the tradition of Stephen King centering on the loss of innocence of the very young, Fenton is ten and Adam seven when all this starts. The long flashbacks show corruption at the very central core of these boys’ lives when their father goes completely bananas and drags them in to his delusion. Or so it might seem.

Bill Paxton plays the dad with the kind of finesse that actually keeps him from becoming and out-and-out monster. He believes in what he’s doing, all the way down to the particulars of using the ax the angel led him too. He is unwavering and he keeps saying “it’s for your own good” to Fenton when he punishes him for not believing.

The ending has a major twist that I don’t think I should reveal for those interested in watching this movie. It’s one of those things that either work on a viewer, or completely miss the mark. It’s mostly a question of how much you can go along with the narrative. I think it works well within the premise of the story, but for me personally, the flashback scenes are stronger.

This is Bill Paxton’s directorial debut and he does a good job of it, the tendency for actor-cum-directors to focus on the actors performances is always rewarding to watch, because invariably there is a certain depth of character portrayal that makes a movie like this, which is basically Southern Gothic, better than they would have been in the hands of someone focusing on the gore.

Frailty (2001) directed by Bill Paxton who also stars as Dad Meiks. Matthew McConaughey (Fenton/Adam Meiks), Powers Boothe (FBI Agent Wesley Doyle), Matt O’Leary (Young Fenton), Jeremy Sumpter (Young Adam), Luke Askew (Sheriff Smalls), Levi Kreis (Fenton Meiks), Alan Davidson (Brad White), Cynthia Ettinger (Cynthia Harbridge), Vincent Chase (Edward March) and Gwen McGee (Operator).

Mule

Land of the Dead – Zombies of The World, Unite

Article first published as Movie Review: Land of the Dead – Zombies of the World, Unite on Blogcritics.

It’s a brave new world out there in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005). There are zombies everywhere, the living are the new minority. The living have built themselves a walled city to better be able to defend themselves against the hoards of the undead.

Zombies come in all shapes and sizes, as anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the genre are well aware of. These zombies start out as the good old-fashioned kind. They shuffle forth, looking for something to feed on, but they neither fast, nor organized. Like most zombies they can infect the living through their bite and once they’ve brought down a living human they tend to overwhelm and devour them, rending flesh from bone in no time at all.

The living are forced to forage outside their walled communities, as in all good post apocalyptic scenarios and there are teams of mercenary soldier types who take care of that. There is also a very hierarchical structure within the walled city, where only the really affluent can live well, in a skyscraper that is a cross between a mall and a luxury hotel. The ordinary folks live in ghetto-like circumstance.

Our main protagonist is Riley Denbo (Simon Baker), one of the foragers, his companion Charlie (Robert Joy) a savant with a special talent for fancy shooting. They work with Cholo (John Leguizamo) who is frankly not a very nice person and they work for Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) who is down-right unpleasant. Kaufman is the king in this little hierarchy, the boss at the top of the skyscraper who never actually has to get his hands dirty.

The zombies start out as brainless as ever in this tale, but they suddenly begin developing the ability to work together under the ”leadership” of Big Daddy (Eugene Clark). They are mindlessly fascinated with fireworks and stand around going “arrrgh” up ’til that point. Not that they aren’t plenty dangerous enough when they get hungry.

Once the zombies start to organise they attack the walled city and all the high and mighties get their comeuppance, as you might expect. That, and a story line about an enormous tank nicknamed ”Dead Reckoning” is what keeps this narrative moving forward, but forget all that for now. Forget Dennis Hopper looking sharp in a nice suit and the entertainment in the pit where you throw a live girl in with two zombies to see who can eat her first.

This is all about the zombies. You have to have a particular love for zombies to enjoy a movie like this. There are so many of them and they are all lovely, they really are. You have to be able to enjoy the lingering close-up of the tableaux created by sweeping a camera along with a flashlight over a group of zombies feeding on soldiers that they have brought down. Much tearing and rending of flesh ensues.

Romero is the granddaddy of this kind of zombie movie with his classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). There is really no one who does it better. This is gore and blood and guts. There is a thin veneer of social commentary, which keeps the film students happy, but mostly it’s about what you can do with effects and fake blood. Romero makes sure that the camera slowly and lovingly tracks how someone gets their intestines pulled out of their chest cavity and gnawed on.

If you like that, and spunky female characters – big props to Asia Argento (Slack) and Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy)- and much shuffling in the shadows of zombies about to grab and eat you, you should be plenty entertained by this.

Me? I like a zombie-movie that gives good ”raahhh”. And this one definitely does. Dennis Hooper as a thoroughly unsympathetic Rumsfeldian bad-ass is just the icing on the cake.

Land of the Dead (2005) directed by George A. Romero stars Simon Baker (Riley Denbo), John Leguizamo (Cholo DeMora), Dennis Hopper (Kaufman), Asia Argento (Slack), Robert Joy (Charlie), Eugene Clark (Big Daddy), Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy), Tony Nappo (Foxy), Jennifer Baxter (Number 9), Boyd Banks (Butcher), Maxwell McCabe-Lokos (Mouse) and Pedro Miguel Arce (Pillsbury).

Daybreakers – It’s a vampire’s world

Article first published as Movie Review: Daybreakers – It’s A Vampire’s World on Blogcritics.

Most vampire movies try to find a new approach to the subject, with varying results. Some keep to the old traditional view of the vampire as a supernatural monster and some incorporate more modern medical theory. Daybreakers falls in the second category. Sort of.

In a not too distant future a pandemic has hit the planet, turning most regular citizens into vampires. You still get infected through blood and biting, but the vampiric condition has become the norm rather than the exception. This means blood is rapidly becoming a commodity that is in short supply. Some humans are kept like cattle in large facilities and their blood is ”harvested”. It’s all done reasonably humanely, the humans aren’t awake for any of this.

Scientists are working on a blood substitute that is supposed to help with the supply and demand problems. The main blood supplier is the Bromley Marks company run by Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). Our main protagonist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a haematologist hard at work on the task of finding a cure. He is also a reluctant vampire, having been turned by his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman). Frankie works as a human hunter, trying to round up any strays that may still be running around in the daytime.

There are some humans fighting the disease, trying to stay ahead of what is rapidly becoming the rule. These are led by Audrey (Claudia Karvan) and Elvis (Willem Dafoe). Elvis has managed to cure himself from vampirism through an extraordinary set of circumstance that involve a car crash, sunlight and water.

The vampires are starving, which is why the clock is ticking for Edward to find a cure’ as well as for the whole vampire population in terms of survival. If they feed on other vampires, on themselves or on animal blood for too long they turn into a more primal, bat-like creature with a much higher level of aggression. They lose any remnants of humanity through the starvation process and are therefore summarily executed by the government.

There are things about this movie that are really appealing, like the way the world has adapted to night time living and what kind of technological solutions have been worked out to allow the vampires to go about their business during the day. The heavy noir feeling you get from the grey monochromatic life of false daylight and night time life is contrasted by a richly suffused palette for the daytime scenes, which makes it easier to understand why Edward fights his vampire condition so hard.

Evil here is represented by Sam Neill’s character, the large corporation incorporate. He just wants to make money, same as always, and weather he does that by exploiting the last remaining humans or not makes no difference to him. Finding a substitute, or a cure, is never really on his agenda.

There are all kinds of family drama going on as well, Charles’ human daughter Alison (Isabel Lucas) refuses to let herself be turned, and once it’s done forcibly she feeds on herself rather than accepting her ration of blood, which quickly turns her into a monster. Edward and his brother have all kinds of issues to work out, concerning the nature of humanity and which is better – vampire or humankind.

There is however a crux. It may be stylish, and pretty and have aspirations of making comments about society and humanity and inter-human relationships, and it’s even got Willem Defoe and Sam Neill, but it still isn’t a very good movie, even in its genre. It tries to do too much, it works too hard at being cool. It delivers broody shots of Edward’s struggle to remain human one moment and explodes a vampire body in an orgy of blood and splatter the next.

The cure for the vampire disease turns out to be the blood of a vampire who has been turned back into a human. This results in what can best be described as a messy bloodbath at the very end of the movie when starving vampires fall on the re-humanized vampires and tear them apart, only to be turned back themselves and so on and so forth. The disease eats the cure eats the disease and maybe the cure will be pandemic as well, but at a very high price.

I have a thing about vampire movies and could easily draw out all the implications of using blood disease and sickness as a metaphor or a synecdoche, but I never really get involved enough in this particular telling of an old familiar story to think it worth the bother. For all its gore this is a bland and anaemic specimen of the genre. Sadly.

Written and directed by Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig, starring Ethan Hawke (Edward Dalton), Willem Dafofe (Lionel ‘Elvis’ Cormac), Sam Neill (Charles Bromley), Claudia Karvan (Audrey Bennett), Michael Dorman (Frankie Dalton), Isabel Lucas (Alison Bromley), Vince Colosimo (Christopher Caruso).