No more on the Writer’s Strike unless it’s particularly amusing, poignant or significant. Instead, you get another review of a mediocre supernatural thriller. Don’t all cheer at once! You were going to get a review of David Lynch’s Lost Highway which I finally got around to seeing after 10 years of meaning to but as I still haven’t got a fucking clue what it’s about, you’ll have to wait.

Okay, so The Dark. Generally speaking, it’s pretty much run of the mill stuff although it’s well shot and pretty well acted and the story (adapted from - or should I say, loosely inpsired by - a novel called “Sheep” by Simon Maginn) is interesting, not least because it’s based on Welsh mythology and you don’t get many of those around these days, do you. It has all the requsite features of contemporary supernatural thrillers - creepy, soggy, dead girl; creepy, creaking house; creepy, bleating sheep; creepy, expositional handyman and so on. What saves it from being dire is good direction, performances, photography and a slightly out of place and interesting (if somewhat predictable) third act.

I didn’t mind any of these things. In fact I quite enjoyed the film. But it did manage to piss me off.
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My Hallowe’en movie, Dagon (or, more precisely, H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon), was great. Seriously, it was surprisingly good. By which I mean that by any normal standards it would be a bit crap - questionable acting, average writing being the worst of it’s sins - but by low budget, independent sfx fuelled, blood, gore and gratuitous nudity standards, it’s pretty good.

It might be that it would appeal to fans of H.P.Lovecraft more than anyone else. As mentioned before, it’s a retelling of the classic Lovecraft story, The Shadow Over Innsmouth although it updates it to the 21st century and relocates the action from New England to Spain. Briefly: a young man and his girlfriend get shipwrecked off the Spanish coast and find themselves in the old town of Imboca (lit. In mouth. Innsmouth, geddit?) They find the inhabitants to be… a little odd.
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There are two versions of this film which both directed by the same person; George Sluizer. The first is subtitled and is a Dutch/French production that I watched last night. The second is a US remake starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jeff Bridges, Nancy Travis and Sandra Bullock. The first is raved about as a near perfect film, the remake is scorned as a disastrously americanised celluloid travesty.

Remember how I mentioned in my review of Session 9 that I don’t scare easily? Well, this film scared me.

“Scared” probably isn’t the right word; I was certainly stunned, definitely perturbed and more than a little un-nerved. For those reasons alone I must recommend this film. The ending, which I was vaguely aware as being one of those endings which people talk about (or would do if they’d seen this film), but I’d either managed to totally avoid any spoilers or totally forget the details. A bloody good thing too as I’m sure it would have lessened the impact.

It did make an impact too. My heart rate has just gone up just thinking about it.
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This was a fucking waste of time.

I’m all for superhero films and I don’t necessarily need them to be believable or take themselves too seriously. I like popcorn movies and I don’t always need substance. All I want, most of the time, is to be entertained. This was just tedious and, pardon the pun, lacked any soul whatsoever. So much so that I can’t even be bothered to go on about it.

It wasn’t all bad though. If you watch the first 30 seconds of the video after the jump then you’ll see my favourite bit of the whole film when the two (yes, two and I don’t care if I’ve spoiled it for you because watching this film will spoil 2 hours of your life) Ghost Riders race on down through the desert to Spiderbait’s version of the classic “Ghost Riders In The Sky”.
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My dilemma about what to watch last night was resolved about half way through this rather dull and tedious affair that showed on ITV last night. In fact, I’m not sure I can be arsed to write about it. I wasn’t impressed by this modern retelling of the Mary Shelley’s classic. It didn’t seem to update the story so much as simply transpose it entirely, merely changing the sex of the main character, giving her a slightly different motivation and updating the science behind the creature to make it more modern and relevant. Still kept the lightning in though. I’m suprised that there weren’t big glass containers full of bubbling and steaming liquid in the laboratory. I found I couldn’t bring myself to care about the characters at all, much less what happened.

Also, throwing in some random “Hammer-esque” moments (hugging the big vat of primordial soup, dramatic intonation of “It’s alive!” and so on) jarred with the otherwise serious tone of the film. Homage shots only work if they blend seamlessly with the style and feel of the rest of the piece.

And what the fuck was going on with that bit about the volcano? Eh? I mean, context people. Maybe it became more involved in the second half of the story (did the monster jump in it? I don’t know. Also, I don’t much care.) So there’s a supervolcano erupting but we don’t know where. In the UK? Because that would be a story. And how come at the beginning, Victoria not-Frankenstein’s car was covered with several inches of ash from this volcano but that was it?

Anyway, I decided, after about 20 minutes, that if they showed that the creature was afraid of fire in some contrived and hokey scene then I’d turn it off. At 45 minutes I did just that.

Session 9 is a low budget supernatural thriller about a group of asbestos removal engineers who get a contract to clear out an old insane asylum. The story was written with an actual place in mind, the Danvers State Insane Asylum and it was shot entirely on location here. As such, the building plays as much a part as any of the characters do.

Overall, this isn’t a bad little film. It’s certainly creepy and well played but the story does feel like it’s meandering a bit and doesn’t necessarily deliver the pay-off that it was building up towards. In fact, as much as I hate to admit to wanting what could be a clichéd ending, I do feel that they could have drawn the last act out a bit more and built even more suspense. As it is, it does feel like it ends a bit suddenly.
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The second film to be directed by avant-garde director Werner Herzog is, without doubt, the most fucked up and bizarre film I think I’ve ever seen. That would probably be saying something if I could remember which other “surreal” films I’ve seen at the moment but I can’t (aside from most Bunuel works, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Jan Svankmeyer’s Alice and Faust etc.)

The story (which I use in the loosest possible meaning of the word) focusses on a group of dwarfs (or dwarves if you prefer) at an asylum who rebel after their “leader” has been captured. Their rebellion involves forcing the two shortest members of their posse to get married and then (fail to) consummate their marriage, burning plants, driving a truck around and around in circles, having a food fight, tormenting a pair of blind dwarfs, killing a pig, crucifying a monkey and dressing dead insects up as members of a wedding party.

Like I said, fucking bizarre.
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Yeah, okay - should have seen this a long time ago. Can totally understand why a) it’s a classic and b) it picked up so many Oscars. Brando is brilliant, Eva Marie Saint is stunning, the direction is fantastic, the script is superb and it’s just a great, great film.

I have nothing more to say.

There’s a bizarre story behind Gaslight. Orginally it started out as a play that opened in the West End (and gave Vincent Price his first villain role) and then it was made into a film in the UK in 1940. MGM bought the rights to the film and remade it in 1944 with Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten and Charles Boyer taking the main leads (and introducing the world to a young Angela “Murder, She Wrote” Lansbury in her debut). They then attempted to destroy every copy of the 1940 version although were unsuccessful. However, you still can’t get the original in the UK.

The story itself is a study of a woman who is being slowly and methodically driven out of her mind by her husband whose motives are unclear. Well, perhaps not that unclear to a modern audience but even so, the performances are so captivating that I found myself on the edge of my beanbag, even though I had a very good idea how it all turned out.
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What a fantastic film! I picked this up for a mere three quid in HMV on the basis that it’s one my 17 unwatched 100 films and that for the price of a London pint, I couldn’t go far wrong.

This is why I recommend using the IMDB top 100 as a way of suggesting new films to watch. It’s a cracker.

The story, quite simply, is about two men: one is a long term undercover cop working for the triads and the other is a long term undercover criminal working for the police. If you’ve seen Scorsese’s “The Departed” then this is the film that that one was based on (and probably has the same plot twists and outcomes - I don’t know because I haven’t seen it yet).
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