Deliver Us from Evil (2014) 70/100

Posted on August 27, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 70/100 118 Min

A modern horror film that has not only a story but … acting as well! No one could have been more surprised than The Red Dragon by this, indeed it’s quite an interesting plot despite being littered with various tropes of the genre – lots of sustained flash light scenes in dark places, exorcism and little girls with music boxes (I mean seriously, who in their right mind would buy a child one of those – here you go my dear, this will practically ensure you will one day be enslaved by a demon who will give you your first sexual experience, or at the very least you’ll have regular nightmares for the next ten years). Eric Bana plays an NYPD cop who, along with his partner Joel McHale, must investigate several mysterious and violent events in the city, all of which lead back to a tour of duty in the Middle East for three ex-military personnel, and their discovery of some ancient ruins ….

Part of the reason for the grounded structure of this is that it’s actually based on the 2001 novel ‘Beware the Night’ by none other than the officer Bana is playing, Ralph Sarchie, who gave up fighting a life of crime to fight against another type of evil, becoming a demonologist (not a dermatologist, as Wikipedia currently suggests) after tutelage and inspiration from father Mendoza, here played by Édgar Ramírez (who has played not only Simon Bolivar and Carlos the Jackal, but was of course the lucky duck who gets it on with Keira Knightley in ‘Domino’ 05). So all of the events in the film are purportedly real from that perspective, but director and scriptwriter Scott Derrickson does a very good job of creating tension and has the right tempo for the story, although it should have been trimmed by maybe fifteen to twenty minutes as the overall length and that of some of the scenes starts to undermine the otherwise taught atmosphere.

There are quite a few throwaway aspects to the narrative too, such as the police connecting events they don’t yet have the information on to be able to do and references to the music of The Doors which seem somewhat spurious. Possibly Derrickson is just a fan, and ultimately the good acting and story make it easy not to mind these faults, especially if you also happen to like The Doors. For some reason, when they are trying to force a demon in possession of a body to reveal its name I could have sworn it replied ‘Jimmy’ (imagine, ‘Hey you, Jimmy! Get oot ya fanny!!’) which would have been awesome, and there are more than a couple of moments when the film is knowingly poking fun at itself to slightly lighten the tone. Worth going to see if you are a fan of the genre.

The Purge : Anarchy (2014) 56/100

Posted on July 26, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 56/100 103 Min

The sequel to last year’s ‘The Purge‘ from Blumhouse productions (with James DeMonaco writing and directing again) who don’t waste any time in getting the next installment in their franchises out. It retains the good basic story from the first one – that at some point in the very near future the U.S. Government sanction one day of violence and wanton destruction when people can ‘purge’ themselves of their baser inclinations and not face any recriminations (until the next Purge possibly), thereby theoretically creating a society largely free of crime for the rest of the year. Here, the concept is advanced a little and more politics come into it, which was a good idea and works quite well, but its critical sin is that four of the five main characters are terribly written and just as terribly acted.

Frank Grillo (‘The Winter Soldier‘, ‘End of Watch‘) plays one man on a mysterious mission – driving around on purge night in a bullet proofed car with a small arsenal with him for company, but focused on his goal rather than engaging in the bedlam around him. The character is the strongest element of the movie. Unfortunately, he stops to help out some strangers and ends up with a small entourage of completely hopeless gibberlings that shackle him for most of the film. I mean, you really feel sorry for this guy, as the others waltz around in plain sight, scream and shriek at every possible opportunity, talk when they shouldn’t, tell him killing is wrong but ask him to kill everyone around them so they can survive, just generally break his balls and cover constantly. It picks up dramatically for the last twenty or thirty minutes, and if the rest had been like this then it would have been possibly better than the original, but as it is the very people we’re supposed to empathise with effectively destroy the entire core of the film.

Oculus (2013) 61/100

Posted on June 13, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 61/100 104 Min

Horror film featuring the supposed shenanigans of an EVIL MIRROR THAT CAN CONTROL MINDS, in this case the minds of Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites) the surviving members of the Russell family, their parents having been brutalised in front of them when they were kids. Now in their early twenties, Tim is released from psychiatric care (where he has been ever since mirrorgate), convinced that his mind used the irrational to rationalised horrible instances of domestic violence – his sister’s first response to him being released is to cajole him into turning up at their old home again to immediately confront the mirror and try to tease out the evil within so she can record it and prove their parents weren’t completely mental. This will severely test the effectiveness of Tim’s therapy sessions, as well as his love for his older sister, who has effectively toughed it out by herself through the foster care system, intent on a danger fraught reckoning with the old heirloom of Balmoral castle (a nod, no doubt, to Gillan being Scottish but also an opportunity missed with no mention or link to any of the Royal Family that stayed there).

Gillan sports an understated and entirely convincing American accent and is herself the strongest element in the film, with Thwaites having the difficult, hackneyed and irritating role of conveying the ‘I don’t believe any of this’ trope across to the audience. Throughout the entire movie we have a dual narrative – what’s happening with the two main characters in the present, spliced with showing us what happened to them and their parents when they were kids and here the biggest difficulty arises, as one not only detracts from the other but they both eventually become deliberately intertwined, which is a pretty ambitious strategy and, well, the film doesn’t really pull it off. There are lots of silly moments, like Kaylie earnestly saying ‘OK, from now on we’ll stick together’ and then hotfooting it right out the door and leaving her brother to stare into space in growing stupefaction (he does this a lot). The enemy they are ostensibly up against seems too powerful as well, with the pair unable to tell what is real and what isn’t, especially when Kaylie has prepared the scenario already armed with this knowledge.

Despite never really hooking the audience it does have its moments, and it’s still better than the majority of horror films churned out nowadays because it at least attempts to have a story, even if that story does, at times, become a convoluted mess.

The Last Days on Mars (2013) 56/100

Posted on May 16, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 56/100 98 Min

A zombie film set on Mars, not unusual in terms of the genre but slightly so in terms of its general release at the cinema and not straight to DVD. Mankind has recently established a base on the red planet and the present crew are due to be shipped back to Earth for the next staff rotation when one of them happens upon sings of microbiological life. This life form, as one would expect, starts to turn the humans into flesh eating zombies that are impervious to the atmospheric conditions of Mars and the laws of science and nature in general. You can tell who is going to meet their undeath first based on their acting calibre. It’s not all that bad, is just isn’t interesting, original or tense enough to be particularly worthwhile, nor is it sadly bad enough to be especially good fun. Watch ‘Mission to Mars’ (2000) instead, which was also ropey in places but was great to watch, or the Mars episode of Doctor Who with the aliens in the water which was also good apart from the completely nonsensical ending. With Liev Schreiber, Olivia Williams, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai and Johnny Harris.

The Quiet Ones (2014) ?/100

Posted on May 15, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : ?/100 98 Min

I had an unusual experience watching this one – I actually felt it was so completely without worth that, upon seeing the gentleman in front of me get up and leave half way through, I thought actually that’s a pretty good idea.

This is the latest example of what I term the ‘Battery’ genre, see Devil’s Due, and here the story is completely pathetic, a young girl is effectively kept as a prisoner in a house in Cambridge/Oxford (I don’t remember which, it’s quite irrelevant) whilst a group of scientists attempt to ‘cure’ her psychosis and film the procedure even though it is completely obvious to us that there is a ghost haunting/possessing her, one of the quiet ones presumably. So we have lots of blah blah blah not at all interesting plot with zero acting BANG blah blah blah BANG blah blah blah BANG! And so this pattern repeats itself constantly. The thing is, these jump moments are not suspenseful or a shock, or a surprise – we know where they are coming with certainty, and yet we still jump at them, not because they are scary but because the decibel level is so high that it’s a physical thing, bordering on the painful.

I don’t see why anyone would want to pay money to be subjected to visual and sensorial abuse, and circa forty five to fifty minutes worth was all I was willing to put up with.

Under the Skin (2013) 69/100

Posted on April 19, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 69/100 108 Min

This is only director Jonathan Glazer’s third feature film (the other two, ‘Sexy Beast’ 2000 and ‘Birth’ 04 are definitely both worth watching too) and as an adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name it’s his most ambitious project yet. The essence of the plot is that aliens have come to Earth and managed to don themselves in our skin, and they go around collecting live human specimens for some nefarious purpose. Interesting, but nothing especially new – however the delivery mechanism is uncomfortably captivating. Scarlett Johansson plays the primary alien honey trap and we watch her drive around the streets of Glasgow in a white transit van (it was nice of the aliens to target our mercurial ned population) trying her hand as a pick up artist, though one imagines her perhaps not having too much difficulty with this, she is after all Scarlett Johansson even with a black wig on. The necessity for the wig becomes obvious when we realise that some of the film is actually comprised of real footage and features members of the public rather than actors.

I love this concept – not only is it daringly unique but, especially with what happens to the men she seduces, it is a very powerful statement on what could lie beneath the skin of any potential partner, whether the viewer wants to interpret that in terms of disease, personality or both. Does it also perhaps imply Scarlett Johansson has a fetish for Scottish men? She is welcome to a cup of tea courtesy of The Red Dragon if so, although I am reliably informed by one of my pregnant female friends (I impregnate human females on a regular basis) that miss Johansson is expecting, so many congratulations to her and her fiancé.

As the film progresses it moves away from this concept somewhat to focus on the character of the main alien herself (assuming it has a gender) as she has a bit of a moral/personality crisis. This is where the film is at its weakest – we spend a lot of time with the director trying to convey this change across to us, but it usually amounts to little more than the principal lead staring into space, or at a wall, and the sci-fi concept of something non human coming to consider their humanity is something that most audiences will be overly familiar with.

There are plenty of moments of darkness and just as many of contemplation, creating several very, very memorable scenes, and there are many physically brazen performances from the cast to accompany them, none more so than from the leading lady herself. She is wonderful throughout, but in this physical aspect she was also the perfect choice. Consistently held up as an ideal in terms of both beauty and sex appeal in the real world, we see her examine her naked skin and body in the mirror in growing curiosity, though it is an opportunity half realised as personally I would have liked to see more focus on this aspect – not for the sake of perving but rather to show that everyone, even the most supposedly flawless person, can find parts of their bodies that are not ‘ideal’ and from certain angles look pretty far from it. The film does at least delve into this denuding of perfection.

A movie like this is always worth going to see if only to appreciate an artist trying to create something original. It’s largely a success and it will certainly stay with you for a long time, just be prepared for lots of nudity and sinister, yet not entirely alien, concepts.

Scarlett Johansson enjoying the Scottish sunshine

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) 73/100

Posted on March 17, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 73/100 123 Min

Another journey into the mindscape of Jim Jarmusch travelling along the familiar pathways of his love for music and physics, but this time delivered via the unexpectedly ethereal, and at times amusing, blackened world of vampires. Tom Hiddleston (Adam) and Tilda Swinton (Eve) are the lead vamps and have been lovers for countless decades, with John Hurt and Mia Wasikowska in support, aided by Anton Yelchin and Jeffrey Wright as two of the few mortals in the film. The performances are great, especially from the leads, but the use of music throughout the film is very well balanced creating not only a sombre tone for the shadowlands of their lives, but also a unique ambience for long reflective moments, as we spend most of the film in Adam’s home musing along with his lugubrious melancholy at the state of the world.

His home is in a rundown area of Detroit, where he lives as a mysterious and reclusive musician lamenting on the fact that his distancing himself from commercial interests only seems to make his music even more popular, which is the perfect setting, subtly adding to the not so cheery vein running through the film after Detroit last year was forced to declare itself bankrupt, the largest scale event of its kind in US history, with her population considerably under half of what it was in the 1950s. The vampirism is part anchor and delivery mechanism for the philosophy, but it could also easily be read as a thinly veiled metaphor for drug use and dependence, especially when they speak of contamination of the blood supply, in today’s HIV conscious world.

Continuing the protagonists commentary on the general malaise of mankind, comparing his centuries of scientific learning and cultural experiences to the modern world, we find mention of the work and theories of nineteenth century electronics pioneer Nikola Tesla, just as in Jarmusch’s ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ (David Bowie gives a nice turn playing him in ‘The Prestige’ (06) as well, incidentally), and when Adam points to the mess of cables and wires around the place that pass for a supply of power and waves it off as woefully rudimentary and wasteful, he is absolutely right. In today’s world, the technology and know how exist to completely transform the way we live, making it a hundred times more economically viable as well as environmentally friendly – for those with a Facebook account take a look at this clip from Physicist TV to see what I mean, or watch the excellent documentary ‘Who Killed the Electric Car’ (06) to see how big business stamps its regressive boot down on technology that threatens its profits.

For fans of Jarmusch this is a must see, and for everyone else it’s worth delving into for the shades of legitimate grey contrasted with the unhurried, yet enduring and passionate romance of the two main characters.

Devil’s Due (2014) 0/100

Posted on February 12, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 0/100 COMPLETE INCINERATION 89 Min

Following in the tradition of what Blumhouse productions have set in motion with their Paranormal Activity franchise, although here not connected with that company, this is just another abysmal take on the handheld, or ‘found footage’, horror genre. Although Blair Witch did kick off the whole racket back in 99, this particular wave of films is designed with a very, very twisted core idea using the technology to in many ways assault the viewers psyche, with sudden jumps and the mixing of real footage with what are designed to be terrifying images. The Red Dragon coins this the ‘Battery’ genre, where as well as the standard use of batteries your visual and audio experience is reduced to being hit repeatedly with shocks and screeches, sudden jumps, and prolonged shots where you know a jump is coming and you just have to wait for it.

It doesn’t sound all that different from the horror genre in general over the decades, but there is a big cinematic difference and the end result is simply a sickening experience on a par with ‘Torture Porn’, and this kind of filmmaking is just about the most rudimentary and easiest to create. Literally anyone can make this stuff, and the team behind this have barely bothered at all with believable characters or a story, with the focus being on a young couple who get hoodwinked by a cabbie into going to a party with him where they get drugged and the girl impregnated by some kind of demon and the offspring starts to twist the young girl’s being into a creature of evil, whilst her partner figures out what’s going on and precedes to do very little about it except stand in the right places for the jumps to arrive.

Same old, same old – to compare this style of film with one of value we have ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (68) which has essentially the same storyline (and also has Mia Farrow’s unconscious character raped by Satan at the bequest of her husband, played by John Cassavetes, and to explain her bruises the next day he says something like ‘Oh yeah, you passed out so I just used you anyway’, not exactly an elaborate excuse) and is revered as a classic, it’s disturbing but watchable. I don’t believe any human being could get anything positive out of this sort of trash which is becoming ever more frequent at the cinema, to the point where I may simply start drawing a line and not even bothering to watch future releases, there really is no point.

Paranormal Activity : The Marked Ones (2014) 43/100

Posted on February 1, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 43/100 84 Min

Grooooooan. Yet another stale and regurgitated horror film from Blum Productions in the Paranormal Activity series, this time swapping surveillance cameras for handheld ones and revolving around the story arc of certain people being chosen for demonic possession by a coven of Satan worshippers and dark magic practitioners. The cameras are held by three friends, one of whom has been chosen to have his brain turned to mush by a demon, but not before he subjects us to terrible camera work and predictable jump moments. There’s a semblance of a story, but not much else going on here.

Carrie (2013) 68/100

Posted on December 10, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 68/100 100 Min

The remake of the 1976 classic horror film (based on Stephen King’s 1974 novel) does a pretty convincing job, but unfortunately loses its way toward the end. Chloë Grace Moretz takes on the titular role of Carrie White (originally immortalised by the wonderful Sissy Spacek) a shy and bullied young girl in high school who discovers she has telekinetic powers, and who also has to contend with her unhinged religious zealot of a mother (Julianne Moore). Moretz is convincing throughout – not an easy role for her given the existing iconic status of Carrie, and also the fact that her character here is in many ways the opposite of her own immensely popular onscreen persona of Hit-Girl in the ‘Kick-Ass’ franchise. It’s just a shame there isn’t a more rewarding release of all that tension that is successfully built up in the first two thirds of the film. It should mostly satisfy, but is unlikely to either delight, or overtly offend.

The Red Dragon

Movie Reviews

Tag Archives: Horror