PROMETHEUS (2012)

Now the dust has settled and the weight of expectation dissipated I finally settled down to watch Ridley Scott’s long anticipated PROMETHEUS. A prequel of sorts to the ALIEN franchise its release set the Xenomorph amongst the pigeons for being not very good. Many people were expecting another horror film in space and what they got was an unexpected mediation on the nature of man. Though I have always thought anything is better as long as it is...IN SPACE.

A team of scientists and support crew answer an ancient riddle and find themselves far across space on an isolated planet. When they arrive they find the answer may not have been what they were looking for.

PROMETHEUS is an incredibly frustrating film. All the elements are there for a classic but somewhere along the line it all goes horribly wrong (which is very much the film’s plot but I doubt it was meant to be a meta mediation on the nature of film making).  What is right with this film is the art side. Ridley Scott’s direction and editing is superb as ever. The art design is breathlessly good. There is a lovely sense of retro with the suit designs but combined with modern sensibilities. One of my major issues with science-fiction is the habit of doing pointlessly futuristic versions of things which have not changed in millennium. “This isn't chess this is chess...IN SPACE” and so on. Prometheus keeps it pleasingly simple. Coffee cups look like coffee cups and t-shirts look like they are from Primark. It suffers from the same problem as the STAR WARS prequels did. The film, set chronologically first in the film continuity, have more advanced looking tech than those set afterwards. PROMETHEUS gets away with it by having this as a state-of-the-art expedition whereas the tech in ALIEN was on a run-down space barge and I doubt such matters were a concern for the casual viewer.

What is a cause of concern for the casual viewer is the script of PROMETHEUS is a confused mess.  In theory it should be fine as it is nominally by Damon Lindelhof, Hollywood’s go to man for consistently good sci-fi.  Having read his superior initial draft of the script I wonder if either corporate meddling or Ridley Scott asked for changes which sent the whole work into a blind alley. The initial draft was closer to ALIEN and this film is basically Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods? It is all Ancient Astronauts and secrets from the dawn of man rather than phallic Aliens stalking people around corridors.  In losing the horror aspect it rather loses any point in being linked to the ALIEN franchise.  There are plot holes a plenty, characters act illogically and everybody seems terrible at their jobs. There are archaeologists ripping open tombs with a gay abandon and biologists contaminating samples left and right. Though I concede if they did their jobs properly it would somewhat take from the drama. They could have switched the film’s genres as I would have paid to see Time Team...IN SPACE.

"I'm Dr. Elizabeth Shaw"

PROMETHEUS has one very odd thing about it. I think, on a fundamental level, the reason this film does not work is Ridley Scott has made a DOCTOR WHO adventure and forgotten to put the Doctor in. It is reminiscent of Colony In Space or the Mutants with its themes of industrial arrogance and colonialism. All of the film’s problems would have been solved by Jon Pertwee striding around the place pointing out the obvious. Are your archaeologists being useless? Let the Doctor tell them that and show them what they should be doing.  If your film ends because somebody does something stupid let the Doctor doing something terribly clever and point out the folly of your plan. One of the characters even shares a name with one of Pertwee’s companions: Dr. Elizabeth Shaw.  

"No I'm Dr. Elizabeth Shaw"

PROMETHEUS could have been wonderful instead it is simply, all right. It entertains but it falls apart too much to ever be good. It is a shame they did not realise and embrace their DOCTOR WHO roots as nothing would have been better than if they had landed on the isolated planet to find, waiting in the dark, Daleks.

RED RIDING HOOD (2011)

The success of the Twilight film has been a bit of mixed blessing. It has seen a revival in teen horror but it has caused a spate of mashing horror films with teenage romance and coming of age plots. It is not necessarily a bad thing but when I want horror film I would far rather it concentrate on horrible things crawling in the corner of your mind rather than teens lustful gazing.

RED RIDING HOOD is a post Twilight take on Little Red Riding Hood. A medieval village of undetermined geography is terrorised by a werewolf.  A young girl in a red cloak falls in love with a woodsman and a religious zealot comes to town to save it from the wolf’s curse.

I cannot decide if I like this film or not (a perfect way to start a review). Every time I think about it there are bits I like and then I think about other parts of the film and weep for the time I will never get back.

The biggest problem with RED RIDING HOOD is it is bloody tedious. Lots of soft focus shots of teens biting their quivering lips at one another and a monster that does very little in the way of being monstrous. The teen romance is there in abundance. Hormones spilling out the frame and with lots of shots of lithe naked young men making the girls in the audience swoon. If your audience are passing out in a horror film because they are swooning rather than being overwhelmed by bottomless terror, you have failed. The film seems to go on and on never get anywhere which is amazing as it is just over 90 minutes long (The length that all horror films should be; what’s that? You think you have a great 2 hour horror film script? That’s wonderful but you’re wrong.)

The film is saved by a wonderfully eclectic cast with GaryOldman, Virginia Madsen and the only Canadian actor with an obviously Canadian accent himself, Michael Hogan.  Gary Oldman is especially good as a religious fanatic with a vendetta against werewolves and a giant metal elephant as part of his retinue.  It is the older cast members who save this film as the younger actors stink up the screen with soap-opera histrionics and a stark inability to convince.

"Heave Bosom, Heave"

However, despite these problems there was something rather nostalgic about this film. It was all shot on a studio village set and only left it to go onto another set which is very rare for modern films.  I liked this because it evoked Hammer Horror at its height like Plague of Zombies or The Reptile. A lone isolated village beset by a horror from within. It is a shame the werewolf is rubbish. A CGI spill over from a SyFy channel Friday night film it looks as threatening as a damp corgi. There are some nice variations on the werewolf mythology with it unable to pass onto hallowed ground but it is mostly a failure.  

The real monster is Gary Oldman’s fanatic. Oldman delivers a camp, grandiose performance which manages to both chew the scenery and be terrifying simultaneously.  Followed by an odd assembly of African soldiers he is brilliant flash of the different. The aforementioned metal elephant is a variation on the Brazen Bull torture device and I have no idea how it ended up in this film. It entrance is trumpeted but then it does not figure in the plot again. A Chekov’s Elephant Gun if you will (I Thank You).

The incongruity of Oldman and his background being better thought through than the rest of the plot makes me wonder if he was a holdover from an earlier, very different draft of the script. If it was originally written more as a straight out horror and the producers decided to make it appeal to the Twilight crowd? 

RED RIDING HOOD is an infuriating failure. You wonder if it could have been something better but commerce took it over. I do not think I can recommend this film but should a friend ever make you watch it I insist you cry “Why Grandma what rubbish taste in DVDs you have”

"What am I doing in this film?

CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

I have had this film on a DVD of three public domain horror films sitting unwatched since 2003. I had long heard it was a unique and interesting horror film and having watched it I am glad I waited so very long to do so.  CARNIVAL OF SOULS manages to transcend its B-Movie origins and ends up becoming something altogether different. It is referred to as a cult classic but I think that does the film a disservice. It manages to take itself into a realm where it becomes simply a classic.

Mary Henry is the passenger in a car with friends. They take up the offer of a drag race but lose control and the car plummets off a bridge.  All appear drowned, until Mary miraculously emerges from the river. After recovering from the accident, Mary accepts a job as a church organist and moves to a new town. However, she is trailed by a strange spectral figure that seems connected with an abandoned pavilion by the sea.

I am not really sure where to begin with this film, there is so much to it. The script must not have looked anything special. The dialogue is reasonable if stilted and there is little in the way of characterisation.  The plot is essentially a reworking of Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Ridge. The main character narrowly escapes death and goes through a series of increasingly wild events only at the last to find that they died and all they experienced was in their minds. Recently BBCs Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes and JJ Abram’s Lost all reworked the concept. It is not in the script where the magic of this film lays.

Mary Henry is played by Candace Hillgloss, an actress with an unremarkable career. Her only other film of note appears to be The Curse of the Living Corpse another drive-in B-Movie.  She is not by any definition a good actress; she is stiff and her speech leaden. Somehow this adds to films sense of dislocation. Mary is an isolated figure throughout and her performance gives a very strange feeling to the whole piece.

The rest of the characters are better but only marginally so. A series of ciphers whose characters can be described by their job titles acted out like a local Am-dram play.  This unusually artificial sensation somehow makes it seem slightly more real. As if the camera is following actual people rather than actors. It is hard to define the sensation it creates except there is a bold sense of terror and tension running throughout the film.  It looks more like a French New Wave film than an American B-Movie. It has the same air of narrative ambiguity and subjective realism.  The film marketed itself with the tag line “A New Wave picture you CANNOT forget” If this was just marketing or a deliberate intention by the film maker I don’t know but it fits as New Wave cinema in France would not end until 1964.

It is the direction which really sets this apart. The cinematography has a strange, dreamlike air to it. It creates a sense of water and fluidity throughout. I do not know if this was intentional but as Mary drowns in the film I like to think not. The director Herk Harvey mostly worked in educational and public information films so even with its dreamlike atmosphere it feels very real. It is an incredible trick to pull off. I suspect this film was a major influence on David Lynch. His films Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Drive have the same tone as CARNIVAL OF SOULS.  The audience are shown a dream as a documentary. I also detect an influence on George A. Romero from this film. The spectral figure which haunts Mary at one point arises from the water. Romero would shoot an almost identical scene in Land of the Dead with his zombies replacing CARNIVAL OF SOULS’ ghosts.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS is not just a cult classic it is a classic. This film deserves preservation as it is quite astonishing. It creates a sense of dread and unease in every part of the frame and note on the soundtrack. In any discussion of the influence of French New Wave cinema in America this should be the first and last example. Somehow what could easily have been a creaky B-Movie becomes art. It has stepped beyond the confines of its commercial format into something altogether different; it is like opening a Superman comic to find it has been drawn by Picasso. I say to everybody to see this film and you are in luck. As so often happened with B-Movies the copyright was not maintained properly and it has fallen into the public domain. So I present to you now CARNIVAL OF SOULS, “A Sensation About  A New Dimension”

THE BLACK HOLE (1979)

This is a film which has passed me by over the years. One of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom films of the late 70s and early 80s it was one of Disney’s rare excursions into darker territory (Both literally and figuratively; the film’s about a Black Hole). THE BLACK HOLE has become something of a curio over the years. Unlike its Disney stable mate Tron it has inspired no spin-offs or calls for sequels.  The only real presence it has in pop culture is V.I.N.CENT, the floating robot which clearly came about as an attempt to emulate R2 D2s success. I had caught moments of it over the years on television but had always missed the first 20 minutes so never watched it through. My SKY TV package had been trailing the new Disney Film Channel for some months but all the trailers had focused exclusively on its animation output so it was a great delight when flicking through the on demand section one night on my iPad I found that it rather more than that. Such gems as One of My Dinosaurs is Missing are out of the remit of this blog so I finally settled on filling my sci-fi film knowledge’s black hole (Ahh see what I did there. I impress nobody)

The research vessel the USS Palomino discovers a long lost ship, the USS Cygnus, on the event horizon of a black hole. Empty except for the scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt and a crew of mysterious robots the course is set beyond the final frontier and into the black hole.

"R2-D2. Is he famous?"

This is a really decent film and has been unfairly forgotten in the annuls of sci-fi cinema. It is a good story which an interesting cast and great production design but I think I can see why it has fallen from the radar. It has a confused tone as it lacks the rigour of hard sci-fi and the daring-do of space opera. In falling in-between it is not successful as either. I think there was a serious Silent Running esque story at the core of this film but the success of Star Wars led to the introduction of melodramatic elements which might have been left for another film. If you can imagine 2001 with cute robot sidekicks and laser battles you are not a million light years away from this film. Actually that would be a great film – Hal in the body of a golden butler with a psychotic glint and the Monolith at the end transforms into a massive robot with a gun.  But I digress.

The film takes a turn into very 2001 territory at the end with a strange bit of metaphorical madness involving heaven and hell imagery. I dismissed it as quite tame then realised it was fairly bold for more modern Disney. It has that air of darkness which the original Disney films had but became lost once Walt Disney’s vision was replaced by corporate pastiche.

A wonderfully eclectic cast including Ernest Borgnine, Roberts Foster and Norman Bates himself Anthony Perkins creates a great texture to this film playing characters far from the traditional Hollywood archetypes. I cannot think of another large budget film with an aging cast full of scientists and journalists.  Roddy McDowell voices V.I.N.CENT and rather raises the role above that cute robot sidekick. His sarcastic, droll performance gently undercuts the whole thing. He is almost a prototype for Joss Whedon’s knowing characters.

The real stand-out of this film is the production design. It is fantastic on a scale we rarely see these days. Huge physical sets which look like somebody has translated sci-fi book covers into vivid architecture. There’s a reality to it modern green-screening cannot approach. The USS Cygnus is a wondrous thing and I was wondering why it seemed familiar. I think it may have been an influence on the Destiny in Stargate Universe. There are certain similarities of scale and design which seem more than subconscious. Vast industrial spaces illuminated by sulfurous yellow arc lights like a Stoke-On-Trent in space.

This could have been a great film but it does not quite manage to get there. I think it may have been Disney corporate policy which held it back. It is with some trepidation I hear a remake is abroad from the director of Tron: Legacy. There is nothing really sacred in this film, no internet fan voices clamoring for nostalgia which can hamper the best of reboots. I rather hope they embrace the impossible in the remake and make it into the film it should have been.

THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961)

"Lovely Poster"

Now dear reader, this was an interesting one. I had been looking forward to rewatching this film for a very long time. I had fond memories of staying up to watch it late at night on Channel 4 when I was a bedroom lurking youth.  Now as a bedroom lurking adult it seemed time to revisit a film which I enjoyed so much I remembered vividly. After watching Hammer’s only werewolf film I discovered something to my horror. Many people are disappointed when watching films through the spectrum of age as time and opinions change. I was not so much disappointed as surprised because this was not the film I remembered.  There was one scene which seemed familiar and the film’s Spanish setting rang bells but nothing else.  My normally infallible memory had failed me spectacularly. I was watching a rather tame film about a man struggling with the beast inside rather than the vivid horror film set in zoo I recalled so lucidly. All roads lead to Wikipedia and I discovered what the problem was. I was not misremembering this film. I was remembering an entirely different film with virtually the same plot, Tyburn Studio’s Legend of the Werewolf.

Once I had got over this confusing disappointment I could actually get back to the film.

One Christmas Day a child is born to a mute runaway. The child’s bastard origins on the Lord’s Day curse him to become a werewolf.  Taken in and raised by the kindly Don Alfredo when he grows up to be a man he leaves home to work in a winery. The temptations of lust overwhelm him and the wolf comes out one full moon.

A rather lacklustre entry into the Hammer canon which start somewhere interesting ends abruptly and goes nowhere in between. In that respect it is very like the A47 between Norwich and Thetford. There is a long winded opening scene of a beggar being locked away by a sadistic aristocrat which rather eludes me. It spends all its time building sympathy for the poor man only to have him commit a rather unpleasant rape at the first opportunity. The product of which is Leon, the boy destined to become a werewolf. I kept getting thrown by the choice of name. Leo as in Lion, for a man who turns into a wolf, which sent me into a right symbolic funk and then realised I was probably the only person in the world who had ever considered that so promptly told me to shut up.  “This is my pet pit bull Lion-O”, but I digress. The film plods along mostly and without much of anything happening. Some Spaniards get drunk and disaster occurs when Leon visits a brothel and the beast runs free. Then at the end the werewolf is shot. That is the film really. To put it briefly;   beggar, rape, baby, wine press  werewolf, dead werewolf. That actually makes it sound more interesting than it is. The best I can say for this film is it is brief.

"You been at the sherry again?"

There are some good points to Curse of the Werewolf. Oliver Reed is wonderful in a relatively early role. He summons the animistic passion of Leon excellently and Clifford Evans is fantastic as Don Alfredo, his adopted father. Warren Mitchell makes an appearance playing a man of indeterminate Hispanic/Middle-eastern ethnicity as he so often did back then.

Terence Fisher’s direction is as ever excellent and the film is really lifted by a fantastic musical score. This is one of the least impressive of Hammer’s golden age of horror films. It is not exactly bad it just never really gets started. The one scene I could remember, of Leon as a child half turned into a werewolf pulling against the bars which imprison him is the scariest scene in the film and was probably why it stuck in my mind.  The rest of it has receded replaced by the seemingly far more interesting Legend of the Werewolf.  Now that is a film I am looking forward to seeing.

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)

As it is the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who this year I have decided it was time to revisit his immediate fictional predecessor Bernard Quatermass. Invented by Nigel Kneale in the 1950s Quatermass was a British Rocket Scientist who took on unknown alien menaces threatening humanity (well the British Countryside). 

Originally a BBC series the Quatermass Experiment Hammer licenced it for the screen in 1955 and began its success sparked the Hammer Horror genre. I shall be watching the whole Quatermass series and so begin where it all started.

A mission to space, launched by Prof. Bernard Quatermass' British Rocket Group, goes ever wrong and crashes back to earth. Only one of the three astronauts has survived and he begins to change into something else, something inhuman. When he escapes from custody Quatermass realises that what the astronaut is turning into is a threat to all humanity.

This is a frustrating film. I enjoyed it but I do not think I can say it is actually a good film. The script compresses the orginal 6 part BBC drama in 90 minutes which gives it a great pace. However, there is something lacking in this film. Some things happen and then at the end they stop and I never quite care about the journey. The more I have thought about the more I have wondered if it is because it was essentially the first Hammer Horror. It lacks the  vividness and lurid incident of the later films and goes beyond taking itself seriously. Hammer Horrors were never tongue in-cheek, that was a dreadful post-ironic media imposition, but they knew what they were there for. To get the teenagers in on a Friday night on the promise of swooning maidens and horrid monsters. The Quatermass Xperiment comes across as too earnest and it seems like it wants to say something relevant about the space race when it does not actually have an opinion.

"Evening All"

This feeling is not helped by the casting of Brian Donleavy as Quatermass.I do not think I have ever seen such a spectacular bit of miscasting in any film. The character is written as  a questing enthusiastic scientist seeking to push the boundaries of science but Donleavy delivers it like some humourless drill sergeant less interested in the pursuit of knowledge than throwing his weight around. His performance is stiff and lifeless and every time he walks on screen the film sinks. What is even more frustrating is the supporting cast are uniformly excellent with Lionel Jeoffries appearing briefly and being more Quatermass than Quatermass himself. One piece of casting which I did not know about and was a pleasant uprise was Jack Warner was Police Inspector Lomax. Dixon of Dock Green himself plays Lomax with a gusto which draws you in. I see why he became Britain's favourite copper for all those years. He is set up as the counterpoint to Quatermass, the supposed rationalist and intellectual, as a salt-of-the-earth man who believes in the bible. He comes to accept what is happening because of the evidence presented even if he does not think man should be meddling. Clearly there was supposed to be more of an opposition on the character arcs between Lomax and Quatermass. Lomax accepts that the events are going wrong because of the evidence presented. Quatermass who was supposed to embrace the unknown, has his faith in science and progress put to the test by events going wrong, or more importantly, not as he predicted. This is there in the script but Donleavy's stilted baleful performance robs the film of any of it.

"I don't know what's stiffer. This man or your acting"

There are some lovely moments in the film. A wonderfully strange bit when the changing astronaut absorbs a cactus into his body for no discernible reason (well there is a bit of techno-babble why but it never really explains the scene). Later on there is a riff on the scene from Universal's Frankenstein when the Monster encounters the child playing. Unlike in that film there is no real denouement to the scene apart from perhaps indication of the last vestige of the astronaut's humanity when he leaves the child to play. 

But those two scenes alone do not a great film make. This film has more worth as a curiosity than an actual film on its own merits. If you are a fan of Hammer Horror it is interesting to see where it all began and to see the first hero of British TV on the big screen. The film was named the Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the new X Certificate fad but it never quite lives up to its own publicity. It set the stage for what was come but never really comes to life itself. So an inauspicious start to watching the Quatermass series but hopefully it can only get better from here. I am disappointed nobody has done the Quatermass XXXperiment yet.

DREDD (2012)

Superheroes films are everywhere these days with Marvel's multiple franchises, DCs endless cash-bat with the Dark Knight films and its upcoming Superman reboot. British superheroes have never had much representation in any medium other than the comics they came from. Marvel may be giving us the Avengers and all related to it but we have yet to see House of Dolmann or The Leopard of Lime Street make it to the cineplex. British comics has always had on character which has stood out head and massively padded shoulders above the rest; Judge Dredd. In 1995 Slyvester Stallone attempted to bring the lawman to the screen and failed utterly. The film was an appalling mess and attempted to turn the heavy 80s satire of the original story into a hilarious buddy cop flick. A film so awful it actually made me wish Judge Dredd's method of summary justice existed so I could condemn Stallone's co-star Rob Schneider, to death for the excruciating horror of his performance in the film. Seventeen years later Dredd comes back in a film that almost gets it right.

In the future megalopolis of Mega-City One law enforcement is run by Judges. Street police with the power to act as judge, jury and, if necessary, executioner. Judge Dredd is sent on routine patrol with with the trainee Judge Anderson, a mutant psychic. They end up trapped in a locked down housing complex chased by the suppliers of the latest designer drug Slo-Mo, the Ma-Ma gang.

Dredd succeeds because of the simplicity of its script, it is Die Hard in the future. With the action confined to one location, the slum tower block Peach Trees, the narrative drives forward unrelentingly  Dredd, by the nature of character as the mono-syllabic, faceless enforcer of the law cannot change. He is a constantly frozen figure with a closer resemblance to a narrative macguffin than an actual character. 

The character arc shifts to Judge Anderson as we see her develop from substandard trainee to the newest Judge on the street. By the end of the film all the questions set up at the start are answered and all the characters have changed which is much better than most action films. Even Dredd learns something by the end of the film. Dredd does not change but he finds a new way to look at being the law which is quite the trick to pull off.

"Tonight on Take Me Out"

The acting is uniforming exellent with Karl Urban getting Dredd bang on right. Lena Hedley, who is rapidly turning into the screen favourite evil British woman, puts in a great performance as Ma-Ma. She manages to find a different type of evil to her portrayal of Cersei in Game of Thrones which impressed me.

The film looks amazing. Shot in South Africa it manages to make the best of its relatively limited budget. By stripping back the sci-fi trappings of the comic books it is a successful update. Mega-City One was a projection of Thatcher's Britain full of punks and tower blocks but this takes a different satirical tack. It seems more like a right-wing Daily Mail nightmare of an inner city. Full of unemployment,feral children and tattooed gang wars. It is clever and very well realised. Shot on RED digital cameras the hi-res videography gives it a brilliant sheen. The cinematography really stands out as it seems they have found somebody who can light for RED cameras without making it look like its shot on BBC Drama videotape.

"Judge Dredd? No. Never heard of him mate"

The one thing the film lacks is Judge Dredd's heavy social and corporate satire. Dredd is in an unfortunate position that a knock-off got there first. RoboCop by Paul Verhoevan was ripped off Judge Dredd with a faceless law enforcer who never slept. Even visually RoboCop looks like Dredd down to the helmet and voice activated weapon. Verhoevan filled his film with the kind of satire of adverts, consumer culture and eighties economics which ran rife through the Judge Dredd comics. To take this approach could have lead to accusations of ripping off to rip off. Although I suspect enough time has passed since the original RoboCop they could have got away with it. Given how clever the script was with distilling the essence of Dredd it is a shame none of the strips satire made it onscreen.

This film looks good, its well written and it is a British superhero on the big screen. It is a shame it was not more of success at the cinema. If late night weekend showings still existed I suspect it would be doing a roaring trade given the incredibly graphic levels of violence and slightly bonkers acting. It seems to be doing massive business on download and DVD which makes me hope there may be a market other than the cinema. Many of the downloaders like Amazon and iTunes are investigating original programming and Dredd would seem a good place to start. 

So Dredd you were not quite the success of Batman or Iron Man but it far more interesting and engaging than either. Like most British comic books really.