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.

THE MUTATIONS AKA THE FREAKMAKER (1974)

THE MUTATIONS AKA THE FREAKMAKER (1974)

Students from a local university are being kidnapped and delivered to a madman for experimentation. Meanwhile a dark Carnival shows its new freaks to 70s London. Could they be related? 

An almost forgotten gem THE MUTATIONS AKA THE FREAKMAKER is a film I have been wanting to see for years. Starring the ever present Donald Pleasance I became aware of the film from Doctor Who Magazine. Pleasance's co-star in this, is the Fourth Time Lord himself Tom Baker in what must have been his final film role before he took the keys to the TARDIS. Directed by the great Jack Cardiff this is a unique entry in the canon of British horror and exploitation.

Donald Pleaseance plays Professor Nolter the, as ever deranged, scientist who tests his theories on crossbreeding plants and animals on unwilling students. Tom Baker plays Lynch, the deformed owner of a travelling Freak Show, who abducts Nolter's test subjects. The failed experimental mutants become side-show attractions for Lynch's circus. However, soon a revolt by the circus performers and an escaped mutant brings the freak making to an end.

This film is a horror miscellany with a plot that appears to be cobbled from two different scripts altogether. We have a plot about a mad scientist and his deformed assistant and a plot about a revolt in a circus freak show and neither really have any bearing on the other. It gives the impression somebody watched Frankenstein and Todd Browning's Freaks and decided they should make a beautiful mutant baby. It is such an audaciously odd mash-up it transcends itself. There's a unreal atmosphere which permeates the film helped by the vivid saturated Eastman colour, odd soundtrack and casting actual circus freaks. 

Every box of a horror film is ticked on a lurid register. Young ladies in danger, a dashing hero, a twisted henchman and a mad scientist who has lost sight of his humanity. One of the Professor's mutant experiment's escapes half way through and becomes the eventual hero of the piece.  It creates an almost textbook retelling of Frankenstein with the monster who is more human and humane than his creator. There is also a howlingly clumsy late in the plot romance between two characters who are never developed. I wonder if the producers watched it and decided they needed a romance so just gave some lines to two extras.

However, there is an odd artificiality to the film. Ironically with Tom Baker in the cast if feels more like a Doctor Who version of a horror film than an actual horror film. It is essentially the Brain Of Morbius but without the Doctor and Sarah Jane. 

"The Unexpected Delights of Speed Dating" 

The cast are all wonderful. Donald Pleasance is hardly in it and his performance is almost identical to Dr. Loomis in Halloween. Rumour has it the role was originally intended for Vincent Price which I can well imagine. Tom Baker is always Tom Baker but he puts in a rather more restrained performance than would come as his legend grew. The Circus Freaks like the Human Pretzel, The Alligator Woman and Popeye help to contribute to the films rather arch air by not acting. Clearly chosen because they were freaks rather than actors they give those odd performances only non-actors can. They reminded me of Mick Jagger in Performance, and Tory budgets.

The cinematography is lovely with some fantastic time lapse photography in the opening credits. It is the film's soundtrack by Basil Kirchen which really stands out. Kirchen produced a number of soundtracks for films like The Abomnible Dr. Phibes, and his strange jazz is so mutated from its origins it fits the film. Kirchen was known for an album called "Worlds Within Worlds" where he prefigured sampling and looping by mixing the sounds of insects and autistic children with jazz noodling. It is a suitably unreal soundscape for such an unreal film.

The biggest surprise in this film is the director. In what is essentially an exploitation B-Movie the director is Academy Award nominee cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Jack Cardiff's work spanned silent cinema to the mid 80s. He was the cinematographer on everything to A Matter of Life and Death to Conan the Destroyer. His directorial output was intriguing for a man who had worked for Orson Welles and Powell and Pressburger it was all pretty exploitation. He directed Scent of Mystery (Presented in Smell-O-Vision) and the Dark of the Sun. A long forgotten and incredibly violent account of the Congo Crisis which had the greatest poster tag line I have ever seen "You don't kill for women. You don't kill for Diamonds. You kill because you're paid for it". I hope it was because he was a fan of genre. I revel in very skilled artists and authors who never leave the confines of the genres they love, like Neil Gaiman and Quentin Tarantino. It really is a bit like finding Steven Spielberg making a revenge fantasy about topless Biker babes.

"All-right babes, I wanna spray tan"

I am pleased I managed to finally see the film and it is so very odd that I wish they still made films like this. It would certainly liven up BBC2s late night schedule. There is simply not enough these days about mutants and chemical freaks.  Now if you will excuse me I am off to watch The Only Way is Essex.

WEREWOLF (TV PILOT) 1987

WEREWOLF (TV PILOT)

With vampires back in vogue werewolves have never had much representation beyond film. WEREWOLF was one of the few, an American TV series on the fittingly canid Fox Network in 1987-1988. I had heard of this series for a few years from scant mentions in TV Zone Magazine so it was an unexpected delight when my obsessive trawling of charity shops and market stalls turned up the pilot episode on battered VHS.

Eric Cord is a typically American 30 year old college student whose roommate Ted asks him to kill him after he becomes a werewolf. I doubt this was an intentional metaphor for house sharing but certainly puts the washing-up rota into perspective. After shooting Ted and becoming a werewolf he tries to cure himself by killing the originator of the curse which turned him, a one-eyed, horror cliche of a man called Janos Skorzeny.

Script wise this is actually pretty decent. It betrays its origins as a TV pilot script as it sets up the situation, characters, motive and format all in 80 minutes. It has a pacing to it most modern films can only dream of, with a brevity which reminds me of the very early Universal horror films. It is a cursed by his superpower man-on-the-run format similar to The Incredible Hulk. I suspect the rest of the series involved him drifting from town to town searching for Skorzeny while being chased by a bounty hunter he crosses paths with in the pilot. Unfortunately as he turns into a wolf it does make me think of it as a lychanthropic Littlest Hobo (There's a Moon, that keeps on calling me) which slightly robs it of dramatic tension.

The effects are better than some films but he design work is strange with the werewolves looking more like gorillas than either men or wolves. Skorzeny has a beautifully gross transformation when he literally pulls his skin off which is one of the few instances of that style I can think of. It looks like 90s TV series, all badly mastered film to video transfer and shonky graphics.

The greatest bit in this entire film is the music score. Clearly taking a nod from the Highlander TV series it is all heavy metal and rock noodling.  I have never heard a score entirely composed of a guitar solo but I reveled in how ridiculous it sounds in some places. Axe grinding may be suitable when he turns into werewolf but it is less so when man wanders about a boat marina for a bit.

A nice idea slightly hamstrung by its need to begin a series of episodic adventures. Hopefully we might see a new werewolf series on TV one of these days perhaps merging it with reality TV as The Werewolf Whisperer.

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (2013)

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL REVIEW

I have decided to begin my blog reviewing horror and exploitation films with a most unexpected entry, Disney's OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL. Though not a horror film nothing could escape the feelings of nausea, terror unending dread which followed my watching this.

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL tells the story of magician Oscar "Oz" Diggs who is transported from Kansas to the Land of Oz by familiar tornado. As the prophesied "Wizard of Oz" the three witches, Glinda, Evanora and Theodora, attempt to get Oscar to claim the throne of Emerald City and destroy the Wicked Witch.

Hollywood's unending fascination with prequels, sequels, reboots and sidequels has finally made its way over the rainbow. The film serves as a prequel to L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz and could easily be seen as a tie-in to Judy Garland's classic Wizard of Oz. Which was clearly Disney's intent although they are barred from the mythic iconography of the ruby slippers. They were invented for the MGM film and so the rights to them reside at Warner Brothers.

Modern remakes have a terrible fixation with trying to explain every piece of continuity. I half expected the film to turn into a discourse on the genetic characteristics of the Munchkins. We are shown Oz The Great and Powerful as a failing Travelling Show illusionist who is swept away to Oz to spend 2 hours trying not to drown in a sea of fanwank.

At no point in this film did I ever begin to care about the Wizard who would be King. James Franco is glaringly miscast as the petty con-man who comes to rule the Emerald City. I had hoped in the opening minutes of the film his lack of showmanship was intentional and it would develop as he moved towards becoming the great wizard. Clearly I was wrong and instead we get a level of showmanship last seen on at a Butlin's Kids Show.The rest of cast do there job but no performance rises above the film's gaudy CGI wallpaper.

The film begins quite nicely in the black and white in the Academy 4:3 Aspect Ratio used in the 1930s and when it moves into Oz opens not only into colour but the modern 16:9 ratio. A lovely touch but the only one. The rest of the film is a lifeless parade of ill-conceived green-screen and fag-packet computer graphics. The entire film resembles those commemorative photos from theme parks where you and your strained holiday companions are lifelessly superimposed over a poorly conceived special effects scene.

A bladder destroying two hours long Oz the Great and Powerful is overblown and the director Sam Raimi appears to have forgotten how to edit and simply included everything they shot. Its a film so obese and bloated it reminded me of Robert Maxwell's corpse.

There are some redeeming qualities.When Mila Kunis's Theodora cries her skin burns and melts foreshadowing her eventual fate. A surprising and nice bit of lateral thinking having the Wicked Witch literally dissolve in tears. The costuming is fantastic evoking both 30s Hollywood and the Dust-bowl Americana of the original novels. Those two do not make up for the admission price. For me the most enjoyable part was when a friend of mine turned up in the short film, the Plotters, which was on before the main feature.

This film was the lifeless zombie version of Oz. It looked and moved in the same way as other Oz films but lacked any sense of humanity. I look forward to its even more obscure follow-up prequel, a daring tale of the Oz labour market, The Yellow Brick Road Builders of Oz.