basics...
A Norwegian 'found-footage' comedy-horror about trolls you say? I'm there!
brilliant...
The Troll Hunter would be an excellent companion piece to the Finnish Rare Exports about killer santas. Both share a Scandinavian attitude to dark humour and feature 'mythical' beasties. And both are hilarious and, to a lesser extent, scary features that will no doubt suffer in inevitable US remakes. Troll Hunter's claim to be cobbled together from real life footage that has been recently discovered adds to the sense of silly reality that has a college film crew follow a man they think is a bear poacher... and turns out to be an employee of the government's secretive TSS (Troll Security Service). Hans (Otto Jesperson) is tired of the bureaucracy of troll hunting, and he's happy for the film crew to expose the badly paid profession and thus the reality of the existence of trolls to the Norwegian public. The film is full of great comic touches, from the TSS' use a Polish team to supply dead bears with which to create a cover story for suspicious deaths, to Hans' medieval armour used in troll baiting. The trolls themselves are effective and work well in the medium of shaky cameras as they're a much more sinister presence when not seen clearly. A great deal of thought has also gone into the designs of each troll, and the behaviour of the species, making these lumpy giants more than just mindless killers - it turns out they have rabies, so there's a real reason why they've suddenly started straying from their enclosures.
briefly...
Funny, scary, intelligent and Scandinavian. There was little chance I wouldn't enjoy this!
Several things drew me to The Walking Dead - the presence of Frank 'Shawshank Redemption' Darabont behind the camera, plus Andrew 'Egg' Lincoln and Laurie 'Marita Covarrubias' Holden in front of it. Plus the subject matter - a bunch of characters try to survive following a zombie apocalypse - appeals to me, and has done since I read Stephen King's The Stand. I like fiction that posits the 'what if' for humanity if everything were to just stop, it's a fascinating concept.
The Walking Dead's brief 6 episode first season wasn't actually packed with heaps of events - all that happened was lead Rick Grimes (Lincoln) wakes up in a hospital to find everyone dead from a zombie epidemic and tries to find his wife and kid. He finds them and the group she's travelling with and they eventually decide to try to get to the local CDC facility. Oh and there are a couple of trips into the city, Atlanta, which is packed to the gills with flesh-hungry dead people. As well as using some pretty horrific effects to create the zombies and their inevitably bloody destruction, the series takes a quieter, slower examination of the living and their relationships, especially in the context of the rest of the country being wiped out.
Rick's wife, believing he was dead, has shacked up with his police-partner, only to ditch him when Rick came back, creating a bit of drama. Survivor Andrea loses her sister to the virus during the series, after their relationship had grown. There's also a wife-beater amongst the group, and a red-neck racist pair who naturally would rather pick on their black companion than concentrate on the zombies in hand. Some of this drama is a bit soapy, but it also shows that the people flung together after an apocalypse won't and don't have to get along harmoniously! Especially considering the stress levels caused by your dead loved ones trying to eat your face. I'll be searching out a second helping and hoping it returns to terrestrial TV next year.
The latest series of Being Human was the best yet! Relocated to Wales, Mitchell had to contend with a burgeoning relationship with Annie as well as the consequences of his train-car massacre last series, while George and Nina had to deal with the latter's impending pregnancy and the implications of a werewolf baby. Throw in the return of Herrick, initially amnesiac and living in the attic, along with the introduction of Robson Greene as a new werewolf vampire-hunter and the usual off-centre, British humour along with some visceral horror and the result was real edge-of-your-seat perfection.
Initially I thought that bringing Herrick back was a bit lazy and unnecessary, his story had ended when George in werewolf form ripped him to pieces last year. But it proved to be a masterstroke, the question mark over whether he was pretending to have no knowledge of his vampire status and the eventual realistation when he feeds off the hapless young detective that no, now he's back is terrifying as he lays waste to a housefull of police before stabbing Nina in the kitchen. Oh that was shortly after killing Robson Greene off too. I didn't see that coming!
2011 continues to impress in the world of cinema, this time with the creepy, psychological horror Black Swan. Masquerading as a drama about a ballet dancer who seems to gradually crack under the pressure of being the lead in Swan Lake, the movie is actually an unsettling chiller and one of the best horror movies I've seen in a while.
Natalie Portman is excellent in the lead, ably supported by Eliza-Dushku-as-Faith-alike Mila Kunis in the role of her nemesis/double/dark side/what-the-fuck?!, with Barbara Hershey as creep personified as her pushy mother in a small but memorable role. Vincent Cassel is reassuringly Gallic as the ballet director, pushing Portman to breaking point in order to get her to play the role of Black Swan convincingly.
Black Swan is one of those movies you can't stop discussing as you leave the cinema, talking about how great it is and also comparing notes on what you think it was all about. There were no definitive answers as to why Portman was seeing images of herself reflected in mirrors in different poses, or why she had a fantasy about sleeping with Kunis, or why Winona Ryder kept stabbing herself in the face with a nail file! It was real (cliché alert) edge of the seat stuff that had me squirming and occasionally watching through my fingers. The film really gets inside your head and toys with what you're expecting while drawing you in with masterful direction and a gorgeous score, adapted from Swan Lake. I hope every movie I watch at the cinema (and at home for that matter) is as good as this and the others I've seen this January.
Yesterday we went to the cinema in the early afternoon to take advantage of the cheaper prices and, along with a whole 6 other patrons, saw my first Christmas movie of the year... Well, it's not that festive, but this Finnish comedy-horror was by turns creepy, hilarious and exciting. The film sees an unscrupulous company mining a mountain in Lapland, on the Russian-Finnish border, and they end up unleashing the original Santa Claus, who was not a nice, jolly red-suited chubster but, according to legend, a horned, giant terror, who kills children who are naughty.
Young Pietari (Onni Tommila) is at the heart of Rare Exports, and he's the film's John McClane, the unlikely hero who saves the day with a great deal of pluck and humour. Living with his reindeer herding father in the snow-covered mountains, Pietari delves into books of folklore about the real Santa Claus, who was trapped in ice hundreds of years ago by unhappy Sami and is now about to be thawed out. As protagonists go, Pietari is one of the best, little Tommila is one of the best actors I've seen in anything, ever, fact! He plays world weary, cautious, terrified, courageous and confidence in ways that have you rooting for him from the first scene. The all-male cast around Tommila are great too, and are happy for him to be the centre of this crazy movie. Relationships are convincingly sketched, with everyone playing their parts straight, letting the comedy in the writing and the situations do their work.
I was worried that the movie would be gory and bloody, particularly since an early scene sees Pietari's father sharpening wooden stakes in a pit to trap wolves - I was praying that we wouldn't be subjected to anything impaling or impaled on them. Thankfully, most of the creeping horror is just that, as the tension mounts, and any violence mostly takes place off screen. There was no point where I had to look away, although one character does take an axe to the back of the head. What's more scary are the hordes of Santa's 'elves', old, bearded, naked men, who protect Santa and bring him naughty children.
Rare Exports - whose title only makes sense in the last 10 minutes, of what is quite a short yet effective movie at 84 mins - sits neatly alongside Bad Santa in the pantheon of alternative, anti-Xmas movies. It's a comedy-horror classic.
I was a bit unsure whether Black Sheep would live up to the premise, so when it turned out to be utterly hilarious I was very, very happy! Filmed and set in New Zealand, the movie is a comedy-horror where a mutant sheep species is accidentally released into the population at a sheep farm. People who are bitten begin to turn into sheep (in scenes parodying An American Werewolf in London), and others are not so lucky, as the killer sheep bite off limbs and eat entrails with gay abandon. The tongue is wedged so firmly in cheek in this movie it almost wears a hole through the side of it's mouth.
The plucky trio who are being besieged by the sheep include a young guy with sheep-phobia, picked up from a disturbing incident as a young boy; a cheery Maori farm hand who's handy with sheep medicine guns; and a chirpy, vegetarian, animal-activist who of course is partly responsible for freeing the killer sheep mutant. They're a massively likable threesome, and the actors are all clearly loving what they're doing. The script is witty, knowing, yet has a keen originality in places. This isn't just some lame Scary Movie retread of other movies, although I did spot some wonderful takes on the raptor-Muldoon Jurassic Park showdown and the wildebeest stampede from The Lion King as rendered by a flock of sheep!
The gore quotient is fairly high, but it's comedy gore, nothing too upsetting. There is great delight to be had in the sheep puppet work and their savagery is never upsetting, always funny. I'd rank Black Sheep in the horror-comedy pantheon alongside Shaun of the Dead and the aforementioned American Werewolf. Yes, it really is that good! Oh and the posters are the funniest I've ever seen.
Having read about Let Me In, the new US remake of Let the Right One In, in this month's Empire, and since we're having a Swedish love-in with Wallander at the moment, the time seemed right to pick up the acclaimed horror movie, on Blu-Ray no less. So this marked the first Blu-Ray I've actually watched since getting a Blu-Ray player several months ago - up until now I've been using it to watch DVDs, although I've acquired about 10 Blu-Ray discs since then. I must say, you can see the difference - it's hard to explain, but the picture on Blu-Ray is just so much sharper.
But to the film... Let the Right One In is a slow burn, creepily effective take on the vampire myth, wih a tween spin. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is bullied at school and ignored at home, so he's interested when Eli (Lina Leandersson) moves in next door. Eli isn't just a little girl, however, she's a vampire, with a minder who looks after her by murdering people and draining their blood for her to drink. Things go a bit awry when he's caught and pours acid on his face, before taking a tumble out of a window.
As with Wallander, the pace is slow, allowing the gorgeous snowy, Swedish landscape to draw you in. Eli's real identity is teased and revealed slowly, and there are great moments of sudden, bloody violence, as she leaps, catlike on to victims - these are vampires like those of True Blood, not Twilight - when they bite, it f*cking hurts! Here the vampirisim is seen as a sort of disease, as Eli passes it on to a victim she doesn't have chance to kill - when the victim chooses death over life as a vampire, she deliberately combusts in a ball of fire, in a very spectacular scene. Another memorable scene sees cats leaping on and attacking the newly created vampire, it's weird but chillingly effective. A scene I'd rather forget sees Oskar look in on Eli changing, revealing her *ahem* nether regions to the viewer - I've no idea why.
Let the Right One In is a true horror classic, much better than any gore-filled teen-slasher pic beloved of Hollywood (and unfortunately the public in general), as it really gets under your skin. When Eli walks into Oskar's flat unbidden, and begins to bleed from her scalp it makes you wonder at those movies that present vampires as an aspirational lifestyle! The finale in the swimming pool is suitably gory but the camera is restrained. I'm interested to see the US remake, mostly on the basis that the Empire article assures me it's not an absolute travesty.
Pulse was a TV pilot shown on BBC3 a little while ago. I didn't bother with any of the other pilots but I was drawn to this one by the promise that it might be a bit like Being Human (in fact the only cast member I recognised was Annie's ex from the first series of that show), and it was written by Paul Cornell, who has written for Doctor Who. If it does get a full series, and I'd watch if it does, they should rename it 'Blood', because there was a hell of a lot of it in this 50 minutes of TV.
The premise of Pulse is that there is a dubious experiment going on in a hospital where cancer patients have things moving inside them, and then become walking dead. Claire Foy plays Hannah, a trainee doctor who has a bit of a reputation for being eccentric, and it is she who stumbles upon the bizarre occurrences that lead her to suspect something odd is going on. She's gets splattered with blood on two occasions, once during a botched operation, and again when she attacks a 'zombie' with a saw, sending blood spurting from the back of its neck. Pleasant.
Gore aside, this was a promising pilot, with bits of unexplained goings on and intrigue that I'm sure could sustain a series. Hannah sees her dead mother in strange places, there appears to be a conspiracy to cover up the medical experiments, and Hannah's counsellor is a bit creepy too... Promising then, though a bit dark, it could maybe do with some of Being Human's humour quotient to counter the medical gore.
American Werewolf is such a great film, I'm not sure what I liked most. It's funny, very, very funny, and a bit scary, and all the characters are so likable. Oh and it's funny. Much more comedy than horror, this film features David Naughton (who? no idea) as an American back-packer exploring the Yorkshire Moors with his buddy Griffin Dunne (who I know from Scorsese's excellent and pretty unknown After Hours) and it's not long before Dunne has been killed by a werewolf, while Naughton escapes with his life... and the werewolf curse. Taken to London by creepy Yorkshire villagers, he wakes up in hospital and seen to (in many ways...) by Jenny Agutter's nurse, oh and dead Dunne pops back to say hello and tells him to kill himself before he becomes a werewolf.
It sounds like such a familiar, cheesy set up, and this is acknowledged in the dialogue - the classic Wolf Man films of yore are directly referenced. Everything about the film has it's tongue placed firmly in cheek, without resorting to farce or parody. Even all of the songs played on the soundtrack have 'Moon' in them! The banter between Naughton and Dunne is effective and Agutter is a great love interest. John Woodvine plays a doctor treating Naughton, and it is he who fills in Agutter in on the fact that her beau is a werwolf, and he's a wonderful creation. Just one of the many well-rounded characters - even the small roles of detectives investigating Dunne's murder are treated well, with excellent lines and characterisations.
The gore during the werewolf attacks, and the bizarre alien-like dream sequence, is very schlocky and thankfully lacks the realistic gore-porn of today's horror/slasher movies. The werewolf transformation effects are very well done for 1981, a time when CGI meant nothing and stop-motion was king of special effects. I always think it's difficult to do a werewolf well, without making the end result look like a man in a suit. Buffy's Oz was a case in point, and his werewolf costume never really convinced; Being Human's George is better; and this film's falls somewhere in between - thankfully director John Landis doesn't spend a lot of time with the werewolf in full shots, other than his transformation most of the wolf's time is spent in a blur as it runs amock. Nicely, Landis (and Naughton) don't shy away from the fact that to become a werewolf a body needs to shed clothing, and thus before and after transforming, Naughton is pleasing naked. Not a bad thing!
I had high hopes for An American Werewolf in London, and thankfully the movie lived up to it's promise. Other than a very abrupt ending, which actually makes sense but is still jarring, this is a perfectly formed beast and I'd happily watch it again.
