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Cannibals and Keanu Reeves 

/ Sara Halub / Leave a comment

The Bad Batch (2016)

Dir: Ana Lily Amirpour
Let’s start with the positives. I’m feeling lots of love and harmony lately, and I’ve decided that I’m gonna try REALLY REALLY hard to see the good in things. Ironically I had this epiphany just before i watched this film so……sucks for me.

So pros….

This film has Jason Momoa in it, who as you all may know, is well…..

It also has a good soundtrack- albeit bizarre, but good. In a Spotify playlist on major shuffle kinda way.

KEANU REEVES PLAYS A DYSTOPIAN PIMP

Jim Carey is in it, and he’s brilliant

Suki Waterhouse has a hilarious accent. Seriously you guys, it’s so hilarious, you literally have to keep rewinding because you will not believe she’s not joking.

It’s filmed nicely. It’s nice to look at.

There’s not much convo if thats your thing. Sometimes dialogue is overrated. Too many films contain dialogue nowadays, this film just skips that shit altogether. A movie is all about images am I right?

It’s made by VICE. It’s a VICE film.

Just so we’re clear. It’s a VICE film.

I also mentioned Jason Momoa?

Interestingly there’s more cons, which is unfortunate because I’m trying to be nice. What are those cons you may ask? What could possibly be better than a film devoid of dialogue about cannibalism with Jason Momoa?

A lot of things it turns out, are better.

I pride myself in my ability to sit through slow films that don’t really go anywhere. I wrote many a uni paper about Jim Jarmusch and Jean Luc Goddard, so when it comes to slow pace I’ve pretty much reached advanced level monk-like patience. This however, took it too far.

What starts off promisingly, with Suki Waterhouse being dumped in the desert kidnapped by cannibals and then consequently having her limbs severed off, turns into a trippy mess that really should have ended an hour before it did.
Everything happens in the first half hour; then it’s all random people in the desert drumming on bins and Keanu Reeves giving people acid. I totally get it, it’s art. The director is cool and edgy and wanted to make something odd and political, but unlike A girl walks home alone at night (an Iranian vampire western, just so we’re clear), this ends up feeling a bit like a really long Bjork video from the 90s.

My brother would have HATED this film so bad. When I think about who would hate it the most out of everyone I know, I’m confident in saying that I’m gonna go with my brother.

I myself quite like the juxtapositions between good and evil, which later transfer on themselves. I dig that, it’s art. But there are elements that borderline on the ludicrous, and you’re like….nah, too far.

*Warning major spoilers*

If I for example, killed your wife, stole your kid, and basically made you hunt me down as a consequence, I wouldn’t exactly be next in line as potential girlfriend. Well not according to this movie! Waterhouse and Momoa are basically full on about to hook up even though she took his child and literally just murdered his wife. Cool

Then there’s the prosthetic leg. Dude if you got thrown in the middle of the wilderness because you were excommunicated from life you wouldn’t expect them to have prosthetic limbs kicking around. I know it’s a film and the likelihood of this actually happening is extremely slim. I enjoy realistic details in unrealistic films. The realistic detail is that there are probably zero prosthetic limbs avaliable in the desert in high abundance. Probably.

What’s with taking the kid away from a perfectly safe place to return him to his cannibal dad? Like why would you have such a change of heart? You JUST MURDERED HIS MUM And the DRAMA she caused in the process. It then got way too unnecessary; holding a pregnant woman hostage just to get back the kid? She literally could’ve just asked Keanu Reeves. The conversation would’ve been super straightforward and that would’ve been that.

I really wanted to like this film. I wanted to because I like the director and I like the cast and I like the concept. On paper I like this film.

The reality is that it’s soul destroyingly long with no purpose. Zero. It was basically a shit “horror” version of Spring Breakers– very visual but lacked substance and context and therefore did a lot of overcompensating because it wanted to be cool.

It wasn’t cool.

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CAMPING; part two

/ Sara Halub / Leave a comment

The Ritual 2017

Dir: David Bruckner 

Perhaps i’m a little biased, but Brits are definitely making the best horror movies at the minute.

Maybe not the best ever, (after extensive scientific research I’ve concluded that Koreans make the best ever), but we are getting considerably better. More importantly directors have stopped using stupid british stereotypes and taking the genre for one big fucking joke (and I promise this isnt a snide jab at Shaun of the Dead, even though i fucking hated it). 

Whilst Hollywood seems to keep churning out one jump scare/found footage/thoughtless remake disaster after another, Brit horror has started to finesse the underrated art of the slow burner.

Make no mistakes about this; if a film starts off slow you’re guaranteed an absolute treat. Blair Witch, for example, is an archetypal slow burner; horrifically dull to begin with, lures you into a false sense of total security, two hours later you’ve left the cinema hollow, afraid and bewildered. Other examples include The Excorist, Ring, Eden Lake, The Loved Ones, even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre-all horror CLASSICS, and yet nothing actually happens for a while in pretty much all of them. 

As a self proclaimed horror connoisseur, I believe the best scares happen when you’re not sure when to expect them. The only issue with this logic is that we live in the instant gratification era of social media where the average attention span is 00.003 seconds. Getting people in 2017 to even SIT through a film like the 1999 Blair Witch is hard enough, so directors have had to resort to cliched watered down scripts and pantomime tactics to keep viewers engaged.
Every few years on this side of the pond, an absolutely underrated banger of a movie will be released which shows just how refined we are becoming at creating genuine fear. Whilst we may be crap at a lot of things (like voting for leaders, making eye contact or being direct) our levels of horrifying just keep getting better and better.

Based on a lads holiday gone exceptionally wrong, the story is totally doomed from the very start. 

*Spoilers ahead*

A lead character from the “group” is murdered during a robbery within minutes of the films opening. His unexpected murder leads to an undercurrent of resentment, blame and guilt, which remains ever present throughout. In many ways he becomes the film’s protagonist as his absence from the group is continually highlighted creating an uncomfortable dynamic between the other characters, who each seem to have their opinions about the circumstances surrounding his death. 

A largely unwanted hiking trip later ensues to honour his memory; this hike follows a long trail from Norway to Sweden, which they ultimately hope will result in getting very drunk at a lodge on the other side.

Obviously someone gets injured and they have to take the “shortcut”.

Luckily the director isn’t a douche, and doesn’t mock your intelligence, we all know what happens when you take a shortcut through the woods, including the characters themselves, who’s banter and laddish jokes indicate that they do too. 

Making remarks about how they’re going to end up dead, is definitely not far from the truth. The group finds themselves being hunted in a bizarre ritualistic fashion, which initially seems like witchcraft, but emerges as something much more terrifying.

Combining elements from classic horror, there is an level of predictability which David Bruckner playfully draws on to create said false sense of security with the viewer. Everything you think may happen you have to later rethink; the twist in plot is very smart and very original.

Definitely up there with The Descent and Creep; also further fuels my desire to stay in hotels whilst in rural regions. 

The darkest shade of neon 

/ Sara Halub / 1 Comment

The Neon Demon (2016)

Dir: Nicholas Refn 

If you were to see this on Netflix, without knowing anything about it, and toyed with the idea of watching it because the visual was cool, and the bloke who did Drive directed it,  then don’t watch it. 

Really, don’t.

I’m not even really sure if Netflix is the right platform for Nicholas Refn. Without sounding like a prentious douchewipe, I see this as more a “Amazon Prime” scenario; the type of film a Kimmy Schmidt viewer may not immediately go to as their first port of call, (unless said Kimmy Schmidt viewer likes cannibalism and necrophila). It doesn’t feel particularly organic, what section would you even put The Neon Demon in? Certainly not “party on!” (Ironically currently featuring Bojack Horseman). 

I digress…don’t get me wrong guys, Nat (my flatmate and very close friend) watched it with me, having no prior context whatsoever, and Nat enjoyed it. I was, however, kind enough to point out that there would be lesbian morgue sex about halfway through, and also that pace was not exactly high on Refn’s priority list. Clearly we needed to stablish some fundamentals prior to our sunday night junk food and horror sesh.

In fact we, and possibly a few other humans sporadically dotted around the globe, enjoyed this movie. The dude from the guardian film section seemed to like it (dude from Rolling Stone magazine….didn’t like it so much). Proof, at the risk of stating the mind-blowingly obvious, that not everything is for everyone.

End of review

Just kidding.

Let me start by explaining that this movie isn’t Drive. A lot of people were passionately pissed off that he didnt make another ‘masterpiece’ like Drive (Drive 2?) and wrote a lot of unsavoury shit about Refn. He famously got booed at Cannes, (often a great PR move), with some even walking out in outrage and shock (think Lars Von Trier circa six years ago). Folks were not happy; apparently appalled and shocked, calling this movie depraved and sickening. So many people got really touchy about the some of the themes, (a far cry from cars, masculinity or crime), that it’s really become a “thing” in relation to the film. So let’s just clarify once and for all that a.Nicholas Refn is allowed to make other types of films that don’t include or involve Ryan Gosling and b. Can we all just get the fuck over Drive. Yes it was incredible, but he’s exploring something else, it’s cool if you don’t like it, let’s move on.

This particular film explores dark topics, in a less than subtle fashion. Excess and materialism marry together beautifully mmm against the isolation backdrop of a dark LA. Everything is visually beautiful, but also feels incredibly detached and in some cases clinical. This notion is further enhanced by the flat conversations between the characters, (its not bad acting, despite Keanu Reeves), the lack of any real emotion in any of the other characters (aside from anger, which is what shapes the end), and the very obvious disposable nature of those within this “world”. If the conversations seem like non starters, its kind of the aim; everyone’s dead on the inside and hates each other.  

The premise is a beautiful child (that’s what I’m calling her, because she’s 16), enters the world of modelling and discovers pretty quickly that you can’t trust anyone. Problem is, this young beautiful ethereal girl (played by the very cute Elle Fanning), becomes increasingly more narcissistic and selfish the more she is sucked into “the neon demon” (a metaphor for the bright shiny lights of the hollywood machine). Her mannerisms subtly change, she grows increasingly more self aware…and kind of turns into a dick. Another casualty of LA.
On the sidelines are groups of grown ups out to get her in various ways. Each with their own set of vile intentions; be it lust, jealousy or power, that culminate in an actual blood bath…

Literally.

So i’m sure you’ree all dying to know about the necrophilia scene (no pun intended)…well, i never thought i would say this, but there is actually a worse scene in this film. That scene ladies and gents, involves Keanu Reeves in a shellsuit forcing a knife down Jessie’s throat. This alone was so stomache churning and dark that it made me question whether i wanted to see what was on its way, which I’m sure was the whole point. This scene also marks a change of pace, because up until this point it’s all been pretty visuals and awkward conversations.

I won’t pretend that this film isn’t self aware, or a little slow. It’s both. If you want to watch a “horror” movie with haunted houses and chainsaws, this might not be your bag. Yes he does borrow a lot; everything from Italian horror, to Kubrick to Lynch. Yes it’s very stylised and very visual. Is it shit? No. It isn’t.

The artist formerly known as Prairie

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The OA

Creators: Zal Batmanglij, Brit Marling

 

Like…where do I even?

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You wonder how high they must have been to actually think of this. You actually wonder.I tried so hard to explain this to someone earlier, and I kept sounding like I was making shit up. Literally as though I was pulling random story lines out of thin air and adding them onto a more elaborate story to make it seem all Christopher Nolany and mind-fucky. I wasn’t though. I was genuinely doing my up most to stick to a simple description, which turned into a lengthy, convoluted, and agonizing run down  of one of the weirdest shows in the history of netflix.

And I still can’t decide if I liked it or not. Eight bizarre hours later.

So a. spoiler alert, and b. I’m not here to knock this show. I appreciate that the OA has now built an army of loyal fans who will hex my first born child if i say anything bad, so that’s not exclusively my aim. I just want to talk about it, you know? because I need to. I need to vocalise some of this shit before attempting to watch anything else on Netflix, because why should I suffer alone?

So the ‘premise’, in the simplest way possible: The show starts with a woman who jumps off a bridge, which we later find out had been missing for the best part of seven years and used to be blind. Now she’s back and she can see, (and by blind I mean actually blind, i’m not talking about it in a biblical context or anything).

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Are we happy with this so far?

So this lady is called Prairie, but she keeps calling herself The OA, which is weird and kinda hilarious. Like… who the hell calls themselves ‘the’ anything? Aside from ‘the exorcist’ or ‘the artist formerly known as Prince’ who ended up abbreviating it anyway because he realised it made him sound like a massive douche.

The OAs parents (i feel dumb just saying it) are a whole heap of ‘wtf’ about everything, partly due to the name change, partly due to the seven year absence (which she refuses to explain), and partly due to the fact that she isn’t blind anymore and doesn’t wanna discuss it.

The OA befriends a group of local teenagers via a weird video she posts on youtube (please stay with me), so they all start meeting at an abandoned house every night to hear her tell her story about what the fuck happened to her. She seems really cool to tell them the story, but literally noone else. Not even the FBI, who you would assume would be the first port of call.

Her story goes something like this (again, stay with me)…She was born to a wealthy Russian Oligarch in the 80s and had a near death experience on her way to school. She came back from the dead without her sight, but a whole bunch of odd stuff happened to her after the near death experience; lucid dreams, premonitions and an amazing ability to play the violin. This is all totally fine so far, so I’m all like yea ok…I can run with this. But then..

Then she moves to America, lives with her aunt in a brothel after her father dies, gets found by a nice couple who visit said brothel in the search of illegal kids, and goes to live with them.

The rest then involves a psycho scientist, who kidnaps her and locks her in a basement (a la Josef Fritzl), a bunch of near death experience survivors used as test subjects, interpretive dance, and an Arabic gatekeeper of the universe called ‘khtum’.

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Oh yea, and they’re all using mystical tai chi to try and move across dimensions and escape this fucked up dungeon they’ve been in for seven years.

That’s a whole lot of tai chi.

If The OA, was about maybe 1 thing…or even 5 things, then it would be absolutely perfect. No-one on earth is expecting a sci-fi to be believable or realistic, so that’s not my beef with this in any way. My beef is that there is literally SO much going on, all at once, in a short space of time, that you’re just like..’I don’t believe you bruh.’

 

For example, I really don’t get why these kids are so invested…SUPER INVESTED, in the OA. Call me a pessimistic prick, but your story requires some type of cut out or you tube link to make me buy it. All they have is imagination and dim lighting. Its not enough hun.

Then you have all these separate side stories involving the kids. The one with the anger issues who’s face is always red, the overachieving Mexican kid who’s mum is a drunk hot mess. Then there’s the emo skater one whose entire family is dead apart from his sister who literally smokes weed all day. Too much going on.

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Then you have the OA herself who is single handedly the most irritating character to ever grace my laptop screen. Why does she speak in hushed tones? Why are her roots so immaculate? Why does she look like the ZARA 2003 autumn/winter model? Where did she buy her foil jacket? Then it turns out she might have been lying the ENTIRE TIME (????!!!!!!!) erm……ok, that was a waste of everyone’s time. Luckily the poorest ending known to man, clarifies that maybe she isn’t lying, so leaves us with a set of pointless questions, to add to the plethora of questions we had already armed ourselves with. Fab.

Is it a sci-fi? is is a drama? Is it a teen thriller? Is it a pisstake? who knows. Its like Donnie Darko meets The Breakfast Club but not even remotely in a cool way. The general pace reminds me of one of those Scandinavian crime shows like The Killing, mad amounts of grey scale tones and bad weather. But then you have the flashbacks, which are super high saturation and vivid, and then randomly Riz Ahmed pops up as the FBI guidance councilor and that made me happy.

Sadly however, the ending is such trash it actually manages to ruin everything. Watch it for the interpretive dance and general confusion.

Don’t watch it if you think its gonna be better than Stranger Things

 

 

Enfield. Not North London

/ Sara Halub / Leave a comment

Dir: James Wan

2016

 

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Let’s just start with a couple of basics right here right now. Enfield is in EN which therefore means its not in London, can I get there by tube? Is it in zones 1-4? Do they even have Uber? I think we can all agree that anything outside of zone 4 really doesn’t count as London.  And whilst I totally apreesh what James Wan is doing, and in the iconic words of Kanye West imma let him finish, Enfield is literally NOT in London.

So that’s that, and lets really just clear that up before any form of advancement is made.

NB. Sorry if you’re from Enfield and feel like I’m being unjust. It’s literally Middlesex, you can’t argue with geography.

Ok so, the story is set in Enfield MIDDLESEX, in the 70’s and it documents another one of Ed and Lorraine’s infamous cases of demons causing a lot of aggro to yet another family who literally just need a good nights sleep. Like all the other films about Ed and Lorraine, it is based on a ‘true’ story (lets say inspired by true events), so you can google the Hodgson family, and their house on Green street and even look at how much its selling for on Zoopla (I do this a lot with homes that were inhabited by serial killers or ghosts, worth knowing if affects market price). The original recordings, can be found at: Real footage from Enfield Haunting, plus there’s like a ton of shows about the house, so if you fancy weighing up how accurate Wan was, it’s all there on the fantastic world wide web for you to draw your own conclusions.

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I personally don’t really care, it might have been true, yada yada yada who knows? Is anything true? Are we even here? I could get into this kind of low level existentialism all day, but that’s not really the scary part. What disturbed me more than anything were the massive fluctuations is English accents courtesy of the ‘actors’ who were chosen to play the Hodgson family. Why did the mum sound like Pat Butcher but her kids sound like the cast of Oliver? The overdone ‘cockney’ accents, combined with Billy and his biscuits were really eye rolling. I half expected a shoe shine boy to pop up and get involved. Give them one English accent for continuity as opposed to five. We know what English people sound like thanks, and don’t actually need an entire family covering all of the London boroughs under one roof.

So the film. Well the Enfield house is basically like most of the houses we grew up in in London; two up, two down, not very glam, with bad wall paper, dire need of paint and Starsky and Hutch on the walls, just a standard regular house. It wasn’t a huge mansion, or even particularly nice, which is proof that ghosts aren’t picky. One minute its Amytiville, and the next its some estate in Shadwell. Be careful out there.

Things escalate pretty damn quickly. One minute Janet is messing about with a makeshift Ouji board made out of shit she found in the art room at school and then BOOM demon from hell, in your home. Classic Janet.

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Would’ve been great if Ed and Lorraine didn’t take their sweet time getting to Enfield. It’s literally Christmas and one whole hour into the (really unnecessarily long) film before they even say London. Meanwhile they’re dealing with their own fallout from Amytiville; Lorraine keeps seeing a Marylin Mansonesque nun in her visions, and then casually walking around her house. Doesn’t help when she wakes up one sunny morning and her husband has drawn a GIGANTIC painting of the thing on canvas ‘I just couldn’t sleep Lorraine’ he muses, ‘So i thought i’d draw what was in my dream’ oh yea….just draw the demon that traumatized your wife in Amytiville, and then proceed to HANG IT UP IN YOUR OFFICE.

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My favourite bit was Ed doing an Elvis impersonation and playing the guitar. If there was ever a time for the Demon to throw some mad shade, it should’ve been there and then. Whip that guitar out of his claws and club him over the head with it. Fuck you Ed, don’t come into a haunted house with your Christianity and big sideburns and patronize everyone by singing. Time and a place mate.

Despite all of the above, surprisingly enjoyed it.

And i’m sure you will.

 

 

Maniac: Revisted

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Even though it wasn’t actually out that long ago, (fine…its only recently become available on Netflix). I feel that this month’s revisited should go to Elijah Wood for acting like a crazy fool.

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Or Frodo goes Loco as Total film put it.

He’s actually so mind-blowing crazy in this film its beyond words.The worst part is that we don’t ever really find out the specifics into why he enjoys murdering so many women, but we do know he LOVES hair. Later there’s some flashbacks of his mum snorting coke and having threesomes, while he’s like 5 and watching from a wardrobe (I’ll assume this lead to some of his angst), but no definite ‘I’ve decided to murder chicks’ epiphany. We know he likes to stalk. That we can be sure of.

In the opening scene he full on stalks this poor girl from outside the club right to her door (ladies, get a ride with your friend yo), and then he scalds her…and then staples her scalps onto an awkwardly standing mannequins back of house, (thankfully he’s intelligent enough not to put that shit in the window). He likes to chat to the mannequins (full on Conversations), and scrubs his hands profusely with bleach a lot. It’s all so damn Freudian.

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To be fair who the hell would trust a guy who works in a mannequin shop? I know who…Anna does. Anna is a French Chick who’s equally as obsessed with mannequins and wants to use them for an art installation thing (like really though, who you expecting to meet in that field girlfriend?) So Anna and our Maniac strike up an unusual friendship, which seems to tip him over his killing threshold. In fact I’m pretty convinced as a way of NOT killing Anna, he just goes on a mad killing spree so he can expel those angry feelings.

The scary one was the online date he goes on, with the girl who takes him back to hers. That annoyed me a bit I must say. If you look at the guys hands, they SCREAM serial Killer, I was literally shouting  ‘please dont fuck him’ really loudly at the TV hoping it would shift the plot. Nope.

Its been labelled by many as trashy gore, with lots of unnecessary explicit scenes, so yes it got a lot of bad reviews, but i actually loved it. The POV thing totally works, except for a few times when they forget its POV and randomly zoom out and you’re like ‘woah…its POV, what are u doing to my mind’, (like the scene in the garage with the girl who runs off the train), so I guess if they kept it a touch more consistent it would be miles better.

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I also love that its Elijah wood, and he’s just creepy as fuck, all the time. Even when he was Frodo I was like if this guy didn’t have a ring, he’d be out murdering elves for no reason. So that helps.

Also the fact that its set in a very unglam downtown LA, and LA looks scary. Forget all those images of Beverly Hills and Laguna Beach. This is a grim LA and you don’t wanna be there on your own at 3am.

So all in its worth the watch. Theres a few weird bits where the mannequins come to life and it gets a bit surreal, but try to gloss over that.

And don’t eat. It’s really gory.