Month: July 2021

Gaia

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Gabi is menaced by something while she sleeps

Gaia is a South African horror film. Unusual enough. An eco-horror, a survivalist horror, a myco-horror and a Freudian horror too. And somehow, in among all that, it even manages a bit of old-fashioned girl-in-a-T-shirt horror titillation, a demonstration of its limber ability to play to and against horror expectations. The supreme example of this comes early on, right after we’ve met Gabi (Monique Rothman) and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi), a pair of forestry workers far from base, punting up river in a canoe, on a mission to collect data. Having lost the drone they’re using as a tech wayfinder, they separate. Expectation one – this is a bad idea. This turns out to be … Read more

The President’s Analyst

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James Coburn and Joan Delaney

With Elon Musk currently trailing his Neuralink “brain machine interface” idea as the future of inter-personal communications, how about The President’s Analyst, a 1967 movie that got there first? It’s called the Cerebrum Communicator – a brain implant that will render phone calls unnecessary – and comes at the familiar point in this spytastic spoof when the evil megalomaniac mastermind is laying out his plan for total world domination (or something) to Dr Schaefer, whose role as the US president’s analyst has got him caught up in a pantomime of escalating espionage mayhem. Before we all get too carried away with an idea that arrives from nowhere and is soon despatched there too, it’s … Read more

False Positive

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Adrian and a pregnant Lucy

Films, like False Positive, that are about a woman getting pregnant and finding herself pressured by her husband, her doctor and her peers into pursuing a particular course of action are always going to be compared to Rosemary’s Baby. There are no satanists in director/co-writer John Lee’s film but he’s largely happy for his film to face that ordeal. Brave man. We meet nice loving couple Adrian (Justin Theroux) and Lucy (Ilana Glazer). He’s a doctor, she’s in marketing and they can’t get pregnant. So they head to a clinic run by an old mentor of Adrian, Doctor Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), a kindly, authoritative fertility expert who runs a modern, bright, smart facility. … Read more

Cruella

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Emma Stone as Cruella

Cruella, like Maleficent, gives a female baddie an origin story, and ends up in the same cul-de-sac, trying to insist that this is one of the female baddies for the ages, while also asking us also to sympathise with a poor Disney dear who’s been badly treated. 101 dogs’ breakfasts is the result. Since Emma Stone is one of the film’s producers (as is former Cruella De Vil Glenn Close, interestingly), she is partly to blame for this boring, messy film. Which is a pity because that wonky smile and arched eyebrow suit her magnificently for the role of Cruella, the girl born Estella who, after her mother is killed by Dalmatians, grows … Read more

The Vanished

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Thomas Jane, Anne Heche and Jason Patric

The Vanished stars three names who used to keep casting directors’ phones busy. Anne Heche, Thomas Jane and Jason Patric all bring a useful intensity to an incredibly wayward kidnap drama written by Peter Facinelli, whose face you’ll probably know (from the Twilight films, or Supergirl or Nurse Jackie on TV) even if you don’t quite recognise the name. It’s a simple whodunit, in many ways, loaded up with paranoia, and kicking off in a trailer park that’s largely deserted, on account of it being Thanksgiving weekend, where married couple Wendy (Heche) and Paul (Jane) rock up in their RV with their daughter for a family camping weekend. What with the film being … Read more

Wendy

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Peter and the children at a cliff edge

With its documentary feel and taste for the fantastical, Wendy walks in the shoes of Beasts of the Southern Wild, the 2012 film that was one of the must-sees of the year. Wendy isn’t going to fare so well, not least because that tune’s already been played. As the title hints, it’s a variation on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan story, which writer/director Benh Zeitlin has refreshingly shifted out to Louisiana (location of Beasts), taking his version of Barrie’s kids down a social rung or two in the process. They’re the rambunctious, happy brood who live right by the railroad tracks where their hard-pressed and careworn mother runs a diner. But life changes for … Read more

Rare Beasts

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Billie Piper

“I’m gonna go home and wank over your Instagram pictures, but not the ones with your mouth open,” Pete says to Mandy early on in Rare Beasts, Billie Piper’s patchily brilliant excursion into the ongoing joust that is male/female relations. Mandy (Piper, who also wrote and directs) has “big teeth”, big cartoon features generally, something both Pete (Leo Bill) and Mandy agree on. He puts the wank/Instagram remark to her at the end of one of those date evenings of semi-aggressive courtship conducted at one remove. Insults, put-downs, ribaldry, flirtatiousness and dirty talk have all been used as a way of avoiding mutual male/female honesty, or perhaps as a way of approaching it … Read more

A Perfect Enemy

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Texel and Jeremiasz

Keeping its cards close to its chest, almost until it’s too late, A Perfect Enemy is one of those low-budget Euro-thriller co-productions that also (eventually) makes some sense of its transborder elements, particularly its cast. There are only really two people, in a “starring” sense, in any case. The Polish actor Tomasz Kot you might know from Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War. He plays Jeremiasz Angust, a onetime high-flier architect who’s cashed in the status jobs and become even more of a somebody by taking on work that’s strictly humanitarian – hospitals in Rwanda, and the like, he tells the audience at the Ted-style talk he’s giving as the film opens. And Athena Strates, … Read more

In the Earth

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A shadowy man with an axe

In the Earth is Ben Wheatley’s most overtly horror of horror films since he did the U is for Unearthed section of the portmanteau The ABCs of Death, though in films like Sightseers, High Rise and last year’s Rebecca horror has always lurked at the edges of his work. Made during the covid pandemic, and incorporating its disinfecting/distancing precautions into theme and treatment (there’s a covid supervisor in the crew credits), it’s a film all about infection, though the contagion in question isn’t so much microbial or viral as an infection of the rational mind by the spores of unreason. In In the Earth, cool, clear, scientifically trained minds are taken over by … Read more

The Tenth Victim

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Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress

The Tenth Victim is a textbook case of a cult film that’s actually no good. Released in 1965 and billed as sci-fi (it barely is), it’s a camp Italian spectacle combining the unique talents of Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni, and just that cocktail – 1965, Italy, sci-fi (ish), Andress and Mastroianni – is plenty of reason for seeing the film. It’s set in the 21st century, where violence has been outlawed and is now limited to carefully controlled contests between designated Hunters and Victims. These contests, adjudicated by the Ministry of the Big Hunt, are broadcast on TV, where advertisers line up with sponsorship deals – Ming Tea being the product successful Hunters (or … Read more