A Quiet Place

         

'A Quiet Place' follows a family going about their lives after some creatures turned up that are attracted by the slightest sound... sometimes. The cold open features a kid dying, so I liked the film immediately. The daughter annoyed me though, and the parents were both a bit too unassertive and not forward thinking enough (the radio doesn't count, I'm talking just setting yourself up so that you can live in such a way as to not be in constant danger). Also they're not only Christians, but the sort of Christians that sit around and pray before eating, so, eh.

The film benefits from a highly limited cast and plenty of open-ended questions about the world and the creatures (I assume they're either alien or came from some subterranean area like those bat things in 'The Silence', which was a similar thing but shitter and with bat things).

     
 
              

There are one or two inconsistencies that bothered me, however. What's running all the electricity? a generator, right? You'd need one of those even if you were using solar or wind I'm pretty sure, and what about when bulbs die? That popping sound can be loud. Why did the mum get pregnant? It's been over a year since these creatures turned up, surely they all know that she's just committing suicide with that? I mean babies cry you know, and even if she gets lucky and it's stillborn, I doubt she'd be able to give birth without so much as a whimper. How come it's okay to listen to music and to the radio on headphones? At one point a hanging light creaks and none of them seem to care, why not? How come there are still birds around, and even raccoons?! Surely all large animals and most insects would be extinct by now?

I stopped noting inconsistencies about 20 minutes in, but basically the rules for what the creatures can and can't detect are vague and change constantly and it annoyed me. I realise I'm being very nit picky here but... HEY, why not just light a big fire? They'd all just run into it. Or, if they're not that dumb, set off a car alarm or something and then sit around a few metres away and shoot arrows at them while they're swarming the car? That could work.

I like the very limited use of music, and the heavy silence of all the shots from the deaf girl's point of view. The general quiet of the film obviously lends itself to jump scares very well, so if you're giving it your full attention it's likely to be effectively startling at times. Overall the tone of the film is great, and is complemented by the creature design and the performance of the actors.

Each round of danger does feel increasingly staged, though. All the characters are dumb enough to make mistakes and attract the creatures, but then are pretty great at getting out of the tight spots they keep finding themselves in. I was half expecting different characters to just keep spiking their feet on that nail, or getting clothing caught on it. I'd have loved it if the movie ended with one of the creatures stepping on it and freaking out.

Wait, why dont they just live by the fucking waterfall? Move to the beach!

           

A Quiet Place: 48.6

         

It Chapter Two

      

Spooky clown scare me! Again!

       

     

That was fun; light viewing with entertaining visuals and some good laughs. The adult cast all did fine (honestly I don't think I remember the first one well enough to feel able to judge their similarity to their kid counterparts, but from the flashbacks they seemed pretty good).

I like how they all turned out psychologically effected by their childhoods, like the continuity is there and I could see myself at a reunion with them all being like "oh shit, yeah I'm not surprised that's what so-and-so ended up doing". Though most of them did turn out irritatingly wealthy.

I'm also glad that they're leaning into the goofiness because I never really found the first one scary (not a flex, I just think creepy clowns are best when they're not played straight). I wanted more of the dancing though, I really liked that shot. With the first one I couldn't tell if it was being intentionally funny, but a lot of the scary stuff in this one is more blatantly geared towards laughs, and I approve.

What I don't approve of is all the weird (native) American stuff, the pandering spiritual journey is at least a few decades old at this point, surely? I guess it fits with the 80s aesthetic though, and at least it turned out to be bull shit (also, I was just thinking about the Simpson's movie during that scene where he was tripping out).

     

          

I kind of wished the bully who came back and got stabbed would just immediately die, I have the vague notion that he played a bigger part in the show, and I'd have found him being a bit of a Boba Fett kind of funny. Oh yeah, and I liked him hanging out with his zombie buddies in their old car, it reminded me of that episode of Buffy that focused on Xander.

Scene-wise it was Highly structured, just like the first one. The protagonists split up, scary thing happens to each of them, they meet back up, and then they have a group scary thing. The big picture was  predictable, but there were a good few little twists thrown in amongst that too so I forgive it.

Oh! And I liked the bit where Bill Hader was shown the lights and he just goes floppy. His body language was hilarious and I liked the bass and the cuts to the alien's vagina mouth thing. It reminded me of Annihilation, mainly, and I enjoyed (the sequence was just a few seconds long but it's one of the things I found memorable).

     

It Chapter Two: 43.0

Life

                
'The Blob' meets 'Alien' on board a suddenly expansive ISS in 'Life', the mostly overlooked sci-fi suspense horror from 2017. We don't spend too much time on the discovery or acquisition of the alien structure (there are no planet-side scenes, apart from right at the end), instead getting right into its development into a killing machine. 

I've been looking forward to the DVD release of this all year (when easiest to stream, without them just being recorded from a cinema or having timestamps all over them), not because it looked particularly ground breaking, but simply because I like stories about a small group of people trapped in a space ship with some kind of threat. It's just a premise of which I don't easily tire. It's not very original, but it isn't really trying to be, and there are enough visual nods to classics of the genre to make it clear that 'Life' is self aware without it becoming annoying ala 'Gravity'. The actual plot is simplistic so far as to feel old fashioned, with each crew member being picked off until the last few finally form a plan to get rid of the thing.

                              

                    
The characters are underdeveloped, but nevertheless convincingly portray academics (for whom slightly broken social skills are practically part of the job description). I'm glad that they didn't really bother trying to do the 'Alien' everyone talking at the dinner table scene, because films like this try that all the time and it rarely feels natural.
The alien itself was pretty cool, especially the way it ingested it's prey (and I like the way that it stays so small for so long, and that we get an extended period of prodding it scientifically). I guess it turns out to be smart, because it does the old switcheroo at the end, but we don't really get that impression throughout most of the film. The ending was a negative point for me, I thought the twist was revealed badly. The confusion over which pod is which felt silly and as soon as it started it was clear to me that they'd switch them and have the alien landing on Earth. Also it's all right at the end, it didn't really have any meaning (beyond “surprise, it's intelligent!”) and I highly doubt there'll be a sequel, so I didn't really care.

                    

Life: 49.4

Infini

                  

'Infini' is a low budget Australian sci-fi horror that combines elements of 'Blade Runner', 'The Thing', 'Alien' and even 'The Shining' in quite a pleasing way, but fails to be wholly entertaining or memorable.
Starting with some explanatory text, we find that the Earth is overpopulated and lots of people are forced into working for security forces that sort of teleport them to distant outposts to fix them or rescue people or whatever. There's a big catastrophe, and a squad is sent to the furthest outpost from Earth where they find that the frozen shit has  very much hit the space fan. It sports a wilfully unorganised narrative, which I think many viewers will find unpleasantly jarring, but I kind of enjoyed the lack of structure, reminiscent of the infected people's state of mind. Every character is infected fairly early on, pretty much removing any hope. Watching their actions I gradually lost my sense of rooting for one character over another as they were all mentally unstable, and the main reason for viewing became physiological study and morbid curiosity.

                      

                        
I enjoyed the tone though, and it was  a good looking movie (the sets really suited, very industrial and 'Alien'-esque). Their take on zombies were cool too, I found the self mutilation and taunting scarier than classic zombies (possibly because I'm just so used to regular zombies, but I did like the psychological element here for sure).
While most of the characters weren't thoroughly explored, they didn't broadcast their simplicity to me either. Their throwaway dialogue wasn't trying too hard to present one as the funny one, one as the bad ass, the coward, the leader, etc.
I don't want to make it seem like this film is perfect, though. The condition is quite simplistic (at least at first) - it's basically just played out as the sane part of the infected person fighting to control a growing desire for mindless violence - but I liked the concept. There's some sloppy editing too (I'm thinking the repetition of the final speech and the flash forward at the start here in particular), and this is where the low budget shows most, but overall they did a good job of it and the acting was solid and really carried the film.
It gets increasingly introspective towards the end, which is nice. I didn't really connect to the whole family love win out out over base desires thing, but it's a nice message I guess. The final twist of them being replicated completely and finishing the mission to return the Earth was fan-freaking-tastic. The best part is that they all seem to be at least partly aware that they've changed somehow, and that they could be taking whatever change happened to them back to Earth, but they just want to be home safe with their families and not dead after all, and we don't even know how much of them are really human. The threat wasn't the bomb, it was them all along. They are the payload, because selfishness wins out against both love and hate.
I mean it's left a little more open than that - maybe the alien life form was finally taught empathy, reconstructed the humans, and sent them on their way - but that's not how I interpreted it.

                

Infini: 50.9

Survival of the Dead

               

For the last film in Romero's dead series, he seems to have given up on getting any kind of meaningful insight across. That's a bonus, as far as I'm concerned, as the last film stank and the one before was too blatant and silly. This one is silly too, but it's not trying to be anything more than a fairly light-hearted zombie western about two old guys with grudges and a band of ex-military survivors lead by a Hugh Jackman lookalike.

                

              

The imaginative zombie dispatching is dwindling at this point, and the editing (one of the strongest elements of his classics) has become bland and formulaic. You can tell that nothing about this is an independent picture any more. Romero never suited mainstream Hollywood, he was at his best telling off the cuff stories that took a lot of feeling from their location and grew into cohesion in the editing.

I liked this one more than 'Diary of the Dead', but not quite as much as 'Land of the Dead'. While I hated the clunky commentary of that film, I did like the setting and general concept. This film was far more run of the mill, and while it was watchable, it was often comically uninspired.

           

Survival of the Dead: 33.2

Demonwarp

                    

Bigfoot. Zombies. An alien. What more could be asked of a film? The plot (as best as I can figure it): an alien crash lands and starts being worshipped by a priest, who feeds him the hearts of topless women. The alien also turns some guy into a bigfoot who runs around and kills people who turn into zombies that come back to the alien's cave/space ship to work for him as technicians. The main characters are a small group of interchangeable teens in their mid-20s who are topless about 35% of the time. That's over a third. It's as fantastic as it sounds. 

The acting is wooden and difficult to interpret (at the start I couldn't tell if those other guys were drunk too, or if they were just that bad at acting), the writing stinks, and the plot is all over the place (several characters never even meet the main group before being killed, making their presence in the film completely pointless). The copy I saw was really warped (I guess the tape had gotten wet at some point or something) which resulted in the camera wobbling and zooming about oddly. I'm not sure how much of that was intentional to create a sense of unease (doubt it), how much was bad camerawork, and how much was damage to the copy, but whatever the case it proved to be one of the more interesting elements of viewing.

         

        

I was bored a lot of the time. Occasionally 'Demonwarp' is unintentionally hilarious (much of the final act was brilliant) but there are long stretches of filler throughout the main act. Many of the characters were totally unnecessary, and there were lots of weird twists and turns in their relationships with one another (it sort of felt like the director occasionally forgot how each character felt about the others). Overall I'd definitely watch it if you're into bad movies, but don't worry about talking throughout.

                

Demonwarp: 12.2

Screamers

                 

An unoriginal B style low budget sci-fi that's occasionally fun. We know what we're in for with 'Screamers' when it opens with the classic explanatory text crawl. It feels like it was made at least ten years too late - I think this movie belongs in the 80's with a smaller budget and a larger quantity of tongue in cheek. 

It has a slightly overcomplicated background, but basically the Earth has collonies all over the place, and one of them is on some planet with a precious fuel in the ground. When you mine it radiation or something comes out, so they refused to, so a big war started between the inhabitants of that planet and the corporation that owns the mines. The corporation bombs the guys on the planet and the guys on the planet make these tunnelling robots to kill people, who end up improving themselves to the point of looking like people.

               

                     

There's lots of other background information, most of which is given to us via the long exposition dialogue chunks dispersed throughout, but that's already more than you need to know. All you really need to know is that there are evil replicants everywhere. A green marine acts as an audience surrogate, and with his arrival comes awhole lot of extra information that I felt was basically unnecessary. It was at this point that I started to see how odd the pacing of this movie was. It both starts and ends haltingly, in several steps with stretches of filler in between. As it ends we get a lot of false final showdowns, but at that point it felt unintentionally awkward rather than an intended surprise.

The dialogue is terribly cheesy and the characters are simplistic, but it was a fun story and I liked the design of the bare robots (there was one short scene of a stop motion one that I thought was fantastic, but sadly they only used it once). There are no big twists, other than the realisation that random people are robots. I found the kid mildly creepy though (the phrase “can I come with you?” quickly becomes disturbing), and I enjoyed the scene when they were burning and shooting a horde of them.

                     

Screamers: 35.9

The Visit

                        

I think I'll put this down as a comedy...? There were a lot of jokes right after creepy shit anyway. Tonally it was all over the place. Two kids go visit their estranged grandparents who act weird, and then it turns out they were crazy people impersonating their grandparents. Oh, sorry; spoilers. You should have known it was going to be some twist like that though, being a Shyamalan flick. I was surprised they didn't turn out to be ghosts, or aliens, or possessed, or something. Crazy is tame, really. 

It's pretty slow, then it gets crazy at the end, then there's a weirdly jarring scene with the mum telling us what the movie was apparently about, and then there was a horrible bit of rapping. Hopefully you have already left the cinema at that point.
              

                

The kids were annoying. The girl's film making pretensions annoyed me (though who am I to talk?) and the boy's rapping annoyed me even more. At least they tried to give them a little character though, despite it feeling kind of false. 

The style is also odd. It's found footage, and occasionally it's edited like she's finished her documentary, but a lot of the time it's just random badly centred shots of nonsense. It feels lazy, but a lot of supposedly found footage films are now taking the lazy route, so whatever. 

The whole film made me feel uncomfortable, but not in a scared way, more in a watching 'The Office' kind of a way. I cringe at the kids being embarrassing or the old people making up excuses for weird shit more than anything else. It just wasn't scary, though: a major problem for a horror. I just can't manage to find crazy old people scary. In the film they're evenly matched because it's kids versus old people, but it's not something I can apply to real life. Just push them down the stairs already, jeez.

It's the kind of silliness you can leave on in the background while you, say, finish your review of 'Poltergeist' though, so that's good.

                           

The Visit: 27.9

Poltergeist

                          

Laugh out loud fun for all the family! 

                       

So 'Poltergeist' has been remade now, and it's hilarious. The elements that are intentionally so usually aren't, but many of the serious family drama scenes totally are. The pacing is awkward, with lots of little horror shorts between the family comedy scenes, and the mood changes back and forth so often that I was never really sure how to feel. I think it needed a re-edit, as while it sticks to the basic plot of the original, the humorous family parts are played up and the ghost parts are presented in that current style (time of writing is mid-2017) of jump scares and loud bursts of noise, and the result is an uneven film that felt like it was going through puberty or something.

I think part of the problem was the casting of Sam Rockwell as the dad. I really like Rockwell. He's almost always fantastic in whatever he's in, but here he kind of takes over the movie with how likeable and endearing he is. The rest of the cast did pretty well too (I quite liked the Mad-Eye Moody style ghost hunter character in particular), but especially during the first half it felt like the Sam Rockwell show and I was rooting for him as he tried to keep his family happy and get a new job at dinner parties.

                 

                             

The first inclination of silliness was the way the comics were stacked up. In the original the mum turns away and off camera the crew stacked up the chairs silently, in this one the kid turns around and an annoying stinger cord plays and the animated comic books blow apart. The original went all bonkers too, but far more competently and without the flashy effects. An exception is the ghostly world; it was hellish and wispy and full of twisted flailing bodies and I liked it. It reminded me of 'The Triumph of Death', and while I think it was a smart move for the original to not show the other side at all, I don't mind that they did so in this one.

A note on the kids though - why do all movie teenagers have to be so annoying? Taking other people I knew at that age, about 10% were as annoying as about 80% are in film. I also didn't like the mums reaction to the boy finding a bone in the garden. Did she think it was dirty or something? It was clearly old enough to be long free of meat, so it's no more dirty than the rest of the ground, and this was before they knew they were living on an ex-cemetery (and even if they knew it was a human bone - so what?) By that age the kid should already have a small collection (not necessarily of human bones).

                     

Poltergeist: 37.5

Gremlins

               

What could easily have been a silly, enjoyable, yet forgettable film about cute fluffy creatures that become evil when fed after midnight turned out to be a minor classic. The extra layer of this cake is made partly of Reagan era consumerism commentary and partly of commentary on its own wider genre of kid friendly creep-out films and Spielberg blockbusters, and it's yummy. If you're in a stupid mood, though, you can scrape it off with your brain knife and just watch the film as a goofy comedy horror. What's rare about this one is that it works both ways, and much like things like 'Poltergeist' it's very much of its time and isn't the kind of thing that can ever be re-made, it's simultaneously timeless and as enjoyable now as I imagine it was on first release.

                    

                  

It's simply written and much of the acting is intentionally goofy, but I still think the human element was the weakest of the film. The characterisation was cartoonish, especially with the main character kid, the evil land lady, and the wacky inventor father. None of the characters are particularly complex or realistic, and the arc of those of them that possess one can be seen a mile off. 90% of this feels in keeping with the rest of the film though, and it mostly felt smart and self-aware rather than dumb and simple. Maybe 80%.

                   

              

After a deceptively slow burning first half, the second kicks it up a gear as the gremlins literally take over the whole town. It's fun seeing them smoke and drink and eat and watch films (they're crazy for 'Snow White'). The effects on the gremlins were fantastic; there was lots of detail and little movements. I was often struck by how un-puppet like they looked (the first time this happened was when Gizmo was pretending he was driving a car. Something about the way his movements flowed and the natural way he blinked. Anyway, there were times when they definitely did look like puppets too, but despite pushing it the film never makes them cross over into out-right sillyness. They were always creepy enough for that final death scene for Stripe to still somehow be alarmingly gory.

                         

Gremlins: 70.9

Diary of the Dead

           

Grandpa Romero thought that a zombie movie about the interweb would be good for the naughties. Somehow he also decided that found footage was an acceptable style. The result is this bizarrely unintentional throwback that feels false and pandering on every level. The people don't seem real, as they talk about bloggers and hackers - I felt like I was watching an episode of 'The Lone Gunmen' at times (bless them, but they have gotten dated). Is anyone even blogging any more?

          

        

Let's give the film a partial pass on that for being a decade old (at the time of writing), despite being oddly misinformed and outdated even in 2007. There are plenty of other major problems that I can talk about.

T he found footage element ties into this whole thing about the guy behind the camera being a student film maker and wanting to document everything and all that nonsense reasoning behind why he has for some reason filmed everything literally until his death. For this reason it's cute, if ridiculous, that he keeps giving people direction to make it look better. The resulting movie really does look like a student film, which it is in the fiction of the movie, to be fair, but I think they did too good a job of it. If their aim really was to make it realistically lame, well done! That doesn't subtract from the fact that this is a lame movie, though, and most of it doesn't seem self-aware (and the scenes that do, are so blatantly self-aware that they become unintentionally ridiculous. 

The writing of this movie was some of the worst I've seen in a while, resulting in some laughable dialogue. The bad acting didn't help, and because of this none of the characters really feel like real people. I thought I'd like the English guy, but just like everyone else he grew too overtly cliché to be enjoyable. There are also SO many long exposition scenes that no one seemed to even try and disguise with other things happening. The film literally stops for a few minutes to give the characters a chance to tell us what's happening and how they feel about one another. There are also lots of repeated scenes or clips of dialogue, for no apparent reason. Stuff that's happened less than twenty minutes ago is repeated in flashbacks in case we've forgotten about them already.

The one bright side I can see here is that there is still the occasional imaginative zombie dispatching, but many of them cross the line into being too silly for me at this point.

             

Diary of the Dead: 31.0

The Divide

                       

This movie sits on your chest and repeatedly slaps you in the face with bleakness - not for any reason, just cause. We get right into it, with nukes falling on NYC without much explanation, and a group of inhabitants of an apartment block getting into the basement, where the situation predictably deteriorates (almost comically fast, too). 

The setup is fine, though obviously it's been done before, and the sets are nice, but all other elements are sub par. The characters all lack much personality and depth, to the extent that I had difficulty telling most of them apart. There were too many characters but not enough characterisation. The majority of the film is just gore/rape/violence porn though, and there's no meaning to it (neither subtle nor blatant), so it's not an enjoyable thing to watch.

       

          

The whole thing with the hazmat guys was totally pointless and did nothing for the plot. I thought they were instigating some kind of twist, or prepping for a Shyamalan style shock ending, but nope. They turn up, their presence is neither explained or matters, then they leave. At the end the lady emerges to find total destruction. They could have at least ended with the city intact, or aliens everywhere, or leaving a holodeck, or something. 

The lack of meaning beyond being a bummer for its own sake feels like a waste of time. There's no letup or comedy or reason given to even care for any of these people. The acting wasn't bad, exactly, but the writing (and probably the direction) definitely needed improvement. They could have made it a character driven film where we care, or they could have had some crazy twists or action. They could have at least had some deeper meaning to events. The best thing this film does is show you the effects of fallout radiation fairly realistically.

                  

The Divide: 25.5

Pontypool

                       

A uniquely intelligent zombie horror about a radio host struggling to survive in a small town in Canada during an outbreak of English language spread zombie-ism. It's very low budget, and there may be a disappointing lack of action and gore for true zombie horror fans, but this is made up for by a focus on dialogue (as far as I'm concerned anyway - this movie is not for everyone). 

Stephen McHattie does a fantastic job in the leading role, channelling a Bruce Campbell-esque, pissed off, self aware kind of a character. He's all about conspiracy theories and riling up his audience, only now something really is happening. I found him very likeable; he's genre aware to the extent that it's enjoyable, without it becoming annoying, he's hammy and makes faces and has a certain surface level dislike for other people that I find very endearing, and he has a great voice.

                  

                  

These qualities make him the perfect protagonist for the situation, as there's a strong power of language kind of a theme. The rules that the infection follow are fairly well laid out and stuck to, and are original and difficult enough to remain a partial mystery for the majority of the film. 

The writing is really this film's strong point. There are lots of double meanings, and a lot of apparently throwaway dialogue, especially early on, carries a lot of weight. It doesn't build tension as well as I've seen descriptive scenes do before though, and at times the musical accompaniment is overbearing. 

It's a good, quirky comedy horror though. It has a strong focus on the breadth of sound contrasting with the claustrophobic little space that it is set in, and is unclear, almost indecisive in tone (in a good way).

                          

Pontypool: 69.3

Alien: Covenant

                   

I'm not too sure how to feel about this one. I liked 'Prometheus', but watching this made me feel like maybe I didn't after all? I mean.. there was a Xenomorph in this one and the plot mostly made sense, so it's better, right? 

On the other hand: fuck you, audience. I liked 'Prometheus', I liked 'A Field in England', I like artsy and I don't think a cohesive plot is important if the film doesn't need it to be. After the outcry over 'Prometheus' they stepped back a little and played it safer with this one. That's fine, and 'Prometheus' certainly went overboard in plenty of places, but to me this film has a little too much 'Rogue One' about it.

               

                

Where 'Prometheus' went full 'Lost' with the number of unanswered wacky mysteries, 'Covenant' doesn't create too many more, and takes steps to answering several of the biggest ones. I appreciate this side of the coin, but the other side is shinier for me - the side that has a Xenomorph headbutting the cockpit of the ship and then being blown out of the airlock at the end. It wasn't as overt as it was in 'Rogue One', but it was present. This kind of fan service is understandable though, especially when it's part of an over-correct. To be fair, a lot of the references to the originals were fairly low key, and I'm probably making a bigger deal out of this than I have to. In my defence, I have become more sensitive to it thanks to the wave of 2000s and 2100s bad remakes. 

The design was great, and all the sets were very much in keeping with the style of the original 'Alien'. All of the visual elements are beautifully put together and the effects were fantastic. There was a pervasive bleak feeling to the whole film, which works well for the series (especially when they were first exploring the planet - that eerie feeling was fantastic, and that was possibly my favourite portion of the movie). 

I also loved the opening - that's basically my dream home, Wayland has taste - and any scenes with Michael Fassbender in it, especially when he's playing David. I didn't like Walter quite so much, possibly just because he's less conniving and evil, but he was a far closer to original androids like Ash or Bishop in his mannerisms.

                    

                         

It lacked the realistic overlapping dialogue and suggestion of a comfortable lived-in relationship between the characters of the original. We had a very slow build up, but instead of exploring the crew (much) we get a lot of details on their mission and the workings of the ship. Personally I love details like this, but I would have appreciated some more character connect too, and I think the slow build up will have bored many viewers (the friend I went to see this with commented on this in the negative, at any rate). It turned out that many of the humans were in relationships with one another, but I never even realised this (and this happened - no joke - at least two or three times) until one of them died and the other one became upset about it. The acting was fine though, and the way that the plot was constructed made the film enjoyable and exciting, especially towards the second and third acts.

                          

Alien: Covenant: 66.7