Bloomer Reviews

Immaculate (2024)

Surprisingly brutal religious horror film that isn't fooling around

[9/10 · 21 March 2024]

I went along to Immaculate hoping or expecting perhaps Blumhouse levels of variable quality. What I got was one of those wonderful surprise horror film experiences where you can barely believe the extremity of what you're experiencing. That such an experience can still be had in your local suburban cinema in 2024 is, paradoxically, a great comfort.

Immaculate is a surprisingly brutal horror film, with a vein of black humour, about an immaculate conception in a retirement-focused nunnery(!). The direction is measured, suspense-building, sometimes poetic (the enormous tear expelled from the heroine's eye as she watches torture through a keyhole). The production design and texture, and the uncomfortable music, are wonderful. There's a folk horror kind of paranoia at work, and also little ghosts of Suspiria about the place, especially in the section where Sweeney's cynical friend gets on the wrong side of the people running the nunnery.

Before the finale, the brutality comes in small dose, meaning the film retains the power to shock. Sweeney must travel in her performance from a not atypical wide-eyed novitiate to a woman completely brutalised and out of her mind. She succeeds, and I can anticipate the last long shot of Immaculate finding its way into 'classic horror scenes' canon.

The film almost feels a little short, but I think - why muck around? I hope Immaculate does really well today, as it is certainly not mucking around. Either way, I can tell that in horror circles, this film will stand in the long term.

Innuendo (2017)

Flawed and difficult, but ends strong.

[6/10 · 1 March 2024]

The set up of Innuendo is that the heroine has left her religiously and sexually oppressive parents in her home in Finland, along with her favoured twin sister, for a life in Australia. Her past has rendered her a completely insular character, almost monosyballic, who repels or attacks almost all form of interaction.

Watching a character give nothing to anyone makes the film hard to stick with for a long time. I felt like I was getting nowhere, and not wondering 'Where is this going?' but 'Will this go anywhere?' Knowing so little of the backstory at this point, I didn't think Saara Lamberg's performance was giving me enough hint of what was hidden to hold my interest

Slowly, violence and weird fantasies start to creep in, and the film gathers more of a hold as it continues. Seeing more of the heroine on her own in more extreme situations, not just fobbing off all the other characters, also starts to suggest more her inner turmoil, which is the point of interest needed to focus everything.

There are some audacious scenes, painful and ominous and true scenes, and some strong performances. I think Lamberg is really good in multiple roles, it's just that for too long in the film, the screenplay (her own) keeps the character too barricaded. Ultimately Innuendo ends much stronger than it began, which is way better than the opposite, and has resonance. But much of it is a slog on the way to building to that point. Flawed but with value.

Fraternity of Horror (1964)

Thin, silly spooky house film, but with a good finale

[4/10 · 17 May 2022]

In this amateur-ish haunted house film, three American fraternity pledges and their unfortunate dates have two hours to complete a quest in a local spooky mansion. The prize is $100, an amount that makes these 1964 characters goggle-eyed with excitement. Before things get going, the Spinners sing a song called "Watusi Girl" to pad out the frat party opening. There is a hokey, Scooby-Doo-like charm to the simple proceedings in the mansion, and probably the whole thing would be more fun with a better print; it's likely the only one we'll ever have is this incredibly muddy and murky video transfer. That said, the film has quite an effective finale and peculiarly downbeat ending. As silly as the idea for the revealed antagonist is, the cacophony of non-stop screaming on the soundtrack that begins once he appears, the frantic acting that one can barely discern, and the creepy, dead-eyed mask on the villain (that looks a bit like Michael Myers's) manage to briefly create an atmosphere of hysterical fear. Unfortunately, even with this short running time, it's a bit of a chore to get there.

You Don't Nomi (2019)

Note that this is not a single point-of-view documentary!

[6/10 · 8 April 2022]

Reading the reviews for this documentary on IMDB, it seems clear to me most viewers didn't understand that the context for the various critical commentaries made in the documentary changes all the time as you watch. The fact almost nobody gets that this is happening is totally the documentary's fault. The editing is simply not clear enough with in its intentions.

What happens in this documentary is that its author, David Schmader, who sees a lot in Showgirls both in the positive and negative, and from both the genuine and camp angles, gets various critics - and/or actors standing in for critics, it's not clear - to read out their genuine and mostly negative critical reviews or thoughts of the film on the soundtrack. You never know if these thoughts were written today or back in 1995, or a mixture of both; the documentary never fully declares the sources.

Schmader then contrasts each of these critical attacks with his own additional commentary (or perhaps in some cases, other people's, but again, it's hard to tell) on the same themes or scenes from the film, pointing out value, directorial skill or just other ideas that people might have missed. He also shows clips from other Verhoeven films. These are illuminating when they're used to show recurring Verhoeven themes. Unfortunately, he also alters some of these shots as a sort of gag where the people in the other Verhoeven films are 'interacting' with elements of Showgirls, and these moments are usually downright confusing.

So people ranting on about 'wokeness' of this film and such - blame each critic David was quoting. Neither he nor the documentary is outright endorsing these views. They present them in order to either comment on them, refute them or expand on them. But because the doco is really bad at saying who's speaking from what time period, and when or why, it's understandable viewers miss this.

The crucial point is, this is NOT a single point of view film. It invites a pile of points of view, mostly bundling them into positive or negative camps (which you might expect - polarisation is the hallmark of Showgirls) and compares them, through unfortunately bad editing, usually giving the positive camp the last word. By stepping away from the critics' views late in the film, it ends with other kinds of positives. But make no mistake, you will hear a lot of negative commentary on Showgirls in this film.

Rot (II) (2019)

Strange, almost naturalistic horror film never really explains what it's all about

[7/10 · 22 July 2021]

The poster for Rot is a great exploitation poster but does not accurately convey the sense of the film at all. The title itself, in light of the film, is terrible! I'm surprised they switched to this as a choice at the last minute... but all this said, I found Rot to be a fairly effective venereal disease horror film, and at times, an extremely effective one.

The presentation is very unemphatic and naturalistic. Long takes, few cuts, lots of overlapping dialogue, low key performances. At times it reminds of a doco. It's set in a world of middle class twenty and thirtysomethings, burnt-out grad students clutching at academic straws for money. And into this world comes - it's hard to say. A living disease? A demonic force? It's something like early David Cronenberg: the disease makes you sexual and crazy. But there's also a bodysnatchers-like element in that the possessed join forces to grow their ranks. Some of the scenes where they overwhelm and trap unpossessed characters are very scary.

The director has a good eye for weird set pieces. A guy has a fit, wakes angrily, attacks his friends, and then they're left stumbling around in the broken glass from the bottle he smashed. One of them then spends the rest of the film hobbling.

Another quite nightmarish scene has no graphic horror at all. It just shows heroine trying to teach a class of bored students when she's out of her mind with worry, and everything's going wrong.

The film holds attention for a long time by never explaining the full nature of the attacking force, nor showing an attack. Often the incidents happen offscreen with a gross sound effect that makes you wonder what's actually being done to people.

The end of the film climbs into some preposterous new territory that's somehow unsatisfying. I wish it had pulled things together more instead of suddenly letting go of the focus it always threatened to offer. But the journey was worth it. Rot has a lot of creepiness and atmosphere. (Why that stupid title, though?)

Monstrous (2020)

Not bad when bigfoot isn't in it, which is less than ideal for a bigfoot film.

[5/10 · 15 June 2021]

With bigfoot's face taking up half the poster, I was expecting a bigfoot movie. What I started to get instead was... a pretty good, deliberately paced psycho-drama revolving around two women who don't trust each other, what with all the local disappearances one of them is investigating. This, more than half the film, was atmopsheric, well acted and directed. But I was wary that it would never come around to mesh successfully with the bigfoot stuff. And it didn't. The bigfoot stream feels arbitrary, and the psychodrama devolves into a rather silly finale incorporating bigfoot. The test of the irrelevance of the bigfoot content is: Could you remove it and still have a solid story requiring very little alteration? I think yes. This leaves this movie in a frustrating spot. I liked solid chunks of it (mostly what didn't involve bigfoot at all. And I came here for bigfoot!) but bigfoot is not comfortably or even very relevantly written into this story. So, Monstrous is engaging at times, but feels flakey a lot of the rest of the time, and is ultimately unsatisfying.

Sleeping Beauty (2011)

Wearily negative

[8/10 · 11 June 2011]

The depiction of human nature in this film is not completely miserable, but it's pretty miserable. Emily Browning plays the largely inscrutable Lisa, a university student in Sydney already exhibiting degrees of nihilistic behaviour before she signs on as a silver service lingerie waitress in a very weird, hoity-toity brothel of sorts. She quickly 'graduates' to the position of Sleeping Beauty in which, while voluntarily drugged and asleep, she becomes a sexual prop for grey-haired men rich enough to pay for the service. While asleep, she sees and knows nothing of what happens, but the audience of this film sees plenty. What is seen and heard is more disturbing than it is visually explicit, excepting the nudity of all involved, especially Browning's.

The question is - what is all this about? It is beautifully designed and photographed in still, square-on Kubrick style, with minimal editing and music. There are degrees of suspense and disturbance, mystery and eroticism, but there isn't much of a vector for any of these elements. The characters are variously arch and obnoxious, cold, stupid, reckless and unkind. We know little about any of them, and most of what we do learn doesn't make much sense. Bizarrely, the kindest person in the film seems to be the madam of the brothel, played by a magnificently still Rachael Blake.

I wondered, while watching Sleeping Beauty, how it was going to end itself. The final scene is pretty unsatisfying, given that the resolution depends on Lisa eventually seeking to find out what has been going on during her sleeps - something the audience doesn't just know already, but has watched at length as fact. And there is a twist which potentially confuses the denouement.

There is no doubting that this film is an experience and finely made, but there's a strain of dumb misery and pessimism at work here along the lines of Catherine Breillat and Michael Haneke. Everybody is hopeless and unkind, they don't know what they want, they can't evolve, they don't want to evolve. Lisa seems interested in a promiscuous brand of self-destruction for reasons the audience basically has to invent. The whole film also teeters on the edge of being one of those pieces where every single man is depicted as being a sex-enslaved scumbag. What you're left with is an aesthetically interesting film with a strong sensibility, but which is wearily negative about everything, and whose ending is also a letdown on the film's own terms.

Tron: Legacy (2010)

Accepting that the feat of the original film can't be replicated, this was still a bit disappointing.

[7/10 · 17 December 2010]

I was an 8 year old kid learning to program my Apple II when my dad took me to see TRON in 1983. The film has probably been a bigger deal in my life than I would consciously reckon.

I was made aware of this tonight after seeing TRON Legacy. I saw it in 3d at IMAX and it was spectacular, no doubt about that. But the story didn't feel like it had much depth, and there was no sense of wonder.

Aesthetically, the feat of the original film is only reproducible by doing something that nobody understands or has imagined yet, and doing it with new technology. The aesthetic of the new TRON is beautiful, but it runs along with my feelings about the diminishing returns of photorealism in gaming - the world of the original TRON didn't look like anything we knew. This new one looks like plenty we know. The world inside the computer has become a concrete looking environment painted with photorealistic CGI. It looks like it's all really there, like it's built out of matter. You can see the real latex wads on people's hands. To me this felt all wrong, somehow.

Is this the point? That graphics are going this way? It seems logical, but in a way, I don't even understand the aesthetic of the new film. It didn't seem to bother anyone I saw it with.

I enjoyed the film when it was in front of me, but afterwards I felt oddly down about it. I didn't think I went in with manic expectations, but I suppose deep down, I did want more, because the original film has been a part of my consciousness all this time, and it's a film which invoked pure creativity. The new film doesn't touch anything so inspiring, even if it has many good qualities.

Nightstalker (2009 Video)

Pretty terrible, but at least it's different

[2/10 · 6 August 2010]

This is a pretty monotonous and factually inaccurate portrait of Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. The Night Stalker, the serial killer and self-proclaimed Satanist who terrorised Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mid-1980s. It offers little characterisation, next to no story, no suspense and lots of badly executed violence. Most of the short running time is filled with Richard's repetitious bad-beat-poetry voice-over of a soundtrack ('She was my dark Princess. Dark like hell. Darker than night, my Satanic queen, she was so dark..' etc) plus endless close-ups of him sucking suggestively on a lollipop.

What the film does have going for it is difference - the style and delivery are significantly unlike those of the majority of straight to DVD horror films. This doesn't save it from being a real chore to sit through, but seems worth commenting on in these times when so many films are bad in exactly the same way as each other.

The grainy video cinematography and no-budget location shooting give the film a gritty sense of place. Richard's voice-over seems designed to fill the void where a recording of the outdoor location sound would normally be. It looks like they only bothered to record sound when it wouldn't be blotted out by traffic and the din of the world - i.e. mostly when they were indoors.

This is actually a pretty good film for the actors when they are able to snatch any screen time away from Richard and his lollipops. It looks like the performers were allowed to improvise nearly all of their conversations. When this works, it gives the scenes a ring of non-movie reality. Of course when it doesn't, the actors end up riffing the same ideas repeatedly.

The Night Stalker was called the Night Stalker because he attacked people at night. Well, he goes in for a lot of daytime attacks in this film. Very few of the crimes match up to the real case history, the scene in which he is apprehended is abysmally directed, you never see how he gets into any of the victims' houses, and there is no real illumination of the man, either real or imaginary. I would have settled for either.

I didn't stop watching this film, but I wouldn't recommend that you start. It's also not a good sign that the film's opening and closing credits take up one eighth of the running time ... but then again, the actors in this film did get a very good deal. They got to improvise, and everyone's name was displayed twice.

Belinda (1988)

Downbeat dance drama which ain't easy to find

[6/10 · 4 August 2010]

The difficulty of finding this 1988 film to see it in 2010 amounts to a sad (or weird) comment on film archival in Australia, as does Quentin Tarantino's need to buy his own print of Frog Dreaming. You can't buy a DVD of Belinda, and there's no copy of the film in the National Sound and Film Archives, only posters and press material. I'd be happy to get a look even at that stuff because there's nothing to be found online.

My minor irrational obsession with this film is a direct consequence of these difficulties. I first saw Belinda on VHS in the early 90s, either during high school or early university years, and remembered filing it away in my memory as one of my favourite Australian films. By the time I was pining to check this memory by seeing the film again, it was the year 2008. Google searches turned up next to nothing on Belinda - though there was a very old interview with the director on a website about adult thumbsucking(!) - and ironically the easiest way to obtain a copy turned out to be by buying an NTSC video from the USA on eBay. The film wasn't even called Belinda in the US, it had been renamed 'Midnight Dancer', and the woman on the front cover of the video hadn't actually appeared in the film, but looked like a refugee from Flashdance, and I had to manually repair this ex-rental video with a screwdriver and great difficulty before I could watch it... but I got there in the end.

So I sat down to watch Belinda for the first time in probably 15 years. Sadly, I discovered that the film wasn't as good as my memory of it. Belinda is an innocent young dancer who ends up in damaged company in Sydney's King's Cross during the 1960s. The strand of the film about her straightlaced parents never really goes anywhere, while the major strand about the wisened old dancer who becomes a drizzled mother figure to Belinda is kind of maudlin or corny by turns. Crime and seediness rub around the edges of the club, and there are a lot of unhappy and dysfunctional women on display.

The film is kind of effectively grim, but just not particularly well paced or involving, and Belinda comes across as too slight a presence. The sexual assault scene is still pretty nasty, and was something which really stuck in my head from the first time I saw it. The standout actor in the film is Kaarin Fairfax (later one of Col'n Carpenter's roommates) who puts in a killer performance as a really lively and dangerous-seeming dancer at the club. Seeing her here makes me wish she'd had more film roles.

In spite of its flaws, I will always have a soft spot for and interest in this film, probably because I had to jump through so many hoops to find it again. IMDb says that the film also received four AFI nominations. You would think an AFI nominated film would be available or distributed somehow in Australia, but not this one, at least not at this time of writing.

The film does have John Jarratt in it, Tarantino's favourite Australian actor, so maybe he will buy a print from somewhere and save it, a la Frog Dreaming.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

Pretty joyless...

[4/10 · 1 April 2010]

This remake of the starry-eyed 1981 Greek mythological fantasy adventure has a grungy, ugly look and a completely joyless opening quarter of an hour. Sam Worthington's blokey performance as Perseus turns out to be roughly interchangeable with the performances he gave in both Avatar and the last Terminator film, though Clash has next to no character development on the cards for Sam or any of its other actors. What little humour there is comes in the form of cynical one-liners from one of Perseus's bearded mates. The film is mostly a series of grunty fight scenes involving sandaled humans versus giant CGI monsters – giant scorpions, giant medusa, giant kraken, etc.

One of the heroes of the original Clash was a cute clockwork golden owl named Bubo. When trailers for the new Clash were screening, my friend and I joked about whether Bubo would make the remake. I said, "there's no way they're going to have a cute robot owl. This film looks way too grungy and they're playing heavy metal music on the trailer."

To all our surprises, Bubo did appear, albeit for ten seconds. Just before Perseus sets out on his adventure, he is digging around in a supply chest when he pulls out... Bubo, looking and sounding exactly like the little blighter did in 1981. This caused me to cry aloud: "Oh my God!"

Perseus considers the owl briefly and says something like, "What the hell is this?" His bearded one-linery friend responds with, "Don't worry about it, just leave it here." Then they shove the owl back in the box and go adventuring. In retrospect this was the wittiest moment in the whole film, even if it only made sense to people who knew the original. If you had been wondering if the owl would reappear, this scene both satisfied your desire to see the owl again and then reassured you that, "Okay, that's the owl issue dealt with, so no, the owl won't be in the film in general, and now you can stop worrying about it."

The basic strike against the new film, which amounts to 1000 strikes, is that not a single aspect of it is developed in any satisfying way. Dialogue is absolute nuts and bolts stuff to propel the simple plot. The people in the film aren't moved when their pals are killed, so you aren't either. There's a cast of gods in Olympus, but 80% of them stand in the background saying nothing, etc. etc.

The new Princess Andromeda is dull as dishwater in a cut down role (but I was kind of in love with Judi Bowker of the original film, so I am biased). The principal female role now belongs to lovely Gemma Arterton as Io, the ageless half human, uh, toga'd spirit type woman.(?) If I thought anyone would ever say anything remotely poetic in this film, I'd have put money on her character saying it. But nobody does and she didn't.

The old Clash of the Titans was extraordinary with romance, G rated magic and beautiful scenery, no matter how naff some of it was. The new one is ugly and weak, brisk and dumb. I think it's safe to say that no kid who is seven years old now will be looking back on this film with any fondness in thirty years' time.

Crush (II) (2009)

Glamour and ridiculousness, together at last

[4/10 · 26 March 2010]

Crush brings a war hammer to the table when it comes to the idea of 'hitting every single part of the youth demographic'. It's a thriller featuring tae kwon do championships, house sitting in a Panic Room mansion, a sexy mystery girl and a brand new rockin' song on the soundtrack in every second scene. The actors are young and glamorous and so is the Perth scenery. The trouble is that all of this rollicking-in-theory content is at the service of a story and film-making which continually nudge at the borders of dumbness, and which ultimately make a leap right into its crazy heart.

Julian (Chris Egan) can no longer compete in his beloved tae kwon do on his USA home turf after a minor underage drinking scandal, so now he has to slum it in Australia while studying architecture. With his next big tourney approaching, Julian figures he'll get a bit of R&R in while carrying out his new temp job of housesitting the mansion of a rich family who are about to holiday in Paris. The dad has installed a Sliver-like system of security cameras throughout the house, and warns Julian that his niece might drop over while the family's away to use the mansion's swimming pool.

Before you can say "Fatal Attraction", Anna (Emma Lung) materialises by the swimming pool in a red bikini. She is well sultry, and about five minutes later Julian is already having understandable fantasies of her licking his face. This immediately creates a ton of problems – he's already got a girlfriend (Brooke Harmon), plus Anna apparently has keys to the otherwise secure house, plus Julian is supposed to be taking it easy before the big fight.

Development in these thrillers about obsession needs to be craftily ratcheted up by degrees in order to keep things believable. Crush is very shaky in this respect, moving alternately in extreme leaps or underwhelming shuffles. Anna's behaviour as she hangs around the house is pretty inscrutable. One scene begins with the decent threat of the lights suddenly going out. It ends with Julian 'rescuing' his girlfriend from a slightly regurgitating toilet.

Julian frequently has flashbacks to scenes which occurred just five seconds earlier, another omen of bad film-making. He is seen with his university friends in authentically Australian campus computer labs, but his two mates are scripted and acted far more like American college frat boys than Australians, even though they occasionally say "mate". Combined with Julian's nationality being American, this feels like further slight desperation to play to the international market, which I wouldn't mind if this film was better.

Unfortunately, at the moment of potential maximum intrigue concerning Anna's origins, a revelation occurs whose proportions are so ludicrous that any viewer remotely cynical at this point (which I believe will be the majority of viewers) will topple completely offside. I then experienced the film's conclusion as dumb and embarrassing.

Chris Egan does okay as Julian, and Emma Lung wrings a few good moments out of an impossible, ridiculously scripted part as Anna. The film's glamour, high production values and unpaid-off hints of intrigue actually make it pretty easy to watch, even through some overbearing faults and naffness, but the finale is irredeemable. I think the real reason Crush invites derision is that it goes all out to be a rousing cross-market genre piece, yet for all its heavy-handedness, doesn't pull it off, and ends up prompting jokey cynicism instead.

Growth (2010)

Yech, unwatchable!

[2/10 · 12 March 2010]

Another wretchedly unwatchable effort from the straight to DVD horror bonanza of the noughties. Little silverfish like parasites which variously kill people or control them while squirming around under their skin ran rampant on Kuttyhunk (!) Island 20 years ago, thanks to some Resident Evilly maniac scientists who wanted to create super citizens – and now, it's happening again, albeit very slowly and stupidly.

The presence of cool CGI parasites is all for naught because the film fails on all the most basic levels: You don't give a crap about any of the characters, the editing is incompetent, and the script is gaping with holes of illogic sure to keep any viewers in Total Cynic mode. The result is extreme boredom.

An opening montage shows parasites swarming like ants in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This never happens during the present day invasion of the island. Instead these parasites, which have demonstrated the ability to leap from one infected person to another over 20 feet away with extraordinary ease and finesse, choose to propagate in the following manner: They infect one young man, imbue him with superpowers and confidence, and make him stroll into the Kuttyhunk Tavern, where he goes all out to pick up one local young woman. After she admits that ' he really gets her', her boyfriend's gander is raised. The boyfriend and Superman go out into the parking lot for a scuffle, which is the cue for Matrix-like articulate slow motion kung fu. After Superman's inevitable victory over three locals, he emphasises his win by smashing the car park asphalt up with his foot. His newly won girlfriend fails to notice the strangeness of this and trundles off into the woods with him for some smoochies. Finally, FINALLY, a parasite begins to squirm out of his ear in readiness to attack a new victim, but her scream panics Superman and he tears the girl's throat in annoyance.

DAMN! The invasion's never going to get anywhere at this rate.

There's an unintentional laugh when heroine B, the one with the really short shorts, begins to play the accordion one night in her cabin, after saying earlier to her would-be boyfriend that she was going to do this. I admired the film's follow-up in this area when it had failed to follow up in most others. That we see her playing the accordion from the POV of a heavy breathing, hooded parasite dude just makes the moment even funnier. However, such pleasing moments are thin on the ground.

As the cliché goes, this is 80 something minutes (which felt like two hours) which I can never get back. CGI tricks and RED camera cinematography are wasted time and time again in the service of completely sloppy material like this from indie filmmakers who haven't got their skills up enough before throwing out a feature with a shiny veneer but zero watchability.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

Stop the directors! Stop the editors! I want to get off!

[3/10 · 17 November 2008]

This is the first time I ever came out of a Bond film at the cinema thinking, 'I enjoyed almost none of that.' And there was no mystery for me as to why I felt this way. I didn't have to weigh up the other pros and cons (it is not an unsophisticated film) or think far or deeply. I couldn't stand Quantum Of Solace because ninety-five percent of its action sequences are appallingly directed and edited. Endless, wobbly extreme closeups are cut together too rapidly into a meaningless dirge which prohibits you from discerning anything about the nature of the scene.

How many cars are participating in this car chase? Will I be allowed to glimpse anyone's face in this scene other than Bond's? Will I be allowed to glimpse even Bond's face? Which boat is in front? Where is anything in relation to anything else, ever? And just what was that? That blur in front of me for the past half a second, what the hell was it? The answers to these questions respectively throughout Quantum of Solace are, 'I have no clue, no, no, I don't know, I will never know, I don't know, I still don't know.'

I'm tired of reading any defence for the most extreme incarnation of this style of action coverage. It is purposeless obfuscation. It's anti-exciting, annoying and just plain rubbish. Bond films in particular are known for their history of spectacular action and stunts, and if you briefly consider any eighties Bond film, you'll recall that somewhere in it was a long, held shot of something amazing. People fighting on the back of an airborne plane, racing cars through Paris or pursuing each other down a mountain on skis. Compared to any one of those scenes, everything in Quantum is a disgrace, incapable of engendering marvel or wonder.

Perhaps I should try to be less catastrophic about the direction of cinema in general and just apportion blame directly to the guy from the Bourne films whose second unit did this to Quantum, and to Marc Forster, who directed the film, and either sanctioned or did not repel the Bourne-on-steroids content. Call me Mister Insane, but I demand the context, information and sense of place delivered by even the occasional wide shot. To see how Bond kung-fu'd an elevator full of guys would be cool, right? The event happens in this film, but what you actually see is a camera jerking crazily over ten inch wide patches of dark clothing, to the accompaniment of cabbages being walloped on the soundtrack. Imagine if Bruce Lee tried to get away with this crap. And this wasn't a well considered case of indicating what had just happened by offering the impression of it rather than the depiction of it, it was simply a continuation of the house style.

Quantum Of Solace takes anti-illuminating film-making to new, stupid lows!

Saw V (2008)

A stumble, but still on mission.

[6/10 · 23 October 2008]

I watched Saw V with a good opening night crowd here in Sydney. I've enjoyed all of the Saw films, predictably liking some episodes a lot more than others, and Saw V is, again, very watchable, with some intense moments and no shortage of grisliness. But I'd still say it's the weakest entry in the series to date. The trouble is that the main narrative addition for this episode, which has to sustain half the running time, turns out to be a dramatically weak one. I don't think a Saw film ever previously failed to create excitement or new meaning via one of its big twisty revelations, but Saw V's add next to nothing. The knowledge gained doesn't force any re-evaluation of the past events it concerns; you just see and know a bit more about them, and to no great effect, except for the fact that Tobin Bell's performance is always compelling, maybe even more so when he's talking to people who aren't stuck in Jigsaw's deathtraps.

The Saw films have demonstrated an unfeasibly high success rate over time in terms of pulling off twist after twist and having them nearly all hit home. With this track record, it seems inevitable that there'd be a significant stumble at some point. They've never been bulletproof films (and thrillers are the genre that are hardest to bulletproof), but I'd say Saw V is definitely the stumble. In spite of this, it still keeps in enough with the series in general for me to be ready for Saw VI in 2009 - which I hope will be better work.

Helen (I) (2008)

Mysterious, weird, beautiful.

[9/10 · 1 October 2008]

I saw about twenty films at the 2008 Sydney Film Festival, and Helen was probably my favourite feature. Steadfast in mystery, atmosphere, weirdness and emotional bleakness, the film follows the slow-growing obsession of the eponymous heroine with the former life of another girl, Joy, who disappeared in the local park one day, and whom Helen is 'playing' in a police reconstruction of the event.

The film has a beautiful cryptic quality, not in any conventional kind of whodunnit sense, but as regards both the elusive character of Helen and the nature of the film itself. The long, unbroken takes, great silences and restrained, almost self-effacing interactions amongst the characters generate fascination and curiosity. Is it some kind of hyper-naturalism? Or the opposite of naturalism? The players are often facing away from each other, or off the screen, or shot from behind, or just so that you can't see their faces. When a creepily patronising policewoman arrives to brief Joy's schoolmates about the reconstruction of the disappearance, half the scene is viewed via its reflection in a mirror.

Some of the dialogue is bizarre in its expositional nature, enough to prompt amusement, yet at others times it is completely evasive. Helen feels such a great hollow within herself (she has been raised in care, and her past and parentage are shrouded in mystery) that her vocalisation mostly consists of dull murmured statements. The strongest indication that some of the weirdness is in droll taste is an amusing scene in which a morose-looking teacher appears to do the worst job in the world in trying inspire the students with talk of 'blue skies thinking'.

The film is framed by metronomically perfect editing, fades to black, abstraction-making shots of dappled light filtering through park trees and a glacial ambient score. It reminded me at times of David Lynch in its poetic design. It offers a unique vision of a situation which opens onto multiple mysteries, most importantly the mystery of what is inside Helen, played with supernatural understatement by Annie Townsend. And it is emotionally confronting, with some moments that are very difficult to bear. This is beautiful cinema.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)

Leaden.

[4/10 · 18 August 2008]

It's depressing that new studios were built to host the animation for this Star Wars entry, as it's the least visually- propelled Star Wars story ever, and that's being euphemistic. The Clone Wars is wall-to-wall leaden dialogue. Everything the characters say is massively, laboriously expositional, repetitively banging home A-B plot information that your brain inevitably took care of fifteen minutes ago. The film is incapable of demonstrating anything visually - for instance, how a forcefield works, just by showing the shot of it spreading; everyone has to sit around and discuss it for five minutes. This is how every situation in the film is handled.

The animation is fluid and clear for action in a way that the prequels' visuals sometimes weren't, but as far as facial expression is concerned, it's weak. There's little precision about what people are thinking or feeling. The disconnect between what is heard from the vocal performances and how this translates on the faces is a constant irritation. Ahsoka's face especially was bizarre to me in terms of what her expressions were even supposed to be about at any time. This probably isn't worth harping on as I found her new super-showy Padwan character pretty obnoxious anyway.

With the film delivered this lamely, lots of the usual Star Wars tropes that appeared throughout it were just making me cringe, and that shouldn't be happening. The politicking and dull troop manoeuvre plot content will probably bore a lot of people anyway. It will certainly bore kids (or simply float over them), yet they're the only ones likely to be attracted to the film's harping repetitiveness.

The Clone Wars is the tiredest turn Star Wars has ever made, and a major failure for storytelling - and for film-making using all the elements of film, not just dialogue.

Toxic Zombies (1980)

Creaky but likable.

[6/10 · 28 April 2008]

Of the thirty-nine films that stayed on the British DPP's list of Video Nasties until the mania ended, there are many that are more striking or exciting than 1980's Bloodeaters - AKA Toxic Zombies AKA Forest Of Fear - but few that manage to be as inexplicably amiable at the same time as they're being creaky and unexciting. I guess having a stiff cast of amateurs playing good-natured characters in as goofy a manner as possible can do that for a film.

The story involves a bunch of hippie criminals who get sprayed with experimental crud when the government tries to eradicate their marijuana crop. The crud turns them into mindless zombie killers who mostly go in for hacking and bludgeoning violence using any tools or lumps of stone they find lying around. This is the wilderness, so there's no shortage of the lumps of stone, especially.

Caught up in the action is a noble government ranger guy with a cute sense of humour, who's fishing in the woods that weekend. He brings along his equally cute girlfriend and his wacky brother. There's also a dumb mum'n'dad couple camping in the woods, and their conscientious daughter who shepherds around her mentally handicapped brother, such shepherding prompting minor swells of earnest and sentimental piano music on the soundtrack. The crankiest character is a government-hating survivalist holed up in a woods cabin.

All of these folks are put upon by the zombies, and due to the smallness of the cast, you can't really be too surprised by discovering who survives and who doesn't, but you can be a little surprised.

This will sound sappy, but the niceness of the main characters is the neat thing about this film. I really like the ranger and the little gags he swaps with his girlfriend, all woodenly delivered. She (Beverly Shapiro) comes across as perhaps the poorest actor of a poor bunch, what with all her eye-rolling and drawling exasperatedness, and yet this is why I like her, too. Plus she has cool hair very much of the time. The sentiment of the handicapped brother subplot is corny, but again, in an earnest way that is strangely neat in the end.

There's a decent amount of limb-lopping and blood in the film, but the overall dynamics are so leisurely that it's not too effecting. The film has themes concerning government corruption and the good-crushing nature of civil service, plus a strange penultimate shot offering a message of the kind horror films like to deliver. (I think to describe it as 'twist' would be a bit much.)

This was enthusiastic director Charles McCrann's one film, and a labour of love, apparently. I've watched it twice, which is more than I can say about a lot of the video nasties.

Gabriel (2007)

Excellent Surprise

[8/10 · 20 November 2007]

Aussie self-consciousness, whether it figures in support of this film or against it, ain't relevant. Gabriel is a great existential-goth-action piece about archangels and their nemeses warring in human form and grappling with their newfound human frailties. For budgetary reasons the film favours the goth and the existential elements over the action one, and it's definitely all the better for it, because what it ultimately develops which is sorely lacking from a lot of films whose stylings it's adopted (the Underworlds, the Crows, etc.) is a ton of genuine involvement. The unknown actors give universally fine performances, and in the case of bad guy Sammael (Dwaine Stevenson) a deeply charismatic and disturbing one.

I was a bit worried by the wordlessness and flat grey look of the earliest scenes, but as soon as we hit the first dialogue two-hander, I got pulled into the characters' situation. Also, the film never looks as grey again as it does right at the start, even if the digital video footage doesn't give much depth of field in this dark world.

The fights are spaced out, but they're very cool. The choreography is of The Matrix almost ESP-martial arts kind, yet filmed in nice clear wide shots with minimal editing (or editing that's well-disguised by passing obstacles) so you can see what's going on. Sometimes it's guns, sometimes hand-to-hand, sometimes both, with bullet time, slow-mo, folks zipping around bullets, all the nifty stuff that's been developed in this genre. There's also an exciting shootout in strobing darkness that reminded me of Equilibrium's gun cabal scenes.

The film Gabriel reminds me of most strongly, however, isn't something super recent. It's Blade Runner. In that film, replicant robots unsure of their identity and nascent emotions variously went into hiding, went insane or fought for their survival in a world that wasn't really theirs when push came to shove. Replace 'robots' with 'angels' and you've got the basic premise of Gabriel. The angels are sent to purgatory to get in amongst the humans and steer them in the right direction, or in the case of bad guys The Fallen, keep them corrupt. But to adopt the mortal form is to become vulnerable to human weakness, and that's what Gabriel has to struggle with as he tries to rally his angel pals who've failed before him for one last battle.

Freakin' good film!

Absurd (1981)

Boring slop studded with the odd gory lowlight

[2/10 · 27 October 2007]

A monster (read - Homicidal Man) with regenerative powers that are 'absurd' - IE stab him and it won't stop him, you have to completely mash his brain to do that - goes on a minor rampage in a small American town.

This film almost sent me to sleep at times. I don't believe that Joe D'Amato was much of a director, just prolific. When he does make films I like (EG - Buio Omega, Anthrophagus), I'm tempted to thank mostly his persistence with exploitatively gory subject matter. For every half-decent film he's made, he's also made two more that sucked, and that isn't a good batting average. There's not even much consensus on his good films. I'm a fan of Anthropophagus, but I know for a fact that it bores a lot of people, and I can understand why. In any case, Absurd is just too obnoxiously stupid and uneven to earn much of a place in my heart, no matter how blitzkriegy its violence.

D'Amato seems to have had no overview of his films before piecing them together. In Absurd, soporific longeurs are broken up by overblown murder set-pieces. The killings are undoubtedly nasty (bandsaw through the head, axe in the head, head in the oven, etc.) but the director offers so little explanation as to why/how these killings occur that the film doesn't feel horrifying, just ridiculous. George Eastman is competently creepy as the monster, but we know almost nothing about his character, and he goes out of his way to kill each victim in the gruesomest way he can, no matter how impractical that course of action might be. My main reaction to this approach was laughter. Every now and then I caught myself liking the film's brutality, but so often it's just boring, stupid or silly, limply structured - annoying.

The film may end up being memorable for not very good reasons, but the reality is that it's pretty crap.

Devil Hunter (1980)

More exotic, hugely padded-out crap from Jesus.

[2/10 · 25 October 2007]

When a man who doesn't have Alzheimer's can't remember how many films he's made, he probably is the world's most prolific director after all. That man is Jesus Franco, the king of so-called 'eurotrash'. His 1980 flick Devil Hunter is as rushed, opaque, stupid, lazy and exploitative in the truest sense of the word (the film's title is misleading, for starters) as any other Franco film I've seen. That makes it sound pretty awful, and it is... Yet Franco does have some kind of inimitable sensibility, a generous way with the baldly outrageous, with nudity and sleaze and violence, and even with his stupid cheap editing which tries to pave over the extreme haste with which all his films were made. The mix of all these elements causes you to ride his films out, even while you're mostly waiting for them to end because they're so very tedious.

Devil Hunter is nigh on incomprehensible for the first half an hour. The kidnap by strangers of a white woman who seems to be a model or film star is intercut with a bunch of native action in South America. There's lots of naked writhing, dancing, and endless repeated zoom-ins on an ugly totem pole. You need to get used to the repetitive zoom-ins and the technique of cutting back to the same shot about three times in a row right away, as these are Franco's main methods of extending a film out to feature length.

The monster who looks like the totem pole is actually kind of scary. He has raw bug eyes and his presence is always signalled on the soundtrack by cacophonous groaning, apparently recorded in an echo chamber. Early in the piece he chews on a native lady strapped to a tree, and it's hard to know what really happens here but I think he ate her stomach (or her genitals, sweet Jesus!).

Anyway, the adventure begins properly when a studly guy and his freaked out Vietnam vet pal are sent to the island to recover the white girl from the kidnappers. The flakey guy has an accent which, as dubbed, is half Brooklyn-American, half English-Liverpudlian and all retarded. All of the dialogue and dubbing is ridiculous and laughable, making for another layer of the film which can somehow hold your interest.

Not too much really happens from here on in, and it happens pretty sluggishly, studded with the odd bit of outrage like a rape. The nebulous action is fleshed out (haha!) by acres of 360 degree nudity from the natives and the two female leads, and even from the monster himself. That he walks around with his penis exposed makes wrestling him an unappetising prospect for the tough guy hero, but it's gotta be done at some point, and it's nice to note that the director will show anyone's genitals on camera.

The best feature of Devil Hunter is the location filming. Franco can be extremely cheap with the structural and story aspects of film-making, but he doesn't muck around with sets. You get real islands, jungles, helicopters and mountains, all in widescreen. This is something that is really cool to experience in these days of crappy CGI sets and backdrops ad nauseam.

Ultimately, issues of recommendation where this film is concerned seem moot. If you're trying to see all the Video Nasties, you will have to watch this at some point, and you'll be made as restless as I was. If you like Franco, you'll watch this anyway. If you fall into neither of the above categories, the odds are you'll never come across this film. Copies of it aren't just lying around, and I could hardly recommend the seeking out of it. It's Franco. Lazy, crazy Franco.

Night of the Howling Beast (1975)

Ne'er the twain shall meet - OR SHALL THEY???

[5/10 · 22 August 2007]

Here's a wacky adventure-horror film with splats of gore, a few sexy ladies and two famous monsters. Made in the 70's, The Werewolf And The Yeti was banned in Britain during the Video Nasty madness of the 80's for reasons even harder to fathom than usual, and stayed banned.

The yeti attacks some folks in Tibet before the credits have rolled, immediately establishing the pace for the film: fast! Within minutes the good guys have thrown together a major expedition and are trekking through the Tibetan mountains in an attempt to find out what weird stuff is going on up there. The answer is complicated. The superstitious sherpas won't stop raving about demons in this land, but the real problem is the shrine-guarding vampire women who like a bit of male-straddling on the one hand and snarling like hyenas as they fight over bloody entrails on the other. The hero does manage to escape from this delicate web of sex and violence, but not before he's been afflicted with the curse of werewolfism! As if life isn't complicated enough, the yeti's still at large and evil raiders are starting to attack folks indiscriminately all over the mountains. This all makes for the sensation of as much action as it sounds like it would. Somehow the film achieves a consistently tense feel, more by the portentous way that everyone talks about the situations they're in than by the actual portrayal of those situations. This isn't to downplay the considerable amount of action that there is, including gunfights, swashbuckling, dungeon torture and monster combat. But I do regard this likable film as a triumph of what's good about exploitation - getting maximum cinematic effect out of modest resources. Technically it's good too. I don't know if some mountain stuff was shot day for night, but the intense blue scenes in the snow are atmospheric, as is the oft-scary score. Note however that the use of 'Scotland The Brave' on the soundtrack over establishing shots of England is of a different kind of scary, as is a lot of the dubbed dialogue.

Macroscopic logic isn't The Werewolf And The Yeti's strong point, but few films throw together as many elements as this one does and still achieve something basically coherent, fun and with good exploitation bang for your buck. Seeing this film made me wish they still made stuff like this today.

Madhouse (1981)

Plenty attractive thriller - Beware The Dog

[7/10 · 16 May 2007]

And so the Video Nasty train that I'm on arrived here, at the MADHOUSE. And it's proved to be quite a scenic stop. In the context of Video Nastydom, it's a shock when you come across a title from the list of thirty-nine which mobilises production values as high as this one does. By any standards, this 1981 Italian psych-horror flick (though shot and set in America) is a film of remarkable aesthetic beauty. The widescreen photography is crystalline, the framing immaculate and Riz Ortolani's 'Cannibal Holocaust'ish score is well used. Ostensibly, this film could almost give Video Nasties a good name. The 'madness' is that it was banned in the first place. There are several scenes of strong gore that leap out, including the best dog attack scene since Suspiria, but for the most part this is a serene, slowly tense film, with a heroine who teaches deaf children. In keeping with the production values of this film, the school for the deaf children is sensitively and authentically portrayed.

Reading all this is potentially enough to make you forget that this is supposed to be a horror film. A horror film about identical twin sisters, one good - the teacher of deaf children, Julia, played by gorgeous Trish Everly - and one BAD! The bad one's in the local madhouse-cum- hospital, felled by multiple diseases and physically deformative medical problems, but she wants out for her birthday to wreak vengeance on the good sis. Her main tool of violence is one of the worst dogs in cinema history, a trained rottweiler who just loves tearing out human throats. If you're dog phobic in general, this is probably a bad film to see. Everything's suspenseful and well acted for the first half of the film, but some extremely odd developments and pacing in the second half (a completely minor character being stalked by a villain turns out to be the longest setpiece in the film - stuff like that) drag proceedings down somewhat. This makes Madhouse less satisfying overall than I'd expected, but it definitely has enough fine qualities that I still think of it with a degree of favour. It's also nifty that the gory moments, as spaced apart as they are, are very gory.

Note that Film 2000's DVD edition of this film has exceptional picture quality but godawful sound.

SS Experiment Love Camp (1976)

Sex film for a worse tomorrow!

[2/10 · 3 March 2007]

SS Experiment Love Camp is a film that makes Love Camp 7 look downright lovable. And I don't mean that in a 'This isn't a film for wimps, while Love Camp 7 is' kind of way. I mean that relatively speaking, Love Camp 7 has a lot going for it and may engage or entertain you in its special fashion, but that SS Experiment Love Camp most certainly does not, and won't.

'Sex experiments in pursuit of a better tomorrow!' screams the tagline. Being carried out by various fools in a Nazi-run slave brothel during WWII, these experiments consist in the first place of observing how German soldiers couple with female prisoners in transparent waist- high water tanks, or on white-sheeted beds. Cue softcore sex scenes. The second kind of experiment involves no sex but lots of particularly idiotic violence. I'll admit that the cruelty of some of these scenes is affecting, but it's hard to get away from the pervading feeling of stupidity. For instance, can you really learn anything by sticking a tube in a woman's ear and then blasting her eardrum with several atmospheres of pressure? The folks playing the unflappable camp staff act as if they really think they can. Truly, it's not just for the purposes of sadism. 'What, she's dead? Get another one in, we'll try the experiment again.' They're also obsessed with perfecting the 'uterus transplant' procedure, a yucky effect you get to see at least three times. Unsurprisingly, these operations, which were clearly going nowhere, come to nothing. The film is for the most part a momentumless series of such softcore sex and shabbily portrayed torture scenes, further undercut by the silliest-looking dubbing I've seen in a film of this genre and the least convincing casting of a period film ever. The German troops look and act - and above all, sound - like American GIs.

Even for folks who want to watch them - like myself - these Nazi sexploitation films are acknowledged as being pretty hard to surpass in terms of bad taste, so when one is executed as dumbly as SS Experiment Love Camp, it sort of topples over into a zone where it could easily be viewed as a complete insult to humanity. You've got a film about Nazi experiments, but they're quite ridiculous. The film's hopeless in its period detail and everyone has a broad American accent. Jewishness isn't mentioned at all (not totally exceptional for this genre, but in this film, again, it somehow looks worse). There's almost no development, no suspense and no engagement value of any kind, except during the last twenty minutes, when they throw in the testicular transplant plot development which I haven't previously mentioned. The ball action and some unintended laughs are about the only things which stick out of this quite dull, dumb and thoroughly poor entry in the genre.

Slave of the Cannibal God (1978)

Mummy, what is the python doing to that monkey?!

[5/10 · 2 March 2007]

Depending on which version you see, this film could look like anything from a moderately tasteful B-grade Hollywood jungle adventure flick by way of Italy (the most cut version, usually known as 'Slave Of The Cannibal God') to an overtly Italian cannibal/jungle genre flick, with all that the latter entails: plenty of extreme footage of real animal violence (turtle bites 'gator, snake molests bird, python eats monkey, lizard regurgitates snake - the list goes on ridiculously), plus the expected human-on-human cannibalism, entrail-paddling and a castration to boot.

Mountain Of The Cannibal God definitely has a more upmarket and light-hearted veneer than most of its cousins in this genre. There's a cast featuring some folks you've heard of, for starters. Ursula Andress is on hand to glam things up, and Stacy Keach brings some leading man aura to his part as the guy who survived life as the cannibals' prisoner and now wants to go back up the mountain to exorcise his demons. And probably kill all the cannibals while he's at it. There's also lots of real adventure here, the kind of thing you'd expect in an Indiana Jones film. The heroes have to battle rapids in a flakey canoe, scale a cliff beneath a spectacular waterfall, and they are repeatedly menaced by snakes both large and small.

But as lots of lingeringly filmed gore and incidents of pointless animal cruelty mount up, you'll start to think, 'Hang on - this really IS an Italian exploitation flick.' And you'll be right! The protagonists in this film end up looking like particularly heedless jerks as a result, too. When one of their native flunkies is chomped by a river 'gator, they make the most cursory possible effort to save him, then quickly paddle away. When the next flunky is yanked by noose into a tree and mashed very slowly by a spike trap, they just stand there watching. Somehow the polished exterior of this film just makes the exploitation content - and especially all that animal-flaying - more smirkily crass than usual.

The finale really lets rip, with truly gratuitous simulated bestiality, snakes having their skin ripped off for lunch purposes and weird closeups of one woman's crotch. It's all part of some kind of cannibal orgy, you see. After the fact of Mountain Of The Cannibal God, you'll be rubbing your eyes and saying, 'Geez, what was that?' For awhile it looked like a Spielberg adventure flick, later on it was an Italian cannibal potboiler, and inbetween a whole lot of animals died. Well, they don't make them like this anymore, which is good news for wildlife.