Watched a bunch of stuff over the past week as the thinly veiled is overseas with work and as such, there is no one around to stop me…
Get Out
Enjoyed this, but possibly not as much as other people seem to be doing so. Good setup that gets increasingly creepy and doesn’t show its hand until right near the end. A satisfying payoff for the protagonist too, superbly played by Daniel Kaluuya who I am also currently enjoying in Psychoville (I don’t think I will ever tire of Mark Pemberton calling his character ‘Tealeaf’). Maybe just not quite scary/bloody enough for me, nonetheless this has been wildly successful at the box office which is only ever a good thing for future horror productions. 7/10
The Void
Been looking forward to this after the John Carpenter comparisons, which turned out to be well founded. A small disparate group of characters end up besieged in a hospital by a force with no clear motive - classic stuff. Some of the acting/dialogue in this is, well…not great, but the practical effects, score, and general Cthulu/weirdness vibe more than make up for it. 7/10
The Shallows
This could well have been alternatively titled “Blake Lively is beach body ready’ (see below poster) such was the amount of screen time dedicated to the main character getting in and out of her swimwear. Fortunately, once it actually gets going this is a genuinely tense animal attack feature. Sharks will never not be scary tbf, especially when they seem to take things as personally as this one does, and this wears its Jaws influences firmly on its sleeve. The final shark confrontation in particular is pleasingly bombastic. 6/10
Wake Wood
The return of Hammer Films (although the poster is somewhat misleading of the actual tone) is something to be celebrated by the British film industry/horror fans in general This is a mashup of themes from Don’t Look Now and Pet Cemetery and falls squarely into the ‘folk horror’ genre. Starring Littlefinger from Game Of Thrones, supported by a nicely hammy Timothy Spall, this has some genuinely eerie moments. Going back to Aidan Gillen, his accent is a bit all over the place in this, which we may have come to expect from his previous work only presumably this is his actual real accent in this? Nonetheless, he does his thing, whatever that is, and from looking at his filmography, in addition to being main cast in two of the most celebrated TV shows of recent years (The Wire and Game Of Thrones) my god has he made a lot of films. Obviously has something. 6/10
After Midnight
An 80s horror anthology is usually right up my street, but this was, what’s the word I’m looking for here…shit. Seemingly assembled entirely out of horror film cliches (the painfully dislikable victims in both of the first two chapters end up stranded after running out of gas in the middle of nowhere - really?), this has approximately zero scares and not even much redeemable 80s nostalgia/kitsch. 2/10
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
Not horror per se, but I’m including it here as it has some serious gore in it. This is the directors cut of the two films combined, with additional scenes added, the gore restored to full colour rather than black and white, and with the chapters in the originally intended order. I found the split of the two original films deeply frustrating (this was obviously before Peter Jackson has unleashed the full terror of his Hobbit cycle on us) so seeing this restored to its full glory was very exciting. The revenge arc makes far more sense with the story in its correct order, particularly (spoilered just in case)…
…we only find out that The Bride’s daughter is alive when she does, right before the final showdown with Bill which gives the whole story far more weight.
Also, The House Of Blue Leaves/Crazy 88 fight is about a third of the way through which doesn’t involve a huge anti-climax like it did bookending the first chapter in the split versions. Watching this as a whole, it is impressive the ambition of the story telling involved as this jumps around a lot of characters and locations all of which are cast, shot and scored to perfection. The support from the likes of Lucy Liu, Darryl Hannah, Sonny Chiba and David Carradine is superb. The undeniable star of this however is Uma Thurman, who is amazing in every part of this - wish she was still doing more stuff. While I’m not sure how wide a market there is for four hour long revenge epics, I think that had this been released as a single instalment, possibly edited down to maybe more like three hours, this would be regraded alongside the very best of Tarantino’s work. 9/10