Film Reviews by NP

This is a strangely disjointed film directed, written and co-produced by Joseph P. Stachura. Shari Shattuck stars as Mirium, and Eric Etebari as Gabriel, who reunite after Mirium takes a break in Venice (where the film opens) after suffering a miscarriage. After praying for another baby, Mirium, who is not taking her medication for schizophrenia, suffers a series of strange hallucinations and scary moments. During one such episode, Gabriel, who likes a drink, disappears.

This appears to be a kind of variation of ‘Rosemary’s Baby (1967)’, but quite oddly paced. The initially amusing Camio, Lilli and Amy (Jennifer Lyons, Amy Argyle and Corina Boettger), together with elderly Bella (Teddy Vincent) and Raven (Jane Park Smith) from ‘nearby’ appear to form some sort of unspecific – possibly vampiric - coven that knows more about Mirium than anyone. After the strong opening scenes in beautiful Venice, things settle, if that is the right word, into a series of scenarios that could be real/could be fantasy. After a while, it is difficult to care. Shattuck attacks her role with gusto, sometimes over-reacting to various occurrences. As if to heighten that, some of the directorial touches are sometimes heavy-handed. After a while, you get that sinking feeling that what you are watching is sadly flawed.

The two cops we meet late in the film might well be my favourite characters. Played by Candyman Tony Todd and Kiko Ellsworth, they have great chemistry and humour.

Events lead up to – although they don’t, really, they just ‘happen’ – the set-up for a sequel. A quick look at IMDB reveals ‘Scream at the Devil’ to be Joseph P. Stachura’s most recent filmic project, so such a concept is possible.

This is often known as ‘Roman Polanski’s Repulsion’, so inter-twined is the director and this piece of work. Catherine Deneuve plays listless Carol, a stunning blond who acts like the dowdiest wallflower you could meet. She lives with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), married boyfriend Michael (Ian Hendry) and is pursued – without much success – by Colin (John Fraser). The attention to minutiae in the dilapidated building is not dissimilar to the location in Polanski’s ‘The Tenant (1976)’.

In fact, that is not the only similarity – Carol could be a relation of the other film’s central Trelkovsky character; she even knocks heads with Colin as Trelkovsky does with Isabelle Adjani’s Stella in a similar scene in the later film. Equally, her comparable descent from being merely preoccupied to full paranoia to the point of hallucination adds to this exploration into her increasingly fragile mental state.

As a shocking tale of someone sliding into insanity, I found this effective, but unfairly, I feel it has dated in a way that ‘The Tenant’ has not. It is still a persuasive and occasionally unnerving depiction of madness. Deneuve is very good in it, as is the rest of the cast, and Polanski makes the most of her increasing physical and mental isolation.

Marie (Christiane Coppé) has an incurable inability to communicate with the outside world, and has been in care on three separate occasions. We first see her sitting in isolation, rocking to and fro forlornly in a chair in the misty gardens of a stately asylum. It’s the classic, haunting type of scene French Director Jean Rollin excels at. Curiously, Marie begins a rapport with fellow inmate angry, loud Michelle (Laurence Dubas), and together, they plan to escape from the institution. Once again, Rollin’s predilection for a young female duo as main players comes into play here. The two girls instantly find comfort in one another, their more tender scenes illuminated by Philippe D’Aram’s melancholy score.

To steer Rollin away from his favoured theme of supernatural horrors, Jacques Ralf was drafted in to co-script the story, much to Rollin’s discomfort. Unusually, some of the more ‘talky’ scenes were cut by the director, who usually refrains from cutting much at all. We are still left with a wordier storyline than we’re used to. Long considered a lost film, it was with great anticipation the eventual project was found – and it is that reason more than anything else that ‘The Escapees’ has not enjoyed great acclaim among Rollin aficionados: the hype put the film on a near-impossible pedestal.

Having said that, events are very slow-moving here, and not hugely filled with incident. But then, that’s a trademark of Rollin. This, however, doesn’t lend itself to the typical dream-like atmosphere due to its very real setting. The two girls’ adventures are a curious delight especially an almost surreal and rowdy erotic dance performance in the middle of a freezing night-time junkyard, and so is a very haunting set-piece in an abandoned ice-rink (Coppé was hired partly because of her proficiency as a skater).

Two increasingly disillusioned girls meeting a disparate band of other disillusioned people: dreamers, outcasts and drifters. This may not make for the most scintillating narrative, and some scenes do drag, but ‘The Escapees’ contains more than enough Rollin-esque touches to keep me happy. Equally, the oppressively drab, unfriendly, rainy, cold darkness of many of the locations still somehow comes across as being strangely poetic. Regulars including Natalie Perrey, Louise Dhour (“Sometimes it’s better not to know what your immediate future holds,”) and mighty Brigitte Lahiae (and Rollin himself) are reassuring just by being there, even if their characters are further examples of the kind of people and societies the two girls are trying to escape. The hopelessness of their ambition is compounding by a very sad finale which seems nevertheless to be tragically inevitable.

A group of people are involved in a car crash and, injured, have little choice but to spend the night in an isolated hotel that has grim secrets of its own. Imagine if this group of people comprised of your usual catwalk, characterless model/actors posing and posturing as they go through the motions of the story in the hope it will lead to something more glamorous career-wise. How forgettable would it be, how uninspired, and how much we, the audience, would be willing their graphic deaths?

What makes the difference between ‘that’ kind of bland production, and ‘Hotel of the Damned’ is that these four characters are far more interesting. Bad lad Nicky (Louis Mandylor), recently released from prison, his loyal friend Jimmy (Peter Dobson), Nicky’s resentful daughter Eliza (Roxana Luca) and her junkie boyfriend Bogdan (Bogdan Marhodin) are a mixed bunch and have a good brutal chemistry (that occasionally produces a few good laughs).

The howling cannibals they encounter aren’t quite so well defined, nor do they need to be. A kind of cross between the antagonists you would meet in ‘The Descent (2005)’ and ‘Wrong Turn (2003)’, they are a convincingly feral, inhuman bunch. However, what lets them down a little is that scenes are sometimes too dark to make out what is going on, and Director Bobby Barbacioru’s camera flourishes (and flashbacks) sometimes make us question what we are seeing and, more importantly, what the characters are seeing. But these are only fleeting problems, and not enough to blight a very solid and enjoyable horror. Recommended.

Well, this is excellent. French-Polish Roman Polanski directs and stars as shy and achingly polite bureaucrat Trelkovsky, who moves into an apartment owned by ‘the Concierge’ and Monsieur Zy (mighty Hollywood veterans Shelley Winters and Mervyn Douglas). The apartment is appallingly cramped, greasy and doesn’t even boast a toilet. Trelkovsky’s charming tolerance of the place and fellow tenants – as well as his boisterous and boorish work associates - is effective.

To make matters more awkward, the previous tenant, Simone (Dominique Poulange) jumped out of the window in a suicide attempt. A visit to the hospital reveals Simone to now be a howling, broken monster. He strikes up an awkward, but progressive relationship with Stella (Isabelle Adjani, frumped-up behind thick spectacles and a 1970’s curls, she gets gradually more bedraggled and beautiful as the story progresses).

The bullying ways of those around him, as well as his bouts of bad luck, conspire to throw Trelkovsky into a kind of chronic paranoia. It is a slow decline, and one in which his crumbling, squalid surroundings become a prison, a sick-house. He even sees phantoms of Simone unwrapping the bandages that encompass her and smiling provocatively, revealing a set of broken teeth. He flirts unsuccessfully with cross-dressing. He becomes violent. There is a certain inevitability to the horrific and shocking conclusion.

At 126 minutes, this is a long film. But it is sumptuous in its depiction of squalidity, expert in its depiction of a man losing his mind, so full of unexpected moments and so evocatively told, I cannot begrudge it a single moment.

The story is based upon the 1964 novel ‘Le locataire Chimérique’ by Roland Topor; amongst many other credits, Topor appeared as Renfield in Werner Herzog's 1979 ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’. Good luck finding a copy for less than £100!

Giallo involving a somewhat detached Klaus Kinski, who barely takes the time to remove his hands from his jacket pockets. For such an insanely powerful actor, he isn’t allowed to do a great deal here, but that’s because he’s the mysterious masked killer. Isn’t he?

Also featured here are British actress Margaret Lee (as Cheryl Hume) and giallo legend Rosalba Neri (as Anne Palmieri). Also known as ‘Cold Blooded Beast’ and ‘Slaughter Hotel’, ‘Asylum Erotica’ is a fairly enjoyable thriller/horror/whodunit involving a murderer lurking around the grounds of a stately mental hospital. The location is tremendous, full of long and clinical rooms and corridors in which various graphic killings take place.

There are some interesting directorial flourishes from the prolific Fernando Di Leo which especially enliven the more gruesome sequences. We get tantalising glimpses of bloodied corpses, mangled inmates and staff, and convincing stab wounds – so brief are these glimpses, that we are not quite sure what we have seen.

This certainly doesn’t push the boundaries of what can be achieved in this genre, but what it does, it does well. It would have been nice to have featured more of Kinski. With his wild and striking looks only barely made respectable by a white doctor’s coat, you know his character Dr. Francis Clay might well be capable of crazed antics. Don’t you?

Ah, the private torment of the ‘secret’ alcoholic – which really isn’t a secret at all, which makes things even worse, and has you reaching for the Vodka. Emily Blunt is excellent as Rachel Watson, the main character, in this terrific adaption of Paula Hawkins’ successful debut novel of the same name. The skin-crawling description of Watson’s daily nightmare is recreated with equal relish here by director Tate Taylor. The moving of events from recognisable English suburbia to America works a lot better than I had anticipated, helped by a cast of actors from both sides of the Atlantic.

Happily, Blunt’s excellence does not exist in isolation. The ex-husband, the other woman, the other other woman, her ex and the splendid DS Riley (Allison Janney) all utterly convince as a nest of truly flawed characters. Their rough edges keep things interesting and stop events ever sinking into the melodrama they might otherwise have done. Watson’s hapless stumbling leads her into and out of trouble, her condition never allowing us to take too seriously any of her wilder accusations. Which is interesting, as some of them may be true …

A fascinating drama then, beautifully shot, both as an adaption and in its own right.

This intriguing thriller stars Henry Ian Cusik as Danny Hart, a documentary film-maker, who is either a victim or perpetrator of a crime. He’s being interviewed by police detective Martin (Steve Lang), and his story is told in flashback. Events concern striking up a conversation with Lex (Nicki Aycox), who speaks in riddles, but they become involved nonetheless. Hart’s voice-over narration reminds me of the ‘beatnik’ style of jazzy detective noirs, which is no bad thing.

Psychotic Spider (Charles Aitken), ‘the other man’ then gets in on the scene and blow me, he speaks in riddles too. They’re all at it. Richly atmospheric and enjoyably ‘knowing’ as this approach is, the impenetrability does become wearing after a while, with it becoming increasingly apparent that this is a series of evolcing set-pieces rather than anything more obvious. It’s good: I like it, but it’s all a little one-note, with no moments of progression. The performances are excellent, but the sincerity that sneaks in between the dark atmospherics exist in isolation and are difficult to truly believe in. The soliloquies are only cleared up during revelations disclosed during the police interview. On a personal level, I would love to meet someone who spoke so enigmatically, but I think we’d both need a break from each other every so often.

Crucial, with a film concerning a deeply troubled child, is the casting of the titular character. It is with relief to note that 9 year-old June is played by Kennedy Brice with all the awkwardness and sense of isolation required of an ‘outsider’, but she never slides into petulance or brattishness. After a difficult early life on a trailer park, she is adopted by Dave Anderson (mightily-jawed ‘Starship Troopers’ and ‘Sleepy Hollow’ actor Casper Van Dien) and his wife Lily (Victoria Pratt). The way their wholesome veneer of eager goodwill slowly becomes fragmented by June’s strange behaviour is well played.

And yet June is as much the victim of her ‘possession’ as anyone. Rather like early onset Alzheimer’s disease, her moments of clarity are very appealing and heart-breaking, merged as they are by the bewilderment she feels as to her condition: she shares her body with an ancient supernatural being, of course. “She’s a very special girl,” we are told.

Rather like a pre-teen ‘Carrie (1976)’, this tells the tale of one person’s frightening possession very well, but where it doesn’t deliver is ramping up the actual scares. The usually effective blackening-of-eyes effect used to signify inner darkness is creepy enough, but around the midway mark, it becomes apparent that this is as frightening as things are going to get.

Ultimately, ‘June’ starts with a lot of promise, but finds itself constricted by its approach to the story of demonic possession and goes more than a bit ‘sci-fi’ towards the end. This nullifies any ability to scare and loses the connection with the audience in its carefully built-up first half. It is well done, but emerges somewhat tamer than I would have liked.

Setting a found-footage horror film in a creepy school overnight is an idea with promise. There’s something about the school arena, buzzing with life and mischief during the day, being unimaginably eerie during the night. The actors employed here are refreshingly dynamic without seeming stagey and have a naturalistic way about them. Unfortunately the seemingly improvised nature of their scenes often results in them standing around talking over each other, with little to distinguish them and little to distinguish their voices. That none of them seem to be saying much of any importance isn’t terribly reassuring.

When all cell phones suddenly run out of power at the same time their watches stop, it becomes clear we are on familiar genre territory here. The camera spluttering and the image distorting allows you to know that something frightening is about to happen, just as it has in other – frankly, better – films of this nature; but ‘something frightening’ doesn’t happen for a very long time. Just more chatting and discussing with no great onset of fear – and little (other than an omnipresent tennis ball) to get worked up about.

With a group dynamic, conflict can be an important and successful way of displaying tension. Such moments here arrive out of nowhere and are then forgotten, meaning anything built up by this dissipates almost immediately.

The finale, when loud noises and disorientation becomes all-encompassing, is effective. And yet, it isn’t terribly well done and ‘Classroom 6’ emerges more as a series of found-footage box-ticking than anything else. It genuinely saddens me to say all that because there’s a lot of love and enthusiasm that seems to have gone into director/writer Jonas Odenheimer’s project. The assorted actors give it their all, without ever the characters becoming too arrogant and dis-likeable. The end result is just not very satisfying.

“I looked into the eyes and there was nothing there!”

It would be unpleasant of me to direct this quote from Lorelei (Jessica Brown Findlay) towards James McAvoy’s performance as Frankenstein, but it isn’t without a certain truth here. As with his turn in 2016’s inexplicably acclaimed ‘Split’, his every movement, intonation, posture, grin and gesticulation never lets us forget he is acting. With sentences instilled with dangerous singularity, McAvoy spits out the words in textbook eccentric, rapid staccato. He is indulged by Paul McGuigan’s excellent direction and looks great, but rather like a stage turn projecting to the back rows, there is not one ounce of anything naturalistic about his Victor Frankenstein. Perhaps it is deliberate; the confidence, bravura, enthusiasm, heightened unreality might be traits attributed to Frankenstein – or to these heightened performances in general - but unlike co-star Daniel Radcliffe’s Igor (for example, and other characters too), we never *know* him, never like/dislike him, never really care for him, not even when the truth is revealed about his brother (Henry, brother of Victor: two of the most often-used names for Baron Frankenstein over the decades). As with all things, I can only offer my opinion on this.

The long-awaited creation scene is spectacular. Occasionally threatening to lose hold of reality, it nevertheless takes advantage of modern filming technology; we can actually travel along the power-lines with the electrodes as they head for the inanimate creature. Whereas the first experiment involved a hellish and extremely effective chimpanzee amalgamation, the eventual human monster is battered and torn by the elements even before (or perhaps during) a time when life has been given him. A clay-like golem, he is a spectacle, but has no time to be anything more. An enhanced, stomping killer hulk that brings the house down.

In two pleasing (deliberate or otherwise) nods to past glories, the police inspector Roderick Turpin (Andrew Scott) loses a hand (à la one-armed Inspector Krogh from 1939’s ‘Son of Frankenstein’) and the monster is animated only to wreck the laboratory and bring things to a close of sorts (à la the monster rallies at the end of the 1930/40’s Universal run of pictures). Despite my reservations about McAvoy’s performance, I enjoyed this a lot. It breathes new life into the pioneering story, which is no mean feat after all these decades, whilst never losing the guiding light of Mary Shelley’s original novel.

As with Andrew Jones’ previous exertions into the past (World War 2 is once more approached here), there is a certain approximation of authenticity on display. Whilst the visuals are convincing, the discourse, with its liberal usage of modern day expletives, breaks the spell somewhat. That, and the occasional line of dialogue drowned by Bobby Cole’s terrific music score, are pretty much the only issues I have with this. This latest instalment of Jones’ ‘Robert’ series shows them both firing on all cylinders. The pace often moves along at a fair lick, the various dolls look pretty frightening, and you truly do not know where the plot is headed.

Lee Bane, bless his cotton socks, who has appeared in the vast majority of films from the North Bank Entertainment stable, labours under heavy make-up as Amos Blackfoot, The Toymaker. A kind of misunderstood Geppetto, he is being searched for by Nazis aboard a train (which you may notice, sports modern carriages during the night shots). The Toymaker is in possession of the mystical book containing spells that bring inanimate objects to life. But the dolls are already alive. The Toymaker’s grief whenever a doll is destroyed echoes a searing pain from his past: the creatures have become children to him. I don’t think I noticed before, but Blackfoot has different coloured eyes, and this is echoed in Robert, his favourite ‘child’.

Whilst the moving dolls are as convincing as you want them to be, the various CGI blood effects work surprisingly well, with the advantage of not staining the various period uniforms! It is surprising how little Robert’s gang are featured here. The ending, rather than providing a spectacular denouement, simply presents us with another twist in the ongoing story, making it highly likely we haven’t heard the last from Blackfoot, or his children. As the end caption warns us, ‘Robert Will Return’ – and that’s fine with me.

I vaguely remember watching the original version of this on television many years ago. The only abiding memory I have is of a little girl mewling ‘They’re coming,’ and a television screen dancing with static. So on that basis, I have nothing much to compare this remake to. It begins with that most frightening thing: the wholesome family unit!

Dad (Eric played by Sam Rockwell) is initially something of a twit but we warm to him as time goes on; mum (Amy, Rosemary DeWitt) tolerates everything with a smile; the teen daughter (Kendra, Saxon Sharbino) is constantly bored, growing up to look perfect and is spitefully sardonic and unbearable unless she gets her own way; the young son (Griffin - Kyle Catlett injects a refreshing earnestness into his character) is the best of the lot: un-sporty, polite and reserved, and the little girl (Maddie, Kennedi Clements) is a typical drama student juvenile. No more, no less. The paranormal investigator Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris) called out to investigate livens things up.

The encroaching possession elements are handled very well. Apart from the cartoon-ish CGI tree terrorising Griffin, most of the effects in the house are real and physical (the finale very much the exception). The camera pans round a bedroom full of everyone sleeping as all the electrical items crackle on and off of their own accord. There are loud bangs and musical stings. And not one of these things is remotely frightening. What is guaranteed to squash the effect is the almost constant accompaniment of screaming children – which may be something I might be in the minority having any kind of problem with.

I would say this is as competent as it can be, with a spectacular finale. It doesn’t appear to tarnish the high reputation of the original, but doesn’t take any particular risks with the format either.

Bullied teen Lincoln Taggert (Ronen Rubinstein), provoked, attacks his aggressor. Unfairly, Taggert is then sent to an isolated reform school. Bizarrely, the school has no security whatsoever, so the others constantly test him and the victimization continues.

Let’s get this out of the way. This is designer, smooth, emo bullying. Either you’re ‘f**king retarded’ (bad), or ‘pretty gangster’ (good). Lincoln is textbook cool – hair faultlessly dyed throughout and worn long, growls, talks about ‘losing his s**t’, well-built, smokes, good-looking. Just imagine if he was really needy, found communication difficult, was socially inept instead of ‘can’t be bothered’, wore glasses, stuttered, suffered from acne? Just imagine if he was in any way sympathetic? Well, he’s not. He’s a practised outcast. He doesn’t belong to the cool kids, but has his ‘uniform’ of goth to play out – just a different level of cool. The others who have been sent to the reform school are equally perfect – not outcasts at all. The girls ooze confident sex appeal, the boys respond in kind. Any hope of a realistic study of – or even a passing resemblance to – real bullying is not wanted here. Bratty kids, dealing with s**t.

Right, with that major irritation out of the way – Lincoln soon finds solace in the arms of the most perfect of the pretty girls (Kaitlin, played by Grace Phipps) at this catwalk institution. Cigarette hanging loosely from his lips, he stares meaningfully as she smoulders in the sunshine. Cue death metal soundtrack …

Why do many of these films seem to think it is frightening to have someone – usually young and female – stare at you wide-eyed and declare, “You’re gona die,” accompanied by a sharp sting of music? It is as ineffectual here is ever. The ghostly apparition of a former bullied inmate promises Lincoln “No-one’s gonna f**k with us,” in a scratchy voice, which reduces any demonic effect she may have and reduces her to the level of the rest of the pack.

Things do briefly improve, however. On this bubble-gum canvas of what a reform school is like, there’s no doubt that however one-dimensional Lincoln is, his detracters are on a different level. It is pleasant to see them finally brought down in some fairly decent gory set-pieces.

That said, this is really just another fau-angsty teen slasher film that you’ve seen many times before. It feeds the dissatisfied youth experience and hope they don’t grow out of it before the 82 minutes is up. It is full of enough expletives to make the parents frown. I thought it would pick up – Adam Egypt Mortimer’s directorial values are fine without ever being innovative – and it did towards the end. I imagine this is designed for a certain audience, and perhaps they will enjoy it.

This is an interesting chiller about people doing horrible things when they are asleep, or think they are. It does contain a fair few children, however. I mention this because children in horror films tend to fall into two categories: genuinely frightening (The Exorcist, The Ring etc) … or brattish. ‘Slumber’ manages to straddle both possibilities, which is something of a first. Stumbling, screaming kids and ghost-like images are fairly well conveyed, never truly annoying and occasionally producing something genuinely sinister.

The soundtrack, a dark ambience by Ulas Pakkan must take a lot of credit for the omnipresent atmosphere of not-quite-reality-or-is-it, and the cast are uniformly very good, even when – in the case of Maggie Q as Alice Arnolds and Will Kemp as husband Tom – the characters are not overtly dynamic.

It can be, I’m sorry to say, a little dull, very talky. But there are plenty of moments that deliver the goods. The idea of demon feeding off nightmares is a good one, and it plays on a fear of going to sleep, the debilitating misery of resisting slumber and that hollow pang it can cause.

Events are enlivened by the appearance of former Doctor Who and Radagast, Sylvester McCoy, who hams up delightfully the typically eccentric Armado. We only catch a glimpse of the lengths Armado has gone to to resist falling asleep, and it is disturbing.