Ten Inch Hero

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Rating 1½


Directed by David Mackay

Written by Betsy Morris

Starring Elisabeth Harnois, Clea DuVall, Jensen Ackles, Sean Patrick Flanery, Danneel Harris, John Doe, Alice Krige Adair Tishler and Sean Wing


Piper (Elisabeth Harnois), a young aspiring artist, moves to Santa Cruz and answers an ad stating, “help wanted, normal people need not apply,” to get a job as a waitress at the City Beach Cafe, which is owned by an old hippie surfer called Trucker (John Doe, the one-time singer with the mercurial Los Angeles punk band X). Piper has come to Santa Cruz in search of the daughter she gave up for adoption as a teenager.

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‘Ten Inch Hero’ was made in 2007 on a shoe-string budget and subsequently screened at a number of film festivals in the US, although it has never received a theatrical release. I first became aware of the film because of the cast and have been waiting for the opportunity to see it ever since. Sadly, it proved to be a somewhat disappointing experience. This might be the most cloyingly saccharine film I have ever willingly sat through. There is more treacle to be found here than in a sweet factory. It conforms to all the stereotypes of a typical low-budget independent feel-good movie, but whereas the characters are clearly intended to be quirky and likeable, too often the screenplay has them veer way too close to being simply annoying. The message the film seems to be trying to tell us is that beauty is not just skin deep, but far too often it almost borders on being offensive.

After a while I found myself going with the flow, but although it is not by any means entirely dislikeable, it did try my patience early on and only the likeable cast kept me watching to the end.

Review posted 14 April 2009



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Sleepwalkers

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Rating 2


Directed by Mick Garris

Written by Stephen King

Starring Brian Krause, Mädchen Amick, Alice Kriege, Dan Martin, Jim Haynie, Cindy Pickett, Lyman Ward, Monty Bane, Glenn Sadix and Ron Perlman


Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and his mother Mary (Alice Kriege) are Sleepwalkers, shapeshifting creatures similar to vampires, who are able to “dim” themselves and objects around them, making them invisible. Their Achilles’ heel is their aversion to cats, who can see through their illusions and can cause fatal injuries by clawing them.

Mary requires the lifeforce of a female virgin and Charles thinks he has found it in the form of Tanya (Mädchen Amick), who attends the local high school and works part-time at the cinema. However, he brings attention to himself when he leads Officer Andy Simpson (Dan Martin) on a high-speed car chase – and then Tanya proves to be tougher than she looks.

This 1992 horror film was written by Stephen King. It was one of the first films to utilise “morphing” special effects. The film looks very dated now, but I remember watching it several years ago and thinking it was all rather silly, even back then.

There are several ridiculously obvious gaping holes and inconsistencies in the plot, dotted throughout the film. For reasons that are never explained, the relationship between Charles and his mother is an incestuous one, which seems very much out of place and is all a little grubby. The premise is interesting, but the final result is disappointing and tepid. At times it almost resembles ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ with a supernatural twist.

Mädchen Amick, who played Shelly Johnson in ‘Twin Peaks’ and has subsequently carved out a successful career in numerous other television shows, is likeable, but Brian Krause (who later played Leo in the television series ‘Charmed’) gives a performance that is probably best forgotten. Alice Kriege is wasted, although she does come into her own in the closing scenes. The cameo appearances by Stephen King and the film directors Clive Barker, Joe Dante, Tobe Hooper and Jon Landis are pointless and, I found, decidedly irritating in their obvious smugness.

‘Sleepwalkers’ grossed a little over $30.5 million at the US box office when it was released into cinemas in 1992, placing it at No.43 in the annual box office list for that year. Although it is was made just sixteen years ago, it probably works best now viewed as a museum piece, so horribly dated does it look.



Still taken from mädchenamick.net



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Ghost Story

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Rating 3½


Directed by John Irvin

Written by Lawrence D Cohen, from the novel by Peter Straub

Starring Fred Astaire, John Houseman, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Alice Krige, Craig Wasson and Patricia Neal


Four elderly friends living in a sleepy town in Vermont are haunted by an unspoken shared secret from their past. When David Wanderley (Craig Wasson), the son of Mayor Edward Charles Wanderley (Douglas Fairbanks Jr), dies a violent death and his brother Don (Wasson again, in a dual role) returns to the town, the secret begins to unravel and more deaths follows.

This 1981 horror film was a vehicle for four veteran Hollywood actors. The eldest, Fred Astaire, was 82-years-old, and still moving with agile and graceful nimbleness. The youngest, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, was ten years his junior. Another of the four, the double Academy Award winner Melvyn Douglas, died two months prior to the film’s release.

‘Ghost Story’ was also the first film, other than ‘Chariots of Fire’, to feature the excellent South African actress Alice Krige, whose screen persona often reminds me of Tilda Swinton.

It is probably close to 25 years ago that I first watched ‘Ghost Story’. I adored it. Not only did it satisfy my love of horror films and ghost stories, it also indulged my interest in “old” Hollywood. I was very much looking forward to watching it again and I was not disappointed.

At 110 minutes it is probably a tad overlong, although it apparently noticeably simplifies the story from the original novel. Certainly, the middle section in which Don Wanderley recounts the story of meeting and falling in love with Alma Mobley (Alice Krige, also playing a dual role) does rather drag the film down for a while. A lot of this lengthy sequence, which put me in mind of one of the those early 1970s British compendium horror films made by Amicus Productions, seems to have been little more than an excuse to have Krige walk around naked. To balance that, we are treated earlier on to a brief glimpse of Craig Wasson’s penis.

The acting is hammy (Krige notably excepted), endearingly so on some occasions and laughably so other times. The story is predictable enough and paints a dispiriting but all too predictable picture of the boastful and arrogant immaturity of a bunch of young men who fall in love with the same woman and treat her as an object to be toyed with, taking out their impotent anger on her when she belittles them.

In the end, ‘Ghost Story’ is well told, utilising a visually effective wintery setting. It has a suitably creepy tone and shock-tactic special effects are kept to a minimum, thereby maximising their effectiveness when they do arrive – something that should be noted by today’s CGI-obsessed filmmakers. The film was screened in 600 cinemas during its domestic release and grossed $23.3 million, a very respectable sum at that time.

Lawrence D Cohen, who wrote the screenplay, also adapted the Stephen King book ‘Carrie’ for the cinema (the celebrated 1976 Brian De Palma film).



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Superstition

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Rating 2


Directed by Kenneth Hope

Written by Kate Dennis and Paul Hoffman, based on an original story by Stephen Volk

Starring Mark Strong, Sienna Guillory, David Warner, Frances Barber, Alice Krige and Charlotte Rampling


Julie (Sienna Guillory, the actress-model daughter of the famous Cuban guitarist Isaac Guillory) is a 19-year-old English nanny living and working in Italy. She is accused of the murder of her employers’ child, who dies in a mysterious fire. Isabella Flores (Frances Barber, sporting a scary pair of eyebrows that seem to do most of her acting for her), the prosecuting counsel, persuades Antonio Gabrieli (Mark Strong), a celebrated defence lawyer who has not worked since the death of his wife a year earlier, to act as the defending counsel. Charlotte Rampling plays Mother Frances Matteo, a nun and psychiatrist, appointed by Gabrieli to assess Julie’s state of mind, and David Warner is the no-nonsense Judge Padovani. Most of the action takes place in the courtroom.

This film is based on an original story, but quite clearly that is inspired by the case of Carole Compton, a 19-year-old Scottish nanny living and working in Italy who, in 1982, was accused of witchcraft when several mysterious and unexplained fires broke out in the homes of her various employers. In 1990 she wrote a book about her experiences, entitled ‘Superstition: The True Story Of The Nanny They Called A Witch’.

The premise of ‘Superstition’ might not be as preposterous as it seems, simply because it is based on events that actually took place – the accusation of witchcraft made against a young woman in the late 20th century – but it is still a preposterous film. The template is set in the opening scene when a red London double-decker bus drives along a lonely and spooky country road, clearly intended to alert us that this is taking place in England. This is all very well, but I defy anyone to find a country bus service using old AEC Routemaster buses.

The film does not get any more believable after that. A joint UK-Netherlands-Luxembourg production, it was filmed primarily in the Netherlands, but set in Italy. The majority of the characters are Italian, but the cast is predominantly British. Nobody attempts any kind of accent, which sabotages the theme of Julie (played with the same kind of posh-girl-putting-on-a-working-class-accent sometimes employed by Keira Knightley) being an innocent lost in a strange land.

Mark Strong was actually born Marco Giuseppe Salussolia and has an Italian father. However, you would never guess it from his accent or physical appearance. At one juncture in the film his character is eating a boiled egg for breakfast, washed down with tea served in a china cup and saucer. My knowledge of Italy is largely confined to holidays there, but this does not seem to me to be a very Italian way to start the day.

What point there is to Charlotte Rampling’s character is never made entirely clear. Having been employed to assess Julie’s mental faculties, we never hear the two engaged in conversation and we never find out what conclusions Mother Frances finally arrives at – this from a nun-psychiatrist in a film that is supposedly tackling a story about the balance between science and superstition. However, what is perhaps most mystifying is why anyone would employ Julie as their nanny in the first place. She is barely literate and exhibits numerous worrying signs of borderline psychosis.

The screenplay is poor and the film constantly teeters on the edge of being laughably bad. It constantly veers from bad soap opera to pretensions to European arthouse cinema to lurid Hammer-style schlock-horror. The actors are clearly hampered by this and some of the performances suffer accordingly. I hated the music, which on some occasions was so overwhelmingly painful to listen to I almost stopped watching the film.

In the end, though, for all of its faults, or maybe because of them, I found it almost transfixing. I would even go so far as to say I rather enjoyed it all – in some inexplicable way!



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Silent Hill

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Rating 2¾


Directed by Christophe Gans

Written by Roger Avery

Starring Radha Mitchell, Laurie Holden, Alice Krige, Sean Bean and Jodelle Ferland


I rented this one some months ago, hated it on first viewing and then began to change my initial reaction to it when I watched it again for a second time the following night.

It has been fizzing away in the back of my mind ever since. Images from the film have stayed with me and clearly there was something about it that made an impression. I was finally able to purchase a copy recently and I have now watched it for a third time.

I know the film, which was written by Roger Avary, something that might have put me off if I’d known in advance (such are my general feelings of aversion to Quentin Tarentino), is based on a series of computer games, but since I have absolutely no interest in computer games and know nothing about them it makes no difference to me. What I can say is that this is, as far as I know, the first film based on a computer game I have actually managed to sit through from beginning to end. As examples, I’ve never watched the ‘Tomb Raider’ films and I gave up on ‘Resident Evil’ after about ten minutes.

I’ll quickly deal with the “cons” first. The plot is somewhat silly, but what horror film isn’t? Visually some of the special effects are quite derivative, or at least very reminiscent of other films, but that is the nature of these things, as each new advance is made in the technologies available. I would guess the effects utilised here were state-of-the-art at the time.

Sean Bean is amongst the cast. I don’t like Sean Bean. I have no particular reason for this; it’s just an irrational thing. In this specific instance, Bean, with his bluff Yorkshire persona, playing an American doesn’t work as well for me as probably an American actor would have done playing the role. Having said that, the lead actress, Radha Mitchell, is Australian (she got her first major acting break in the daily TV soap ‘Neighbours’) and I don’t have any problem with her playing an American.

What I like about the film is the genuine nightmare quality. It’s surreal and queasy and oddly unsettling, but I don’t find it stomach-churning. Some of the visual imagery is really impressive, especially in the first half of the film. It has a melancholy feel that I like, something it has in common with films like ‘The Fog’ and ‘The Return’. The film it probably most reminds me of is John Carpenter’s ‘In The Mouth Of Madness’. If you happen to like women in uniform kicking ass (not really my thing, to be honest) – well, that would be a bonus.

This is not a classic film and there is nothing in particular to recommend it for, but I have now watched it three times, so it must have something that appeals to me.



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