By bADVERTISING.
Once again here’s another fashionably late straight to DVD double-bill. Maybe ‘Belated Reviews’ could become a regular feature. No? Ok, fair enough…
Franco-Belgian horror The Pack starts promisingly enough, clearly taking inspiration from recent continental horror efforts like Haute Tension and Martyrs. Charlotte (Emilie Dequenne) drives through the grey French countryside, puffing cigarettes and listening to French punk music. Clearly designed to be an intelligent, take-no-shit modern kind of girl, she nevertheless breaks horror movie survival rule #15 – ‘don’t pick up the the hitchhiker’ – and travels on to a rural truck-stop known locally as La Spack, named after it’s sinister looking landlady (Yolande Moreau). Naturally, things start to go wrong…
The Pack’s opening gambit is more effective if you’re familiar with the tropes of modern French horror. These new ultraviolet and nihilistic films often feature strong female leads and washed-out, queasy colour-ranges, and so the first 20 minutes or so crackle with a sense of foreboding. The expectation is that the film will devolve into something nasty and grimy. And to an extent, it does – Charlotte is kidnapped and caged, and her blood is drawn from an elaborate and unsanitary looking home-made contraption. However, the film starts to stutter when the reasons for Charlotte’s incarceration are revealed.
It turns out that the frumpy La Spack is the mother of a pack of ground-dwelling zombie-cannibals, and they need feeding. While the creatures are well designed and certainly look terrifying enough, it feels like they are revealed too early, undermining the good work done at the start of the film and dissipating the sense of dread. Moving from suspenseful horror-mystery to creature-feature just isn’t quite handled all that well and the picture continues on its wayward trajectory until the end, culminating in a twisty ending that feels tacked on, as though the film-makers felt obliged to do it. Ultimately, The Pack feels somewhat like a missed opportunity, especially given its strong start.
At least Risen can’t be charged with the same offence as The Pack, because it doesn’t even start well. It tells the tale of real life championship boxer and ‘Welsh Wizard’ Howard Winestone (Stuart Brennan), who rose to prominence in the 1960’s and became something of a Welsh sporting hero. Risen follows Howard from an industrial accident in his home town of Merthyr Tydfil, through to his fights for the World Championship title that became his obsession.
The story is packed with potential, but unfortunately the film is hamstrung at almost every turn by a low budget, almost non-existent production values and some atrocious acting. It almost feels mean to have a go at the film, but given that someone, somewhere spent their hard earned cash on making it, it should be able to justify its existence. Leading man Brennan is passable, if not entirely engaging, but his supporting cast range from ‘okay’ to truly awful. Recognisable face John Noble (LOTR’s King Denethor) as Howard’s trainer Eddie Thomas spectacularly fails at accents; his Welsh lilt flitting somewhere between a bad Richard Burton impression and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.
A lot of the time you can’t really hear Noble’s accent however (a mixed blessing), as the sound design is truly terrible. Characters mutter their lines or shout over the top of each other, with one particular scene where Howard finds out he’s due to fight for the British Championship belt rendered completely unintelligible as three men talk over each other.
But this is a boxing film – the fights are most important, right? Well, in Risen’s defence, the hits look real, and hard. Cinematically though, they are un-stylish. One fight with reigning Champion Vicente Saldivar (Erik Morales) is shot almost entirely in slow motion and set, of all things, to Moonlight Sonata, just serves to magnify the uninspiring choreography. Howard’s home life was clearly somewhat troubled in real life, but here it feels soap opera-esque – this fact magnified by cheap sets and bad lighting.
Parallels drawn on the DVD’s cover to Raging Bull are certainly not to be trusted. Unfortunately Risen lets down the legacy of a real Welsh hero.
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