By Last Caress.

It’s 2008. Jean Delaware (Margot Leicester, Charles III) awakes suddenly in her hospital bed, startling the nurses in attendance. They’re right to be startled: Jean was admitted to the coma ward at St. Jacob’s general hospital in 1960. She hasn’t moved in 48 years.

At Jean’s request, the hospital contact Ernie Child (David Warner, The Omen), to let him know she’s awake. Ernie is a dusty old man running a dusty old pawnbroker’s, idling away his remaining hours steeped in memories, and regret. Who is he to Jean? Husband? Lover? Friend? Ernie visits the hospital and delivers to Jean a letter, which he wrote to her half a century previously. She reads it, and then Ernie asks her what she’d like him to do.

Shot over four days across London and the Essex estuary and entirely crowd-funded via a Kickstarter project, Blue Borsalino is a noir-flavoured, melancholy tale of loss; of time, of life, of the opportunity to make amends. What happened to Jean back in 1960?

Why has she been comatose for almost fifty years, and why has this incident effectively placed Ernie’s life in stasis as well? I shall not say, but writer/director Mark Lobatto allows us to witness the event in fragmented backstory where Ernie and Jean, played with such pathos and poignancy in their advancing years by heavyweights of TV, film and stage David Warner and Margot Leicester, are played with no less gravity but with evermore hope, belief and even a hint of fledgling romantic frisson by Bart Edwards (Peep Show) and Laura Dale (Lake Placid vs Anaconda).

Beautifully shot with a dreamlike quality and with a keen, painterly eye for detail, Blue Borsalino* will be available to all online “soon” according to the movie’s official Twitter feed and, as soon as it is, it’ll be well worth fifteen minutes of anybody’s time. Recommended.

*What is a blue Borsalino, anyway? Well, Borsalino is a fine old Italian hat manufacturing company, and they have been making quality headpieces for 160 years, such as the blue felt Fedora favoured by Ernie.

www.blueborsalinofilm.com

The title, Doobious Sources, is a deliberate pun that will get you laughing from the moment you see the cover. Yes, Doobious Sources, as the title of the movie suggests, is a comedy about stoners. Watch the movie in its entirety, however, and you will find an entertaining movie with personality.

Doobious Sources is written and directed by Clif Lord. It tells the story of two marijuana-loving video journalists who got caught in their own doings. The rest is a series of thrilling acts that unravel beautifully.

Plot Summary

The movie is about Reg and Zorn, two stoners who consider themselves legitimate investigative journalists. They actively search for stories to uncover and report, especially about local scam artists and con men. Their ambitions lead them to take a more dubious route when constructing their stories.

As they sell their pieces to TV news and get the stories broadcasted, their habits of cutting corners and fabricating facts are starting to cause problems. One of those problems is a wealthy man who Reg and Zorn ruin. That man then seeks revenge and Reg and Zorn have to use everything in their playbook to survive.

The straightforward plot makes this movie very easy to watch. It is a movie that you can watch when you just want to relax for the night and you’re looking for something really entertaining. The twists and turns along the way, on the other hand, keep the movie exciting for most viewers.

A Strong Cast

Jason Weissbrod plays the role of Zorn Tappadapo, while Jeff Lorch plays Reginald Block-Hunsleigh. We’ve seen Jason in movies like Never Been Kissed and Fuzzy Connections. He also directed the latter, along with two other short movies: Curious and Dance Club: The Movie.

Jeff, on the other hand, showed his acting skills in titles such as Masters of Sex and What Once Was. The latter is a Sean Penberthy-directed movie about stranded astronauts who find that their biggest enemy isn’t the planet that they are on, but each other.

The combined acting of Jason and Jeff really brought the two characters to life. They played Zorn and Reg to a stunning degree, but without taking the movie too far to the serious category.

A Pleasant Watch

It is arguable to say that Doobious Sources is one of the best stoner movies in history but with no doubt It is a light movie that you will certainly enjoy, but not too light that you get bored after a few minutes. In fact, the story holds characters and plot keys really well all the way through to the end of the movie.

While it may not be a big-budget movie like other stoner titles, it is still a masterpiece nonetheless. Doobious Sources has the wittiness of Pineapple Express, but without the cheesier approach of titles such as Harold and Kumar. It finds balance in the comedy genre and it successfully utilizes strong plot twists and interesting storytelling angles to take you, the audience, on a journey.

By Last Caress.

Hounds of Love opens on a netball match, being viewed in bullet-time slow-motion, lingering intrusively on the girls’ tanned legs and short swishing netball skirts. The individual through whose eyes we are seeing this perfectly innocent after-school activity is viewing the contest from afar, sexualising every movement, savouring it, drinking it in. It’s uncomfortable from the off, but Hounds of Love is merely beginning as it means to go on. A film hasn’t made me feel this uncomfortable since Wolf Creek (2005) over a decade ago, and not so relentlessly from start to finish since Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) TWO decades ago.

Vikki (Ashleigh Cummings) is an adolescent living with her mum in Perth, Australia, sometime in the mid/late eighties. She’s resentful of mum’s recent decision to leave dad and this presents itself in the form of the usual acts of teenage rebellion: Casual experimentation with recreational drugs, sneaking out to parties et cetera. It’s on her way to one such party that Vikki encounters Evelyn and John White (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry), who pull up beside her in their car and ask her if she’d like to score some pot. Since Vikki hasn’t lived in the area for very long she’s more interested in finding a payphone so she can get a taxi but, hey, Evelyn and John’s house is just nearby, she can call a cab from there and they’ll build her a nice big blunt to take to her party while she waits. She’d never normally take a lift from a stranger but this isn’t some guy prowling about on his own, it’s a couple. And Evelyn seems nice, and the thought of taking a lovely big bifta to her mates at the party seems very nice. It’ll be fine, just this once, eh?
Well, no, it won’t be fine. It won’t be fine at all.

John and Evelyn are serial abductors and killers of high-school girls, and they do so for their shared sexual kicks. These are the people who were watching the netball match at the start of the movie and at this point in the proceedings we’ve already seen John disposing of their previous houseguest. At their house, Evelyn engages Vikki in some friendly chit-chat about her marriage to John and about her kids from a previous relationship whom she never sees, and she pours Vikki a drink which also happens to be spiked. Vikki has just enough time to realise she’s being overpowered, dragged to a small room at the back of the house, gagged, and handcuffed to a bed before she passes out. The clock is now ticking, and Vikki has to somehow convince Evelyn that her monstrous actions are a result of John’s abuse and that it’s not too late to change, in the hope Evelyn might relent and release Vikki before the couple tire of her and dispose of her. In the meantime, John wants to play…

I almost swerved Hounds of Love. Early buzz around the picture suggested to me that it might be an exercise in torture porn, and I had little desire in getting my cinematic jollies watching some poor soul being brutalised for an hour or so. I’m fine with a gore flick but it needs to be a fun ride too. Endurance tests of graphic human suffering merely for suffering’s sake is old hat for me. I’ve no interest in it. However, it would appear that writer/director Ben Young has little interest in titillating his audience with an overabundance of grue here either, because the focus of this quite remarkable debut feature – based loosely upon the Moorhouse murderers David and Margaret Birnie, who abducted and raped five girls in Perth in 1986, killing four of them – isn’t on the acts of barbarism perpetrated directly upon Vikki’s person, the vast majority of which happens mercifully just off-camera with the blanks filled in by our own horror-stricken, reeling minds. The focus is on Vikki, the victim; on John, the monster; and most of all on Evelyn, who has become a monster under the yoke of John’s years of psychological abuse towards her. Outside of the murderous sex-crazed hell he’s created in his home, John is a weak man, mocked and dismissed by his peers. When a neighbour hears Vikki scream for help, he has Evelyn deal with it even though the neighbour is shouting for John to come to the door, mistakenly assuming it was Evelyn screaming for help in the midst of what must be yet another domestic.

But why does Evelyn go to the lengths to which she does for John? Well, she’s not very bright, she’s deeply insecure and she’s somewhat smitten by John, who has used all of this to manipulate her to such a degree that she is not only prepared but willing to commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of their relationship. John has convinced her that this is all about them when it’s clearly about him. Vikki, assaulted both by the couple and by John on his own in Evelyn’s absence understands this and knows that convincing Evelyn is the only hope she has of escaping this, which won’t be easy since Evelyn’s reaction to John’s treatment of her manifests as a sick jealousy of John’s attention to the girls they abduct. The more he wants to rape them, the quicker she wants to kill them. It’s these relationships between the three principal characters, brought to life with stunning conviction by Ashleigh Cummings, Stephen Curry and especially by Emma Booth as Evelyn, which makes Hounds of Love so grimly fascinating and which keeps us, the audience, bound in place throughout a movie which retains from start to finish the most palpable sense of dread I’ve experienced in years.

Hounds of Love is not a movie which will entertain you. It is not a movie you will “enjoy”. It’s likely not a movie you will want to see more than once. I’m unsure if I’ll ever choose to settle down to it a second time. But it is gripping, nerve-shredding and even grotesquely beautiful in its way; an unsettling, grounded horror told without compromise but nonetheless with great integrity, deliberation and guile, and featuring not one but three performances which will not be bettered in a film of this type this year. Strongly recommended.

Hounds of Love is released in cinemas July 7, 2017.