film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: BRWC

  • War Of The Arrows – Film Review

    War Of The Arrows – Film Review

    Released to a thunderous reception in its native South Korea in 2011, War of the Arrows stormed the domestic box office picking up several prestigious awards along the way. Coming to the UK on Blu-Ray and DVD on the 7th of May, War of the Arrows is an epic, period action movie chock full of breath-taking action sequences and exceptional performances from all its leads.

    Set along the backdrop of the 17th Century Manchurian invasion of Korea, the film tells the story of Nam-Yi (Park Hae-Il; The Host), a master archer, who goes on a one-man quest to save his younger sister Ja-In (Moon Chae-won), from the clutches of Mongolian invaders who kidnap her at her marriage to family friend Seo-Goon (Kim Mu-Yeol).

    War of the Arrows come to Blu-Ray, DVD and VOD 7th of May 2012

    Unlike many recent period action films from the Far East such as Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, War of the Arrows deviates away from the visual extravagance and grandeur of those movies, painting a more brutal and dare I say realistic picture of 1636 Korea. This isn’t to say the film isn’t as visually stirring as those aforementioned movies, just interpreted in a more violent and barbaric style as opposed to an excessive artistic flair. Every action scene is masterfully shot however, harbouring a constant feeling of tension as Nam-Yi attempts to pick off his sister’s captors one arrow at a time. There are also a couple of chilling sequences that capture the brutality of the time period; most notably the opening scene and about half the way through involving a relentless game of cat and mouse between the Mongolians and their prisoners.

    Park Hae-Il as Nam Yi.

    While high in violence for large portions of the movie, there is a certain class given to the fight scenes. Never becoming overly gory they simultaneously maintain a high level of intensity throughout. This is where War of the Arrows is at it’s strongest, with a good mix of fine sword choreography and slow motion arrow play, there is enough here to entertain fans of eastern cinema and even the action genre in general. Reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s Mayan era chase-movie Apocalypto as well as holding certain parallels to Jean-Jacques Annaud’s underrated war tale Enemy at the Gates, the story leans between a one-man army revenge movie and an intense battle of wits between two exceptional warriors. From it’s horrific opening; director Kim Han-Min dials down the pace for good half an hour to set up its utterly brilliant middle and final third. With a no holds barred flow of tremendous action, the film is a visceral delight only let down by a disappointingly generic soundtrack and the odd inclusion of some needless humorous moments. Minor gripes then, for what is a thoroughly entertaining affair that ticks all the boxes for a gripping film of the genre. Exciting sequences, breath taking action and superb sound design all contribute to what is a wonderfully entertaining 2 hours and 02 minutes.

    Moon Chae-Won as Ja-In; the kidnapped sister of Nam-Yi.

    The performances are very much what you’d come to expect from a film of this ilk, with very strong leads and a whole host of fine support that lend to the powerful and somewhat tragic plot line. Park Hae-Il excels as Nam-Yi (unsurprising following his brilliant turn in The Host) offering a great range of diversity in his performance. Going from emotionally charged brother to raging warrior with ease, fully justifying his recent haul of best actor awards. And while his on-screen sister features only for a handful of minutes, relative newcomer Moon Chae-won creates an instantly likeable persona adding a little more dimension to the usual “damsel in distress” fare.

    From every whistling arrow feather and taught stretch of a bow primed to launch, War of the Arrows is Far Eastern action cinema at it’s very finest, hitting the mark with precision at every turn. Cracking stuff. ****

  • Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron – Book Review

    Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron – Book Review

    The Anno Dracula series of books by author Kim Newman is a delightfully entertaining alternative history, focusing on a tangent reality that mixes historical fact and fictional sources into a world of vampires and humans. Taking it’s cue from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this alternative world posits what might have happened if events in the novel had occurred drastically different, with Dracula proving successful and rising to power in England, marrying Queen Victoria to become Prince Consort and ruler of the nation.

    The first novel, titled simply Anno Dracula, takes place a couple of years after this, in 1888, with half the population now turned into Vampires and a new social and political structure forming as people come to terms with the Nosferatu walking amongst the ‘warm’. It is a sleek, intelligent novel that follows several characters viewpoints in a retelling (or rather a retooling) of the Jack the Ripper story, with the victims replaced with Vampire prostitutes instead of regular warm blooded whores. Amongst the main protagonists are Charles Beauregard, an agent of the secret Government services group the Diogenes Club, and Geneviève Dieudonnè, a 14th century Vampire elder, tackling the Ripper case and ultimately Dracula himself, who appears mainly in the background as an arbiter of chaos, merely the instigator of the stories setting rather than a direct character.

    The sequel, The Bloody Red Baron, is set during the first World War in a landscape altered drastically by the addition of Vampires, but that ultimately retains many of the historic details. Dracula, having been exiled from Britain following the events of Anno Dracula, has now spread his Vampirism throughout Europe helping to instigate and take a leading role in World War I. Charles Beauregard returns, now in his sixties, as one of the principle elders of the Diogenes Club with Edwin Winthrop, a promising young secret agent, taking his place as the principal protagonist in this story. Several other characters recur from the first book, many of them Vampires and as such not plagued by the fatigue of age occurring in the 30 years since the previous title. The narrative follows the close of the War and more specifically aerial combat squads on both sides, including the German Flying Circus and it’s main fighter Manfred von Richthofen or The Bloody Red Baron, as Germany attempts to build an invincible squad of undead mutant fliers. The Flying Circus is the centre of a ghastly mixture of science and alchemy at Schloss Adler (a typically gothic castle setting), perpetrated by a team of mad scientists headed by Professor ten Brinken and Doctor Caligari.

    On the heals of Beauregard and Winthrop, and in search of a good story, is undead journalist Kate Reed, another carry over from the first novel, who flits between her duties as an ambulance driver on the front and her professional curiosity as a prolific purveyor of truth. Also present in an adjacent, but still integral, story is Edgar Allan Poe who has been hired by the German government to ghost write the autobiography of the Baron, to be used as inspiring propaganda. The story weaves and flows between Beauregard and the government in England, Winthrop in the flying squadron, Kate in the trenches, and the flying circus with Poe, and depicts the final push of the war and the eventual success of the allies but with a distinctly vampiric twist.

    As with the first book historical, literary, and film references abound, indeed there’s such a wealth of inspiration mined from other sources (from real events, to the wealth of all Vampire fiction, to movies and fiction in general) that the research that must have been undertaken in coalescing the book is astounding. Of particular note is the breadth of description of aerial combat and technical flight info that is so precise it must have been based on extensive research. The story is very entertaining and enthralling, the split view points providing a great depth that fleshes out the characters and provides many angles of insight. There are countless moments of action, espionage, horror, and comedy that are littered throughout the very well conceived story. One moment of particular brilliance occurs when a zeppelin airship descends on the German castle to convey Dracula’s arrival accompanied by Wagner’s ride of the Valkyries in a hilarious, and twisted, reference to both Apocalypse Now and also the imperial march that announces Darth Vader’s arrival in Star Wars.

    The Vampires in the series are treated with a type of humanity, rather than being supernatural beings they are explained more in the sense of being a tangential evolution of humans, and are frequently portrayed as being extensions of human characters. There are also a variety of types, much like different species, with various bloodlines having different characteristics, thus allowing for a greater diversity from just a singular idea of what constitutes a vampire.

    The Bloody Red Baron is a stunning addition to the tightly written, and researched, alternate timeline universe of Anno Dracula, with compelling characters, plenty of intrigue, and not just a little smattering of blood and guts. The series, having been written some years ago with the first being published in 1992, is in the process of being re-released by Titan Books, most with new additional extras. The Bloody Red Baron comes with a fairly substantial new novella Vampire Romance, set in the 1920’s, that sees the return of Geneviève, from the first novel, being swept up in a Diogenes Club assignment involving Edwin Winthrop as they infiltrate a country house meeting of Vampire elders, who in the course of their meeting begin to be killed one by one creating an entertaining murder mystery. This additional material shows that Newman is still very comfortable in the world of vampire fiction and is both a great story on its own merit and a nice accompaniment to follow The Bloody Red Baron.

    Anno Dracula and The Bloody Red Baron are both available now from Titan Books.

  • James Plumb – Interview

    James Plumb – Interview

    I sat down with director James Plumb to talk about horror, remakes and his new film Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection. 

    DG: A lot of film makers can trace their careers back to a particular film or director. What would you say was the experience that first engaged you with film?

    JP:  When I was a very little kid I really really enjoyed Jaws as a film, and we’re talking like four or five here. I clearly didn’t get it on may levels but I think just as a little kid you seeing the big fish eat the people was just for some reason just hilarious to me. But I think it was more for the fact there was, you know I had a video camera, one of these giant ancient VHS kinda things I could barely lift. I just had that to play with and just started putting stuff together that way. So that was about 1988 I actually started making terrible terrible short films and bizarrely they were all kind of horror films.

    My mum was a lecturer at Warwick uni and she did american literature but also tutored a few things on film and TV on night courses and stuff like that so I always had access to all these reference books in what was basically the humanities library. And so I’d flick through these books and I’d see stills of stuff like the original Nightmare On Elm Street and it would be like five stills to tell the picture of the film. So you’d have all these mental images of like freddy coming out of the wall, the tongue coming out of the end of the phone and like the claw coming out of the bathtub and it was those kind of images that just kind of stuck with me.

    So in terms of one single film, I honestly can’t remember. I was very lucky as a kid, my parents didn’t censor anything from me (I don’t think they let me watch porn), but in terms of like horror films or sci-fi or anything like that which were clearly 18s that was fine that was never off limits. I definitely watched Robocop when it first came out on video which I’m guessing was about 89 90 when it came out on vid. I saw that and my mum turned to me and kind of went ‘did you like that?’ and I was like ‘yeah it was great’ and so she then showed me The Terminator. As a kid The Terminator completely blew my mind. But its always been horror and sci-fi films that have really stuck with me, because you get all this extra ordinary stuff that you don’t get in real life and I think later on in life I actually appreciated that usually, for the most part the films weren’t about giant robots, they were about other things but they had nice giant robot window dressing that kept you entertained, they made you think without realizing that you were thinking about it.

    DG: Whats your take on the state of horror as a genre at the moment. Theres lots of remakes, Michael Bay seems to be going through all the old films and remaking them one at a time, and then Saw and Paranormal Activity, they just keep coming. So whats your take is horror in good state at the moment?

    JP: Theres always been sequels, especially since I was a kid you know one of my favorite things at the time was the eight Friday the Thirteenth films. Even back before that, you had the universal stuff, you had Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Ghost of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, all of these things Albert and Costello and Frankenstein and I’m fine with that. I think as long as it’s well written and well told it doesn’t matter if its a sequel.

    The state of horror – I think its doing pretty well. Theres enough things going on right now, where we’re getting to the point where every week theres a new horror film or something horror related, some of the films that are being released as horrors I would call horrors, like the Underworld films I think are more action films. But again there are found footage film flying around all over the place right now and I’m fine with that, I think its a good format as long as the story’s well told great I’ll happily go see those.

    On to remakes then. I’m fine with remakes, some of my favourite films are remakes, you’ve got The Thing. John Carpenter’s The Thing is for me one of the perfect films ever made. Beyond that The Fly as well, Cronenberg’s The Fly I just think is an amazing achievement. Really when you actually consider it its only got three characters in it. It’s literally Jeff Goldblum, Gina Davis and you know the dick, I can’t remember his name. And it’s just this little character drama with a guy who happens to be turning into a fly. It’s just taking that old cheesy Vincent Price movie and turing it into something great.

    I think what those films did and they did right was they just looked at the core concept of it. The Thing is basically shit goes down in the Antarctic with aliens and a small team of men cut off from the outside world have to battle it. The Fly is – a guy turns into a fly, thats pretty much all they keep from the original. They keep those core concepts and then they do there own thing and its no surprise that the people I’m mentioning there Kaufman, Cronenberg, Carpenter they all had a vision they all had their own things and they focused on that they didn’t worry about being too literal with the originals they didn’t look at any scene and say ‘oh I need that’ scene. I think thats been the problem with the modern remakes which I think started with The Hills Have Eyes. That was at the point where the studio, you know, film made by comity and they brought in a really talented foreign director but he’d only done one or two features and they handed him a package and said go shoot this and if you look at the original there are so many scenes that are just lifted in their entirety without actually paying attention to what made the original great. They had some success with that and it was based on brand recognition and all this kind of stuff, so they just kept on doing it and going through the back catalogue. But rather than thinking about the concept they just thought what were the good set pieces that we could steal and bring back.

    I just thought they’ve started doing remakes and I think the Tom Savini Night of the Living Dead the 1990 one was the last one that actually looked at the concept. I can’t honestly think of one since then thats looked the concepts and done it that way rather than just looked at specific scenes and done retreads.

    Bringing that to our Night of the Living Dead, when Andrew (producer Andrew Jones) told me he wanted to do a remake of it I didn’t jump at the opportunity I hesitated a little bit. I though ok, no-one else is offering to let me do a feature film but do I really want to do a remake of what I think is a classic film. And then I go to some horror film festivals and I know some people there and we we’re chatting about it and they kind of went to me look your favourite films are remakes so just do what they did and thats totally how we approached Night of the Living Dead. As long as we keep the isolated farm house setting and the idea that there are Zombies pretty much we’re free to do our own thing and so that was great to have that amount of freedom and hopefully people will appreciate that if they want a girl with two guns blasting they’re not gona get that.

    DG: So given the film’s mid-wales setting and the cast were you particularly worried about or conscious of avoiding any sense if irony? We’re you worried that the film would be seen as a comedy?

    JP: We totally played it the other way and I can honestly say that Shaun of the Dead is one of my top five favourite films I couldn’t narrow it down any more than that but when it came out it completely spoke to what can be done with the genre.

    In terms of how we dealt with it we kind of, we didn’t want to do a straight out comedy. But there’s been a lot of horror comedies and I’d say only about half of them were successful either as a horror or as a comedy. Shaun of the Dead I think works as both actually I think there are moments of Shaun of the Dead which are really good and do work as a horror as well as a comedy. With us it kind of worked from the characters. Although we’ve got some of the characters from the original we’ve also retooled some of it so it makes a little bit more sense for our characters to be there and one of the main things we did was they were like a family unit and so the film kind of grew out the fact that if its a family stuck in a farm house out in the middle of nowhere they would react and behave differently than a group of strangers.

    I think the tone of the film really grew out of the characters we had and how they would behave, one thing that was good because it was set in Wales was that unlike American films where they have easy access to firearms in England we’re not all packing heat. So there are weapons there but theres a good reason for them to be there. It made us focus on how would people actually react rather than start double tapping ex-family members in the head and we agreed that realistically wouldn’t happen. They we’re characters that didn’t know they were in a zombie film and that helps us with the tone of the film and how the characters would act. We didn’t take a stance that this can’t be a comedy but in the same way the things happening to the characters have to be horrific and really upsetting. It helped that when I was writing Night of the Living Dead I saw A Serbian Film. Its not a fun experience but its genuinely upsetting not because of what you see but because of what happens to the character and the idea of putting your characters through that amount of torture as an audience member is actually really horrible to watch and you care a lot more. So that was probably one of the best things to watch while I was writing a film about a family unit that we’re doing our best to make the audience care about if something really unpleasant has happened to them. What I find in a lot of action films and zombie films and horror films is that it’s far too easy for a hot chick with a samurai sword to lop somebody’s head off, and it looks cool if you’re making an action film fine but for the audience it never seems like it hurts its not upsetting it just looks cool. It’s much more horrible if someone gets shot in the cheek, its a kind of pain that you can’t quite comprehend but you can imagine the implications of a bullet going through flesh, cheek, teeth all that kind of stuff. Thats what we tried to do, if there is violence in the film we don’t make it flashy and gory we make it horrible and something that the audience would shudder at the thought of. We’re trying to horrify you, we’re not trying to thrill them in that way.

    DG: How did you find the experience of filming in Swansea and Camarthanshire?

    JP: Shooting in Camarthanshire was great because we were just out in the middle of nowhere and we had the majority of the cast there for the full ten days so it was brilliant. Thats how I imagine film making will be. You’ve got about twenty talented people, enthusiastic, excited for ten days, you come out of it and you’ve made a feature film. There were no interruptions there was no mobile signal, we were working crazy hours, we got into the routine of filming stuff that was meant to be set in the day at night and stuff that was night for day. Trying to film a feature film in ten days is amazing when you’ve got zombie hoards and military running around. But it was great fun, it felt like war and we were just going in and we had so much we had to get done.

    DG: How important would you say Facebook and youtube marketing is for independent films?

    JP: It completely survives on it, we don’t have the budget for a massive marketing push and I’m coming round to the opinion that a massive marketing push actually don’t help in this day and age, people are far to savvy for advertising now. Just because somebody throws something on billboards or on the yahoo banner for 30 days, people aren’t convinced that it’s a good film.

    Much more important is word of mouth and I think tools like the internet and social media are so so important, just through a couple of independent blogs and our combined twitter accounts and Facebook we’ve had thirteen thousand hits on the trailer on our channel. We’ve had no massive push, obviously we have if you like the brand name of Night of the Living Dead so its something people recognize but its still good going and without the internet it wouldn’t have happened, we would have had to stick up black and white photo copies around the place and hope that people would have found out about it. I’m a massive horror fan and I automatically don’t trust advertising, I’ll go on forums or I’ll look on my twitter feed and the people I follow on twitter are people that I’ve identified as having similar tastes as me and therefore if they like something theres a good chance I might like it.

    DG: With professional productions moving down to Wales do you think it will provide a boost for the independent industry or will it create competition?

    JP: I think that its great that its happening in Wales I haven’t got a problem with it at all but i think its just going to run parallel to what we’re doing independently. For British TV its really important that everything’s not made in London its got a different voice to it theres a lot of talent outside of London and its great to see things really start to be made here.

    It can only be good for TV but I don’t think it has much of an impact on the independent stuff beyond the fact that some of the art and design guys want to direct there own stuff and have access to a bit better kit so on that stage great. I’m all for everyone picking up a camera and everyone making a film I really just think with technology the way it is now everyone can have a go.

    What I’m interested in is if more people are making stuff it will be more difficult to find the good stuff but there will be more good stuff being made. We’re getting to the point now with the technology and the distribution methods as well, with Night of the Living Dead we’re going with very traditional distribution methods but there are so many things coming out about alternative ways you can actually get your film out there that its meaning that you don’t have to have worked as a grip on a set for ten years for the BBC to end up getting close to looking at directing a feature. I think thats good, I liken a lot of the indie stuff thats going on in Wales right now to the punk movement in the 70’s where they didn’t have to be classically trained you know they just picked up a guitar and made some noise and for some people it worked it connected with them. I think theres a lot of stuff being made right now thats completely independent of the film business or the film industry and it might not be for everybody but there are people out there that really want to see that stuff and I think thats great.

    Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection has recently acquired distribution in the USA through Lionsgate Home Entertainment and is hoping to secure DVD distribution in the UK and Germany. Watch the teaser trailer for the film below.

    Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection teaser trailer

  • The Cabin In The Woods – Review

    The Cabin In The Woods – Review

    Five American college friends go for a holiday retreat to a cabin in the middle of nowhere; this is how countless horror movies begin, a tired cliche that The Cabin in the Woods relies upon and then turns it on its head in this self-aware, genre exploding movie directed by Drew Goddard and co-written by Goddard and Josh Whedon. Goddard is responsible for creating, as if from nowhere, the marvellously entertaining hit Cloverfield and Whedon’s well known for a host of things from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the upcoming Marvel comic movie The Avengers, so both are comfortable with worlds of sci-fi, fantasy, horror and… well, this.

    From the first moment the onslaught of horror cliches from a cast of gorgeous, and obviously doomed, collegiates is met with an equal amount of mystery in scenes of office workers and technicians that are seemingly at odds with the general tacky horror preamble going on elsewhere. A few of the Whedon regulars, Fran Kranz and Amy Acker of Dollhouse amongst them, are peppered throughout a cast that see’s Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison and Jeese Williams make the road trip out into the middle of nowhere America that exists almost exclusively, we assume, for the setting of these kind of movies. They arrive at the titular ramshackle cabin looking for a good time and from there things swiftly devolve into chaos, the details of which will not be delved into here in part due to not spoiling the movie but also for the sake of brevity.

    Not so much scream out loud horrifying as it is laugh out loud hilarious, The Cabin in the Woods is a deftly crafted adventure that frequently makes you wonder what the hell it is that you’re really watching; lulling you into thinking one thing before careening off in an entirely different direction without a moments hesitation. There are moments of genuine disgust that are met with a darkly frank humour and wit, that should bare up well upon repeat viewing. There are elements present from a myriad of sources from the wealth of the horror genre, not the least of which being The Evil Dead.

    The kind of self-awareness (or ‘meta shit’, to use a cringe inducing term) that’s prevalent in the Scream series is highly abundant throughout, as is a tight, quick witted script that’s not without more than a few moments of pure, and exquisite, lunacy. All the requisite gore and special effects are present and accounted for, probably even more so than expected, providing a joyous visual and visceral madness.

    In many ways The Cabin in the Woods is a difficult movie to review, in the sense that to discuss it too deeply is to give too much away; suffice to say it really is worth the watch. That’s not to say that it defies definition, indeed there’s plenty here that’s intentionally recycled from countless other movies, but to describe in any great detail what happens would be severely to the detriment of anyone who hasn’t seen it. It’s a movie that requires watching for it’s sheer bat shit insane interpretation, and send up, of horror in general. The brilliance, and stupidity, of the final sequence alone is worth the price of admission.

    Highly recommended viewing, for both horror buffs and genre newbies alike, The Cabin in the Woods takes established ground and roots around in the corpse laden earth below to provide a deviously intelligent and frightfully entertaining left-field cinema success.

  • The Avengers – Running Order?

    The Avengers – Running Order?

    I don’t know if any of you have heard, but theres a little film coming out in couple of weeks called The Avengers (not Marvel Avengers Assemble, I refuse to call it that). You’ve probably never heard of it, its very obscure and it hasn’t had much in the way of advertising or hype. That said it could be a sleeper hit and I was wondering, in what order would you watch the films leading up to the epic of epic epicness?

    I was thinking chronological order which I reckon is –

    1. Captain America: The First Avenger
    2. Hulk (Ang Lee’s version. I know this wasn’t made by Marvel and doesn’t really count but I thought I’d give it another chance)
    3. Iron Man
    4. Iron Man 2
    5. The Incredible Hulk
    6. Thor

    There’s an argument for watching them in order of release but I’m not sure. What do you think?

    Also where do you stand on the many faces of the Hulk? To me the Eric Bana film could be the origin story and the Ed Norton is a continuation. Do you think the fact that there’s yet another actor (Mark Ruffalo) playing the green beast in the upcoming Avengers ruin the continuity that Marvel have worked so hard to build?

    Also what the best way to watch? IMAX 3D?

    Comment below.