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  • Dracula, The Black Phone, Adrift: Weekly Round Up

    Dracula, The Black Phone, Adrift: Weekly Round Up

    Dracula, The Black Phone, Adrift: Weekly Round Up – It wasn’t unusual pre-Coronavirus to hear of projects from filmmakers who currently have a few movies in the pipeline already, but one of the things the pandemic has most definitely done is highlighted this since no one can work properly on any film at the moment.

    Not one month ago I spoke about director Darren Aronofsky’s new movie, The Whale, starring Brendan Fraser, but now we’ve learned of yet another project from the filmmaker. While it may not be his next movie, it’s still a rather tantalizing prospect – especially if you’re, like me, a horror fan and have enjoyed Aronofsky’s work in the past.

    The new project is called Adrift (although that’s not to be confused with the Shailene Woodley survival drama, also called Adrift, that came out a couple of years back) and will see the director reteam with his Requiem for a Dream star, Jared Leto. For those of you who have stomached it, you’ll know just watch a grueling experience that movie is, and so I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the idea of these two getting back together isn’t a rather exciting prospect.

    Perhaps what makes it even more exciting, though, is the fact that it is a horror movie, and one based on a book by Koji Suzuki, the author also behind the inspiration for Ringu – or The Ring, or Ring, depending on what you prefer – and if that hasn’t got you chomping at the bit then I’m not sure what will.

    We’ll remain on the horror train for a moment because this week we also got some (good) news surrounding a long-awaited project that I have been anticipating with eagerness.

    For those of you who aren’t aware or haven’t been keeping track, the horror film Last Voyage of the Demeter has been in production hell for just over a decade now, it was originally put into development way back in 2010 (ah, simpler times, eh?) and was going to star Viggo Mortenson and be directed by Neil Marshall. The film is a sort of “spin-off” or “re-imagining” of one of the key events from the Grandaddy of all vampire stories, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

    In Stoker’s book, the “Demeter” is the ship that sails from Transylvania to England, transporting the vicious Count’s undead body from his Gothic Castle to the foggy streets of London.  In the novel the ship arrives at the ports in London with no one on board, the crew has mysteriously disappeared. While it is, of course, implied that Dracula has had his way with them, it’s very much nothing but a plot device in Stoker’s story and appears once as a newspaper clipping.

    It does then make for a rather intriguing prospect for the focus of a feature film since one can draw upon the Dracula name while crafting almost an entirely new story. While it has been through a slew of potential directors, it appears that the movie is finally happening with The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark director Andre Øvredal taking the reigns.

    The movie will reportedly star Corey Hawkins, who some may recognize from 2017’s Kong: Skull Island or 2015’s Straight Outta Compton. What role Hawkins will be playing remains very much a mystery at this point, but I’ll be keeping my ear very close to the ground on this one.

    Now, I debated about whether or not to include this piece of news or another piece this week, given we’ve already had two horror related stories, but I figured “fuck it, this is my roundup, I’ll write what I want!” so let’s move on over to the wonderful world of Blumhouse.

    Known for their low-budget horror output, Blumhouse is a studio synonymous with the genre at this point, and so any new project that comes from them is worth some interest, in my opinion. However, there are occasionally projects that get announced that quite quickly become something more than simply another Blumhouse movie. The Invisible Man, Get Out, and this week’s subject, The Black Phone…

    Now, The Black Phone was already a project that was noteworthy since it is based on the short story by author Joe Hill, the son of the world’s most iconic and successful horror author, Stephen King. If that wasn’t enough, though, the film was also set to be directed by Scott Derrickson, who hit the big time with Marvel’s Doctor Strange, but before that was best known as the director of Sinister, a genuinely creepy little movie starring Ethan Hawke, which is supposedly the scariest movie of all time although… well… no.

    Anyway, The Black Phone can now add another piece to its already impressive puzzle, as Ethan Hawke himself has signed on to appear in the movie, reuniting with his Sinister director. As well as reteaming with Derrickson, Hawke is also reteaming with Blumhouse, as the movie will be his ninth with the production company. What role Hawke will be playing remains unknown, but I’ll be sure to bring you the news when I know. Hawke will, of course, soon be seen in the upcoming Disney+ show Moon Knight, starring Oscar Isaac, and in Robert Egger’s next movie, Viking drama The Northman. – Dracula, The Black Phone, Adrift: Weekly Round Up

  • Mass: Sundance 2021 Review

    Mass: Sundance 2021 Review

    A measly church office room gets dressed for a tight-knit group of incoming visitors. This seemingly vacant setting acts as a revealing confessional hall in Mass, a confrontational chamber piece on grief and the endless search for the unanswerable. Writer/director Fran Kranz’s poised debut digs under the nails of a societal quandary with gravity and fittingly compassionate touch.

    Mass follows two couples reuniting over the common thread connecting them. Jay (Jason Isaac) and Gail (Martha Plimpton) are still recovering over the loss of their son, who died at the hands of Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda’s (Ann Dowd) son during a senseless school shooting. After previously acquainting with contentious vitriol, the two sides try to discover a semblance of closure from the life-altering events.

    Amidst the holy quarters, the four explore the sentiments stewing in their minds since that infamous day. Kranz’s play-like premise could feel combustibly melodramatic in the wrong hands, but the actor turned director presents just the right touch to make the narrative thread resonate. His precise minimalism keeps the conversation in the forefront while preventing the oppressive rigidness of other close-quarter narratives (the motifs on religion help accent the confessional journey).

    Kranz deserves significant praise for morphing a stale office room into a riveting battleground, oftentimes capturing his actors at their most emotionally vulnerable. Kranz’s stirring dialogue also touches upon the intimate evolution of grief. The characters travel between anger and empathy with a naturalistic verve, throttling a deeply-personal confrontation into a stark reflection on a deeper societal debate.

    We always search for answers in the aftermath of a major tragedy, but those oftentimes heated searches lead nowhere without a sense of empathic understanding. Mass would go nowhere in this search without its dedicated performances. Isaac, Plimpton, Birney, and Dowd are universally terrific in their demanding roles, grasping towards raw sentiments without an ounce of personal vanity. Their emotive range conveys the event’s sizable impact, creating lived-in textures that linger with unspeakable pain.

    Aside from a drawn-out opening act and a few distracting camera techniques (a third act aspect ratio change doesn’t benefit the narrative), Mass vaults impressive heights with its seemingly slight set-up. The glowing initial recognition will be just the start for Kranz and his cast, as I am sure we’ll be hearing plenty of buzz come next award’s season

  • Grimes Edition: Bits & Pieces

    Grimes Edition: Bits & Pieces

    Grimes Edition: Bits & Pieces – When LITTLE FISH was made in 2019, the idea of an international pandemic seemed like a piece of science-fiction. But now in 2021, it’s the reality we are living. The film, which is also set in 2021, is eerily more relevant than ever before. Check out this clip and watch how when Jude’s (Jack O’Connell) memory starts to fade, he and Emma (Olivia Cooke) will do whatever it takes to hold on to the life they know.  

    Tilly (Quinn Liebling) and Harper (Anjini Taneja Azhar) have lived across the street from each other since they were small children. Harper’s older brother (Alex Jarmon) is Tilly’s best friend. When Harper enters high school, she and Tilly find themselves in an unexpected relationship that challenges social expectations, self identities and family standings, providing us with an honest look into the naive yet complex social/cultural worlds of today’s young people.

    From the executive producers of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE NIGHT is a suspenseful thriller that unfurls the story of a young Iranian family living in the US. This is the directorial debut from Iranian filmmaker Kourosh Ahari and is crossing the historic benchmark of being the first US-produced film to receive distribution in Iran in four decades. Following a tense night out with friends, Babak (played masterfully by Iranian superstar Shahab Hosseini, winner of Best Actor at the 2016 Cannes Film Festivali), and Neda (Niousha Jafarian) and their infant daughter find themselves spending the night in a hotel. As a malevolent energy torments the family, Babak and Neda’s deeply guarded secrets are summoned from their dark hiding places. THE NIGHT will not end until they confront the truth within themselves. IFC Midnight will release THE NIGHT on Friday, January 29, 2021 in select theatres and on digital and VOD platforms. 

    A young mother’s “American Dream” turns into a living nightmare until she finds the inner strength to hear a voice she hadn’t heard before: her own. Donna : Stronger Than Pretty, featuring Kate Amundsen (“Shameless”) in an unforgettable performance, premieres on all major streaming platforms February 23 from Gravitas Ventures.

    Following its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Tara Miele’s personal exploration of trauma and parenthood in the aftermath of tragedy; WANDER DARKLY will be released in the UK and Ireland on digital download from 8th March 2021. 

    In 1970, filmmaker Luchino Visconti travelled throughout Europe looking for the perfect boy to personify absolute beauty in his adaptation for the screen of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In Stockholm, he discovered Björn Andrésen, a shy 15-year-old teenager, who he brought to international fame overnight and led to spend a short but intense part of his turbulent youth between the Lido in Venice, London, the Cannes Film Festival and the so distant Japan. Fifty years after the premiere of Death in Venice, Björn takes us on a remarkable journey made of personal memories, cinematographic history, stardust and tragic events in what could be the last attempt for him to finally get his life back on track.

    FrightFest favourite Barbara Crampton (From Beyond, Re-Animator) makes a welcome return to our screens in this dark terror-filled flick that’s set for its UK premiere this March thanks to 101 Films and it’s a fright for sore eyes.

    Take a trip and break out of your shell with Barb and Star.  From the gals who brought you Bridesmaids (co-stars and co-writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo) comes BARB & STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR. Lifelong friends Barb and Star embark on the adventure of a lifetime when they decide to leave their small Midwestern town for the first time…ever. Romance, friendship and a villain’s evil plot…Hold onto your culottes, BARB & STAR debuts in your home on February 12th!

    A beautiful story of acceptance and reconciliation, the film tells the story of a Korean American family and their fight to save their dry cleaning business in Flushing, Queens NY.

    Grimes Edition: Bits & Pieces

  • La Llorona: The BRWC Review

    La Llorona: The BRWC Review

    La Llorona: The BRWC Review. By George Clark.

    Shudder’s 2020 Spanish language horror, La Llorona, directed by Jayro Bustamante and starring Sabrina De La Hoz, María Mercedes Coroy and Julio Diaz, is a quiet, trembling film that sadly doesn’t utilise its potential to full effect. Set In Guatemala, the story depicts Alma, a young woman who is murdered with her children during a military attack thirty years prior. In the present day, the general who ordered the genocide is found not guilty, and thus Alma comes back to the world of the living to torment him for his sins. 

    In Jayro Bustamante’s third feature film, he reimagines the old Latin American legend of La Llorona with a social/political spin showing just how the indigenous people in Guatemala were victimised by those of higher power. Many reviews surrounding La llorona should entail that this Spanish language film has nothing to do with Michael Chaves’ “The Curse of La Llorona” that debuted the previous year and is part of the wider Conjuring universe.

    Instead, the film itself, also known as “The Weeping Woman, takes a completely different approach, avoiding the usual tropes of many horror films, instead opting for a smart film that’s filled with the sense of realism, with the real horror lying not in the supernatural but in the savage acts of men with power beyond control. 

    This reimagining of the famous folkloric figure is a reminder that in the right hands, horror can prove successful. Turning into something that’s as skin crawling as it is impactful, holding an indescribable ideological potency that won’t only prove meaningful to many viewers, but will make the outer world think about the horrors that occurred. However, it’s sad to say that, despite the politics being meaningful and thought provoking throughout, La Llorona fails to create a horror film that scares you.

    There’s a high sense that the film is building to something, an ultimate payoff if you may, but it never does. The film builds and builds, but the pay-off feels underwhelming. Perhaps even disappointing to what had come before. That sense of skin crawling, eerie atmosphere is never developed beyond ground level and whilst Bustamante direction, the way it’s shot and acted was consistently plausible, I found myself frequently restless, wishing the story would pick up some sort of speed and scare me more with its source material. 

    The horrors of the Guatemalan civil war are brought to life through the incarnation of the ‘weeping woman’ brilliantly, but the story never utilises itself to full effect and thus, while being a painful reflection of the injustice caused, it’s a story that would be better suited to a slow-burn political drama that merges the real-life horrors of the Guatemalan genocide, rather than an eerie horror film that never truly worked.

    It’s certainly not a film for everyone, but if you can look past the weak jump scares and the lack of horror many general audiences perceive as scary, you’ll be sucked into this elegantly crafted folktale to the point it will linger with you for hours to come. 

  • The Queen Of Black Magic: Review

    The Queen Of Black Magic: Review

    Hanif (Ario Bayu) and Nadya (Hannah Al Rashid) are taking their three children back to the orphanage where Hanif grew up because the beloved caretaker of the orphanage Mr. Bandi (Yayu A. W. Unru) is very ill and Hanif wants to check that his father figure is being well looked after. They’re joined by Anton (Tanta Ginting) and Jefri (Miller Khan), Hanif’s best friends from when they were children and his friends have brought their wives as well.

    Deciding to spend the night all together under one roof, the three couples and their children all settle in, but tensions soon start to rise when an unfortunate accident becomes more terrifying than they first thought and a mysterious supernatural force starts to take over their minds and bodies.

    All of this happening because a secret long left buried has finally been unearthed.

    The Queen of Black Magic is a remake of the 80’s horror classic of the same name, directed by Kimo Stamboel and written by Joko Anwar, a rising star in Indonesian horror. A simple premise which puts the audience into a false sense of confidence, The Queen of Black Magic seems like a slow burn horror at first. However, once the gore, violence and mayhem starts, it keeps going until the credits roll.

    The original movie had such an impressive display of practical effects and body horror that the remake attempts to recreate the same feel. However, although it does manage to maintain that atmosphere, there is some slightly ropey CGI thrown in to paper over the cracks. This does help the movie do things that the original could only dream of doing though.

    Unfortunately, it’s the plot that’s a little paper thin with moments of convenient exposition explained by characters that conveniently appear with other characters that disappear entirely. It also doesn’t seem like the movie knows where to stop as by the finale, the effects have gone so over the top that it verges on being unintentionally funny.

    A perfect horror movie slasher for those who love their gore and violence ramped up to the max, but for others it may turn their stomachs.