film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Category: REVIEWS

Here is where you would find our film reviews on BRWC.  We look at on trailers, shorts, indies and mainstream.  We love movies!

  • Alien Addiction: Review

    Alien Addiction: Review

    Riko (Jimi Jackson) loves hanging out with his mates, getting stoned and chasing girls. Unfortunately, the only thing he’s good at is getting stoned. He lives with his mum and his friends all make fun of her because she’s so absent minded and also keeps talking about the day that the aliens will come to Earth. Riko tries to defend his mum to his mates, but he still feels embarrassed by her.

    Then one day a news report tells the nation that a large meteor has hit the earth, somewhere in New Zealand, so Riko and his friends set out to find where it went and even what may have landed alongside it.

    After a while nothing happens, but soon Riko finds two aliens that have come out of their spaceship when it crashed, but rather than being scared, Riko finds out that they have more in common with him than he’d ever imagined.

    Alien Addiction is a sci-fi comedy written and directed by Shae Sterling that seems to be taken from a different time rather than just from a different space. Riko and his friends are the typical kind of characters that you’d find in films from the early 2000’s, they’re lazy stoners who still live like teenagers and will remind the audience of characters such as Harold and Kumar and Jesse and Chester from Dude Where’s My Car?.

    The problem is though, especially with Riko being the protagonist, he has no redeemable features whatsoever.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsNWkGvYpn4

    Alien Addiction is also supposed to be a comedy, but again the jokes are lazy and juvenile, seemingly only aimed at an audience of teenage boys and man-children. If you think this kind of comedy is aimed at you then you should feel very insulted.

    Although the kinds of things like jokes about feces and sex with larger women may have been funny once, audiences have moved on and if anybody ever admitted to finding that kind of thing funny then they’d probably be outcast from society. Alien Addiction is a mean spirited, outdated comedy that’s an embarrassment to all those involved.

  • No Escape: Review

    No Escape: Review

    No Escape (alternatively titled Follow Me) is the latest genre film to set its sights on our modern social media-obsessed culture (this year alone featured the accomplished satire Spree and the less successful heist thriller Infamous). Meshing a bevy of intriguing aspirations, writer/director Will Wernick creates an unsatisfactory concoction stuck in filmmaking autopilot.

    No Escape follows Cole (Keegan Allen), a social media star who has spent the last decade vlogging his day-to-day adventures. To celebrate his 10-year landmark, Cole and his friends travel to Moscow to experience a personalized escape room, though this new endeavor may present an unknown danger to Cole’s picturesque image.

    With genre horror films releasing at a prevalent clip, filmmakers must work diligently to find inventive new angles to explore horror’s machinations. While the social media flavor adds some intriguing wrinkles to the table (a semi-interesting exploration of the different ways personalities act on and off camera), Wernick’s effort uses these concepts as mere window dressing to his standard-issue affair.

    The script fails to infuse a substantive throughline between its poser protagonist and the horrors he’s subjected too, missing a prime opportunity to comment on social media users’ jaded relationship with horrific violence. It doesn’t help that the workmanlike cast is straddled with blandly conceived roles, utilizing clunky dialogue that often over-explains the character’s whims and desires. Wernick never decides if we should be vilifying Cole for his vapid actions or sympathize with his over-exposed lifestyle, opting for a murky middle ground that doesn’t satisfy either angle.

    All could be forgiven if No Escape generated some eerie scares, yet this is the department Wernick struggles the most. Aping the grimy setting and trap-oriented approach of Saw isn’t necessarily a bad idea on paper. The issues arise from the lack of creativity brought to the screen, utilizing cheap, predictable setpieces that do little to inspire dread. Saw was able to hide its inexpensive assets by pushing the boundaries of the torture porn subgenre. No Escape seems pleased to operate in the shadow of superior films, complacently going through the motions with little panache.

    A “gotcha” twist ending does bring some fun to the table, though it can’t hide No Escape’s trite, bargain bin execution.

  • Monsoon: Review

    Monsoon: Review

    By Jack Hawkins.

    This is a quiet, solemn little film about change, nostalgia and odyssey. Our focaliser is Kit (Henry Golding), a British-Vietnamese man who returns to his birth country some 30 years after fleeing it. He and his family escaped Saigon in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, settling for England because of his mother’s fondness for the Queen.

    We know little of what happened since, only that his parents have passed. Their ashes accompany Kit as he touches down in Vietnam, where he hopes to find a place of meaning to scatter them.

    The opening establishes Monsoon as a film of mood and ambience, framing Kit’s voyage with wide, static camerawork that captures the scale and exciting isolation of travel. ‘Exciting isolation’ may sound oxymoronic, but it describes the feeling of solitude a solo traveller can have when they’re immersed in an environment very different to their own, which is especially true of Southeast Asia’s buzzing, balmy cities. Moonsoon understands this, immersing you with beeping horns, rumbling engines and foreign voices as Kit navigates the streets and alleys of Saigon.

    Kit cuts a rather aloof figure, coolly detached from the people and places around him. That is until he meets Lewis (Parker Sawyers), a thirty-something African American man living in Saigon as a fashion entrepreneur. A bigger personality, Lewis brings out a smile in Kit, revealing him to be insouciant rather than hostile. Their connection appears to be just a tryst, yet a chance second encounter becomes more meaningful as they share their respective connections to Vietnam.

    Lewis is drawn to Saigon ostensibly because of the city’s growth and opportunity, but his relocation is spiritually underpinned by the country’s dark past. Lewis explains how his father served in the war, suffering scars both physical and psychological by the time he was discharged. Years later, he would commit suicide. Lewis’s presence in Vietnam, therefore, is an odyssey almost as personal as Kit’s.

    This shared, quiet mourning is part of the young men’s understated chemistry, one that’s both physical and intimate, sometimes bittersweetly. They find some comfort in the city – Lewis feels accepted by the locals, Kit finds traces of his childhood – but their experiences are still wistful.

    The memories of their relatives will stay in a troubled past, supplanted by the skyscrapers and free market optimism of modern Vietnam. Indeed, Lewis and Kit’s experiences can be seen as a microcosm of the Vietnam story, representing the past, present and future of that beautiful, exciting country.

  • The Last Laugh: Review

    The Last Laugh: Review

    Myles (Steve Vanderzee) is a stand-up comedian heading to the top. His material is edgy and hilarious and it’s got the attention of a lot of talent scouts. Then Myles is given his big break as his agent books him for a big comedy event compered by comedy legend and children’s movie star, Reggie Ray (Lowell Deo).

    Although not a fan of Reggie Ray himself, Myles believes that Reggie Ray sold out a long time ago, he still powers through although his recent issues with losing his girlfriend in a car crash which means he has to regularly take medication. However, when Myles gets to the venue and finds a dead body in his dressing room, he realises that the theatre may have a serial killer on the loose.

    The Last Laugh is a horror movie written and directed by Jeremy Berg. Its premise seems solid and as the characters are introduced it seems like the audience may be in for a fun, possibly satirical bloodfest. Unfortunately, it seems that The Last Laugh is not that forward thinking as there’s not much room in the script for any character development and doesn’t even have an interesting antagonist.

    As Myles is met by a couple of dead bodies along his journey to catch a killer, it seems that this is what he should really be doing. Instead, after telling one of the staff at the theatre what he found they assume that he’s joking and they don’t believe him.

    This should logically lead Myles to desperately try and prove the existence of the killer, instead though Myles just ends up being mildly disinterested in finding dead bodies and goes about preparing for the show, no matter how many people are getting killed.

    This is no fault of Vanderzee’s performance though, but in the script and the direction as for long stretches of the rather short running time there is very little indication that there’s been any murders at all. This may lead the audience to think that Myles is perhaps the killer himself, and in this day and age it would have been a mistake to demonise somebody dealing with mental health issues.

    However, even this would have been a more satisfying end than what the movie gives the audience, leaving them thinking they wasted their time.

  • Rialto: Review

    Rialto: Review

    Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) has seemingly got everything sorted in an idyllic life. He’s married to Claire (Monica Dolan) and they have two teenage children, Kerry (Sophie Jo Wasson) and Shane (Scott Graham) and he’s had a steady job for as long as he can remember. However, when Colm’s father dies his life starts to spiral into a deep depression where he contemplates his place in life and what it’s all meant.

    Then one day he meets Jay (Tom Glynn-Carney), a man around the age of Colm’s son and instinctually Colm decides to pay for Jay’s services as a male prostitute. Unfortunately, Jay’s services come at a bigger price than Colm was expecting, however what starts out as a seedy relationship soon turns into something deeper and satisfying for Colm.

    Rialto is an independent Irish film backed by the BFI, directed by Peter Mackie Burns and written by Mark O’ Halloran, adapted from his award-winning play. Rialto explores a man’s life as it seemingly unravels, forcing Colm to lose everything he’s ever valued, wondering how it got to that point.

    With a script that feels authentic, Rialto gives a slice of life in an ordinary Irish town where men like Colm need an outlet before they lose themselves entirely.

    Vaughan-Lawlor gives an outstanding performance as a man who’s starting to realise that he’s lost everything and the relationship between Colm and Jay plays out well, seamlessly turning from one of an illicit encounter, to that akin to a father and son.

    The events of Rialto are also realistically grounded and although the audience knows that Colm is going through great inner turmoil and emotion, it’s never pushed to the front. This makes the audience feel for Colm as he silently deals with his grief, his delayed resentment of his father and his worries for his own children.

    In the end there may be a little light as Colm starts to come to terms with who he is and what his life has become, but the ambiguous ending will be up to the audience to decide whether Colm deserves a better life.