Gloom & doom

Here’s a slightly edited review taken from my 'Blood Spectrum' column in #3 of Black Static magazine.

Night Watch (aka: Nochnoy dozor, 2004) started a new brand of occult horrors, based upon novels by Sergei Lukyanenko (whose Twilight Watch was published in English by William Heinemann), and was heralded as the first Russian fantasy blockbuster. Timur Bekmambetov’s wonderful sequel, Day Watch (aka: Dnevnoy dozor, 2006) continues a fascinating tale of supernatural warfare hampered by Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and shows how the fragile truce between forces of light and darkness is broken by the fulfilment of a prophecy. ‘Gloom’ is the sideways reality of invisibility, or detection, where dust or bugs drain the very life from unwary visitors on both sides of the shadowy conflict.

Repressed vampires, formidable witches, shape-changing characters, and world-weary immortals - of wilfully undefined yet clearly prodigious abilities - struggle to exert a moral authority or commit sundry acts of mischief. The legendary ‘chalk of fate’ is a clever macguffin by which troubled hero Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) may quite literally write-right all wrongs, and thus save the world. There’s gender body-swap farce (with perhaps the most hilarious faux-lesbian/ hetero-romantic shower scene ever filmed?), featuring the comedy talents of Galina Tyunina as wry sorceress Olga. Zavulon and Geser (archetypal ‘big guns’ of this good against evil premise) both receive story-arc development of their previously established supporting characters, and all your day/ night watch favourites, team-players and loners, re-appear here, even if they are relegated to sideshow duties.

More take-no-prisoners antics by Alice (striking Zhanna Friske) provide thrilling CGI action, and while new visual effects sequences preserve the previous film’s murky affect, eschewing the acute realism of Hollywood for a whimsically impressionistic style, the contrast with an urban grittiness (Russian street life and office politics) actually benefits the typically earnest drama. If the ‘strange boy’ plotline (and the curious happy ending!) marks this potential epic as formulaic populist tripe, it really doesn’t matter. Startling or inspired cinematic moments worth seeing and savouring, and plenty of clever myth building, make this foreign movie superior entertainment, even if all these watchmen fail to deliver the same pure comic-book fun as Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola’s more engaging BPRD agents in Hellboy.

Also reviewed in Black Static #3:
Highlander: The Source
House Of The Dead
House Of The Dead II: Dead Aim
Undead Or Alive
Doctor Strange (Marvel animation)
Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist
Disturbia
Wrong Turn 2: Dead End
Hatchet
Slaughterhouse Of The Rising Sun
Rise: Blood Hunter
The Last Legion

Creepy unknown

Here’s an edited version of two reviews originally published in my 'Blood Spectrum' column for BLACK STATIC #2.

Bad places are a staple of genre horror. Essentially, there are two types. Places already known to be domains of evil, visited only for the purposes of investigation, or exorcism by fools or heroes (Legend Of Hell House, Ghostbusters), and places where the forces of darkness lurk unsuspected yet soon to be encountered by protagonists (The Amityville Horror, The Grudge). The first category tends to rely on broadly theatrical effects, while the second delivers suspense with audiences forewarned about a supernatural menace that characters have yet to confront. 

Based on a novel by Kei Oishi, Japanese chiller Apartment 1303 belongs to the latter group. A malevolent spirit haunts a hotel condo. Female residents commit suicide after disturbing events, and several girls exit via the 13th floor balcony. Wholly responsible for the strange death of her abusive mother, the resentful ghost is deficient in redeeming qualities, using her medusa hairdo and brooding expressions to drive the heroine crazy. Director Ataru Oikawa astutely preserves a novelistic approach to exposition here and so, because uncanny imagery and moody atmosphere are more vital to cinematic frights than witty dialogue or memorable characters, the movie plays out its generic narrative with a second-hand checklist of impressionistic scares. This is not a classic but it passes the time.

Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist is now available as a digitally re-mastered 25th anniversary edition. Despite the influence of producer Steven Spielberg on this classic movie, it retains many peculiar characteristics found in the director’s other works. From the sweaty chills and savage humour of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, to the childhood problems and domestic strife underpinning his underrated Invaders From Mars remake, and various socio-political anxieties in the pilot episode for TV series Taken, all these disturbing themes indicate that Hooper is one of the few auteurs capable of working on a Spielbergian project without losing his own distinctive vision, most evident here during the weirdly surreal goings-on affecting the Freelings’ household. Hooper takes Spielberg’s spooky plot - inspired by Richard Matheson’s Twilight Zone episode Little Girl Lost, and transforms it into one of the most nightmarish and shockingly visceral confrontations with death (the bathroom mirror shows a rotting face, the suburban garden ejects broken coffins) that fantasy-horror cinema has ever seen. 

In the same issue, I also reviewed:

Hostel: part 2

Vacancy

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

The Last Sect

Perfect Creature

Beowulf & Grendel 

Dark Water

This is the first in a series of (weekly, hopefully) blog posts about horror movie & TV reviews for my 'Blood Spectrum' column in BLACK STATIC.

Jennifer Connelly in DARK WATER

Americanised remakes of Japanese chillers rarely match the impact of their originals, so it’s a very pleasant surprise to discover Walter Salles’ Dark Water is far better in many respects than Hideo Nakata’s drama (aka: Honogurai mizu no soko kara). Jennifer Connelly is extraordinary as single mother Dahlia, struggling to avoid a custody battle for her young daughter Ceci (eight-year-old Ariel Gade, from sci-fi TV series Invasion), and moving into a rundown apartment on New York’s Roosevelt Island, while fighting personal demons inextricably tied to her own childhood sorrows.

Confronted with apathy, professional incompetence or hostility at each turn of events, Dahlia slowly loses emotional strength when her low-rent home is plagued with horrendous plumbing faults and possible vandalism, and seemingly haunted by the ghost of lost neighbour, Natasha, who becomes Ceci’s invisible ‘friend’. Dahlia crumples magnificently under the overpressures of her workaday urban life, but she emerges from the drowning pool of Salles’ expertly crafted psychological thriller as a superb heroine, willing to pay the ultimate price to keep her innocent daughter from any harm.

On Dahlia’s side here, against slippery estate agent Murray (John C. Reilly is entertainingly believable), there’s lawyer Jeff Platzer (a virtually unrecognisable Tim Roth, creating a lonely yet sympathetic character), while the great Pete Postlethwaite delivers a memorable turn as Veeck, the building superintendent, whose intentions remain ambiguous to the end, despite his initially suspicious behaviour.

This review was first published in BLACK STATIC #1 (October 2007).
Also in that issue, I reviewed:
The Return 
Dark Corners
Karla
The Thirst
Dead And Deader
28 Weeks Later
The Butcher

Interzone & Co.

The latest INTERZONE (#262) is out now, and this issue includes my 'Laser Fodder' column of DVD & blu-ray reviews. Here's the line-up:

Robo-Dog (5/10)
The Man From The Future (6/10)
A Traveller In Time (5/10)
Robinson Crusoe On Mars (7/10)
Alien Extinction (2/10)

I have also contributed to the Book Zone's "2015 round-up" section, covering the top 5 most outstanding non-fiction titles I enjoyed reading last year.


TTA Press publish BLACK STATIC #50 this month, which features my final 'Blood Spectrum' column reviewing movies & TV on disc. This was not a very good batch of DVD & blu-ray to end with, but my farewell essay occupies 4 pages...

    Code Red Watch
Maggie (3/10)
Fear The Walking Dead - season 1 (4/10)
Sinister 2 (5/10)

    Sinful Children: Retro
The Reflecting Skin (6/10)
Ghost Story (6/10)

    Mild At Heart: The Last Round-up
Dartmoor Killing
American Horror Story: Freak Show
Maneater
The Honeymoon Killers
The Stranger
Blood Rage
River
The Gift


Thanks to editor Andy Cox for putting up with my ranting & raving in 'Black Static' since the magazine started in 2007!