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Reviews
The Descent (2005)
Not scary, not gory and, worst of all, not well acted or written.
Neil Marshall's feature debut as writer and director, the generally excellent Dog Soldiers, was burdened with one flaw. In a movie about men, with some fantastic 'bloke' dialogue, Marshall proved himself to have a tin ear for female dialogue. The talented Emma Cleasby was burdened down with some awful lines that sounded like rejects from Rachel Weitz' part in The Mummy. They might have worked in that campy environment - in the grimmer Dog Soldiers, they were just clumsy.
The Descent is that, multiplied by six female leads, none of them as talented as Cleasby.
Marshall's sophomore outing is just that - juvenile, priapic and gormless. Sticking half a dozen women down a cave (try to work out which country it's set in and what nationality the disposable 'heroines' are supposed to come from - I dare you) he leaves them to get consumed by albino cave dwellers. Dependent upon lapses in narrative logic that will annoy the halfway competent film watcher and indulging in failures in basic caving protocol that make it completely implausible that the cast could find their way out of a land rover, it's more Elle than Fangoria. Everything is set up for these smug Prada-by-way-of-DMM yuppettes to get slaughtered, and then they descend into asinine bickering. You'll be praying for their deaths... and possibly your own, if it brings this fearsome drivel in to land quicker.
It is ironic that several noted movie gossip sites that constantly criticize M. Night Shyamalan for the use of twist endings are lauding The Descent, when it has possibly the worst and clumsiest 'shock' reveal of the last decade. This is a new low in cinema because it shows that the once-critical audiences have now accepted pablum as worthwhile. Once upon a time, the benchmark trapped-in-the-wilderness movies were films like 2,000 Maniacs, The Hills Have Eyes, Cannibal Ferox and Deliverance. If this is getting good word, we need to reconsider the medium.
The Wild (2006)
Great opening, tolerable 1st act and then a roaring success.
Animals escape for New York Zoo to head to a tropical island? That's familiar.
However, while Dreamwork's Madagascar was basically Seinfeld in the tropics, Disney's The Wild (scripted and in production at the same time) centers on Samson, a male lion in New York zoo who is raising a son on his own. Young Ryan (Ryan Lion? Some parents can be so cruel) becomes sick of living in his father's shadow, so stows away in a cargo ship back to the titular wild, to find his roar. Samson follows, along with a ragtag band of zoo animals and an amiable squirrel, to rescue his boy. However, while Madagascar played the scenario for comedy, The Wild throws a healthy dose of heart and danger into the mix.
In part, The Wild has suffered from coming in second to the similarly-themed and set Madagascar. However, it is in one very important way almost completely the opposite of the Dreamworks movie - each has high and low points, but they are at opposing ends of each film.
A regular criticism of Madagascar is that it has a great opening act, but the later scenes in the jungle is a huge disappointment. Bar a fantastic open sequence, the first twenty minutes of The Wild are hurried and generic. However, once the animals arrive in the jungle, it suddenly finds a new gear. The introduction of William Shatner as a crazed wildebeest high priest (wildepriest, if you will) adds a strange element of danger, and the art design on the island is sumptuous, dark and daring. If the directors had avoided the strangely empty urban jungle and kept The Wild in the wild, it would have probably received much better press.
It could also be because the opening sequence is so promising. Rather than the photorealism of Ice Age, the quasi-puppetry of A Bug's Life or the 3-Dification of 4-color comics, the animators experiment with an almost surrealistic and remarkable color palate. It is a sequence that suggests that Disney should bite the bullet, commission a new Fantasia, make it all CGI and resurrect Walt's original plan for a constantly updating program.
However, the true star of the picture is Kiefer Sutherland as Samson, the lion with a secret to hide. Although this is not his first animated voice work, his rumbling tones bring a nuance and a sympathy to Samson that place this head and shoulders above his other work to date. Samson actually should stand with Jack Bauer, Dr Schreber, Bob Wolverton, Doc Scurlock and The Caller for proving just how superb an actor Sutherland is.
The American Astronaut (2001)
If Aki Kaurismaki had made Rocky Horror...
... you'd have got something like The American Astronaut.
Writer/actor/director/musician Cory McAbee's ultra-low-budget indie The American Astronaut is something that almost defies description. Shot in black-and-white, it hearkens back to the science fiction of the 1900s and its description of the universe as consisting of a series of 'themed' worlds. Venus is inhabited solely by Southern Belles; Saturn by lonely miners; and there's a bar with an all-male dancing contest in the asteroid belt. Space cowboy Samuel Curtis wends his way through this dreamlike universe with a blase charm, like Han Solo if he'd suggested to Greedo that they don't fight, but instead go bass fishing. Pursued by a deranged Pee-Wee Herman-esque mad scientist (played by noted character actor and HBO regular Rocco Sisto), he has to take The Boy Who Once Saw A Woman's Breast and exchange him for a corpse, which he can then take back to Earth, along with the stinking hydraulic gimp that he picks up along the way.
If this all sounds confusing, that's because you're over-thinking it. McAbee's fourth movie and his full-length debut is a collection of oddball moments and weird incidents, told with a certain sweetness of tone. Early David Lynch is a good sign post, but then so are the Quay brothers. Yet neither has McAbee's well-intentioned sense of humor. There are no overt jokes, but somehow he catches that mood of security that pervades the oddest of dreams. No matter how bizarre, it never becomes terrifying. This is, of course, helped by the occasional song and dance number, with music provided by the director's day job in his band The Billy Nayer Show.
If McAbee has made any mistake, it's that this is almost too relentlessly and resiliently oddball. Conventional audiences will have no truck with this, and those looking for subversive cinema may find that it almost tries too hard to be off-kilter. However, while McAbee does feel like he's pushing his own personal envelope, it's undeniable that he is has unique and perverse cinematic vision. Most importantly, his vision allows him to make a true creative virtue of his low-to-zero budget. Primitive space cowboys who managed to launch their barn into the solar void use tin cans as oxygen filters: space travel is represented through flash cards: and bizarre alien cultures are summed up by raiding the prop cupboard of the local amateur dramatics society. In less talented hands, this would be abortive. Yet McAbee thinks around all the problems out of which so many other directors just buy themselves.
Trauma (2004)
Colin Firth makes another bad career choice
Over the past few years, there has been a resurgence in cheap British horror movies. From the artsy approach of 28 Days Later to the low-budget, hi-gore of Cradle of Fear. Trauma is the latest of this dreary progression of spooky-ooky to inflict itself on screens, and one of the weakest.
Colin 'Mr Darcy' Firth leads as Ben, a grief-stricken artist recovering from car crash that put him in a coma and killed his wife. As he comes to terms with his grief, he is burdened down with clumsy student film imagery (ants, mirrors, creepy janitors, inexplicable bleeding, mysterious figures, living in an abandoned hospital). At the same time as he becomes convinced that his wife may be dead, he finds himself the prime suspect in the murder of a generic R'n'B singer whose connection to the main plot isn't explained for over an hour. It all starts to get too much for Ben, who starts hallucinating. Meanwhile, Mena Suvari has a few disconnected scenes as his new love interest, and then disappears for lengthy swathes of time. Not that it matters much - it's the plot, not Ben, that seems psychotic, flailing wildly from one unresolved trick on the audience to another.
Running 5 minutes longer in its UK cut than the 88 minute version that showed at Sundance, the extra time does it no favors. In fact, for such a tiny film, it lags, and obviously lacked a strong editorial hand over debut feature writer Richard Smith's red herring-laden script. As the follow-up to director Marc Evan's surprise indie hit My Little Eye, and featuring a leading role by Colin Firth, Trauma was bound to gain some press coverage. That may be fortunate for the investors, because if this had come out of the gate cold, it would have been ignored - and rightfully so.
The problems start with the pairing of Firth and Evans. Much as the director's last movie, large slabs are shot through surveillance cameras - however, whereas My Little Eye felt like it showed a degree of ingenuity in its use of non-conventional film stocks, at least the web-cam gimmick used there provided a logicale for their use. Here it feels like Evans falling back on a trick, one that wears the patience of the audience down rapidly. Firth, on the other hand, seems to have taken this role so that he can break away from his type-cast affable bumbler, the more macho Hugh Grant. It's neither the picture to do it in, or the role to do it with. He may as well just be wearing a t-shirt that says "I'm dead mad, me, since he falls back on a collection of tics and idiosyncracies to put over Ben's mental collapse.
Ultimately, and much like My Little Eye, it feels riddled with Evans' hubris. He obviously feels like he's making a terribly important and significant movie that owes no debts to anyone. However, much as his last movie was 'inspired' by The Blair Witch Project, it would be worth checking his Blockbuster rental history to see when he last took home Jacob's Ladder. The dissolution of the central character, rotting hospitals used as sets, the half-seen monsters, even the 'vibrating demon' trick all turn up.
However, that lack of originality may make it possibly the defining movie of the new wave of British horror. As a scene, it all seems to be so generic, falling back on the use of DV to give it some sense of grittiness. As a movement it lacks the vivacious ingenuity that defined the Amicus and Hammer movies of the 60s and 70s, Italian Gallo, or American grindhouse splatter.
Dagon (2001)
The most successful Lovecraft adaptation to date
The best of the Cthulhu adaptations to date, and the best Stuart Gordon movie as well. It has been suggested that this is a dark movie, violent and without any sense of hope. Well, that's what Lovecraft was always about. The idea that humanity was adrift in a universe of elder gods so fierce and primordial that, to them, we were less than gnats, is caught perfectly.