Tag: horror movie

Sputnik

Posted on by Paul Risker

Russia, 1983 – Colonel Semiradov (Fyodor Bondarchuk), the head of a secluded military facility recruits the maverick doctor Tatiana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina), to evaluate Konstantin Sergeyevich (Pyotr Fyodorov) the sole surviving cosmonaut of the spacecraft Orbit-4. In the process of her work, she learns that he may have brought back to Earth an alien parasite, and Semiradov’s motivations lie in weaponising it.

I’ll never forget the unsettling feeling I had watching the opening of Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), the memory of which still conjures up an eerie feeling. The triumph of mankind darkened by the shadow of an extraterrestrial force creeping over the lunar landing site. The music building to the big reveal of the alien vessel appearing overhead with Earth in the distance. It’s cinematic storytelling with an adrenaline rush. This one scene is symbolic of how humanity’s gaze to the stars has been one of wonder and fear – the achievement of our adventurous spirit juxtaposed with the fear of the unknown depths of space.

Out of this fear cinema has presented the unscrupulous nature of man as a source of terror, and the comparative nature of the ambitions of the socialist Soviet Union and a futuristic vision of capitalism. These are two opposing forms of political ideology, but Semiradov’s intentions to weaponise the parasite recalls the Weyland-Yutani Corporation of the Alien franchise, who have similar ambitions for the Alien.

In one scene, Semiradov says to Klimova, “Do you know why we need weapons? Weapons guarantee peace. A pack of dogs would tear each other to pieces. In order to live in peace, they need one leader.” His argument is an oversimplification – the world is divided up as a more than a pack of dogs, and the reason for weapons is peace through a propensity for mutual destruction. Our political world is built on this idea, and we still see tensions with countries such as Iran over nuclear development programmes, a deterrent to military threats from political and economic adversaries.

The political commentary aside, director Egor Abramenko’s feature debut is a journey from suspense to emotion, that creates a symbiotic relationship with Klimova. Introduced as a maverick who has saved the life of a boy, she deduces that Semiradov has recruited her because she’s willing to take risks. He sees someone akin to himself who prioritises results ahead of process. A single-mindedness imbues a character with a hardness, and Akinshina is captivating in the way she reveals the emotional depth of her character. Abramenko and his writers and writers Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev position her to other characters in such a way that develops and mutually benefits them as a group, while also creating dramatic parallel arcs: Sergeyevich (Pyotr Fyodorov) the emotional, and Semiradov the ethical.

Sputnik is an assured first feature that does not try to reinvent the genre and break with cliche. Abramenko, Malovichko and Zolotarev trust in a familiar science-fiction horror told well, and here is its pleasure. However, Sputnik is the type of story that will inevitably live or die on the back of its creature. Abramenko’s direction empowers the alien, that while not as iconic as other creatures in the genre, is a ferocious and menacing addition to the genre.

Sputnik is streaming On Digital in the UK (Vertigo Releasing) and in select theatres, On Digital and Cable VoD in the U.S (IFC Films) from Friday, August 14th.

The Final Wish

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

There’s a reason many couples – typically new and loved up – choose horror on a movie night; it is the genre most likely to draw them together, causing grips to tighten and heads to nestle. However, no such experience will be had watching The Final Wish, a scare-free effort that trades on Lin Shaye’s B-movie charisma.

Shaye’s schtick is a good fit for unhinged matriarch Kate Hammond, who she commands with a blend of psychosis, senility and the supernatural. Michael Welch also proves capable as her son Aaron, a bewildered everyman trying to make it as a lawyer. Regrettably, everyone else is a stock character – Jeremy the stoner friend, Derek the brutish local sheriff, Lisa the vapid love interest.

Even worse than the characters are the woefully constructed scares. It’s a reheated medley of creaky floorboards, possessed household items and characters’ reflections screaming at them in the mirror – all of which occur in a rickety old house with inexplicably poor lighting… why is it so dark in there?

And of course, this litany of tropes is amplified by a generic score that does two things: assaults you like a cattle prod during its irritating jump scares or counterfeits the tortured strings of The Shining. Even more annoying is the trailer, which uses that almost dubstep-inflected crescendo of synthetic drumbeats and screaming noises that audiences are just sick and tired of.

There is a plot, something about a haunted urn and seven wishes, but it’s so trite that it doesn’t bear repeating. Ultimately, this is just another rehashed horror movie. Aside from the competence of Shaye and Welch, the only praise one can eke out goes to the gaffers and set designers, who mock up some neon-kissed diners that have a charming air of Americana about them. Otherwise, there’s barely a shred of flair or creativity.

The Final Wish is on VoD from Monday, May 25th.

Wish Upon

Posted on by mjbstaging

Echoing of not only the ‘seemingly inanimate object which is a demon in disguise’ horror movie (the Child’s Play and Annabelle franchises which involve demonic dolls) but also the Hellraiser franchise with its deadly puzzle box, the American Wish Upon is something slightly different from both. For a start, its title recalls the song When You Wish Upon A Star from Disney’s Pinocchio suggesting a fairy story with a happy ending. Which of course it isn’t, being a horror movie. It also recalls the 1902 short story The Monkey’s Paw, the archetypal ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale widely read in U.S. schools although in fact of English origin.

Having as a small child witnessed her mother’s suicide, teenager Clare (Joey King) comes across a Chinese puzzle box. Since she’s studying Chinese in college, she works out that the inscriptions on the box’s side indicate it can grant its owner seven wishes. Some of the wording proves harder to translate as it’s written in ancient Chinese. Unperturbed, Clare starts making wishes and can’t believe her luck when the wishes come true. The part of the inscription that she’s not yet read, however, requires that each wish granted be paid in blood: whenever one of her requests is fulfilled, someone that Clare knows dies in a gruesome fashion.

On one level, this is predictably silly horror fare which pushes all the right buttons to satisfy its target audience. However, there’s a lot more to it on the level of morality. All of Clare’s wishes possess a moral dimension. She wishes the school bully Darcie (Josephine Langford) would rot, which is a form of revenge. She wishes to inherit her late uncle’s fortune and that the boy she fancies at school (Mitchell Slaggert) would fall in love with her, both of which are forms of self-gratification. She wishes her dad (Ryan Phillippe) would stop embarrassing her by dumpster diving immediately outside her school and she wants to be the most popular girl at school, both of which relate to being socially successful. It later transpires Clare only gets seven wishes, so the last two become her attempts to combat the box as the screenplay attempts to close its narrative.

Thus the film cleverly explores female teenage mores as its heroine moves from object of bullying to object of admiration and from social outcast with two good and faithful close friends (Shannon Purser and Sydney Park) to popular girl who left those two friends behind as her popularity grew. Joey King plays the heroine as ordinary, banal even, which proves highly effective in terms of the audience’s relating to her character. You’re not sure if you would make the same choices of wish yourself but you can absolutely understand why she chooses the wishes that she does. When her apparent good luck turns out to be bad, you’re completely with her in trying to make everything right again and return her life to the way it was before.

To boot, the script and direction have a lot of fun with the murderous mayhem in the wake of the wishes which include kindly neighbour Sherilyn Fenn losing a battle with a kitchen sink waste disposal unit and relative of a friend Alice Lee accidentally impaling herself on the horns of a Chinese statue in her apartment. The seven wishes limit ensures the proceedings never outstay their welcome as they might so easily have done. It’s no masterpiece but a perfectly efficient and serviceable little horror flick with a provocative moral dimension for anyone who cares to probe beneath its surface.

Wish Upon is out in the UK on Friday, July 28th. Watch the film trailer below:

The Eyes of my Mother

Posted on by victorfraga

This bizarre and elegant tale of gore and horror is not for the faint-hearted and squeamish. The novice helmer Nicolas Pesce will torture viewers with plenty of mutilated bodies, sadistic pleasures and – above everything else – deeply dysfunctional and psychotic minds. Throw in a little bit of TLC, maternal warmth and lesbian affection, you will end up with a masterpiece of creepiness.

A mother (Diana Agostini), who was previously an eye surgeon in Portugal, lives with her husband and their young daughter Francisca (Kika Magalhães) in a secluded farm somewhere in the remote American countryside. She gives her daughter anatomy lessons from a very young age, probably unaware that Francisca would soon use her acquired skills in the most unorthodox ways imaginable. One day an intruder named Charlie breaks into their house and kills her mother, but the criminal is soon subdued and becomes a prisoner and guinea pig for the little girl’s morbid experiments. Francisca soon grows up, and the intensity of the anatomic and psychological escalates to the highest level imaginable, as she recruits new victims to submit to her sadistic ordeals.

The Eyes of my Mother skillfully blends interrupted motherhood (twice, but you must watch the film in order to understand why), female psychosis, isolation and religion in one big pan. The sharp black and white photography renders the grueling scenes more watchable and gives the film an eerie veneer, in a way similar to Hitchcock Psycho (1960) – the director opted for black and white because he wanted to spare audiences from the violence of the colour red in the famous shower sequence.

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The eyes of Francisca’s mother are terrifying

The Eyes of my Mother is very Lynchian in the portrayal of a disturbed and twisted mind. In many ways, Francisca is both puerile and repulsive, in a way not too different from Frank (in Blue Velvet, 1986). The film has also elements of Cronenberg, in his pathological obsession with the human body, with all of its limbs and cavities. The changes that she will perform on the bodies of her victims may remind you of The Fly (1986) or Crash (1996), and they are certain to make Josef Mengele jealous.

Francisca’s detached reality and gruesome little world will make you cover your eyes, cringe and retch. The occasional utterance in Portuguese and the Fado music will alienate you further, giving a final touch of eccentricity to the movie (although you might notice that some of the accents are feigned, if you are a native Portuguese speaker). This is a surreal universe of which you wouldn’t want to take part anyway. You’ll be glad to be on your seat, safely removed on the other side of the fourth wall.

The Eyes of my Mother is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday March 27th. The film was produced by the young master of the dysfunctional Antonio Campos – click here for our review of the equally disturbing and superb Christine, from last year.

Watch the film trailer below:

Personal Shopper

Posted on by mjbstaging

The world-famous American actress and model Kristen Stewart has teamed up with the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas for the second time (after 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria), now in a film with a peculiarly different premise. The helmer decided to focus on the subject of celebrity again, but this time moving from a Lesbian drama taking place in idyllic Switzerland to a ghost story set in a very urban Paris.

The big question of course is: how do you blend horror devices, which are meant to be jarring and unsettling, with a fashion environment, where beauty and splendour are meant to prevail? Assayas has set a very difficult quest upon himself, albeit not an impossible one. France does not a a strong and consistent tradition in the horror genre, and instead a few sporadic classics such as Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju/Claude Sautet, 1960). So Assayas had to use his very own blueprint in order to come up with personal variant of French horror. The outcome has been very divisive: Assayas received the Best Director Ex-Aequo prize last year at Cannes Film Festival, but the film was also booed in the same event. Personal Shopper is indeed an audacious and creative pieces, but a number of flaws make it a little incoherent and difficult to engage with.

Maureen Cartwright (Stewart) is a young American working in Paris as a personal shopper for a celebrity called Keira (Nora von Walstatten). She has the ability to communicate with spirits, just like her recently deceased twin brother. She is now trying to communicate with her recently deceased twin brother, and it’s other ghosts that cross her path. She is determined, however, to remain in the French capital until she has spoken to her dead sibling. She begins to receive strangely ambiguous text messages on her telephone, from an unknown source. She travels to London for a work errand, but she’s consistently harassed by the stranger on the phone on her way there. Are the dead now able to communicate through 21st century technology, or is someone pulling a prank on Maureen?

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There are elements of paranormal activity, fashion and erotica in this very unusual horror flick

The scares throughout the film are very sparse, maintain the “creepy-glam” atmosphere throughout. There are elements of erotica, paranormal activity, murder and fashion in this multi-flavoured film gumbo (or perhaps casserole?). But this multitude of genres and references make the film a little disjointed and fragmented, much like a broken mirror. For example, we never find out why Maureen is in Paris, what exactly happened to her brother and why the whole saga is in English. I wonder whether French nationalists were outraged at the absence of their own language, surely an American worker would working in Paris be expected to pick up French? Maybe Personal Shopper does not want to be perceived as French film at all, but instead as an international endeavour.

Aesthetically, the film is also very hybrid. Entities probably don’t care much about fashion (they always seem to wear the same attire, don’t they?), so the idea of them creeping into this plush and colourful world is a little preposterous. Some nicely timed flying objects and green ectoplasms will make you jump from your seat, but overall a feeling a awkwardness will linger, and the inevitable WTF will occasionally spring to mind. Assayas is a very talented and bold filmmaker, but he still has some edges to polish in this newly-created horror-fashion “genre”.

Personal Shopper was out in cinemas on Friday, March 17th (2017). On Disney + UK on Friday, July 22nd (2022). Also available on other platforms.