Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 5th, 2009
Dustin Hoffman is the titular Harvey, a morose jingle composer who, with his job hanging by a thread, arrives in London for his daughter's wedding. He is a complete outsider at the rehearsal dinner, and feels even more cut off when his daughter informs him that she wants her stepfather to give her away. Meanwhile, the scarcely more cheerful Emma Thompson spends her time being set up for disastrous blind dates and being constantly harangued on the phone by her mother. These two losers at the game of love meet, and something blossoms between them.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 4th, 2009
Jean-Louis Trintignant (here dubbed into Italian) is a hard-boiled actor (!). Arriving at a night club to meet the proprietor, he instead finds the man dead, and the luscious Ewa Aulin standing over the corpse, protesting her innocence. Trintingnant believes her, and decides to help her out. The quest for the truth leads them though a series of encounters with various aspects of London nightlife and lowlife, 1967 vintage.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on May 2nd, 2009
Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz burst onto the horror scene in 2004 with Calvaire, an unforgivingly black tale of a young man running afoul of a town whose exclusively male population would make Leatherface blanch and get the hell out of Dodge. A distinctly European concoction, it nevertheless paid tribute to Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was an attack on the audience as assured as it was original. Now, Du Welz has followed up with Vinyan, which is no less original, no less assured, and stakes out its own identity distinct from its predecessor, while still sharing many of Calvaire's thematic preoccupations. People, I think we have an auteur in our midst.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on April 28th, 2009
I first became aware of J. T. Petty when his Mimic: Sentinel came through for review. I popped it on, expectations very low (it always seems to be a sign of a franchise's last gasp when the digits are dropped from the titles of sequels), and was pleasantly surprised by a clever reworking of Rear Window. Soft for Digging, his feature debut, was just as interesting, and was a quietly effective little ghost story. He hasn't been very prolific as a director (though he did find gainful employ scripting the first three excellent Splinter Cell games), and I missed his S&Man, but now he's back in horror territory with a bleak western with monsters: The Burrowers.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 28th, 2009
A while back, Cult Epics released a 2-disc limited edition of Un Chant D'Amour. This single-disc reissue features a number of the features (though not all) from the limited release. The actual film and transfer quality are the same, and so much of this review is likewise the same.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 21st, 2009
So Toby Wilkins will be helming The Grudge 3. That's a bit of a shame. Not because I think he's the wrong man for the project. Rather, it's the wrong project for the man. Or, less glibly but more precisely, he is showing real promise as a filmmaker, and it would be a shame to see more talent squandered on a franchise that should definitely be put out to pasture. I base this evaluation on the evidence presented in Splinter, a nifty little creature flick .
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 14th, 2009
Alan Rickman, in a stunningly unexpected bit of casting, plays an arrogant, womanizing SOB of a chemistry professor who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize. While he and wife Mary Steenburgen jet off to Sweden, their son (Bryan Greenberg) is kidnapped. Before long, the parents receive are sent a severed thumb as proof of the kidnapper's serious intent. But nothing is quite what it seems.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 13th, 2009
Try this plot on for size: Gordo, an ape owned by carnival sideshow barker the Great Lampini (Paul Richichi), gets loose and rampages about Long Island, raping and killing and stealing cars (!). Meanwhile, the moronic detective in charge of the murder case dismisses the idea that an ape is the culprit, and casts his racist eye on the unfortunate Duane Jones (Christopher Hoskins, whose character is named after Night of the Living Dead's lead).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 12th, 2009
The sleaze of the grindhouse era inspires a special kind of love. Warped, dubious, indefensible, yet real all the same. Part of that love is a nostalgia from those bad old days. But it takes an even more special brand of that special love to seek to recreate forgotten exploitation genres, and yet that is what we have here: the first Nazisploitation flick in close to thirty years.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on April 11th, 2009
The current wave of extreme French horror marches triumphantly on. The latest wave-making entry is the Franco-Canadian production Martyrs, and it is as nasty as it is a vital piece of filmmaking. Writer/director Pascal Laugier, whose previous film was the honorable but not entirely successful House of Voices, here reveals himself as a force to be reckoned with. Horror fans, the genre is healthy and out to get your.
