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  • 15 May

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    Blu-Ray/DVD Review: Cria Cuervos

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    Director: Carlos Saura
    Screenplay: Carlos Saura
    Starring: Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Mónica Randall, Florinda Chico
    Producer: Elías Querejeta
    Country: Spain
    Running Time: 110 min
    Year: 1976
    BBFC Certificate: 12

    (5/5)


    One thing I love about writing about films and getting sent screeners to review, is discovering great films I’ve never heard of. I still have to request the titles and don’t have time to ask for all that get offered, so I tend to do a little research beforehand to pick and choose. This entails looking up a few reviews from trusted sources, so for films I don’t know much about I do develop a certain level of expectation based on the critical response to them. However this can be a help and a hindrance. Living up to hype is always difficult and some classic films may be admirable or groundbreaking but not necessarily have the same impact they once had within a film landscape that perhaps they helped shape. Once in a while I get a film like Cria Cuervos sent over though. I must admit I hadn’t heard of the film, but on looking up a couple of reviews and noticing it had been added to the Criterion Collection I figured it would be worth a watch. And it certainly was.

    Cria Cuervos (translated ‘Raise Ravens’), directed by Carlos Saura, is set in Madrid in a mansion seemingly cut off from the rest of the city, despite being set in the heart of it. As the film opens we see eight-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) creep downstairs in the middle of the night to hear her army general father die during a sexual liaison with his friend’s wife. Later we learn that Ana believes she killed him using ‘poison’ (actually baking soda) that she had promised her (also dead) mother to throw away long ago. As an orphan, Ana has to grow up with her two sisters under the care of their aunt Paulina (Mónica Randall). Ana doesn’t get on with her aunt, who is more strict and cold than her mother was, and she develops a desire to ‘kill’ her too. The only solace she gets is in her visions of her mother she conjures up in her imagination and memory.

    It’s a peculiar film which is hard to pin down. A number of critics describe it as an allegorical piece hitting out against the Franco regime, of which Saura was an outspoken opponent. To me however, having little knowledge of Spanish politics and history, the film worked in other ways. In particular, as a look at life and death through the eyes of a child the film is incredibly powerful.

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  • 12 May

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    DVD Review: Slice and Dice: The Slasher Film Forever

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    Director: Calum Waddell
    Starring: Mark Atkins, Emily Booth, John Carl Buechler, Corey Feldman, Tobe Hooper, Adam Green, Mick Garris
    Producers: Naomi Holwill, Calum Waddell
    Country: UK
    Running Time: 75 min
    Year: 2012
    BBFC Certificate: 18

    Documentary: (2.5/5)
    DVD Set: (4/5)



    There has been a minor surge of celebratory film-focussed documentaries over the last few years. I’m not sure of the correct ‘label’ for them, but I mean the type of documentary that plays as an enjoyable nostalgia-trip with a ‘fan-boy’ feel. We’ve had Not Quite Hollywood presenting the joys of Ozploitation movies, Machete Maidens Unleashed looking into the Filipino genre film industry and several celebrating the work of a single director/producer/artist, such as Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan and Corman’s World. I’m a bit of a sucker for these types of films, so I track them down whenever I can – who doesn’t like a trip down memory lane or a chance to find some lost gems within a genre you love?

    So I of course leapt at the chance of reviewing Slice and Dice: The Slasher Film Forever. This is a documentary by Calum Waddell and editor/animator/producer Naomi Holwill (who have been steadily churning out featurettes for DVD/Blu-Rays for the last few years) which, as the title suggests, looks at the history and continuing love for the slasher film. We are taken through the birth of the sub-genre with films like Psycho, Peeping Tom and Bay of Blood, then into its refinement and boom in the late 70′s/early 80′s with the release of Halloween and Friday the 13th and finally looks at what’s on offer now and where the films are heading. On top of the history, the interviewees discuss the essence of what makes a slasher film and why they love them.

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  • 06 May

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    Blu-Ray Review: Bakumatsu Taiyô-den

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    Director: Yûzô Kawashima
    Screenplay: Yûzô Kawashima, Shôhei Imamura, Keiichi Tanaka
    Starring: Frankie Sakai, Sachiko Hidari, Yôko Minamida
    Producer: Takeshi Yamamoto
    Country: Japan
    Running Time: 110 min
    Year: 1957
    BBFC Certificate: 12

    (4/5)


    In 1951, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon played at the Venice Film Festival and introduced not only the well-loved director to the Western World, but also Japanese cinema in general, which previously had been little seen outside of its home and neighbouring countries. Funnily enough, Kurosawa wasn’t quite as respected in Japan, in fact Rashomon’s production company Daiei and the Japanese government didn’t feel the film was the right choice to enter in to the festival as it was “not [representative enough] of the Japanese movie industry”. Kurosawa was always thought to have too much of a Western style in his home country, local tastes tended towards directors such as Ozu and Mizoguchi. With the success of Rashomon overseas however, these directors (and others) did begin to receive recognition in the West and Japanese cinema brought forth many critical favourites for audiences around the world.

    One film which has still remained relatively unknown however, despite being released during the Japanese cinema boom of the 1950′s and despite being considered one of the greatest films of all time in the country itself, is Bakumatsu Taiyô-den (a.k.a. A Sun-Tribe Myth from the Bakumatsu Era or Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate). As far as I’m aware (after having a scan online), the film has never seen a release in the UK or US, other than through imports. Well fear not world-cinema aficionados, as Eureka, through their superlative home release range Masters of Cinema, are finally giving us Brits the chance to see this period comedy for ourselves.

    Bakumatsu Taiyô-den is set during the last days of the Shogunate, in and around a popular brothel in the red light district. The bustling location sees home (or home away from home) to numerous characters, including Saheiji (Frankie Sakai), a grifter who gets caught out trying to swindle a free night of lavish entertainment. To pay off his debts he works for the brothel and ends up using his ‘talents’ to solve everybody’s problems, from a geisha that too freely hands out marriage agreements to a group of nationalist samurai who are looking to attack the droves of foreigners invading the city.

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  • 30 Apr

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    DVD Review: The Purge

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    Director: Antti Jokinen
    Screenplay: Antti Jokinen, Marko Leino
    Based on a Novel by: Sofi Oksanen
    Starring: Laura Birn, Liisi Tandefelt, Amanda Pilke, Krista Kosonen, Peter Franzén
    Producers: Jukka Helle, Markus Selin
    Country: Finland, Estonia
    Running Time: 120 min
    Year: 2012
    BBFC Certificate: 18

    (4/5)


    Accepting an offer to review a screener of Finnish drama The Purge (a.k.a. Purge or Puhdistus) was a no brainer for me. My wife is a proud Finn and insists on watching any film/concert/event that makes its way over to the UK. Usually it’s her that tracks these down so I get extra brownie points for finding and obtaining them myself. Add the fact that she’s read the book this is based on and given that I can’t always talk her into watching my usual choices of film, I replied as soon as the email from distributors Metrodome hit my inbox and requested a copy to cast my critical eye over.

    The Purge opens with a bruised and battered Zara (Amanda Pilke) seeking refuge in a remote farmhouse in Estonia. Living alone in the house is the elderly Aliide (Liisi Tandefelt) who reluctantly offers her shelter. The two get talking and we learn that Zara has escaped from enslavement and abuse at the hands of a group of sex-traffickers (shown through flashbacks). A possible connection between the two women as well as familiar aspects to her story flashes Aliide back to her youth (where she’s played by Laura Birn). Whilst the Communists cracked down on Fascists in Estonia during World War II, Aliide fell in love with her sister Ingel’s (Krista Kosonen) fiancé Hans (Peter Franzén). In a bid to win him for herself and to survive the ongoing atrocities, she makes some painful yet selfish decisions which put her sister and niece’s lives in jeopardy and haunt her several decades down the line. However, when Aliide discovers Zara’s full background, she finds a way to seek redemption for her past crimes.

    As is to be expected from the source material (and most Finnish dramas for that matter), The Purge is an extremely bleak film. With both women enduring some horrific sexual abuse and mental anguish, it’s a tough film to get through. The grim tone is relentless and there are no moments of light to alleviate the oppression shared by the characters and audience. This of course fits the film’s content, but I actually felt it maybe went a little too far. The film is so consistently brutal through its two-hour running time that it actually loses its power to shock and move as it gets into the latter third. By the end I was quite numb to it all and what was theoretically quite a powerful and affecting finale didn’t really get to me as it should.

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  • 14 Apr

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    Weekend of Trash X

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    With the 10th Weekend of Trash (backstory and previous write-ups can be found here – I, II, III & IV, V & VI, VII, VIII & IX) we pulled out all the stops, with a couple of films on the Friday as well as a record-breaking seven whole films on Saturday. We got a nice range of B-movies watched and picked wisely, with the only real dodgy titles being on Friday night.

    The reviews are only brief as usual and with so many films being watched and the nature of their quality, my ratings should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. I’ve included clips and trailers when possible too.

    Enjoy!





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  • 10 Apr

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    Blu-Ray Review: Le Beau Serge & Les Cousins

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    Before I review these two French New Wave cornerstones, I must stress that Eureka aren’t packaging the two films together, they are individual releases. I’m just reviewing them in one go because of their obvious links and identical release dates. Plus I feel they complement each other very nicely.

    I’ve had a turbulent relationship with French cinema and the New Wave in general. I can remember watching a handful of Truffaut films when I was a teenager because they were deemed ‘important’ and I kind of liked them, but didn’t quite understand their significance enough to love them. I was a massive Jeunet and Caro fan in the 90′s, but I was put off by the more ‘worthy’ intellectual/mature art house fare coming out of France so shunned a lot of what the country had to offer, including the New Wave which I still hadn’t quite got my head around. I became a bit of a film racist I guess.

    Over the years I became more open minded though and more recently I’ve started to venture back to our friends across the channel and check out the notable films I skipped over in the past. The turbulence didn’t end though. I’ve watched a few of Godard’s films recently and admired and enjoyed aspects of them, but have still been put off by the academic nature of much of it and the lack of heart and soul to latch onto. I downright hated his Rolling Stones film, Sympathy For the Devil. I think the French idea of ‘cool’ doesn’t click with me, so some of the charm of the more stylish experiments of the New Wave are lost on me.

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  • 30 Mar

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    Blu-Ray Review: The Princess Bride

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    Director: Rob Reiner
    Screenplay: William Goldman
    Based on a Novel by: William Goldman
    Starring: Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Robin Wright, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, André the Giant, Fred Savage, Peter Falk
    Producers: Rob Reiner, Andrew Scheinman
    Country: USA
    Running Time: 98 min
    Year: 1987
    BBFC Certificate: PG

    (4.5/5)


    In the 80′s (and just into 1990), director Rob Reiner had one of the greatest runs of films in the history of filmmaking (in my opinion at least). Being of the generation that experienced them pretty much first hand (on their VHS and first TV runs – I’m a little too young to have caught them on cinema), these were films that helped shape my love of film and still stand up incredibly well. This is Spinal Tap and Stand By Me will probably always be in my top 10-15 films of all time for sheer quality as well as pure enjoyment and nostalgia. Add When Harry Met Sally, Misery, the underrated The Sure Thing and this, The Princess Bride and you’ve got six ‘modern’ classics that all have a huge fanbase. A Few Good Men came next, which a lot of people love too, but for me it wasn’t on a par with those aforementioned titles.

    After that, his films steadily declined in quality. I keep hoping for a comeback, but I’m not holding my breath. However, we still have those six greats to go back to time and again – their re-watchability being among many strong points. So that brings us to the well-loved The Princess Bride, which is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year with a new feature-packed Blu-Ray edition.

    For those of you that haven’t seen The Princess Bride, before you march straight to the nearest shop to buy yourself a copy in shame, here’s a summary of the plot. We open on a young boy (Fred Savage of The Wonder Years fame) who is a bit poorly and bed-bound for the day. His grandfather (Peter Falk of Columbo and A Woman Under the Influence fame) hears of this and comes round to comfort the boy by reading him a story that his own father used to read when he was ill. The video-game loving youngster reluctantly allows this. The story that follows is of Buttercup (Robin Wright), a beautiful young woman whose true love Westley (Cary Elwes) is supposedly murdered at sea by the Dread Pirate Roberts. In her misery she does little to stop the cruel Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon) from claiming her for his wife. Whilst awaiting the big day though, she is kidnapped by Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) and his assistants, the sword-master Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) and the giant Fezzik (Andre the Giant). Hot on their trail however is a mysterious masked man who is revealed to be the Dread Pirate Roberts himself. Or could he be someone else entirely?

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 22 Mar

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    Blu-Ray Review: Tess

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    Director: Roman Polanski
    Screenplay: Gérard Brach, Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn
    Based on a Novel by: Thomas Hardy
    Starring: Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson
    Producer: Claude Berri
    Country: UK/France
    Running Time: 172 min
    Year: 1979
    BBFC Certificate: 12

    (2/5)


    With all the controversy over Roman Polanski’s personal life and complicated legal issues that remain, his life and work are well discussed and debated. I’ve never got too much involved though when arguments rage on comments boards about boycotting his work and the like. I’m rarely interested in the private lives of actors or directors. Obviously what Roman Polanski did to 13 year old Samantha Geimer was reprehensible, but, without wanting to sound unconcerned by such actions, I tend to be of the mind that it’s up to the legal system to deal with that and if his films are produced and available then I’ll still watch them if they interest me. I’m not the world’s biggest Polanski fan though it must be said. Although I consider Chinatown to be amongst my favourite 10 or 15 films of all time I’ve not seen a huge amount of his work and a couple of those I have seen have been less than stellar. I really didn’t see the appeal of The Fearless Vampire Killers for instance and thought the more recent Ghost Writer/The Ghost was hugely overrated.

    The memory of Chinatown and Knife in the Water (as well as what I can remember of Rosemary’s Baby) still remain though and despite Tess not being one of Polanski’s more popular films, I thought I’d give it a go.

    The film is a fairly straight adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (from what I gather – I haven’t read the book). Tess (Nastassja Kinski) is a the daughter of John Durbeyfield (John Collin), a farmer who is told by a local parson that he is descended from the illustrious d’Urberville family. In a bid to cash in on this fact, John sends Tess out to the known d’Urberville’s who live near by. She meets her ‘cousin’, Alec d’Urberville (Leigh Lawson), who is besotted by her. Although she is initially reluctant, he manages to seduce Tess as she spends time with his family, forcefully ‘winning’ her over for a short while. Tess breaks free from him though and heads back for home but not before she is impregnated with his child. The baby dies after only a few weeks and, disgraced and distressed, Tess leaves home to work on a dairy farm further afield. Here she meets Angel (Peter Firth), a reverend’s son who falls madly in love with her. She quite quickly reciprocates, but the shadow of her past weighs heavy on her soul and she worries about whether Angel will accept her as she is.

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  • 17 Mar

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    DVD Review: Ozu Collection – The Gangster Films

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    Much like The Student Comedies collection which I reviewed last year, this continuation of the BFI’s Ozu Collection takes a look at some of the director’s early work which seems to go against the grain of what he became famous for. Often thought of as a highly ‘Japanese’ director that only made very sedate family melodramas, his early work is actually highly influenced by Hollywood films of the era and his style reflects this, with more dynamic camerawork and editing styles. Three films are included in the set, Walk Cheerfully (Hogaraka ni ayume), That Night’s Wife (Sono yo no tsuma) and Dragnet Girl (Hijosen no onna). Below I give my thoughts on all of them individually and the DVD set as a whole.

    Walk Cheerfully

    Director: Yasujiro Ozu
    Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda
    Based on a Story by: Hiroshi Shimizu
    Starring: Minoru Takada, Satoko Date, Hiroko Kawasaki, Hisao Yoshitani
    Country: Japan
    Running Time: 92 min
    Year: 1930

    (3.5/5)


    Walk Cheerfully follows Kenji ‘the Knife’ Koyama (Minoru Takada), the leader of a small-time gang of hoodlums. He falls in love with the sweet and innocent Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki), but when she finds out about his life and crimes she leaves him, saying that she won’t let him back unless he has become an ‘honest person’. He tries his best to do so, but his past (and jealous ex-girlfriend in particular) makes it very difficult to do so. Luckily, his good friend and partner in crime Senko (Hisao Yoshitani) agrees to go straight too and the pair face the consequences together.

    Those familiar with Ozu’s better known films from the 50′s and early 60′s will be quite surprised with this and the other films in the set. Where his more famous works have quite minimal plot, these are fairly dense considering the shorter running times. There are very few of his low angle wides either or rule-breaking, almost straight to camera close-ups. Walk Cheerfully and the other films in this set feel much more like early gangster films from Hollywood with the costumes most clearly reflecting this as well as some low key shadowy lighting and moments of violence (which never appear in the likes of Tokyo Story or Late Spring).

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  • 10 Mar

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    DVD Review: Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan

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    Director: Gilles Penso
    Screenplay: Gilles Penso
    Starring: Ray Harryhausen, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, John Landis, Terry Gilliam
    Producer: Alexandre Poncet
    Country: France
    Running Time: 93 min
    Year: 2011
    BBFC Certificate: 15

    (4/5)


    As a young boy growing up in the 80′s, some of my very favourite films I would love to watch on TV in the UK (where they were widely circulated) were Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films as well as Clash of the Titans and the great Jason and the Argonauts. His wonderfully detailed and stunningly well-animated stop-motion creatures thrilled and excited me throughout my pre-teen years. Nobody else did it quite like him and although the films his work featured in weren’t all that amazing, they were simple and fun enough to keep you engaged between the incredible set-pieces where his skills took centre stage.

    Well the French director and producer team of Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet obviously grew up on Harryhausen’s work too and over several years have put together this affectionate tribute to one of cinema’s greatest special effects artists.

    Being a fan of Harryhausen I of course really enjoyed this film. Like Corman’s World this is a bit of a fan-boy affair, which heavily features an outpouring of love for the subject. Like Corman’s World, the roster of ‘fans’ is very impressive though so it kind of gets away with its arse-kissing nature. In fact Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan puts even that star-studded interview line-up to shame. Here you get Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro to name but a few. You also have some of the heavyweights of the special effects world too such as Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett as well as the man himself, Ray Harryhausen. Watching the special features you really get a sense of the love these great artists have for him too, when you learn that when the documentary makers struggled to get licences for footage from 20th Century Fox, they spoke to James Cameron and he contacted Fox, telling them to allow the use of their footage or he would pay for it himself. Steven Spielberg did a similar thing for another studio. Peter Jackson’s love for Harryhausen is described in the documentary too when you learn of the great assistance he gave in restoring Harryhausen’s models and work for an exhibition and to preserve them for the future. A great inclusion is also a short stop-motion animation Jackson made as a teenager which is clearly inspired by The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

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  • 10 Mar

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    DVD Review: Room 237

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    Director: Rodney Ascher
    Starring: Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan
    Producer: Tim Kirk
    Country: USA
    Running Time: 102 min
    Year: 2012
    BBFC Certificate: 15

    (3.5/5)


    A favourite of the festival circuit last year, Room 237 is being released on DVD in the UK so that you can analyse and dissect the film as its subjects do with The Shining. If you haven’t heard about Room 237, it’s a documentary which allows 5 people who are obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s film version of The Shining to describe their various theories about what that film really means. They each have wild ideas about every minute detail of the film and, rather than looking at the overall narrative on display (which came from Stephen King’s book of course), the interviewees look into Kubrick’s input and how his changes and quirks make it more than the sum of its parts.

    Room 237 is an odd beast. Rather than really being a film about The Shining, this is more of a look at obsession as well as perhaps a look at how people can see any films completely differently from one another, depending on the knowledge and baggage the viewer brings to a film. This is certainly not a ‘behind the scenes’ look at The Shining and the theories are that outlandish and varied that the film never seems to be claiming that any of these readings of the film are necessarily as Kubrick intended. So, I got the feeling that maybe Room 237 could have been made about fan’s thoughts of any other surreal or cult film, such as Mulholland Drive or Kubrick’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey.

    The theories themselves range from bat-shit crazy (one sees it as Kubrick airing his feelings on having directed the faked TV broadcast of the moon landing) to vaguely plausible (The Shining as a metaphor for the genocide of the American Indians). Even the wilder ones have one or two almost convincing ‘clues’ though or at least the interviewees are good at explaining them. Much of what they come up with is reaching though, to put it mildly. A lot of their ‘proof’ comes from what is clearly a continuity error or a ridiculously warped view of some random object in the background (that poster clearly shows a skier, not a minotaur). However, as mentioned, the film seems more focussed on their obsession rather than the theories themselves.

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  • 27 Feb

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    DVD Review: Reign of Assassins

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    Directors: John Woo & Su Chao-pin
    Screenplay: Su Chao-pin
    Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Woo-sung Jung, Xueqi Wang, Shawn Yue
    Producers: Terence Chang, Shaoye Shi, John Woo
    Country: China
    Running Time: 103 min
    Year: 2010
    BBFC Certificate: 15

    (3/5)


    The wuxia (martial hero) genre has been a staple of Chinese cinema since the format’s introduction to the country and has stayed so ever since, helped largely by the huge popularity of the output of the Shaw Brothers studio that shaped the genre. In the year 2000, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon brought the period wuxia into great popularity in the West, with the film winning numerous awards and helping pave the way for crossover successes for similarly beautiful romantic action dramas such as Hero and House of Flying Daggers. This trend died out after about 5 years and, in Western eyes at least, the wuxia genre has slipped back to realm of ‘fan only’ straight to DVD titles. There haven’t been many truly notable period wuxia films for a while and the martial arts titles that have found success have more recently been from Thailand (with Ong Bak and Warrior King) and Indonesia (with The Raid). Looking to bring wuxia back in fashion this month is Reign of Assassins. Teaming Crouching Tiger’s own Michelle Yeoh with Hong Kong action’s most well known director John Woo (although he’s only co-director and producer here), the film tries to recapture the glory days by fusing romance, intrigue and physics-defying combat.

    Yeoh’s character Drizzle/Zeng Jing actually begins the film played by Kelly Lin. She is part of a team of assassins (the Dark Stone gang) that kill prime minister Zhang and his son Renfeng in order to steal half of the mummified remains of an Indian Buddhist Monk which supposedly hold the secret to the world’s greatest martial art skills. Drizzle gets her hands on these remains and runs away with them. After killing a monk she becomes ashamed of her actions though and, in a bid to live a normal life, she gets a special operation to change her face (to Michelle Yeoh’s). Things go well for a while and she falls in love with courier Ah-Sheng (Woo-sung Jung) so they get married. Her past eventually catches up with her though and the Dark Stone gang discover her new identity. After bargaining with them to save her and her husband’s life she works with them to find the second half of the monk’s remains and along the way learns some secrets about Ah-Sheng which further muddy the waters.

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