No wriggle room, then?

Kill List

(2011)

(WARNING: SOME SPOILERS) Ben Wheatley appears to have swiftly become the new poster boy for British horror, thus supplanting the undeservedly crowned regent Neil Marshall. Obviously, Wheatley has a far more suitable name so that’s something. And, at first glance, he appears to have artistic aspirations higher than the swathe of gore Marshall is content to cut a path through. But for every area where I admired Wheatley’s inventiveness and craft in Kill List, ultimately he left me feeling dissatisfied with the result.

It's possible that I'm just not sufficiently on board with horror movie tropes. It’s never been my preferred genre, and the further the dial swings from suggestive to splatterific the less engaged I become. At least, usually, you can see the signs a mile off in terms of content. Kill List has the air of arthouse to it, a film not obviously wearing its genre on its sleeve. As a result, by the time I reached the climax, with its "What's the most shocking reveal I can put in here?" the whole enterprise transformed into one that is distractingly manipulative and calculated (and, by that point, sadly inevitable). Maybe part of this disappointment results from the lo-fi "Ken Loach horror" suggestiveness of the opening sections leading me to expect something more subtle and sinister.

In retrospect, it just seems that Wheatley employs a wall-to-wall foreboding soundtrack for these scenes of domestic strife with same lack of restraint seen in the ending. Jay (Neil Maskill), unemployed for eight months, is getting grief from his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring). He is reluctant to return to his role as a hitman (which he took on after leaving the army) but his friend Gal (Michael Smiley) persuades him. But why is Gal’s girlfriend Fiona carving an occult symbol on the back of Jay's bathroom mirror and secreting a tissue containing Jay’s blood upon her person? Before long the job begins, but grows more and more disturbing, including the discovery of horrific activities by some of the targets, a peculiar resignation to their fates, and the apparent recognition of Jay by one of them. Deciding to quit, they discover that it is not so simple.

So many aspects appear to be inspired by the likes of Rosemary's Baby and The Wicker Man (and various other British horror fare, including Blood on Satan’s Claw) but instead of their ambiguous unease Wheatley finally succumbs to rubbery intestines, machine guns and OTT Satan worship; the pursuing hordes presumably sound like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers for no other reason than Wheatley though it would be cool. It’s quite apparent that, tonally, Wheately is setting audiences up for the more disorientating third act tone, but the lack of restraint on display and his succumbing to hackneyed plot devices (the retreat to an isolated location) suggest it does all comes down to the “splatter effect” pay-off (I should have seen the warning signs with the hammer incident, however).

Which is fine, except that Wheatley has sold the illusion that the film might be about something. What you realise is that he doesn’t really care about his characters (which, ironically, diminishes the impact of the ending); it becomes all about how clever and tricky the narrative construction is. Smiley makes Jay affable, but Maskell isn’t so far removed from his zombified hit man in Utopia (is he getting typecast?) There’s no resonance here other than the most superficial (which neatly reflects the all-pervading soundtrack). All the choices are, ultimately, very mannered and studied, from the verité handheld camera (all the better to make you feel like you’re there… but haven’t we seen that so an awful lot lately?) and drab – but cinemascope; this is an epic mundane landscape remember - cinematography to the use of title cards announcing the next victim.

I probably sound like I’m coming down hard on the film, which is no doubt a consequence of the excessive hype its received. There’s much here that is effective. Maskell and Smiley give outstanding performances, and there's a sense of easy-going chemistry and natural improvisation to their run-of-the-mill hit man duties. Individual elements of the sinister surround make you sit up and take notice (the initial carving on the back of the mirror, the encounter with the “doctor” – I half expected Jay to sprout hair from his cut hand!). In the end, though, the most creative elements aren’t enough to overcome the more derivative and exploitative ones.

***

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

If this were a hoax, would we have six dead men up on that mountain?

The X-Files 4.24: Gethsemane Season Four is undoubtedly the point at which the duff arc episodes begin to amass, encroaching upon the decent ones for dominance. Fortunately, however, the season finale is a considerable improvement’s on Three’s, even if it’s a long way from the cliffhanger high of 2.25: Anasazi .

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I think it’s wonderful the way things are changing.

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) (SPOILERS) The meticulous slightness of Driving Miss Daisy is precisely the reason it proved so lauded, and also why it presented a prime Best Picture pick: a feel-good, social-conscience-led flick for audiences who might not normally spare your standard Hollywood dross a glance. One for those who appreciate the typical Judi Dench feature, basically. While I’m hesitant to get behind anything Spike Lee, as Hollywood’s self-appointed race-relations arbiter, spouts, this was a year when he actually did deliver the goods, a genuinely decent movie – definitely a rarity for Lee – addressing the issues head-on that Driving Miss Daisy approaches in softly-softly fashion, reversing gingerly towards with the brake lights on. That doesn’t necessarily mean Do the Right Thing ought to have won Best Picture (or even that it should have been nominated for the same), but it does go to emphasise the Oscars’ tendency towards the self-congratulatory rather than the provocat

You’re the pattern and the prototype for a whole new age of biological exploration.

The Fly II (1989) (SPOILERS) David Cronenberg was not, it seems, a fan of the sequel to his hit 1986 remake, and while it’s quite possible he was just being snobby about a movie that put genre staples above theme or innovation, he wasn’t alone. Fox had realised, post- Aliens , that SF properties were ripe for hasty follow ups, and indiscriminately mined a number of popular pictures to immediately diminishing returns during the period ( Cocoon , Predator ). Neither critics nor audiences were impressed. In the case of The Fly II , though, it would be unfair to label the movie as outright bad. It simply lacks that *idea* that would justify the cash-in.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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