Category: Film & Television

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American Insurrection (2021)

American Insurrection (2021) is more interesting than the marketing would have you believe. Ignore the poster.

There’s been something in the air, probably since before Trump was elected in the United States, and to a lesser extent Johnson in the United Kingdom, that’s emboldened a certain section of disillusioned citizens. This film, like the much more bombastic Civil War (2024), imagines what might happen if the movement that inspired January 6th riots had been more successful.

Two couples are hiding in a remote farm, waiting to be contacted by allies ready to smuggle them across the border into Canada. Trapped in this purgatory, obsessively monitoring a radio for instructions from their Canadian connection, they wait to be discovered by the local chapter of the Volunteers, the armed militia now in control of the country. To complicate this already dangerous situation they have the owner of farm, a Volunteer, chained up in the barn.

Then, as if things weren’t already complicated enough, one of the group rescues a young gay refugee fleeing north, killing two Volunteers in the process. As the Volunteer noose begins to tighten, the complicated history of each couples relationship begins to unravel with devastating consequences.

It’s a film that makes things personal, concentrating on the domestic situation, and is clever enough to avoid clumsy exposition, by letting story reveal plot.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11737466/

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The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live (2024-)

There’s a lot to like about The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live (2024-). Visually it’s stunning but it does lack the grim extremes that made early seasons of the original so compelling.

On the plus side we finally find out what happened to Rick after the bridge explosion midway through Season 9, and Michonne’s unlikely decision to go looking for him a Season later.

Rick being kidnapped is one thing but Michonne abandoning her children never felt like a realistic choice to me. I’d understand her following Rick’s trail with RJ strapped to her back and Judith at her side, but never just leaving them.

The Ones Who Live opens with Rick fighting a hoard of burning walkers for the authoritarian Civic Republic Military. His three previous attempts to escape mean he now has a wire cuffed to his wrist. This mistake, not attaching this wire to a cuff around Rick’s neck, allows him to make a fourth attempt at escaping. He cuts off his own hand. I know I said this lacks grim, and this is pretty extreme, but it doesn’t have the build up that makes his actions profound.

This lack permeates the series, caused I think by a lack of set up. There isn’t enough plot to make the back and forth of the story feel earned. Rick has been here before. The battle to survive Negan, the one that raged throughout Season 7, saw him emotionally besieged but never broken.

While I understand his capitulation within this story, mainly because it’s explained to us, I wish the writers had stuck to the three word adage, show don’t tell, and given us more of what got him here. While his actions now are desperate, he wasn’t when we last saw him.

For me, there should’ve been an entire series of Rick’s struggles to that point. Only after we know what broke him can we truly appreciate what makes him equivocate when he finally reunites with Michonne. Intellectually we know, we can work it out, but we don’t feel him get there.

I’ve been watching the TWD universe expand since the first episode. I watched all six episode of this in two days, so it’s watchable enough, but I wish the writing was a little stronger. Stronger is perhaps the wrong word. Confident is perhaps more accurate. The writing needs to relax and be more confident.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9859436/

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Hyena (2014)

Gerard Johnson’s Hyena (2014) is a brutal crime drama. The complicated threads of a London policeman’s life slowly unravel as two Albanian brothers take over the local rackets. Shot like a documentary, it has that gritty social realist feel I associate with Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, and Andrea Arnold. All the performances are strong, Peter Ferdinando, Neil Maskell, and Stephen Graham stand out. And to top it all, The The provide the soundtrack.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1837574/

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Superdeep (2020)

Superdeep (2020) is a Russian film set in the early nineteen eighties. It’s one of those films that reminds you of something else. For me it’s the overlap in the Venn diagram where Inseminoid (1981), The Thing (1982), and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) meet.

A scientist, haunted by past mistakes, is ordered by an overly patriotic government official, to investigate the outbreak of a disease at a secret research facility in the frozen Kola Peninsula. They drilled down twelve kilometres, the deepest borehole on the planet, and found a fungal spore that infects and consumes the host.

For some reason SHUDDER are showing the film dubbed into English, which gives it the feel of a spaghetti westerns and nineteen seventies giallo horror. Russia has made some really interesting, visually stunning, science-fiction horror films of late, Sputnik (2020) and Attraction (2017) come to mind. I can only think this was a deliberate choice dictated by financing.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11815960/

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Into the Labyrinth (2019)

Into the Labyrinth (2019) is, dare I say it, a labyrinthine film, written and directed by Donato Carrisi, from his novel of the same name. Its Russian doll plot is combined with some interesting visuals to hold your attention, but it demands work to realise which plot is nested within which.

A thirteen year old girl is kidnapped off the street. Fifteen years later a confused and frightened Samantha (Valentina Belle) wakes up in a hospital bed. Hoping to help the authorities catch her kidnapper, psychologist Doctor Green (Dustin Hoffman) wants Samantha to recount her time in the labyrinth.

Inexplicably, only these scenes with Hoffman are in English, the rest of the film is in Italian.

Meanwhile, as the police continue their investigation, debt collector Bruno Genko (Toni Servillo), in a last chance at redemption before cancer kills him, sets out to honour a contract made with Samantha’s family, and find her kidnapper. As Genko gumshoes his way from one damaged soul to the next, the mysterious bunny-headed-man becomes his prime suspect. But who is he?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8594376/

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The End We Start From (2023)

The End We Start From (2023) is a quiet film, clever enough to let the story breathe, and engaging performances shine.

A heavily pregnant Jodie Comer, known only as “Woman”, is waiting to give birth when it starts to rain. This rain is unrelenting, and when a storm surge hits, London is flooded.

Weaved into this growing crisis, the woman goes into labour and gives birth to a son. These early scenes have an intimacy to them I think would’ve been lost if the film had been written and directed by a man. Writer Alice Birch, from a book by Megan Hunter, and director Mahalia Belo create something truthful, almost sad, that lingers throughout the film.

As the situation continues to worsen, father “R”, mother, and baby son “ZEB”, leave hospital and join the traffic jams trying to escape the rising flood waters. They’re heading for the countryside and the relative safety of the father’s mum and dad, “G” and “N”, where they hope to wait out the worst of the unfolding calamity.

For a short while the extended family have an almost idilic existence, but when supplies run low and they’re forced to go looking for food, tragedy strikes. The matriarch “G” is killed. Husband and son, “N” and “R”, are devastated, and without giving too much away, mother and child are forced to seek refuge in a rescue centre.

Here the woman bonds with “O” (Katherine Waterston), a mother with a child of a similar age. But when the camp is raided by men with guns, there to steal food, the two women take their babies and flee, heading for the relative safety an island commune.

There’s a tension throughout the film between building society anew and rebuilding what we had, no more so than on the island. Unable to accept the isolation demanded by the commune, the woman takes her child and returns to her London home, hoping to rebuild what she had.

It’s interesting to note that throughout the film, most of the men are either aggressive or weak, jacked up on testosterone or overwhelmed by what’s happening. The women are pragmatic, resilient, and strong, they’re survivors. The unsettling message for all of us, but particularly the men, is we’re not prepared for what’s coming. The sad truth is most of us just don’t have the emotional, physical, or practically strength we need to deal with what’s headed our way.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21810682/

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Don’t Grow Up (2015)

Don’t Grow Up (2015) is a coming of age story with an infected crazies twist. It’s an interesting idea let down by all kinds of inconsistencies that take you out of the story.

On an island supposedly off the coast of England, six teenagers in a youth centre wake up one morning and quickly realise they’re unsupervised. Right out of the gate there’s a lack of clarity. For example, which island are we on? Isle of Wight, Isle of Man, one of the many off the coast of Scotland? None of these places resemble the location on screen.

Then there’s the centre. The locked doors and supervision suggest a secure unit. In which case, why are (incredibly well spoken) “at risk” kids housed in mixed sex units? The film was actually shot on location in the Canary Islands, so why not set it there? How hard would it be to frame this as six “at risk” kids on one of those character building adventure courses?

Anyway, returning to the film, the initial response of the kids to their unsupervised freedom, they break into and ransack the supervisor’s office. The gob-shite banter gets more prosaic after they find and promptly empty a bottle of whiskey. Finishing the bottle provides the excuse the script needs to go on a booze-run to the local village, where one of the group conveniently has the keys to a supermarket.

While three of the boys rob the place, they each come face to bloody pipe, knife of glass, raging mother, with the true nature of the crisis; adults have become ultra-violent dead-eyed killers.

It’s during this explosion of ultra-violence the films already weakened credibility takes an almighty beating. One of the number finds a gun hidden under the supermarket counter. Guns are not a big part of British culture, they’re strictly controlled, and the overwhelming majority don’t have access to them. Finding a gun under the counter might play in the States, it might even make sense in Spain, but not in England.

The rest of the film brings murder and mayhem, love and loss, and the dawning realisation that growing up, becoming an adult, is about actions not a number, and no matter how hard you try your environment will forces adulthood on you.

Not a film I’d watch again.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3557406/

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Calvaire (2004)

One of that loose category of films lumped together under the heading “New French Extremity”. This early example from 2004 pulls on the then thirty-year-old threads of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Last House on the Left (1972), wrapping them in the blood soaked gauze of Deliverance (1972).

Here, just before Christmas, travelling entertainer Marc is driving to his next show when his van breaks down. The unsuspecting singer is guided to a rundown inn by a helpful local, and offered a room for the night by fellow entertainer, the eccentric Bartel.

Two days later Marc is wearing a dress, covered in blood, scalp torn to shred, hands tied behind his back, fleeing for his life.

A slow start escalates by increments of surrealist crazy, as Bartel and the local “mouth-breathers” fight for possession of Marc. They seem to share the collective delusion that Marc is their estranged wife, or adulterous lover, Gloria.

It’s an unsettling film, that revels in turning an unflinching eye on humanity given over to impulse.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407621/

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Nefarious (2023)

Nefarious (2023) is a ninety-seven minute propaganda film for Christian fundamentalism.

A psychiatrist is draughted in to evaluate the competence of a convicted serial killer before his planned execution. Is he sane or is he, as he claims, the demon Nefarious?

Most of the film is a two-hander, psychiatrist and demon, skeptic and believer, debating the epic war between good and evil, logic and faith, like evangelical preachers spitting evocations from their respective pulpits.

An exuberant, verging on the histrionic, performance from Sean Patrick Flanery can’t disguise the faith at the core of the writing. It’s like watching The Birth of a Nation (1915) now. There’s something deeply unpleasant about the world-view being given a voice.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14537248/

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The Colony (2021)

The Colony (2021) picks at the scab of imperialism inherent in the death-cult we call capitalism, a cult happy to strip the planet to destruction, and then just walk way.

In a distant future, the elites of the world flee the collapse of Earth’s ecosystem, escaping to a future on the distant planet Kepler 209.

In an ironic twist of fate, infertility threatens the end of the nascent colony, so the Keplans send a research mission back to Earth hoping to confirm signs of a recovering planet.

A decade later, a second mission arrives to discover a tribe, presumably descendants of the poor abandoned by the elites, surviving in the foggy tidal waters of some rocky outcrop.

As the only surviving member of this second mission explores this perfectly realised dystopia, it slowly becomes apparent the first mission landed like some intergalactic Christopher Columbus, claiming dominion over the recovering planet, intent on taming the tribe in their image.

It’s not a perfect film but the production values are solid, and the Keplan invaders are offered some level of redemption, albeit with a “saviour complex” framing.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6506264/