Horror

Triangle is a psychological horror brought to our screens by Christopher Smith. Smith has not been particularly diverse with his cinematic offerings; he was behind budget horror Brit-flick Creep, and the gruesome Danny Dyer vehicle Severance. We enjoyed Creep, and found Severance good for a one-off watch and so were hoping for at least the same the third time round.

Triangle tells the tale of Jess (Melissa George), a single mother who reluctantly joins her friend Greg for a leisurely day of sailing, or at least that was the plan.

Greg’s friends clearly think Jess is a little peculiar; she shows up looking like she’s been dragged backwards through a bush and then slapped with a fish. Whilst her co-sailors are upbeat and ready to enjoy some fun in the sun, but Jess seems unable to get into the party mood.

An unfortunate encounter with a freak electrical storm dashes their boat to pieces. Conveniently the Aeolus, a passing ocean liner, happens to be in the vicinity, allowing the crew to clamber aboard to safety. Save for a mysterious bag-headed figure spotted on the deck before the group boarded, the ship appears to be completely deserted.

Things take another turn for the weird when Jess discovers her lost keys on one of the ship’s floors and starts experiencing some rather strong feelings of deja vu…

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Pandorum can best be described as the box-office bomb that is actually a satisfying sci-fi horror treat. If you have been fortunate enough to catch the remake of 3:10 To Yuma, you may recall Russell Crowe’s right-hand man, played by the excellent Ben Foster. Foster continues his good form in Pandorum, a freaky horror combining The Descent and Event Horizon to immensely satisfying effect.

Foster plays the astronaut Bower, accompanied by the ever-reliable Dennis Quaid as Payton. The two confused space-dwellers wake up from a long sleep aboard the ship Elysium with no knowledge of their mission, and no recollection of any prior events. There are no signs of any crew, and power to the vessel appears to be lost. The ship itself offers nothing but a mysterious, sporadic, hellish rumble; a sound akin to some kind of otherworldly monster in great distress.

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The title of this 2004 sci-fi thriller starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart refers to the notion of sensitive dependence in chaos theory, whereby a change in something seemingly innocuous, such as the flap of a butterfly’s wings, can have enormous and unpredictable ramifications, such as a hurricane in Asia. The film applies this theory to four children growing up in American suburbia whose young lives have been marred by tragedy. When Evan Treborn (Kutcher), one of the group who is now a psychology undegraduate, discovers he can travel back in time he decides to alter the present by ‘undoing’ the harrowing events of the past.

The story begins with Evan as a child who, though a kind boy, shows definite traits of madness. Rather than sailing boats and flowers, his precocious primary school drawings depict cold-blooded murders; he has frequent blackouts, raids the kitchen cupboard for knives and is eventually referred to a psychiatrist (Nathaniel DeVeaux) for treatment.

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Set in Communist Romania in the final years of the Nicolae Ceauşescu era, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days tells the harrowing story of two female students who try to arrange an illegal abortion, 20 years after the practice was outlawed so that Ceauşescu would have more subjects to rule. Directed by Cristian Mungiu, it won the Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Mungiu based the film on a real story he had heard which he said “still affected me after more than 15 years”, and which had been repeated countless times among young Romanian women who turned to the black market to avoid the indignity and poverty that would accompany single motherhood. The film cost just $600,000 to make and forms part of a planned series of stories from Romania before the fall of the Iron Curtain, called Memories from the Golden Age.

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Like many films that have come out of Germany in recent years, Yella is concerned with coming to terms with the past and adjusting to the present.

Yella (Nina Hoss) is a reserved yet ambitious woman who is determined to leave behind her old life in a rather demoralising eastern German town, where her possessive ex-husband (Hinnerk Schönemann) trawls the streets in search of her, unable to accept that she no longer loves him. Partly to escape him, she accepts an accountancy job in Hamburg, but nothing is quite as it seems. After a brutal parting shot with her husband, Yella legs it to the train, sodden and dishevelled. She arrives at her new workplace the next day to find that her lecherous boss (Michael Wittenborn) has been given the sack, leaving her jobless, alone and haunted by the past.

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Following on from the earlier ramble about the forthcoming Watchmen film (which may or may not happen) we rifled through our DVD collection and dragged out The Hughes Brothers 2001 adaptation of From Hell – another Alan Moore graphic novel adaptation, this one about Jack the Ripper.

Given that the book is nearly 600 pages long, it’s not surprising that the film adaptation loses several plot points, and is very liberal with the narrative; the film is more of a Victorian whodunnit, whereas Moore and artist Eddie Campbell practically reveal the identify of the Ripper within the first few pages.

Nevertheless, the film is an enjoyable romp, whether you’ve read the book or not. The violence is delivered with the same trademark Hughes Brothers style, and despite the claret (of which there is quite a lot) none of the nastiness ever feels obtuse or gratuitous – the Victorian London created in From Hell is a vision of putrescence, overflowing gutters, gin palaces and gas lamps around which the fleas and flies dance inbetween feasting on the bodies of murderees.

Killings are all too common in Whitechapel, and so it takes a particularly vicious and brutal slaying of a ‘bang-tail’, for its residents to sit up and take notice; “it was the way she was done,” which draws the attentions of Inspector Abberline (Johnny Depp), a character based on the real police Inspector who followed up the Ripper murders in 1888.

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It’s ten minutes to midnight.

Released over twenty years ago between 1986 and 87, to say that Watchmen was an influential success would be a pretty epic understatement. It cemented Alan Moore’s reputation as a writer in the graphic novel medium and since then, more than a fair few of his graphic novels have (much to his chagrin) been adapted for the big screen, most notably V For Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Constantine, and Jack the Ripper conspiracy theory yarn From Hell. His treatment of the Joker in his celebrated Batman one-shot The Killing Joke, is widely cited as being a major influence on both Tim Burton’s 1989 movie, the subsequent Batman animated series, and recent outing The Dark Knight.

No Watchmen, no Heroes. Simple as.

The comic book is set in an alternative universe where superheroes exist – it is 1985, and the Cold War is on the verge of becoming a very, very hot one.

In this universe, the USA won the Vietnam War, and Watergate never happened – Nixon is still the President. The West is defended by a small elite corps of licensed superheroes, the most powerful of which, Dr. Manhattan, has given the States an edge over the Soviets. However, things take a turn for the worse – the story begins with the discovery that The Comedian, an ultra-patriotic American superhero is found dead, having been hurled several stories from his apartment.

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An unmarked video tape that kills you seven days after you’ve watched it is the focus for this psychological thriller, based on the Japanese horror film of the same name. More eerie than grotesque, The Ring is bound to send more than a few Hallowe’en shivers down your spine this Friday.

Naomi Watts plays Rachel Keller, a Seattle-based newspaper reporter who is asked to investigate the sudden and mysterious death of her niece. Rachel discovers that three other teenagers also died that day, and that all four had watched a mysterious, grainy video exactly a week earlier. But once she manages to track down the offending VHS the budding journo can’t help but take a peek, and begins to fear that her curiosity could get the better of her. Determined not to be fooled by an urban legend, Rachel enlists the help of her reluctant ex-boyfriend Noah (Martin Henderson) and intuitive son Aiden (David Dorfman) to get to the bottom of the mystery. But one death threat later and Rachel is fighting to save her own life and those of her family. The clock is ticking…
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Jennifer Marsh (Diana Lane) is a widowed FBI officer who spends her nights online tracking down identity thieves, fraudsters and cyber pervs. One night she stumbles across a website named killwithme.com where a cute kitten is being tortured to death. A disclaimer on the main page states that the more people who visit the site, the worse the killings will be - a few nights later the psychotic webmaster has moved onto humans.

Following the formula of Se7en, the killer is driven by a perverse moral agenda – to expose the people’s voyeuristic tendencies through ‘torture porn’. In one of the films many clichés, Marsh is caught between fighting crime and neglecting her daughter, who also becomes a target for the psychopath.

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Will Smith, a sci-fi legend himself, stars in the latest version of Richard Matheson’s classic chiller I Am Legend. He plays the last human survivor in a post-apocalyptic New York City.

After the pretty average reviews, we at DVD Rental didn’t have high expectations of this film, but have to say, we were pleasantly surprised when we got out copy through the post.

For those who have not read the book, nor seen The Omega Man (the 1971 version starring Charlton Heston) the plot follows Robert Neville, who has only his dog Sam for company (and a few shop window mannequins he’s made friends with) and his struggle to both discover the cure for a virus that has spread throughout the world, and see through each day in the streets of an empty New York.
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