DVD Rental: Reviews

Gorgeous rising starlet Gemma Arterton continues to take the movie-world by storm with her excellent performance in devilishly devious and delightful British thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed. She has appeared in recent blockbusters Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but is still making time for homeland cinema and we should all be very grateful.

She plays the eponymous Alice Creed, who is taken, stripped, bound, gagged and left in the darkness by twisted thugs Vic and Danny. The two rotters have painstakingly fortified a small flat in an unknown location, and this serves as the set for almost the entire movie. Their grand plan is to force Alice Creed’s rich father to pay up £2million, through the use of some unpleasant photographs and video that effectively display Alice’s harrowing, brutal and potentially fatal situation. Vic is particularly bonkers; he poses a very genuine threat to Alice, as opposed to the younger Danny, who seems a little more confused and reluctant about the plan once he sees the physicality of the torment and stress placed upon the helpless girl.

Perhaps this sounds a little familiar, and the ‘kidnap a rich man’s daughter’ motif is not an original concept. However, this is a film packed with twists, turns and a couple of very genuine shocks. The film takes about 5 seconds to get going, and then bounds forward in a perfectly paced and gripping manner, demonstrating some real potential from writer and director J Blakeson. The script is excellent, with the beats coming at just the right time, and effortlessly executed with aplomb. The film is certainly not without its kinky side, and there is no holding back regarding nudity and violence.

Read the rest of this entry »

This maddening mess sees three violent and disturbed teenagers break into the home of an unhappily married and extraordinarily unlikeable couple. The pair are beaten and tied up within seconds, and the assailants then proceed to sit on the couch waiting for the couple’s son to come home so they can kill him for being a grass.

This lasts for almost 80 minutes, and it is excruciating; a mind-bendingly dull and lazy waste of time; time that could be spent doing something infinitely better, such as attempting to clean your teeth with a pneumatic drill whilst swallowing a rusty cheese-grater.

The painfully clichéd unhappy couple argue over dinner in a monotonous and badly scripted fashion about an affair that she may have had a while ago (it’s hard to keep track of the conversation due to its poor delivery). They answer the door and are attacked. They are subjected to occasional abuse of a severe nature, whilst the clock ticks down (somewhat erratically) to their son’s arrival, which is due to be met with a fatal response. That is literally it.

Read the rest of this entry »

This terrific low-budget thriller from little-known director Carlos Brooks is a real treat, especially considering it forms part of that dreaded straight-to-DVD selection.

Briana Evigan (Step Up 2, Sorority Row) plays Kelly Taylor, a bright and caring young woman preparing to enrol at college whilst leaving her autistic younger brother Tom (played by Charlie Tahan) in the care of a school for special needs.

They live with their unpleasant deadbeat stepdad Johnny (Garret Dillahunt; Last House on the Left, No Country for Old Men) as a result of their mother’s prior suicide.

Kelly’s payment to the special needs school falls through because Johnny empties the account. He has grand plans to turn the land surrounding their home into a mini-safari park; this includes the purchase of a tiger that comes with Meat Loaf’s official seal of evil. The non-payment means that Kelly must choose whether to leave young Tom in the incapable hands of their stepdad, or abandon her plans for college so that she can remain as his carer.

Things take a bizarre twist when a hurricane charges through the local area. After the house has been boarded up in preparation for the storm, an unseen figure lets the tiger (which has been starved for 2 weeks) loose in the house, before boarding up the doors entombing Kelly and Tom with the tiger.

Read the rest of this entry »

Prior to his untimely death in 2004, Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson wrote a trio of novels collectively known as the Millennium Trilogy. Written in his native Swedish tongue, the stories have proved a critical and commercial success, and all three have already been turned into Swedish language movies.

This month sees the DVD rental release of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, originally titled Män Som Hatar Kvinnor or Men Who Hate Women. The film, much like its source material, has enjoyed mass acclaim from pretty much everyone, and deservedly so.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo introduces the trilogy’s two main protagonists; firstly Mikael Blomkvist, a middle-aged investigative journalist writing for the magazine Millennium. His attempts to uncover the corrupt nature of Swedish billionaire and industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström have gone awry and resulted in a libel case against him. He will have to serve three months in prison, but has a few months before he must face his sentence.

The title character and movie heroine is Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-something with prior issues relating to behaviour and mental stability, but a brilliant researcher. She has been hired by ultra-rich Henrik Vanger of the Vanger Group in order to check the legitimacy and authenticity of Mikael Blomkvist’s reputation as a skilled investigator.

Satisfied with Mikael’s credentials, Vanger meets with Blomkvist and requests that he investigate the disappearance of his foster child Harriet, who has been missing for 40 years and presumed dead. The circumstances surrounding the disappearance are more than suspicious, and Henrik suspects foul play from none other than a member of his own twisted, money-hungry family.

Read the rest of this entry »

Modern cinematic heavyweights Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up for the fourth time in this eerie and brooding mystery thriller, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.

Set in the fifties, Shutter Island sees Leo’s U.S. Marshall Edward ‘Teddy’ Daniels investigating the apparent disappearance of a mental patient from a totally locked and guarded room. The patient, Rachel Solando, is a resident at the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, located on the otherwise desolate Shutter Island.

Daniels is accompanied by his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), as they attempt to solve the unusual case. Their hospital ‘guide’ is head psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley, portrayed by Sir Ben Kingsley, who makes no bones about coming across as rather sinister and creepy.

It does not take long to establish that there is a lot more going on that a crazy woman with a talent for matter displacement. Daniels believes from the offset that the island and its inhabitants, including Cawley, have some dark and desperate secrets buried within those not-so-solid hospital walls.

Secrets from Teddy’s own past, a few suspect twitches from various characters, a cameo from Max von Sydow, a visit to the ‘off-limits’ prison/hospital on the hill, a secluded and mysterious lighthouse and some weirdness on a cliff all help to create a bizarre, baffling and intriguing mystery shot by a master of cinema.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2002, relatively unknown author Alice Sebold saw her first fiction novel, The Lovely Bones, become a bestseller, garnering almost universal critical acclaim from the literary world, and owing many of its sales to word of mouth.

Such surprise success would almost certainly result in talk of a film adaptation, and Peter Jackson, the man behind the glorious Lord of the Rings adaptations, was the man eventually handed director’s duties by producer Steven Spielberg.

The film adaptation of The Lovely Bones sees 14 year-old photographer-wannabe Susie Salmon lulled into an underground trap by a neighbour named George Harvey. It appears at first that, after a brief struggle, she manages to escape and run to freedom, but it quickly becomes clear that she has been murdered and is watching the subsequent events that occur after her death.

She watches from a heaven-like place; a world that is only limited by her own imagination, and one which serves as a precursor to her spirit’s final resting place. She remains in this limbo until such time that she chooses to move on; something which she is regularly encouraged to do by a mysterious little girl who accompanies her.

She observes her family and friends, and their respective responses to her untimely, grotesque demise. Her attempts to contact her loved ones have minimal success and only serve to aggravate the situation, as her father, Jack, starts to lose his mind in his relentless quest for justice. Meanwhile, her murderer attempts to cover up any evidence of his sickening act, although it is clear he has other secrets to hide.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last time that the Hughes Brothers ventured into moviemaking was 2001, when Johnny Depp played a cockney opium enthusiast in the underrated From Hell. They kept a low profile afterwards, until a script titled The Book of Eli showed up and attracted studio interest.

The twins were brought on board, and their ability to tackle the visual and the emotional would be key to the film’s successful transition from script to screen.

Denzel Washington plays Eli, a man heading west through a post-apocalyptic wasteland; he has nothing more than a backpack, a mysterious book and some Matrix-style combat skills. When a gang attempt to trap him, he dispatches them in an extraordinary fashion. One assailant is warned by Eli, “If that hand touches me again, you will lose it”. Needless to say the man calls Eli’s bluff, and does not fare too well.

Eli’s travels bring him to a town that is operating as a primitive society, with an aggressive but educated man called Carnegie (Gary Oldman) running the show. Eli’s dogged persistence to travel west with his book is matched by Carnegie’s desire to find the exact same item. Carnegie, unaware of Eli’s possession, bears witness to his incredible combat skills, and attempts to recruit him, offering a luxury lifestyle and constant clean water. But Eli is unflinching and resolute in his mission, and he declines, although agreeing to a single night’s stay.

Carnegie offers his step-daughter Solara (Mila Kunis) as a further temptation for the skilled fighter to remain in the town, but Eli is not forthcoming. However, during their meeting Eli reads from the book and Solara picks up a few words. The following day, she unwittingly recites them back in Carnegie’s presence and he realises that the book he seeks is in the town, and in the possession of Eli.

Aware of a potentially precarious situation, Eli escapes the town and continues his quest, with a hot-headed Carnegie on his trail.

Read the rest of this entry »

1963 saw the release of a controversial children’s picture book called Where The Wild Things Are. It was written and illustrated by American Maurice Sendak, and contained little more than ten sentences. It was, arguably, an allegorical piece, cleverly portraying the difficulties and strains on parent and child. It was a huge hit with children, and has gained legendary status as a groundbreaking piece of children’s literature.

It is hard to believe that something so short, aimed at kids, could metaphorically encompass the complexities of childhood, aggression, loneliness and love; but a picture paints a thousand words.

Almost 50 years later, quasi-loon and creative genius Spike Jonze has brought the story to the big screen with a lavish adaptation. You may remember him as the lead street dancer in the video for Praise You, by Fatboy Slim. He directed this video, as well as countless others including Weapon of Choice (Slim, again), Buddy Holly (Weezer) and surreal Kaufman movies Adaptation and Being John Malkovic.

Where The Wild Things Are would be a new challenge, but he certainly possesses the imagination to bring it to life.

Eight-year-old Max is a lonely boy with an active imagination, and once he becomes frustrated with his perceived lack of attention from his sister Claire and divorcee mother Connie, he decides to do a runner dressed as a wolf.

Max keeps running until he finds a small unattended boat at a nearby riverbank, and sets off into unknown territory. The seas take him to a strange land of sand and forest, and the home of 7 large surprises.

He meets the ‘Wild Things’; a collection of 7-foot creatures with a penchant for eating new arrivals. Max stares them down and tells them that he has great powers from another land – he can ‘explode heads’. He tells them that he is a great king, and will punish them if they try to devour him.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cormac McCarthy is one of the finest writers in modern literature; he has produced instant classics with Blood Meridian and All The Pretty Horses, not to mention a certain novel titled No Country For Old Men.

The latter is a truly brilliant and breathtaking book, and many who did not appreciate the film would have done well to check out the source material first, in order to gain a better understanding of the story, its purpose and the reasons behind the opinion-splitting ending.

McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with The Road, a literary work that is magnificent beyond words. It is the story of a man and his son as they attempt to survive an arduous journey through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The film version, directed by The Proposition helmer John Hillcoat, faithfully adapts the book into a stark, vivid and harrowing piece of cinema.

The two embark on an emotionally and physically draining quest to stay alive in a barren, cold and savage environment where vicious cannibals are a constant threat, and thieves would not think twice about stealing a blanket from a sleeping child.

Man and boy are heading south, out of hope more than anything else. We do not know their names, we do not know what happened to the world and we certainly do not know if they can survive this bleak, unforgiving hell.

A moment of weakness and fatigue sees them investigate a house where they find something truly horrifying in the basement, whilst the man’s own savage survival instincts cause him to defy his son’s desperate request of leniency towards a thief they hold at gunpoint.

Read the rest of this entry »

Utterly compelling, brilliantly scripted, a masterclass of acting and direction – the original Jaws is quite simply one of the greatest films ever made…

Following up Quint’s devastating Indianapolis speech, as well as Chief Brody’s awesome toe-to-toe with the shark in the finale, was never going to be easy. Director Jeannot Szwarc had a fairly acceptable attempt with Jaws 2, which saw Roy Scheider’s Brody electrocute a bigger, badder and very annoyed underwater beastie, whilst single-handedly carrying the film on his shoulders.

The almost vertical decline in quality would follow.

Jaws 3-D was an upsetting mess with Dennis Quaid portraying Brody’s eldest son Michael, who is now working at SeaWorld. The aquatic park manages to attract a psychotic 40-foot (?) shark that can roar and swim backwards. Suffice to say, this was not a positive step, and certainly not Quaid’s finest moment. The shark death: protagonists use a very long rod to pull the pin out of a grenade that is still in the hands of a diver eaten earlier in the film (what?).

If you haven’t seen it, we assure you it makes even less sense than you think.

Surely the best thing to do at this stage is kill the franchise before anyone turns mental and goes on a mad, murderous rampage in disgusted protest. Alas, this was not to be, and a fourth instalment was given the green-light.

Read the rest of this entry »