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Showing posts with label gore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gore. Show all posts
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Thursday, July 17, 2014
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As far as ridiculous movie premises go The Purge takes some beating. Set in a near-future US, the government has decreed that the best way to reduce crime is that for one night a year all crime (including murder) is legal. The thinking is that if the populace has a release valve for their repressed anger then the other 364 nights of the year will be relatively peaceful. Amazingly it sort of works - 'Purge Night' is in its sixth year as the film begins and, though it the majority barricade themselves inside their houses and pray for sunrise, it at least appears to generally accepted as a worthwhile endeavour.
This is a sequel to the 2013's The Purge, which used the night as an excuse to stage a relatively low-budget home invasion movie. The sequel sets its sights much higher, guiding us through the streets of Los Angeles as the citizens tear each other apart. With gangs of flamethrower wielding maniacs, van-based minigun nutters and ranting sniper rifle wielding egomaniacs prowling about it's a pretty crazy 12 hours.
Stuck in the middle of all the mayhem is a pretty standard gaggle of stock types. There's mother and daughter pair Eva and Cali, dragged out of their homes by a mysterious paramilitary army. Shane and Liz, whose car breaks down at the worst possible time and the mysterious 'Sergeant' - a thinly veiled ripoff of The Punisher. Thrown together by fate the group pick their way through the carnage, looking for a safe haven - or in The Punisher's case - bloody vengeance.
There's a pungent whiff of John Carpenter to all of this and DeMonaco relishes showing off seedy, urban environments populated with over-the-top, extravagantly costumed weirdoes. The premise allows for a cavalcade of violence throughout, mostly through gunshot wounds. This isn't some splatter flick though, and while you get your fair share of bloody squibs blasting holes in people, a surprisingly amount of the the violence is either threatened or left to our imagination - gotta get that R rating after all.
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| 'yer cast |
The central idea - that an awful lot of Americans are secretly frothing gun-crazy psychopaths with fear of punishment as the only thing stopping them heading off on a Grand Theft Autoesque rampage of death and destruction - is inherently satirical. The Purge: Anarchy is thus easily at its best when its directly engaging with politics. It doesn't feel enough to say the satire here is 'on the nose', more that it's screaming while beating the nose in with a baseball bat.
DeMonaco has refreshingly little time for nuance in his political commentary. Going straight for the jugular, he introduces the concept of being a 'Martyr'. Essentially if you're poor you can sell yourself to a wealthy family as a sacrificial lamb. They'll carve you up and send your relatives a hefty cheque for privilege. DeMonaco shoots this scene like a live action political cartoon - an elderly, dignified working class black man sitting Buddhalike surrounded by grinning, primped, psychotic WASPS.
Better is to come later in the film, when we enter an elite hunting club run by 1%ers with the 99% as their quarry. I have seen few more satisfying things than a load of hoity-toity snobs in suits getting their shit wrecked up bigtime by a very angry Punisher analogue. If nothing else DeMonaco has his finger on what the people want: when a horribly witchy Republican woman is held at gunpoint by our heroes the audience actually began murmuring "shoot the bitch!" at the screen. There's similar assent when we see a mutilated man strung up in front of a bank bearing a sign "This man stole our pensions." Eh, he probably deserved it.
The audience's palpable bloodlust makes you think that maybe DeMonaco is actually onto something with this Purge idea. After all we're all gathered to watch people getting blown away in increasingly creative ways - and it's undeniably pleasurable to watch a bunch of arrogant rich pricks getting theirs at the hands of our firmly proletariat heroes.
It's a shame then that these sequences are broken up by the rest of the film - which turns out to be a pretty by-the-numbers action thriller. The further we get away from political commentary the more we stray into territory that has the unmistakable stink of straight-to-DVD. None of the characters are particularly compelling, well written or well performed, though at least they manage to look believably terrified most of the time.
It's also a bit of a let down visually - the film is bathed in queasy piss-yellowish light that looks a shade too artificial for the grittiness of the material. DeMonaco obviously has it in him to compose a decent shot - there's a few moments that make you sit up and pay attention - but the majority of the direction is pretty bland - especially some of the later action sequences, which are so impersonal they could be lifted straight from any number of B movies.
The Purge: Anarchy is undoubtedly a B-movie; but when it's unapologetically acting out revolutionary wish-fulfilment it's at least a B-Movie with its heart in the right place. The rest of the time it's a faintly bland, largely identikit bit of fluff. This isn't a film to run out and see, but if you want a bit of schlock in your life you could do worse.
★★
Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist is on limited release from May 13th.
★★
Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist is on limited release from May 13th.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Saturday, February 2, 2013
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'No One Lives' is a film where a maniac kills a fat guy then cuts open the body and hides inside it, gruesomely emerging in a bloody rebirthing scene. It's a sick little film mainly concerned with the process of disassembling its cast, who are among other things impaled, shot, strangled, stabbed, bashed, beheaded, mangled, pierced and processed into a chunky paste. If nothing else, 'No One Lives' can be admired for the gusto with which it goes about this process of dismemberment.
The setup for this chaos is fairly straightforward. We meet a gang of criminals, ranging in likeability from utterly detestable to merely evil. They all live in a big house together and seem to wear shirts with the logo of their crime gang on the back. It's like a 5 year old's idea of what a criminal gang is, but then this is not a film overly concerned with subtlety. Soon, one of the particularly evil criminals runs a couple of tourists off the road and steals their car. But these are no ordinary tourists.
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| Driver - Luke Evans |
The driver, named only as 'Driver' (Luke Evans) is an unbelievably competent and sadistic killer. He's the Batman of murdering people in ridiculous ways. As soon as Driver starts his campaign of terror, people start blankly intoning lines like "It doesn't matter what you do, he's going to kill you all". It's slightly interesting in a sick way, because the victims are vicious criminals we find ourselves rooting for the 'monster'. This is a bit disturbing because Driver is an antihero in the loosest sense. While he has no internal conflict his motivations are extremely muddled and there's a slightly annoying self-awareness to him that totally undercuts any attempt to take him seriously. As far as psychopaths go, he's got much more in common with Wile E Coyote than he does with Hannibal Lecter.
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| "Nobody kills Ethan!" |
The rest of the cast are to various degrees, different varieties of meat for him to cut through. Aside from one noble exception in Derek Magyar, these are the sorriest group of actors I've seen assembled in a very long time. The acting is generally at about the level of a well-produced porn film. This isn't helped by one of the worst scripts I've ever seen. Judging by the dialogue I assume the writer, David Lawrence Cohen was being paid by the use of the word "fuck". "Fuck! Shut the fucking door you fuck!" says one character, "Fuck YOU!" says another in reply. It's pretty clunky stuff and results in ridiculous moments when a character sees a bloody knife sticking out of a wall and says inquisitively "something's wrong here". You think?!
You also get bizarre sequences like the astonishingly violent fight between two women at the mid way point. Everybody is hiding in terror from the killer when things flare up between two members of the criminal gang. For the next few minutes the killer is forgotten as the women roll around together, bodyslamming each other through glass coffee tables and throwing each other right across the room. Even the other characters in the scene look slightly confused by what's happening. It feels a bit like some slimy producer turned up on set and started demanding that there be a cat fight in the movie.
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| A suspiciously well lit junk yard. Guess someone was throwing away spotlights and dry ice machines. |
Damn near everything about the film other than the gory murders is half-assed. It's clearly got a small budget, but this doesn't mean that it has to look quite this cheap. It's shot digitally, and considering nearly all of the film is set at night this results in huge, washed out black areas of the screen, something exacerbated bystrangely expressionistic lighting. The film is lit like a rock concert or a stage musical. Characters appear backlit by spotlights surrounded by mysterious plumes of dry ice. If they went fullbore with this unnatural atmosphere it might just about work, but they don't and it doesn't.
I try to keep an open mind whenever I watch a film, pre-judging stuff before you've seen a frame can poison enjoyment of a perfectly good film. Having said that, I felt a little tingle of dread when the first thing on screen informed me that the film was a World Wrestling Entertainment production. As far as I'm concerned there's no real reason that the WWE shouldn't be able entertaining enough action film, so I tried to forget about it. But when you have characters bodyslamming each other through tables and suplexing people into cars it's difficult not to become a little suspicious that you're watching pro-wrestling in disguise.
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| If you like seeing women getting cut up then boy is this the film for you. |
What's a little more disturbing are the frequent links 'No One Lives' makes between sex and death. Perhaps this kind of thing goes with the exploitation genre but even so when we're looking at a strangled, semi crucified woman tied up in a bathroom it feels a bit weird that her gigantic blood stained breasts are front and centre in the frame. On a slightly subtler, but arguably weirder note is the central relationship between the Driver and his captive. It's some kind of weird Stockholm Syndrome style attraction that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The film seems to want to set up some kind of commentary on the way victims of abuse become dependant on their abuser, but it's garbled to the point of incomprehensibility.
I've got to admit that at least on some weird trashy level 'No One Lives' occasionally works. When there's some bonkers murder scene going on, or when the killer is running around naked and smeared with blood it approaches entertaining purely through B-movie audacity. But make no mistake it's an absolutely atrocious film on almost every level. I've seen quite a few films directed by Kitamura over the years and found 'Midnight Meat Train' surprisingly worthwhile. Unfortunately 'No One Lives' is boring, badly acted bargain bin trash punctuated by the odd moment of sadistic relish.
*/*****
'No One Lives' is apparently in theatres on April 18th. I suspect it's more likely to end up going straight to DVD.
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