DARK (2016) Review

Directed by: Nick Basile

Starring: Whitney Able, Alexandra Breckenridge, Michael Eklund, Brendan Sexton III

“Set in NYC during the blackout of 2003, Kate, a struggling 30-something model with a troubled past, has just moved into her girlfriend Leah's Brooklyn loft, but already doubts about their relationship have begun to loom. When Leah leaves for the weekend, Kate unexpectedly finds herself alone in the apartment in the midst of the worst blackout in North American history. As darkness falls over the city, Kate's paranoia grows and she begins to believe someone in the building is stalking her. With no one to help her and escape out of reach, Kate is forced to confront her deepest fears as she fights to survive through the night”

On August 14^th, 2003 the Northeast Blackout struck the U.S and Canada. Large areas including New York City ground to a halt as the world's second most widespread blackout in history took down water supplies, transportation routes, oil refineries, cell towers and just about anything else you could think of. Wall Street, the UN Headquarters and emergency services all took a hit. City streets became parking lots and people flooded the streets on foot to avoid the gridlock. Power to some locations was restored within hours but, as the night settled in, most of New York City was left in the DARK.

Although the NYC blackout was a real life occurrence, the events that unfold in DARK are completely fictional. But fictional as they may be, they are also entirely plausible, and the realism of this story is what makes it so tense and frightening. How would somebody with mental health issues and a history of self harm deal with a situation where not only are they all alone in a new place, but now also in the dark with no cell phone or internet access? When the lights go out in a city of millions is the real danger lurking in the shadows? Among the strangers walking the streets? Or in your own mind?

Kate (Able) is a yoga instructor and former model who has just moved into her girlfriend Leah's (Breckenridge) NY apartment. Despite their obvious relationship issues Leah leaves the city to spend some time with family, leaving Kate alone in the apartment to finish unpacking and settling in. But after dropping and breaking a glass of orange juice, and a quick trip to the store to pick up some paper towel, the power drops out. Kate gets back home and discovers that not only is the power out in her apartment, it's out in the whole city.

After a number of run-ins with her strange neighbour John (Sexton), Kate is convinced that she is being stalked. But is it all just in her head?

DARK opens with a lesbian sex scene, which is a risky move that could so easily go wrong and so often does in films. But somewhat remarkably the opening minutes of the movie treat the scene in a totally organic, non gratuitous way. My girlfriend even noted how impressed she was to see a lesbian scene being used as character development, rather than just “tits slapping together”.
This opener shows the audience that the relationship between the protagonist and her partner is perhaps not going quite as smoothly as they might hope.
And since for the majority of its running time Kate is the only person on camera, the character development is incredibly important. There is barely a scene that goes by that doesn't in some way give you a glimpse of her personality, her history, or her state of mind. No matter whether she is unpacking her personal items or getting drunk and trying to pick up at a bar, the scenes all serve a purpose.

In respects to the technical side of the film, it's all pretty solid. The acting is good (Whitney Able's portrayal of a woman in the midst of a psychotic break is indeed impressive - and it's nice to Brendan Sexton as Kate's creepy neighbour, I swear I haven't seen him since SESSION 9) and the pacing is consistent (although I imagine much slower than a lot of people would like). The use of dark and light is handled well, and the slow burn pace does a good job of ratcheting up the tension.
As a package DARK is really well put together, and with shades of Polanski's REPULSION and THE TENANT, it's not the kind of movie that we see often enough these days.

Unfortunately I think the biggest issue with DARK is the way it's been marketed. From the artwork especially; DARK looks like it has its sights set squarely on the horror market, and although it certainly fits somewhat in the horror genre, I can just imagine people going into this movie and coming out disappointed because they expected something completely different.
If gore and jump scares are what you're looking for then you'll have to go elsewhere, but if you want a nice, brooding psychological thriller then DARK is well worth a look.

STORAGE 24 (2012) Review

Directed by: Johannes Roberts

Starring: Noel Clarke, Colin O'Donoghue, Antonia Campbell-Hughes

It’s been a while since I last saw a really good movie involving aliens, well not really that long I suppose since last year’s SUPER 8 was pretty damn impressive. I never understood what the big deal was about ATTACK THE BLOCK though, but here we have another alien movie from the UK; STORAGE 24. Will it fill the void?

The title refers to where the movie takes place, a 24 hour storage facility. You know those places with rows and rows of locked storage rooms which you can hire and fill with all of your crap. Anyway, right at the start of the movie there is a plane crash, but not just any ordinary plane. This is a military plane and we all know what that means right? Obviously it was carrying some type of top secret cargo which in this case comes in the form of a vicious bipedal alien. After escaping from its container it makes its way into the storage facility to hide out. Electrical problems due to the plane crash are causing the storage facility to have some problems and soon all of its occupants find themselves trapped inside.

Inside the facility we have three friends who are sorting through Shelley’s (Campbell-Hughes) stuff after a break up with her boyfriend. Boyfriend Charlie (Clarke) and friend Mark (O'Donoghue) show up and there’s some whining and bitching (mostly from Charlie) about why they broke up and what went wrong and blah blah blah.
But of course soon they discover that they’re not alone in building and that whatever is after them is fast, cunning, deadly and not human. Now they have more important things to worry about rather than their relationship woes, thank fuck.

You’d think that putting a small group of people in a confined space with a vicious alien would make for good cinema, but I guess it’s not always the case. Firstly the characters are so annoying or bland that you don’t care one way or the other whether they live or die. Secondly the opportunity to create some mood and tension has been completely wasted here and instead we are treated to a lot of pointless arguing and running around as the alien picks these people off one by one.

All of the attack sequences for some reason are filmed in close-up and I found myself just begging for a nice medium shot just so I could actually see what was going on.

Thankfully there is a bit of blood and gore and it’s the good old fashioned practical kind, and the alien itself looks pretty menacing. But the fact remains that too much of the movie is taken up by these annoying characters (mostly Charlie; it’s no wonder your girlfriend dumped you, you whiny little shit) and their stupid relationship subplot. And the ending. Oh the ending. Is that really the best they could come up with? I could not think of a more predictable finish to the film. But at least it fits with the rest of the movie which is also predictable, bland and void of any tension or atmosphere. What they've done here is take an interesting location, a nice, simple premise with plenty of potential and they've just wasted it. As far as alien movies go this year I would rather watch MEN IN BLACK III again, at least it had some laughs and entertainment value.

DECAY (2012) Review

Directed by: Luke Thompson

Starring: Zoe Hatherell, Tom Procter, Stewart Martin-Haugh

You know what I like? Free horror movies. You know what I don’t like so much? The endless spewing forth of shit zombie films. There are so many it’s as though I could throw a rock blindfolded and still manage to hit about ten of them. However there is one thing that can persuade me to check out a new zombie flick and that’s the promise of something new and fresh. Sure, a lot of the time these claims turn out to be complete bullshit but what about in the case of DECAY? A free movie set and filmed at the CERN Large Hadron Collider… with zombies? I know what you’re thinking; did I just read that right? Yes. Yes you did. But an awesome premise means nothing if the movie can’t match up to it, so how does DECAY stack up?

 As has already been mentioned, DECAY takes place at the CERN Institute, primarily inside the world’s largest particle collider nestled 100 metres underneath France and Switzerland. Four physics students (played by real life physics students apparently) are volunteered to man the control room during the absence of one of the professors who is leading a technical team down into the tunnels to fix some kind of problem. Suddenly and inexplicably the Large Hadron Collider begins running seemingly by its own volition, an event that shouldn’t be able to take place while there are people down there. After some panicking one of the students shuts the machine down, but not before it has baked everybody in the tunnels with a lethal amount of Higgs radiation. With the phones down and the elevator not running, the only way out is through the access tunnels. But has the radiation really killed the technical crew?

I’ll bet a few of you who are reading this are wondering the same thing I was worrying about at first. Are these actual zombies? Or just some irradiated CHERNOBYL DIARIES type freaks? Well rest assured they are zombies in as much as they are reanimated corpses (it’s all explained in the movie with science and stuff). And what better place to put a bunch of zombies than an isolated, claustrophobic, subterranean maze?
Unfortunately although this would seem to be the perfect environment for some creepy, panicky, and action-packed moments I don’t feel that the filmmakers really got as much out of the location as they could have. Since the film was supposedly shot at the actual LHC maybe they had to hold back in fear of doing damage to the equipment? I don’t know. Regardless they still did a good job of creating an appropriate atmosphere with flickering lights, shadows, the distant gurgling and moaning of zombies and any sounds seemingly amplified in the dead silence.

And what about the effects? I hear you ask. Well I hate to say it but there’s a bunch of kind of dodgy looking CGI and not enough practical going on here. And the film also commits one of the worst effects sins ever; CGI blood. I can’t understand why any film should be using digital blood, unless that blood is being used for an effect which would be impossible otherwise. I can understand that the budget here wasn’t huge but really I would have preferred having no digital blood, even if it meant less blood overall in the film.

I should mention that the entire film doesn’t take place in the Collider, in fact there is a fairly sizeable chunk at the beginning where we see the students getting ready for some kind of emergency meeting. There’s some character development and some kind of love triangle introduced but it’s not very deep and all it did was make me want the radioactive zombie action to start already.

So overall DECAY isn’t a great film but then I don’t know all of the details. If it really was shot at the CERN Super Collider maybe there were safety and time restraints to deal with. I still think it could have ditched the CGI blood or at least toned it down. But hey the movie’s free so I can’t complain too much. Check it out if you’re a fan of zombie flicks, after all what have you got to lose apart from 75 minutes of your life?

247°F (2012) Review

Directed by: Levan Bakhia, Beqa Jguburia

Starring: Scout Taylor-Compton, Christina Ulloa, Travis Van Winkle

Imagine being trapped in a sauna while the heat steadily climbs and to make things worse nobody outside actually knows where you are. That would be terrible right? In fact it would probably be almost as bad as having to sit through this movie.

If you want to know the plot well I've pretty much just summed it up in the previous paragraph. Three friends (Compton, Ulloa & Van Winkle) staying at a holiday house get trapped inside a sauna. A fourth friend awakens from a drunken stupor and thinks that his pals have left for the party they were planning on attending, so he’s no help. The owner of the cabin is away making preparations for said party so he’s no help either. As the heat rises and the supply of bottled water runs out the trapped trio start losing their shit as they realize that nobody is coming for them. The sauna is a sturdy building made out of trees and the door simply won’t budge, and the only window is a tiny porthole with enough room to stick an arm out. What to do then? Cue a lot of yelling, screaming, crying etc.

Lots of movies have tried to tackle the idea of filming almost solely in a single isolated location, and with varying success. A good example of a success would be the recent film BURIED with Ryan Reynolds, and while I was not a huge fan of it (mostly because I can’t stand Reynolds) I couldn't deny that the filmmakers did a fantastic job of handling a movie that is set entirely in a fucking coffin. That’s a coffin. Buried underground. With one person in it. You’d think a sauna with three people in it would be no problem then, right? Well apparently not.

247°F is in my opinion much too long and would have been much more effective as a shorter film with less filler. The start of the movie (before the whole sauna incident happens) drags on for way too long and even when these three characters are trapped, the film insists on showing scenes happening outside which really have no bearing on the plot.
Also there is a weak subplot embedded in there somewhere which really has no impact at all.

Making the characters as annoying as they are just makes things worse. I didn't know this but apparently the best way to escape from a sauna is to bitch and argue and fight with each other, or at least that’s what these three think of as the best idea. If I were in the sauna with them I would be welcoming death with open arms.

But it’s not all bad news. There are a few exciting parts although they are few and far between, and the film at least looks good. As far as the acting goes it’s not award winning but it’s decent for what’s needed here. I know it seems like I may be tearing this movie to shreds but there is definitely an audience for 247°F. If your idea of fun is watching a half-naked Scout Taylor-Compton sweat it up in a sauna with another girl and a guy then by all means go ahead. Similarly if you’re in the market for a movie which doesn't require much brain power to process then this will suffice. Personally I was just really disappointed because I thought the concept had more potential than this, and it’s not something I plan on watching again. Having said that however, there have been plenty of worse movies this year so at least there’s that to hold on to.