Tenet

Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki

Director: Christopher Nolan       

150 minutes (12) 2020

Warner Bros. 4K Ultra HD

Rating: 9/10

Review by Christopher Geary

A nameless CIA agent (John David Washington, BlacKkKlansman), identified here only as the Protagonist, investigates a sinister plot against life, the universe, and everything. His mission to save the world is aided by skilled colleague Neil (Robert Pattinson, Twilight, High Life, Cosmopolis), and involves art expert Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki, Princess Diana in TV series The Crown), in hard confrontations with Russian super-villain Sator (Kenneth Branagh) whose Machiavellian ambitions puts all existence at great risk. Globe-spanning adventure, from Oslo to Mumbai, and back again, is essential for such movies. But, what if you meet yourself going the other way?

Complexity of narrative unfolds like a grand puzzle, part jigsaw, part chess-problem, part spy-fi conspiracy, where memory collides with deep secrets hidden even from the Protagonist himself. Following convoluted SF, like Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012), and the Spierigs’ Predestination (2014), this fascinating exercise in precognitive mystery and metaphysical crimes has a time-machine called the ‘Turnstile’ that weirdly inverts entropy for objects and people. Ever since Memento (2000), intellectual auteur Christopher Nolan has been playing in paradox sand-pits, with a requirement for perceptual adjustments, finding order in the chaos of a new-style hyper-reality. A car-chase in Tenet explores far more than just fast-moving vehicles on a roadway. Viewers must question what’s happening on-screen during violent action scenes that re-mix layers of cause and effect, into bizarre and practically cartoonish live-action, often with an intentionally comical affect, that only makes any sense, later on, when cleverly re-played from another perspective.

Fans of Nolan’s brain-melting escapades, for movies like Inception (2010), and intricate drama of magical secrecy in The Prestige (2006), should fully appreciate how cerebral aims lead to rare moments of a wonderful ambiguity, eventually hitting moving-targets we cannot see at first. Story-telling with fractured episodes and fragments of need-to-know info, taken out of its contextual meaning, defy simple logical explanation. Learning can match discovery, if the timing is right. Stunts and visual effects blend into seamless stunning unity for some impressive, kinetic impacts. Nolan piles on greater scope and effortless scale to reach a climax that depends on many tiny details for complete success. Change one variable, and nothing works exactly as planned, unless there are second and third chances to correct faults and mistakes. As a master-class in movie editing, Tenet scores very highly. Pattinson and Debicki easily steal the main acting honours. Michael Caine enjoys a nice sit-down cameo as British agent Sir Michael Crosby, Clemence Poesy coasts though vital exposition as the scientist, while as a military team-leader Aaron Taylor-Johnson brings a hefty dose of rationality just before plotting is lost in confusion. 

Avoiding 007 clichés, like Bond is a nasty rash, Nolan subverts generic standards in every way possible, for a science fictional picture that remains, recognisably, a super-spy movie. Despite nine seconds of violence cut from this British version (for a certificate 12, instead of an uncut 15 rating), this thriller excels at what Nolan always does best. It delivers amazing staging of explosive action scenes that engage your mind equally as well as pricking your nerves. 

Skyfire

Cast: Jason Isaacs, Hannah Quinlivan, and Shawn Dou

Director: Simon West      

97 minutes (12) 2019

Patriot Blu-ray

[Released 23rd November]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton   

Cinema’s first wave of CGI-candy catastrophes included Roger Donaldson’s Dante’s Peak, and Mick Jackson’s absurdly entertaining Volcano (both 1997), but this similarly themed Chinese disaster movie ups the ante of spectacular visual effects to an epic scale, with a knowing nod and a wise wink to various exemplars of its now familiar subgenre.   

After the Tianhuo eruption, its Pacific island site becomes a theme park with geo-thermal power and stylised buildings, as if sci-fi capitalist futurism has conquered primal nature’s force. Professor Wentao Li (Xueqi Wang) is wary of his daughter’s involvement in the same research area that killed her mother, but headstrong scientist Meng (Hannah Quinlivan, Skyscraper), interprets tech sensor data with intuition, and conceals any raw fears. Her team’s ‘Zhuque’ system checks magma flows and gaseous emissions, and is supplied complete with handy 3D holographic displays. Resort mogul Jack Harris (British character actor Jason Isaacs, Star Trek: Discovery), is a token westerner in the picture’s main cast, and yet his performance dovetails perfectly with Asian co-stars. 

“The snow is burning”  

British filmmaker Simon West’s track-record as a director is patchy, with curious failures, and notable star-vehicles, but his work forms a diverse and quite interesting list, starting with prison-plane comedy-thriller Con-Air (1997), which helped establish Nicolas Cage as Hollywood action-man. Likewise, West’s adventure based upon a video-game, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), diverted Angelina Jolie’s Oscar-winning career into popular thrillers. Watchable genre remakes soon followed, including psycho-horror, When A Stranger Calls (2006), West’s successful 2011 updating of Michael Winner’s cult-worthy Charles Bronson drama, The Mechanic (1972), and then another picture starring Jason Statham, maligned unfairly by box-office failure, modern noir, Wild Card (2015), penned by William Goldman and previously filmed as Las Vegas crime drama, Heat (1986), starring Burt Reynolds.

West tried again, with British spy thriller Stratton - starring Dominic Cooper, and Antonio Banderas’ comedy-actioner Gun Shy (both 2017), before continuing his global quest for a witty re-mix that resulted in Skyfire. This glossy production harks back to the celebrated disaster movies of the 1970s, but cleverly builds upon the off-beat appeal of recent Asian movies, freshening up Hollywood clichés with cutting-edge imagery and wholly unfamiliar faces. Early scenes are busy with intros, of course, but also careful to position the heroes as central to exposition.

There’s one almost fairytale moment of romance just before the underground blows up, and from then onward it’s raining explosions, blazing landscapes, preposterous but fun scenes of rescue, with gravity-defying stunts, and deadly perils that just happen like falling off a cliff. A pair of monorail cable-cars, with escaping passengers, are endangered upon broken tracks. Eerie static charges haunt the very air, before rivers of lava surge in, wrecking the best laid plans of speculative investors, much like all those misbehaving dinosaurs that overwhelm Spielberg’s Jurassic franchise. Frantic searchers, looking for stranded survivors, soon have to contend with the localised doomsday, when this island’s model apocalypse arrives with hurricane style clouds of ash.

West brings his usual competence to journeyman action where no experimental creativity simply means we can always and easily tell what’s happening, despite the ongoing chaos. Thankfully, as tragic events are repeated, characters learn that most cyclical constants in human history are not about careers of discovery and invention, political gain, or cultural celebrity, or making mega-money for the building of empires. True tales of humanity are chiefly nothing more than a brave struggle for endurance against nature. Despite its composition from a range of recognisably international tropes, Skyfire is certainly one of those briskly paced and highly enjoyable stories.

Rogue

Cast: Megan Fox, Philip Winchester, and Greg Kriek  

Director: M.J. Bassett     

103 minutes (15) 2020

Lions Gate DVD 

[Released 16th November]

Rating: 6/10

Review by Donald Morefield 

After the absurdist feline fantasy of Cats (2019), with its anthropomorphised city-street strays turned into musical protagonists by recent advancements in photo-real animation, here’s a very basic monster-movie, enhanced with visual effects for a big cat, plus soldiers-of-fortune mayhem, shot with a hectic pace and bullet-riddled fury, over many sudden and gory deaths.

Megan Fox probably got so tired of dealing with alien giant robots, in early Transformers, then hanging out with TMNT heroes for superhero satire, and far too many other, merely decorative, roles. Leading a group of mercenaries here, must have appealed, greatly, for Fox to extend her sexy stardom into action heroine. She tackles human-traffickers in the movie’s quickly tragic first sequence before a farm-raised but freed lioness begins stalker ‘n’ slasher predation during the armed rescuers’ layover night in an abandoned house.

 

Welcome presence of Philip Winchester links this African actioner to TV series Strike Back (2010-8), where he played commando Stonebridge, directed well in several episodes helmed by British filmmaker Michael J. Bassett, explaining that connection. Bassett previously made horrors Deathwatch (2002), and Wilderness (2006), and fantasy Solomon Kane (2009), and then changed screen credits for transgender name M.J. Bassett after 2016.

It’s easy to view this atypical ‘Megan Fox movie’ as a personal project for Bassett, whose early interests and pursuits included wildlife photography and becoming a veterinarian in Africa. As Rogue develops from standard 'macho' actioner into a monster movie, where a lone lioness hunting at night turns the nervous men into easy prey, the heroine pointedly asks some bad guys to consider, “which bitch is gonna kill you?” Hostage girls run-around in cat ‘n’ mouse scenes that are now so common in horror genre productions, while varied knife-fights and shoot-outs in the burning camp are familiar as grisly bloodbaths and noisy showdowns from too many movies set in third-world war-zones.

Although visual effects for the ‘rogue’ lioness are clearly not of premier quality, it’s a minor fault that hardly matters when nocturnal sequences are constantly bordering upon nightmarish surrealism. There’s also the astute presentation of rebel females, and their fierce impacts upon the brutal containment systems of patriarchal oppression that makes this, decidedly offbeat, star vehicle far more than just another disposable B-movie.

Jeepers Creepers

Cast: Gina Philips, Justin Long, and Jonathan Breck 

Director: Victor Salva      

91 minutes (15) 2001 

101 Films Blu-ray region B

[Released 26th October]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary   

This highly praised teen-horror, from the maker of the underrated Powder (1995), starts out as a road movie, then turns into psycho-chiller, before revealing its bizarre creature and entering the subgenre of monster movies.

Trish and Darry (excellent performances from leads Gina Philips and Justin Long) are a casually bickering sister and brother, driving home from college on a term break when they are caught up in a noisy road rage incident against a manically-driven, rusty old lorry. The youngsters also spot the same vehicle parked next to a disused church, and are witnesses to the driver’s extraordinarily suspicious behaviour, apparently dumping bodies into a cellar. When the young heroes decide to go back and investigate, Darry makes a shocking discovery...

The first sequence is admittedly inspired by Spielberg’s Duel (1971), and is only the first in a handful of borrowings cleverly woven into a fairly unpredictable rural-horror legend. Much to his credit, director Victor Salva is mindful of what he takes from other works, such as Bill Norton’s cult TV movie Gargoyles (1972), and how he uses it. So this, and similarly notable references, are likely to win viewers’ appreciation, not our scorn - as genre homage, not random theft.

Basically, this small-town shocker is a variation on modern vampire horrors, with a weird fiend - the Creeper, plenty of headlong action sequences in the wake of a suspenseful first half, and a purposely cheerless ending. The choice of tragedy for the emotionally-charged finale, instead of the typically spectacular but happy closure we might have been expecting, is commendably brave, and it pays off handsomely with great psychologically wrenching moments that are more believable than any safer option.

However, what makes Jeepers Creepers so worthwhile is Salva’s expert balancing of gallows humour and traditional horror movie conventions. There’s a grisly ‘house of pain’ - with fleshy décor that reminds us of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the graphic ‘artistry’ of Clive Barker’s evil Cenobites in the Hellraiser series, but there’s also originality by design in the displays of curiously preserved bodies, and particularly their rationale within the main plot. Although there are a number of ghastly fright scenes, this horror is definitely not about pointless blood and guts just for the sake of satisfying fans of gore.

Shot in central Florida, the notion of ancient evil, seemingly derived from tribal folklore, lurking on this American peninsula is powerfully evoked, and the movie’s use of an often-recorded song from 1938 helps to generate an appealing air of sinister but witty fun that haunts the whole picture. Other things in the film, such as the attempted intervention by a psychic (Patricia Belcher) during the siege at a police station, and a superb cameo by character-actress Eileen Brennan in a fine mid-story scene (“That’s not my scarecrow”), attach myth-building elements to the narrative, and the attraction of the sort of quality supporting roles that are typically required nowadays to support any movie series. Unsurprisingly, Salva made two sequels, Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003), and Jeepers Creepers III (2017). 

Blu-ray disc extras:

• Director’s commentary, plus another track by Salva, Philips, and Long
• Retro featurette - Jeepers Creepers: Then & Now (36 minutes)  
• From Critters To Creepers (19 minutes) 
• Town Psychic - Patricia Belcher interview (16 minutes) 
• Gallery, deleted scenes, trailers.

The Strangers

Cast: Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman, and Gemma Ward  

Director: Bryan Bertino    

86 minutes (15) 2008

Second Sight Blu-ray region B  

[Released 28th September]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary 

Home-invasion movies have long since become a staple of modern horror pictures, partly resulting from combination of siege thriller with slasher shocker, especially following such notable remakes as Cimino’s Desperate Hours (1990), and Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991). Themes of urban anonymity and masked antagonists adds a weighty layer of paranoia to any such suspenseful plotting. The Strangers builds up considerable tension with a rural setting, where, at four o’clock in the morning, fright begins with a shadowy visitor asking “Is Tamara home?” 

After going to a wedding, then falling out over his proposal, Kristen (Liv Tyler) and Jamie (Scott Speedman) end up in a country house troubled by annoyingly persistent nocturnal visitors who turn frightening by their lurking threats, even before they resort to physical violence. The spectre of Halloween (1978) haunts this with a similarly eerie supernatural mystery, generating shifting moods and electrifying tones - where hell is found in ‘hello’, and Hell is certainly other people. 

“Why are you doing this?” The tragedy of a first killing ushers this nightmare movie away from a simple crime drama, where judgements against victims’ foolish or illogical actions might be valid criticism, and locates The Strangers in that ‘Twilight Zone’ of inescapable terror beyond genuine rationality that makes human aspects fearsome, while unexpected noise matches the equally disquieting charge of deathly silence. Yes, of course, the ‘night people’ want you dead, simply “because you’re home”, and time’s not on your side in this remarkably modern twist on typical haunted-house narratives. When daylight eventually comes, it doesn’t bring a welcome return to clarity or sanity. Only further torture awaits. Murders of madness remain.

Sequel movie The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018) is a family affair, although they are a quite dysfunctional group to start with, while leaving the suburbs for a lakeside getaway, where routine stalk ‘n’ slash events play out without any of the previous picture’s rather claustrophobic shocks. Only a few jumpy scares distinguish this from the 1980s’ cycle of subgenre horrors. Whereas Bertino’s original showcased iconic playing of Merle Haggard’s song Mama Tried, this follow-up has a couple of Kim Wilde’s hits as ineffective, bemusing counterpoints, while its main synth score is blatantly inspired by John Carpenter’s creepy tunes, and then it goes on to steal climactic imagery from Carpenter’s Christine (1983), and Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). There’s not much sense that sequel director Johannes Roberts opens up The Strangers’ limited set-pieces to a wider scenario, he just unapologetically recycles, almost randomly-chosen, action-horror stuff. 

Blu-ray disc extras:

• The cinema version (85 mins.), plus an extended cut (87 mins.)
• New interviews with director Bertino, editor Kevin Greutert, and star Liv Tyler
• Deleted scenes and trailer

Split Second

Cast: Rutger Hauer, Kim Cattrall, and Alastair Duncan

Director: Tony Maylam   

90 minutes (18) 1992

101 Films Blu-ray region B  

[Released 27th July]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton   

Set in 2008, sci-fi monster-movie Split Second remains, in many ways, a grimly British version of Predator 2 (1990), genre-spliced with Blade Runner (1982), not least because of the presence of Rutger Hauer, here playing an anguished and paranoid - and probably psychic - super-cop named Harley Stone. The supporting cast alone are more than sufficient to win this effort cult status. There’s Ian Dury who runs Jay Jay’s strip-club, Pete Postlethwaite (The Last Of The Mohicans, Alien 3) as police squad senior Paulsen, and RSC actor Alun Armstrong is good fun as Stone’s shouty boss Thrasher. The hero’s new partner is detective Dick Durkin (Alastair Duncan, credited as Neil Duncan), supposedly providing the brains to match Stone’s brawn.

At the city necropolis, Stone meets his murdered partner’s widow Michelle (Kim Cattrall). Flooded by rising sea levels, London crumples under the pressure of climate change, and is besieged by plague rats, while Stone and Durkin hunt a serial killer, that appears with deadly efficiency, and evades capture or even pursuit. Like an inhuman stalker with claws and fangs, this powerful monster has apparently supernatural powers. “The only thing we know for sure is that he’s not a vegetarian.” The slayer rips through metal doors, leaves extremely bloody murder scenes daubed with occultist symbols, and the creature’s victims get their hearts torn out.

Atmospheric locations are furnished messily, with a flourish of gothic lighting evoking the retro styled grunge of disused futurism previously on display in Morton and Jankel’s iconic TV-movie Max Headroom (1985). The double-act of Stone and Durkin form a smart parody of chalk ‘n’ cheese partnerships in American buddy-movie traditions, that resulted from the likes of 48 HRS (1982), and Lethal Weapon (1987). As a title, Split Second is a clever pun concealing thematic resonance within its nest of spoofy off-handed charm. The hasty and heavily-armed showdown against the fast-moving beast, is dramatically staged in an abandoned Underground station, where the director, Tony Maylam (The Burning, 1981), was helped by Ian Sharp (Who Dares Wins), to finish off this production with plenty of B-movie mayhem.

101 Films ‘Black Label’ edition has a second Blu-ray disc with a Japanese version of Split Second in standard-definition video format. Extras include interviews:

• Great Big Bloody Guns! - producer Laura Gregory with Alastair (Neil) Duncan (27 mins.)
• Call Me Mr Snips! - composer Stephen Parsons (22 mins.)
• Stay in Line! - producer Laurie Borg (23 mins.)
• More Blood! - creature effects designer Cliff Wallace (32 mins.)
• Shoot Everything! - cinematographer Clive Tickner (19 mins.)

There’s also a featurette of interviews with Hauer, Cattrall, Duncan, and others (6 mins), some behind-the-scenes clips, deleted scenes, promo adverts, and trailers.

Screamers

Cast: Peter Weller, Jennifer Rubin, and Roy Dupuis     

Director: Christian Duguay    

108 minutes (18) 1995

101 Films 
Blu-ray region B  

[Released 25th May]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary  

Norman McLaren’s classic animated short-film of pixilation, Neighbours (1952), helped to establish the essentially critical tone of many notable anti-war movies. With its narrative about escalation, from dispute and confrontation to high levels of increasing violence and brutality, this dramatic sketch from Canada’s national film board, might be viewed as the vital spark for multi-cultural protests about Vietnam, and even an influence on CND. In a further controversy, McLaren’s animation won an Academy award for documentary short. After those sneaky killing-machines of James Cameron’s SF action-thriller Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), and its low-budget imitators, Screamers was based upon Philip K. Dick’s story, Second Variety (1953), and obviously continued promoting the staunchly accordant message of Neighbours.

In the 21st century, on planet Sirius 6B, a 10-year global war has been fought without using nukes. An outpost chief salvages a priority message from enemy forces calling for peace negotiations. Despite grim cynicism, official armistice talks are considered and so Alliance bunker chief Joe (Peter Weller, RoboCop, Naked Lunch) accepts the challenging invitation and travels to meet corporate NEB command. Along the way, the expedition is attacked by fast-moving mole-bots ‘autonomous mobile swords’, that still emerge from an automated underground factory, because “No-one’s been down there since they first pushed the button and ran like hell.” Screamers concerns the evolution of military tech and the horrifying prospects of weaponised A.I., with upgrades proliferating, including droid-boy ‘David’, specially designed to infiltrate troop deployments in a dangerous world where “things ain’t what they used to be”, including orphaned refugees.

Joe meets Hansen (Jennifer Rubin) who’s averse to gunplay, and simply wants to escape off-world. Paranoia ramps up with fatal consequences from mistaken identities in a trust-free zone of Jekyll ‘n’ Hyde character interactions. Ultimate night-fighting against hordes of electric ‘children’ precedes a string of final twists in a human-versus-machine conflict. Digital visuals enhance locations, and action scenes on gritty industrial sites, including a refinery, while filming sequences inside the roof of Montreal’s Olympic stadium provides a vast set which adds great production values to this movie’s rather modest budget. Also worthy of note, the Chiodo brothers provide appealing stop-motion effects for the quirky robots.

While it’s possible to nit-pick and find significant faults with basic plot-lines in Screamers, and some of the obvious flaws are sometimes confusing with sadly illogical developments and curiously intentional ambiguities, there can be little doubt about the crucial sincerity of SF meanings. Peaceful co-operation is the only route forward, especially for interstellar colonisation. This moderately successful cyber-horror was scripted by Dan O’Bannon, and co-writer Miguel Tejada-Flores (screenwriter of Brian Yuzna’s robot-dog movie Rottweiler, 2004), who - with producer Tom Berry - extracted a second movie from the original PKD source, for their belated sequel, Screamers 2: The Hunting (2009), directed by Sheldon Wilson, maker of average yet creepy shockers, Shallow Ground (2004), and Kaw (2007).

Following an 'as you know...' recap, and video reportage, this offers a homage to James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), with a paramilitary starship on an action-replay rescue mission to the mining planet, Sirius 6B, where runaway mecha threatens the few survivors of the earlier movie’s warfare. Team leaders are played by genre TV’s Greg Bryk (ReGenesis), and Gina Holden (Flash Gordon, Blood Ties). Veteran star Lance Henriksen, tries to bring something worthwhile to his supporting role, but the space squad don’t locate his bunker hide-out until the last half-hour and, by then, it’s really too late to salvage entertainment value or narrative significance from this unabashed retread of genre B-movie conventions, not helped by Z-grade plotting and barely workmanlike direction.

Screamers made a stronger point about machine evolution as the key product of militarism, but the robots that are first encountered here are stuck in that hyperactive leaping-mole gear, and the ‘androids’ remain hidden, just so the original movie’s story-arc can be reproduced (keep that word in mind, so you can easily guess the picture’s closing twist). Most of the main cast rarely perform well enough to recite their lines and emote at the same time. Even the usually dependable Henriksen coasts along on past experience, so this sadly tedious sci-fi horror ends just where it should have begun.

Disc extras include:

• Northern Frights - Christian Duguay interview
• Orchestrating The Future - Tom Berry interview
• More Screamer Than Human - Miguel Tajada-Flores interview
• From Runaway To Space - Jennifer Rubin interview