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

Snowpiercer

Cast: Chris Evans, Ed Harris, and Tilda Swinton   

Director: Bong Joon-ho   

126 minutes (15) 2013

Lions Gate Blu-ray region B  

[Released 25th May]

Rating: 8/10

Review by Christopher Geary  

Adapted from Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige (first published 1982; English version The Escape, 2014), this sci-fi adventure by Korean director Bong Joon-ho (monster movie The Host, Oscar-winner Parasite) might have been rather weird art-house fare. Instead we get an exciting bundle of hugely enjoyable imaginative action and spectacular thrills, combined with dry black-comedy showcasing several oddly compelling characters. Apart from recalling several movies also set on rails, like Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train (1985), originally written by Akira Kurosawa, perhaps the most notable genre influence on Snowpiercer, as a post-apocalypse drama about a quirkily 'futuristic' society in a frozen landscape, is Robert Altman’s Quintet (1979), starring Paul Newman.  

The introduction laments how a ‘CW-7’ solution to climate change only results in an ice-bound planet. Now it’s 2031 on the Rattling Ark where non-stop travel pays “homage to the Sacred Engine” as Curtis (Chris Evans) leads a desperate rebellion against rationing for lowly survivors trapped in filthy overcrowded slums of the refuge train’s tail section, while parasitic rulers horde mankind’s final resources in ultimate luxury in many forward carriages. Being in constant motion, even heroically inclined stereotypes find that human memory fades, and the poor have accepted their fate, until several daring questions are asked. Little boy Timmy is taken away by armed security, and this kidnapping prompts a revolution. Gilliam (John Hurt) represents the spirit of resistance, while on the other side, Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton, gamely doing a Yorkshire accent), champions the tyranny of elitism.

The ultra-violence of revolt kicks off just in time for the Snowpiercer’s 18th anniversary, when Curtis proves that bullying police have no bullets in their guns. Advancing through one railway carriage at a time, pockets of social privilege and exclusivity are revealed in zones of hellish discovery where tunnel-darkness is lit only by fire. The rebels cling to a forlorn hope that if “we control the water, we control the negotiation” but not everything here is what it seems. Into this sustainable and ecologically balanced microcosm, where surrealist wonders of greenhouse, aquarium, and school-room, co-exist with many other box-cars, serving every ironic or decadent need from sauna to disco, iconic fanatic Curtis and his equally frantic supporters challenge the status quo that has stagnated into gross normality, while the engine rumbles on through graveyard cities, apparently without any hope.

With fairy-tale ambiguity exploring class warfare, the train’s designer and chief driver is ‘benevolent’ dictator and divinely ‘merciful’ Wilford (Ed Harris, great as ever), happily inviting surviving hero Curtis to a melodramatic dinner, where his Bond style villainy can explain this hideous master-plan, while former cannibal Curtis is forced to admit: “I know that babies taste best.” Humanity is revealed as both brutal curse and supreme promise, primed for an exploding tragedy like a stylised disaster movie emerging from a time-capsule chrysalis. As profoundly farcical, amusingly compromised, socio-political allegory of holocaust absurdity, Snowpiercer offers a stark and timely reminder, albeit buried in grimly vicarious chills of 'lockdown' isolationism and privileged exclusivity, that we all have really wasted most of the last 20 years.

Revenge

Cast: Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens, and Vincent Colombe  

Director: Coralie Fargeat   

108 minutes (18) 2017

Second Sight 
Blu-ray region B  

[Released 11th May]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton

A French action-horror with some dialogue in English, Revenge is the feature debut from writer-director Coralie Fargeat. Clearly wealthy Richard (Belgian TV actor Kevin Janssens) brings his blonde mistress, Jennifer (Matilda Lutz, Rings) to a remote house in the desert. 

At first, Jen seems like a flirty Lolita fantasy but the arrival of boozed-up rednecks Dimitri and Stan disrupts the couple’s plans. Tensions increase during a morning of intimidation, and creepy insults, ending with rape. After she runs away, Jen is left for dead by all three men.  

The notorious I Spit On Your Grave franchise an obvious point of reference for this graphically violent and stylish thriller - but, perhaps wisely, there are no lingering images of the rape. At its heart is a spirited performance from Italian star Lutz, suffering through a nightmarish ordeal, yet emerging into powerful vigilante heroism after surviving mortal terrors and the searing agony of severe injury, with an effective determination seemingly made possible from eating a dose of peyote.

Shot on Moroccan locations, beautifully presented throughout by its excellent widescreen cinematography, the intensity of vivid hallucinations, and Jen’s grisly dreams, all adds up to a heavyweight genre appeal for her phoenix-like rise (complete with a bird image that is branded across her belly) from victim to slayer. Unlike similar American movies of this type, Revenge owes a debt (which is paid back in full) to European cinema developments surrounding millennial shockers of the ‘new French extreme’, particularly Alexandre Aja’s Switchblade Romance (aka: High Tension, 2003), and Moreau and Palud’s Them (2006), but Revenge deftly avoids the usual soul-crushing nihilism of many comparable slasher movies. There is plenty of genuinely artistic talent displayed here, on both sides of the camera.

Jen eventually adopts a bandit-babe guise for a lengthy and suspenseful finale, that soon follows time-honoured traditions of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and its numerous imitators, and wild westerns like Hannie Caulder (1971), yet without any gun-training for the homicidal heroine. When this movie promotes feminism with all the timelessness of a modern fable, about ‘a woman scorned’, wreaking a savage vengeance upon hunters who are now hunted targets, its outcome is not in doubt. Despite an element of predictability, the full extent of its bloodily theatrical showdown is new movie-making of richly dramatic greatness.

Disc extras:

• Out For Blood - interview with Coralie Fargeat and Matilda Lutz (45 minutes)
• The Coward - interview with actor Guillaume Bouchede
• Fairy Tale Violence - interview with cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert
• Death Notes - interview with composer Robin Coudert
• Commentary track by Kat Ellinger

Bacurau

Cast: Sonia Braga, Udo Kier, and Barbara Colen

Directors: Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonca Filho

131 minutes (18) 2019

MUBI Blu-ray region B

Rating: 7/10 

Review by Donald Morefield

Approaching a quiet village in near-future Brazil, a tanker lorry drives over empty coffins accidentally strewn along the road. The vehicle brings essential water to Bacurau, where a failure of the piped supply has alarmed the villagers. Returning home, Teresa (Barbara Colen) arrives in Bacurau for the funeral of respected Carmelita. A celebratory procession for the deceased matriarch ends with startling burial in a watery grave. Next day, mayor Tony Jr appears to campaign for re-election but, at first, nobody turns out to see or hear him as complaints fester in response to his sleazy corruption. Dr Domingas (Sonia Braga) confronts him about the kidnapping of a young woman.

Later, a UFO style drone tracks local delivery biker. Horses escape from the nearby farm and introduce further mystery to rapidly expanding scenarios about predatory capitalism. With improv singing, the local guitarist insults spying visitors. Michael (Udo Kier) heads a group of assorted outsiders plotting a secret man-hunting mission against villagers. They are sporty, but so unsporting in their approach to criminal assaults, it’s a crowd-pleasing twist when the inhabitants of Bacurau rise up to defend their territory.   

Jury Prize-winner at last year’s Cannes festival Bacurau (Portuguese for ‘nighthawk’), a prime example of foreign-language sci-fi, is rarely good at portrayals of quirky futurism, but due to socio-political differences and cultural perspectives, this sometimes generates a compellingly weird sense of otherness via surrealistic tendencies and several very odd, or offbeat, directorial choices and winningly quasi-satirical narrative. 

Here, world cinema embraces weird western themes explored in a mix of Portuguese and English dialogue by sundry characters often intended to be upended stereotypes. ‘Trigger King’ Pacote is the village’s favourite video-star outlaw. For the movie’s action-packed climax, local bandit Lunga (Silvero Pereira) returns to help the village with defence against gringo mercenaries.

After a child is murdered, violence ramps up, into a siege with machine guns and satellite surveillance. The eclectic score includes synth music ‘Night’ by John Carpenter. This curio blends generic elements of commercial Hollywood pictures with wittily subversive political critiques of Brazilian history. Despite its desert setting, any fans of swampy movies like Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort (1981), and John Woo’s Hard Target (1993), should enjoy this unique central inversion displaying cowboys ‘n’ indians parodies as dystopian motifs.