Hellraiser: Revelations

Cast: Steven Brand, Nick Eversman, and Tracey Fairaway

Director: Victor Garcia

75 minutes (18) 2011

Lions Gate Blu-ray

[Released 1st March]

Rating: 5/10

Review by Ian Shutter

Inauspiciously, this starts with a found-footage video sequence of handy-cam style. It’s a low-budget effort, perhaps too hastily produced, reportedly only to maintain the rights to a variable, but potentially lucrative, sub-genre franchise, created by author Clive Barker. This ninth movie in the horror series is directed by Spanish-born Victor Garcia, the maker of sequels Return To House On Haunted Hill (2007), and Mirrors 2 (2010). 

American students Steven and Nico disappeared in Mexico, leaving their families with an amateur recording of unsolved crimes, and possessions that include a mysterious puzzle box. The main siege-story unfolds at home with timely flash-backs but there is not much plotting. It’s clear that this is a horror of emotive, agonising intensity, and graphic visuals of gothic sadomasochism. “It’s better than sex” promises a vagrant apologist for Cenobites. There’s no sign of Doug Bradley as Pinhead, but other actors wear punk versions of the same iconic make-ups.

With souls as primal currency, stolen fleshy decor, demonic actions tearing people apart, and twisted human desires turning so grimly obsessive, Hellraiser: Revelations eagerly explores secrets hidden beneath the normality of society, where darkness in supernatural erotica and violence lurks awaiting the absurdly curious or merely foolish. Skinless ghouls terrorise anyone still attached to mortality and the innocence of reason. “It’s not the shirt off your back that I want.” Garcia fails to add startling elements or imaginative scenes to the Hellraiser canon, but this remains (excuse that pun), a basic yet worthwhile exercise in thinly atmospheric gore.  

Two Weeks To Live

Cast: Maisie Williams, Sian Clifford, and Mawaan Rizwan

Director: Al Campbell

146 minutes (15) 2020

Acorn DVD

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary

“Did you lie to me... about the end of the world?” With a list of things to do, Kim Noakes (Maisie Williams, Game Of Thrones, The New Mutants) leaves home in Scotland to visit a gangster named Jimmy (Sean Pertwee, Gotham), who murdered her father. Although she is immature, Kim is not a typical runaway girl, as dangerous Jimmy soon learns when she arrives to kill him. Pursued by two bickering brothers that she met in a pub, highly skilled but innocent Kim plans for the atomic apocalypse following a cruel prank. Her hard-boiled and paranoid mum Tina (Sian Clifford), attempts a rescue but only succeeds in making a terrible situation worse. “Gloves and a gun if you want to have fun.” Meanwhile, crooked cop, Brooks (Jason Flemyng, Pennyworth), is on the trail of a bagful of stolen cash.

This TV drama series is largely a black comedy that offers a parody of survivalism, and is seemingly inspired by Joe Wright’s Hanna (2011). Rattling along from the start, it keeps up a brisk pace while some telling flashbacks provide necessary exposition. Kim’s group is on a journey to the south coast, where she enjoys fairground rides and plans to scatter her dad’s ashes down at the seaside. Perhaps inevitably, its humorous action builds up to a car chase and a shoot-out, ending with revelations of deception and greed, followed by a suitably ironic tragedy and sudden death. 

Two Weeks To Live flits between amusing banter and poignant moments of essentially British culture. Fairy-tale allusions, concerning shock discoveries of outside-world reality, add layers of mystery-genre appeal to a basic road-movie adventure, with crime-thriller aspects. Although half of the supporting cast lapse into TV rom-com clichés, Williams has authentic star qualities and Clifford gives an outstanding performance. Perhaps the moral of this storyline is that any uninitiated protagonist should always make reckless decisions from a position of safety?

LX 2048

Cast: James D’Arcy, Anna Brewster, and Delroy Lindo

Director: Guy Moshe

103 minutes (15) 2020

Dazzler Blu-ray

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton

From the maker of lavishly visualised martial-arts adventure Bunraku (2010), this sci-fi movie is equally colourful as stylish soap opera, bordering on kitsch of a genre sit-com. Depressed nervy tech-broker Adam (James D’Arcy, Stark’s butler Jarvis in Agent Carter) struggles to cope with medical shock of his impending demise, while trying for a reunion with estranged wife Reena (Anna Brewster). His life insurance Premium 3 offers solution of a GM-clone replacement after death for his bereaved, perhaps aggrieved, spouse who can alter his replica-drone version to please her, as favoured, if not best, doppelganger.

LX 2048 delivers four-star wraparound futurism within a nocturnal dystopia, where toxic sunshine means largely binary civilisation stratified for vampire-shift workers. Inhumanly efficient coping mechanisms present life as socially distanced enough that daylight-world decay is prompting social migration from retro virtuality to upload existence only on data chips. Rejected scientist Donald Stein (Delroy Lindo) entering distraught Adam’s morality role-play for an intervention. Notable guest cameos include the smart casting of Juliet Aubrey (Primeval), and Gina McKee (Wonderland), before the tragic fatality and theatricality of third-act revelations. When Adam meets his new and improved self, one of them should die... but which one is more likely to commit murder?

Partly a variation of E.M. Forster’s classic story The Machine Stops (1909), this is filtered through a distorting lens ground into copycat macro-focus from liquid-crystalline notions in Philip K. Dick’s work. Here, though, familiar phildickian themes mesh with concerns of J.G. Ballard, and post-cyberpunk William Gibson, but often using ideas not really derived from their books. Instead, writer-director Guy Moshe skims off inspiration from Impostor (2001), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), for basic tones and finely wrought style, so that LX 2048 sometimes feels like the best kind of PKD fan-fiction. Possibilities of immortality, and the promise of dreamscape avatars incarnated as replicants, form intrigues here and enable levels of complexity while a timely narrative is unfolding. Adam’s ranting in VR-goggles suggests a stage-play basis for this philosophical, and ultimately satirical, melodrama about identity and transcendence, but filmic quality emerges from a combination of D’Arcy’s excellent performance and the SF noir moods of Moshe’s astute vision.

The Nightingale

Cast: Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr, and Damon Herriman

Director: Jennifer Kent

136 minutes (18) 2018

Second Sight Blu-ray  

Rating: 8/10

Review by Peter Schilling

This Australian period drama, made in a western style, and set on the prison island, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), is about convict Clare (Irish star Aisling Franciosi, British TV series The Fall). As a servant, she provides the ‘song-bird’ entertainment for colonial troops, but is raped by soldiers, while her husband and baby are murdered. On their trail for revenge, she ventures into the wilderness helped only by native tracker Billy (Baykali Ganambarr). They are troubled by a river-crossing and forced into stealing food, as Clare is haunted by nightmarish grief, and beats an enemy to death, while being stalked by the ‘mad devils’ of a local tribe. 

Written by director Jennifer Kent (The Babadook, 2014) this neo-gothic character-portrait is far more than a straightforward Ozploitation action-thriller. Its vivid brutality shows us a violent clash of cultures, as it explores the intersection of rugged mountain bush-lands and desperate feminist survivalism, while also depicting the spiritual rituals of Aboriginal folklore. Here, mortal fears and frantic endurance collide with Clare’s grim determination, armed with an unreliable musket. There’s coincidence spiked with dark humour in several unflinching examinations of racist oppression by British colonialism. Anyone remembering the late Geoff Murphy’s magnificent Utu (1983), about Maori vengeance, should find The Nightingale is a similar movie of powerfully uncompromising themes.      

“White-fella way is shit way.”

Peculiarly, the screen ratio is unconventional (1.37:1), and it resembles an old TV-movie. This aspect practically eliminates the landscape views that very often provide a cinematic spectacle in the familiar letterbox frame of widescreen movies, and prompts a tight focus upon the main characters, seemingly trapped within a squarer framing, especially in their many close-ups. What it lacks in stunning vistas of rural scenes, Jennifer Kent’s compelling drama makes up for with its quite theatrical intensity, a searing central performance, boldly poetic images, and graphic displays of horrific tragedy.

Extras:

• Cast & crew interviews
• 2 making-of featurettes
• Bloody White People - video essay (19 mins), historical commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 

Tammy And The T-Rex

Cast: Denise Richards, Terry Kiser, and Ellen Dubin   

Director: Stewart Raffill    

91 minutes (15) 1994

101 Films Blu-ray region B

[Released 8th February]

Rating: 6/10

Review by Steven Hampton 

There’s obviously some genuine potential here for cult comedy success, as if the ultimate cheerleader-loves-dinosaur movie could really be anything else, and this proudly answers the question ‘what can you do when someone offers you the use of a robot monster?’ ‘Why not make a movie?’ Some days you have to be very quick! How about a high school rom-com adventure, crossed with a Frankenstein parody? ‘I Was A Teenage Dinosaur’..?   

Denise Richards cruises through bimbo routine as Tammy whose boyfriend is love-struck football-jock Michael (Paul Walker, years before The Fast And The Furious), mauled by a lion. Campy mad Doctor Wachenstein (Terry Kiser, playing dead in Weekend At Bernie’s) and his sexy nurse Helga (Ellen Dubin, ‘Giggerota’ in TV series Lexx), might be two failed graduates from Herbert West’s medical teaching college, as they implant the traumatised young man’s brain into their animatronic beast.

Stewart Raffill is best known, probably, for directing spoofy space-opera Ice Pirates, and time-travel mystery The Philadelphia Experiment (both 1984). The on-screen title of this movie actually reads Tanny & The Teenage T-Rex. Credits also say Richards’ plays Tanny not Tammy, but never mind all that because such minor changes are practically common if not essential for marketing low-budget movies. 

When the cyber-saur goes on a rampage, severed heads are rolling about, as other tragic victims are crushed underfoot, or disembowelled. Who’s up for a party massacre? Trashy gore effects and silly jokes abound and dino-bot uses charades gestures to communicate. Tam confides in the sheriff’s gay son Byron, who proves helpful at robbing the mortuary for a replacement body, but choosing a new form is not an easy decision for a desperado. Meanwhile, pursued by cop cars, Tam rides off into sunset. 

This restored version includes all of the gory scenes previously cut from an original video release. Clearly, it’s a weaker shocker without so many gruesome make-ups, but most of this movie’s comedy remains effective because its central images of a disembodied brain, and the romanticised creature are quite bizarre enough to be modestly entertaining. It’s almost worthy of comparison to varied sci-fi horrors in Larry Cohen’s oeuvre.    

Extras:

• Commentary track by Stewart Raffill and producer Diane Kirman
• Blood, Brains, And A Teenage T-Rex - interview with Raffill (22 minutes)
• A Blast From The Past - interview with Denise Richards (11 minutes)
• Having The Guts - interview with actor Sean Whalen (12 minutes)
• A Testicular Stand-Off - interview with actor George Pilgrim (25 minutes)
• Full-length PG-13 version of Tammy And The T-Rex (standard definition, 82 minutes)