Murder By Decree

Cast: Christopher Plummer, James Mason, and Donald Sutherland 

Director: Bob Clark 

124 minutes (12) 1979

Studio Canal Vintage Classics Blu-ray

[Released 28th June] 

Rating: 8/10

Review by Christopher Geary

London after dark. A nightmarish stalker on fogbound streets. Women are slaughtered in Whitechapel. Gruesome death lurks in alleys where a gothic atmosphere often blocks out sunlight, even on some beautifully designed urban sets. Scenes on docks and wharfs are particularly effective. Murder By Decree remains the finest film about Sherlock Holmes, here tackling his greatest (non-Arthur Conan Doyle) crime story, the real-life scandals of the world’s prototype serial-killer, Jack the Ripper. This very welcome hi-def edition (that includes English subtitles) begins with an on-screen ‘trigger warning’, about its ‘historical attitudes’ that might cause offence.

 

Bob Clark’s admirably straightforward direction benefits from the efforts of a superb cast, who are more than a match for the leads of Herbert Ross’ stylishly eccentric The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), where an addicted Holmes met Freud. Although, traditionally, Sherlock has been played by top British actors, it’s fascinating to see how well Canadian star Christopher Plummer (who died in February 2021), portrays the most celebrated of fictional detectives. As Dr Watson, the usually formidable James Mason is also excellent, with a supporting performance so confident, like he’s part of a timeless double-act, that this pair illustrate a genuine friendship as few partnerships from 221B Baker Street ever managed before, or since.

 

Prompted by local merchants to investigate the East End murders, Sherlock consults the psychic medium Lees (Donald Sutherland), a man with haunted eyes who claims to have visions of the Ripper. Scotland Yard’s own dogged policeman Lestrade is played by Frank Finlay, returning to the role he had in the movie A Study In Terror (1965), a previous version of this Ripper mythology. Case-book policeman Inspector Foxborough (David Hemmings), fronts a secret plot by radicals against the monarchy, while Sir Charles Warren (Anthony Quayle) adopts a stridently corrupt position as Holmes’ authoritarian nemesis, protecting a source of ghastly mutilations. 

Holmes takes on a chimney-sweep disguise. Dr Watson gets himself arrested. Crushingly traumatised victim Annie Crook (scene-stealer Genevieve Bujold) is barely coherent, and committed to an asylum. Despite a balancing of spontaneity in its comedy-drama with creepy mystery-horrors, this Victoriana movie avoids the grisly slasher mentality, as explored in From Hell (2001), except for just a few scenes of bloody violence. Atypically, melancholy heroism emerges from gallantly re-active desperation, rather than any astute planning or keen-eyed judgements. Holmes is nominally polite in society but rather less coldly calculating. Plummer makes him far more compassionate, and too intelligently liberal for Tory snobs when he’s quietly dismissive of titled toffs. Obviously, Plummer is the people’s Sherlock.

 

From a wonderful bit of character-building about Watson eating a last pea, to an ultimate confrontation with a sinister conspiracy of a Freemasons order, this movie scales up from a wholly mundane modernity, to an esoteric and yet compelling answer to London’s most infamous unsolved crimes. “Imagine a more malign influence at work.” Clearly, this most human champion of all the Holmes on screen feels obliged to speak truth to power. For a negotiated showdown with the Prime Minister (John Gielgud), the soloing Holmes asserts, “I would prefer some more reliable authority”, when only token ‘justice’ appears possible.

The Babadook

Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, and Daniel Henshall

Director: Jennifer Kent

94 minutes (15) 2014

Second Sight 4K Ultra HD

[Released 26th July]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary

Expanded from the 11-minute B&W short movie Monster (2005), witty Australian chiller The Babadook is writer-director Jennifer Kent’s feature-length debut. A marvellously compact effort, its plot is centred on a mysterious pop-up picture-book - about a weirdly intrusive stranger, that’s not a very wise choice as bedtime reading for any little boy already prone to worrisome nightmares. Six-year-old orphan Samuel (wonderfully played by newcomer Noah Wiseman) irritates his mother Amelia (Essie Davis, from Billy O’Brien’s Irish horror movie Isolation), unable to cope with her son’s increasingly unruly behaviour. Without a wink of sleep, her depression worsens rapidly as the cartoonish, and yet menacing, ‘Mr Babadook’ looms up from the shadows to admirably surrealistic effect. 

When Amelia’s maternal neuroses lead to psychotic episodes, this becomes a delicious frightener of domestic terror and mental disturbance, fuelled by TV of genre horrors and epic toothaches. Young Sam fights his mum’s apparent possession with various Home Alone tricks and makeshift weapons. Sadly, after building up a considerable momentum, Kent’s movie falters and almost flat-lines with its bargain-priced poltergeist showdown, as the screaming Amelia conquers her fear (with the Oz power of she-la, or something) and practically tames the black-hat demon. It’s a clever surprise, and a twist that’s fully in keeping with her original short film (helpfully included on this disc), but I couldn’t help wondering if a wholly darker, more pessimistic, ending might have worked rather better.

 

In the end, though, this is a haunted-house melodrama partly about struggles to overcome the crushing distress of grief and, as such, the movie is both artistically extraordinary as a moody genre piece, and satisfyingly worthwhile as a reflection on modern widowhood, stranded amidst uncaring relatives and unsympathetic neighbours. Davis’ performance is emotionally raw, at times, but leavened by directorial humour that embraces the styling of typical art-house cinema. Kent remixes that familiar European brand, imperfectly, but very enjoyably, switching effortlessly between hysterical screaming fits and wacky puppet-theatre antics. 

There are similarities to Walter Salles’ spooky Dark Water (2005), the superior American remake of Hideo Nakata’s delirious Japanese horror, where an innocent girl is stalked by an imaginary ‘friend’. However, the cultural tone of this movie is determinedly Australian (yes, that’s a clip from Skippy on Amelia’s TV) even though the single-mother’s sleepless hallucinations conjure up mooda of hopeless dread. Although its uncompromising 'western' story is something very different, Kent’s second movie, The Nightingale, continues the essentially gloomy aesthetic.

4K UHD disc extras:

Commentary track by critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson

An excellent package of cast-and-crew interviews...

• This Is My House! - interview with Essie Davis (26 minutes)
• The Sister - interview with actress Hayley McElhinney (10 minutes)
• Don’t Let It In - interview with producer Kristina Ceyton (12 minutes)
• Conjuring Nightmares - interview with producer Kristian Moliere (26 minutes)
• Shaping Darkness - interview with editor Simon Njoo (14 minutes)
• If It’s in a Name Or In A Look - interview with designer Alex Holmes (10 minutes)
• The Bookmaker - interview with designer Alexander Juhasz (20 minutes)
• Ba-Ba-Ba...Dook! - interview with composer Jed Kurzel (14 minutes) 

Archival bonus material:

• They Call Him Mister Babadook: making-of featurette (35 minutes)
• There’s No Place Like Home: creating the house (10 minutes)
• Illustrating Evil: creating the book (6 minutes)
• Special Effects: stabbing scene (3 minutes)
• The Stunts (3 minutes)

Shock Wave: Hong Kong Destruction

Cast: Andy Lau, Sean Lau, and Ni Ni 

Director: Herman Yau 

121 minutes (15) 2020

Cine Asia Blu-ray 

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary 

A follow-up to Shock Wave (aka: Shock Wave: Tunnel, 2017), stand-alone sequel Shock Wave: Hong Kong Destruction (aka: Shock Wave 2), is not actually a typical disaster-movie, as its title might suggest, but a hi-tech cop thriller that’s closer to US movies like Stephen Hopkins’ Blown Away (1994). Intrepid bomb-disposal cop Fung (Andy Lau, from Island Of Greed, House Of Flying Daggers, Infernal Affairs), rescues victims from devices planted in their building, but a booby-trap takes off his left leg. Five years later, terrorist gang Vendetta launch their campaign with a suicide-bomber at a government building in Hong Kong.

Working as hotel porter, Fung becomes a suspect after another bombing but he claims to have amnesia and escapes from a secure hospital, while the counter-terrorist unit, led by Ling (Ni Ni, The Flowers Of War), begins a manhunt for him, codenamed Blizzard. Details of the baddies include a white-haired mastermind ‘Maverick’ who is just like a 007 villain. The cleverly unfolding sci-fi plot is based on suspicion, paranoia, implanted thoughts, and plenty of twists that keep us guessing about corruption, memory loss, PTSD, under-cover agents, and Ling’s crucial role in a top-secret mission. Lau is mightily impressive as Fung, playing out a character-arc of increasingly obsessive behaviour with ranting and rages to concern his friends and perplex his colleagues. CID Inspector Tung (Sean Lau, so great in Johnnie To’s excellent mystery Mad Detective) remains loyal to Fung, no matter what any of the authorities or news media are saying.  

There’s crisply edited cinematography of spectacular stunts, physical effects, and visuals, including photo-real animation combined with briskly paced direction, making slick action sequences in this extraordinary blend of gadgets, betrayal, duplicity, and heroic sacrifice. A shoot-out in a car park, a hijacked train, maintain levels of tension, further elevated by armed police raids enacted with clockwork precision. The tremendously exciting climax delivers a fine display of electrifying professionalism, complete with a suspension bridge demolition for maximum jaw-dropping style. The supremely efficient director Herman Yau (Ip Man sequels), somehow manages to cram all of this, from the first sparks of anger to a city on fire, into a mere two hours.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete

Voice cast (English): Steve Burton, Rachael Leigh Cook, and Steve Staley 

Directors: Tetsuya Nomura and Takeshi Nozue 

126 minutes (12) 2009

Sony 4K Ultra HD

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary

This genre picture is entirely unreal. It was state-of-the-art digital animation for the year it was first produced and, even putting its fantasy content aside, it’s impossible to review this kind of movie fairly without commenting upon the visuals and the medium they were created in. Said images frequently achieve surprising degrees of photo-realism, with skin (though, admittedly, too free of random blemishes for convincing people) and eyes being presented with quite impressive clarity, opacity, reflectivity, and luminosity. Hardware is particularly well served, throughout, whether tangled detailing on stained or dusty ruins, or the appealing lustre of shiny futuristic machines. Textiles are imperfectly rendered but less attention is given to drapes and looser clothing (patterned after top designers?) than is awarded to flesh and muscle tones. 

Sadly, voice-actors (whether they speak Japanese or English) sometimes fail to properly sell an emotive or sympathetic performance by the animated characters half as well as relevant sound effects help convince viewers that splashes in pools and puddles, or the random noise of rainy weather are entirely natural and synchronous with environments. Of course, decades of exposure to audio tracks generated entirely by sound design, and the remarkable work of Foley artists, ensures that a majority of viewers should have few problems in accepting digitally-generated backgrounds as location settings for unfolding dramas, but - for these animated characters - there remains the viewing problem of the ‘uncanny valley’.

Somewhat perversely, the harder that such 3D anime strives to produce any believable human figures and faces, the more that - even unskilled - viewers might unconsciously  ‘reject’ the delicate balancing act of creativity and software which blatantly attempts to accurately imitate life. When such presentations approach perfection, their tinniest flaws simply loom ever larger than life itself. Discernable ‘imperfections’ in this illusion of life are not to be confused with commonplace human faults. They are, instead, entirely the flaws of something inhuman, and their manufactured state is always readily apparent no matter what the context, so any illusion of life here remains only partial and viewers are likely to instinctively disengage from the drama. 

As ever with such genre productions, the biggest single flaw in the filmic narrative is not the presence of hackneyed dialogue or lack of believability for some fantastic aspects, but the movements and placement of virtual cameras. Simply put, there is just far too much ultra-fast cutting from one angle to another, and jittery whizzing about in midair, or swirling around in circles (that on a real film set would expose the ‘fourth wall’), and this amounts to a rather childish misuse of the possibilities available for such animation. Virtual cameras unwittingly compromise the - sometimes passable - test of basic physics within portraits of imaginary worlds. 

It does not help matters that the main plot is wholly incomprehensible. Viewer might struggle to make sense of mystic nonsense crashing into explorations of otherworldly SF themes, such as the ‘geo-stigma’ disease that’s somehow being passed onto humans by the ailing planet. Visually, if not quite thematically, the influence of The Matrix films is evident in fighting scenes, where both the sword-play heroes (how do the spindly-limbed youngsters wield unfeasibly over-sized weapons?) and unarmed combatants lurch across the screen with gravity-defying leaps over tall buildings, and rather wretchedly silly notions of boot-strap help-mates who each hurl the hero upwards, like throwing a relay-race baton flung up the side of a skyscraper.

Nevertheless, this newly revised 4K edition is the director’s cut of the 2005 animated movie (100 minutes, cert. PG), and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete is hugely enjoyable, if you can overlook the amusingly ridiculous character names, like Cloud and Rude, and your appreciation of genre action cinema is not hindered by much intolerance for the confusing absurdities of variously convoluted and lengthy 3D-cartoon sequences. The planet’s mythic Life-stream infecting humans with geo-stigma disease as the central problem is a worthy ecological metaphor (a witty riff on the Gaia hypothesis) and it means the plot seems less vital to anime movies like this. FF7:ACC is best viewed as a collection of action sequences and visual poetry - like visionary vignettes of digital art - on SF themes of survival. Its fantastical artistic qualities and stunning exercises in stylish photo-real animation are of much greater importance than story-telling and genre-narrative concerns. Most effective as an expression of artistry inspired by the possibilities and impressions from game-play in an extraordinary fairy-tale franchise, this is basically an atypical sci-fi movie. Although it delivers frequently astonishing images of post-industrial city-scape and giant monster-fighting in a dystopian world, it hardly matters that many scenes defy the natural physics of motion and gravity, because it's the hyper-kinetics of super-hero traditions that are most clearly being respected here, not any conventional reality.

Magically fabulous, this movie boasts PRA (photo-real animation) of superior quality than 3D-styled ‘Hypermarionation’ for Gerry Anderson’s TV series New Captain Scarlet (2005). Despite its complete lack of actors on-screen, there’s more genuinely imaginative artistry here than can be found in Disney’s techno-fetishistic TRON: Legacy (2010), although that was more about quest gamers and explanatory narrative than this. FF7:ACC was followed by Takeshi Nozue’s equally impressive Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016).

Parallel

Cast: Aml Ameen, Martin Wallstrom, and Georgia King 

Director: Isaac Ezban 

100 minutes (15) 2018

101 Films DVD    

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton

Reminiscent of Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), this Canadian thriller has young techies discover a secret room with a kind of magic mirror that’s a dimensional portal to a multi-verse of possibilities and career opportunities. The kids develop their unfair advantage by exploiting differing clock-speeds in some mirror-world timelines. From stolen inventions to copied artwork, creative industries are a potential goldmine, but is theft from alternate worlds just a victimless crime? The childish indulgence of blowing up $1 million sounds like fun, until creepy doppelganger antics result in sudden death.

Like a next-gen version of TV show Sliders (1995 - 2000), Mexican director Isaac Ezban’s Parallel is perhaps the best wonderfully witty sci-fi movie since Looper (2012). It brings out dark paranoia in the protagonists that ramps higher with every new level of deception folded sideways into their original reality. Somewhat unavoidably, determination soon becomes obsession when emerging characters develop complicated ambitions into money-spinning solutions to problems and needs that didn’t exist before. It cleverly fulfils a precept of all the best SF about extrapolation of any fantastic idea to its logical conclusion. Intelligent sci-fi does not have to be a confusingly intellectual puzzle. Parallel is instantly engaging, like a heist-movie with a moral dilemma, and it succeeds at being hugely entertaining without ever losing its appeal to fans of Twilight Zone-style mysteries.

 

“I know that sounds crazy, but you have to believe me.” Oh yes - it’s just not possible to avoid such dialogue in a movie that makes unreasonable demands on the viewer’s sense of ironic humour. Made in 2018, Parallel might have been overlooked for an international release until now because it lacks any Hollywood star names, although Kathleen Quinlan appears briefly, in a prologue sequence. It could be this year’s re-watchable Tenet on DVD. Look out for the strange mirror’s final and weirdly fatal tilt. It’s gruesomely slippery when wet.