Monday 30 September 2024

The Hitcher

Cast: 
Rutger Hauer, C. Thomas Howell, and Jennifer Jason Leigh

Director: Robert Harmon

97 minutes (15) 1986  

Second Sight 4K Ultra HD   

Rating: 8/10

Review by Christopher Geary  

Driving from Chicago to California, Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell), picks up hitch-hiker John Ryder (Rutger Hauer). The road-trip is going well, until John threatens to kill Jim, and says “I want you to stop me.” Lucky Jim manages to get the psycho out of his car, but that’s not the end of it. The crazy hitcher pursues Halsey, murdering anyone that he meets, along the way. Police don’t accept Jim’s wild story, and only highway-cafe local girl Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh, in an early role) eventually believes him enough to accompany increasingly desperate Jim on his journey into hell. 

This is a subgenre thriller that moves quite briskly, but really accelerates to a lightning pace whenever Hauer is on-screen, and his scenes crackle with explosively violent energy, and dark humour. All the way through it, there are vague suggestions of supernatural forces around the intriguingly uncanny (seemingly allegorical?), spree-killer, which are thankfully never explained. Howell plays the persecuted innocent Halsey very well indeed, and Hauer was perfect casting as eerie antagonist Ryder. Even Leigh’s rather overly-studied role as Nash is likeable, although she’s just another victim of the lunatic’s mayhem. The Hitcher remains a quite stunning thriller, with plenty of witty dialogue in Eric Red’s knowing script, some tense direction by Robert Harmon, and terrifically arranged stunts action.

It’s a classic modern-day nightmare movie, where outrageous things get worse, dramatically, every time that Halsey wakes up. Mystery-man Ryder is a demonic monster, pretending to be merely human. He gets his kicks on Route 666, halfway between nowhere, USA, and ultimate damnation. The Hitcher is strictly business right from the start. Dark mythical resonance, emerging from existential terror, becomes the movie’s only sub-plot. There are also a few homo-erotic moments in this haunted tale about macho confrontations, with a seduction by charismatic evil. Shot, mostly, on locations, the movie’s grounded in reality, but it explores a fantastically dynamic situation, leading to many horrific events.

 

“What do you want?” asks Halsey, repeatedly. “That’s what the other guy said,” replies Ryder. Talking never helps in this movie. Language is simply mundane noise, or seemingly redundant in the twisty narrative of a moral dilemma. It was successful enough, on video at least, to warrant a sequel, Louis Morneau’s sadly flawed The HitcherII: I’ve Been Waiting (2003), which prompted a competent but uninspired remake, Dave Myers’ The Hitcher (2007). Both are worth seeing if you enjoy this original movie, fully restored for maximum impact in 4K UHD with HDR and Dolby Atmos.    

Disc extras: 

  • Commentary track by Robert Harmon and Eric Red
  • Commentary by critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
  • Scene specific commentaries
  • The Projection Booth podcast: Robert Harmon and Rutger Hauer
  • Bullseye: new interview with Robert Harmon (42 minutes)
  • Penning The Ripper: new interview with Eric Red
  • Doomed To Live: new interview with C. Thomas Howell
  • The Man From Oz: new interview with John Seale
  • A Very Formative Score: new interview with Mark Isham
  • Duel Runner: Leigh Singer on the evolution of The Hitcher and Rutger Hauer
  • China Lake: newly restored short film by Robert Harmon
  • The Calling Card: Robert Harmon on China Lake
  • Telephone: short film by Eric Red
  • The Hitcher: How do these movies get made?
  • Trailers 

Thursday 22 February 2024

Bad Biology

Cast: Charlee Danielson and Anthony Sneed   

Director: Frank Henenlotter

84 minutes (18) 2008  

Severin 4K Ultra HD   

Rating: 8/10

Review by Christopher Geary

[Released 26th February]

After 15 years away from creating horror movies, Frank Henenlotter made a welcome but outrageous comeback with Bad Biology. Like a drunken Cronenberg imitator, this OTT black comedy-of-errors about shockingly abnormal sexuality is often lurid and repeatedly crude, and yet really too deliriously silly to cause serious offence. Jennifer (Charlee Danielson) is a blonde ‘nymphomaniac’ photo–artist, who has seven clitorises. Her pregnancies seem to last about two hours, and then she disposes of any unwanted ‘babies’ in dustbins (perhaps that’s where early-Henenlotter's mutant Basket Case progeny originated?).

Batz (Antony Sneed) has a faulty penis, but he fixed it with regular steroid injections. Apart from inducing a non–stop hour–long orgasm in hookers, the troublesome side–effects of drugs and his self–abuse result in Batz’s monstrously unwieldy cock developing a mind of its own, detaching itself from his body, and tunnelling through skirting and floorboards, going on a sexual rampage (cue: farcical stop-motion animated penis–creature!). While Jen takes pictures of models wearing vagina–face masks, Batz has lonely ‘fun’ at home with a Heath Robinson-style vacuum apparatus. Of course, they are destined to meet.


What happens when an unstoppable foreskin meets an insatiable sex object is, perhaps, the ideal, most surrealistic expression of Henenlotter’s body–horror weirdness. In retrospect, maybe this ultimately peculiar flick is what the cult director was actually trying for all along? Obvious thematic predecessors include brain–fart ‘Elmer’ in Brain Damage (1988), and fiendish examples of twisted fetishism in Frankenhooker (1990).

Bad Biology features porn stars (Tina Krause, Jelena Jensen), and a main cast of novices, so don’t expect great acting, but its parody of rapture, a parade of rap studs and junkie whores, and the comically tacky serial–rape spree, make this knowingly unwholesome treat a nightmarishly bad–acid antidote to mediocre horror’s predictability and genre respectability.

4K disc extras:

  • Commentary by Frank Henenlotter, DoP Nick Deeg, and Anthony Sneed
  • Archival commentary with director Henenlotter and producer Thorburn

Bonus Blu-ray:

  • Commentaries (as above)
  • Spook House - interviews with Henenlotter, Thorburn, production coordinator Michael Shershenovich, DoP Deeg, retired detective David Henenlotter, and production manager Chaz Kangas
  • In The Basement - interview with Charlee Danielson
  • Deeg And Sneed – a conversation between Deeg and Sneed
  • Swollen Agenda – interview with make-up effects artist Gabe Bartalos
  • Beyond Bad – behind the scenes of BAD BIOLOGY
  • F*ck Face – photographer Clay Patrick McBride
  • SUCK – short film by Anthony Sneed
  • Legendary Loser – music video by R.A. The Rugged Man
  • Thorburn image gallery – publicity, behind-the-scenes, video covers, death pix 



Friday 2 February 2024

Inside

Cast: Alysson Paradis, Beatrice Dalle, and Nathalie Roussel 

Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury 

85 minutes (18) 2007

Second Sight Blu-ray    

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary 

[Released 5th February] 

Riding on its decade’s bloody new wave of French horrors - including such thrillers as Alexandre Aja’s hallucinatory High Tension (aka: Switchblade Romance), Xavier Gans’ splattery sci-fi masterwork Frontiers, and Pascal Laugier’s astonishing Martyrs - grisly shocker Inside (aka: A l’interieur), brings a gripping claustrophobic power. Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, this stars Alysson Paradis, as heavily pregnant widow Sarah, and the great Beatrice Dalle as a nameless ‘angel of death’ - or something quite like it. 


With diabolical sense of purpose, and an unhurried intensity of destructive envy, Dalle’s almost demonic seeming home-intruder turns Sarah’s lonely Christmas Eve into a night of mortal dread, locked in a gore drenched bathroom. Animation of the unborn baby adds a dimension of CSI styled graphics to the visual impact, and there is clever use of sound effects to build tension and suspense, accentuating an extraordinary violence, which skims along fuzzy borderlines between absolutely nightmarish fantasy and the brutality of a psychopathic reality. 


Although it’s a short 85–minute feature, action plays non–stop as visitors to Sarah’s residence only survive a few moments in the confrontations with Dalle’s antagonist. Cruel and gutsy with a disturbing savagery, very memorably using a large pair of scissors as multi–purpose household weaponry, Inside is a smartly constructed and fascinating thriller. Its agonies transform Sarah’s quiet suburbia into a veritable war-zone of wildly inhuman atrocities, without any hints of compromise or moral restraint. It’s a mesmerising hell of torments, but definitely not suitable viewing for any mum-to-be in a delicate emotional condition.

Extras:

  • New commentary by Anna Bogutskaya
  • New commentary by Elena Lazic
  • First Born - new interview with co-writer/directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
  • Labour Pains - new interview with Alysson Paradis
  • A New Extreme - new interview with producer Franck Ribiere
  • Womb Raider - new interview with cinematographer Laurent Bares
  • Reel Action - new interview with stunt co-ordinator Emmanuel Lanzi
  • The Birth Of A Mother - Jenn Adams on Inside 

Monday 22 January 2024

High Tension

Cast: Cecile de France, Maiwenn, and Philippe Nahon 

Director: Alexandre Aja 

91 minutes (18) 2003

Second Sight 4K Ultra HD

Rating: 9/10

Review by Jonathan McCalmont

Cinema and literature are in a constant state of flux. Genre formulae and canons are not fixed, they are constantly challenged by new and innovative works that, invariably, invite not only imitation but also the re-examination of older works that were once considered little more than creative cul-de-sacs. Traditionally, horror films are made for very little money and with relatively inexperienced directors who make the most of lurid subject matters and formulaic storylines to secure high returns for their investors whilst learning their trade as directors. A glance at the history of French cinema will reveal Art house and mainstream traditions healthy enough to ensure that French film makers have never needed to pass through the crucible of genre filmmaking before maturing artistically. As a result, older French horror films tend to be either part of the Art-house tradition, or part of the trans-European exploitation films of 1960s and 1970s, centred not in France but in Italy.

Twenty years ago, High Tension (aka: Switchblade Romance) is the film that kick-started a wave of French horror cinema, and it is interesting to note how much of those genre films’ DNA is included in Alexandre Aja’s work. The story begins in a country house where Marie (Cecile de France) is staying with her friend Alex (Maiwenn Le Besco) and her family. Marie is masturbating in her room when she hears a sound downstairs. Going to investigate, she witnesses a large man with an obscured face brutally murdering Alex’s family before dragging Alex away and locking her in his van. Marie gives chase and sneaks into the van in the hope of freeing Alex. But who is the man with the obscured face? 



High Tension is notable not only for its levels of stress and incredible violence but also its no-nonsense approach to plot. Where many horror films spend an eternity introducing you to characters and delivering back-story, High Tension jumps almost straight into the action. However, this is not to say that the film is shallow. Aside from the genre conventions that the film plays with, it also through its use of imagery, and its plot development manages to say a number of interesting things about gender roles and how one perceives one-self. For example, is a willingness to use violence an inherently masculine trait and, as a result, are women who decide to use violence more masculine than those who don’t?



Most intriguingly, Aja adopts an Art house posture towards his audience. Rather than explicitly spelling out the film’s ideas and message through exposition, he allows the audience to draw its own conclusions and concoct its own ideas. This, along with the film’s awareness of the sexual politics of horror, has proved to be a hugely influential approach to the material.

Trailer: 


Bonus material:

  • 4K UHD presented in HDR10+ approved by director Alexandre Aja
  • New audio commentary by Dr Lindsay Hallam
  • An Experiment In Suspense - new interview with Alexandre Aja
  • The Man In The Shadows - new interview with writer Gregory Levasseur
  • The Darker The Better - interview with cinematographer Maxime Alexandre
  • The Great French Massacre - interview with special effects artist Giannetto De Rossi
  • Only The Brave - Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on High Tension
  • Archive ‘making of’ featurette
  • Archive interview with Cecile De France
  • Archive interview with Maiwenn
  • Archive interview with Philippe Nahon

Monday 27 November 2023

Dark Winds: Season 1

Cast: Zahn McClarnon, Kiowa Gordon, and Jessica Matten 

Creator: Graham Roland

261 minutes (15) 2022

Acorn Blu-ray   

Rating: 8/10

Review by Steven Hampton

“Have you seen any witches in your dreams?”

This TV mystery is derived, partly, from Errol Morris’ movie The Dark Wind (1991), which starred Lou Diamond Phillips and Fred Ward. Graham Roland’s excellent spin-off delivers franchised revisionism, adapted from Tony Hillerman’s novels, efficiently combining weird (modern-) western tropes, with a character-study focus that’s very like the crime dramas of Nic Pizzolatto’s gothic styled anthology show, True Detective (2014).  

Despite being set in the 1970s, like the original books, it’s a lively updated scenario, with solid production values. Armed robbers using a helicopter are tracked but lost at Monument Valley, on the Navajo reservation, where native folklore traditions and the social pressures of tribal policing mix into an uneasy balance that's very unlike the themes of Lone Ranger and Tonto. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), meets new deputy Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and there’s workplace displacement friction, but some romantic attraction, between Chee and Sergeant Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten). These local cops are insulted when a ‘motel murders’ case - linked to activists of the Buffalo Society, is rudely taken over by FBI agents. Plenty of regional Diné dialogue helps to forge the cultural authenticity, and historical heritage, of many scenes on seemingly haunted landscapes, in a ‘twilight zone’ where spooky wisdom appears linked to freaky weather. 

“Remember, what you see and hear in ‘ceremony’, stays in ceremony.”

Ethnic horror movies like Nightwing (1979), and The Manitou (1978), can easily be seen as laying the foundations for this sophisticated scripting about an often neglected ‘secret’ world. Everything’s connected like theft and corruption, violence and 'black magic', family feuds and land-owners’ rights. There are no clear-cut heroes and villains, partly because tragedy and brutality are eventually revealed on both deceptive sides of survival choices, lacking profit motives or any justice. Providing most of the comic-relief, Rainn Wilson plays a car-salesman. The show didn’t need this crude level of clown-humour, but ‘Devoted Dan’ does embody some cynicism about religious ignorance and a white-man’s casual disregard of the indigenous American people, that fits - however clumsily - into this endlessly fascinating era.

Disc 2 extras:

Behind-the-scenes featurette Show Me More (32 mins.) includes exec. producers George R.R. Martin and Robert Redford. 

Wednesday 25 October 2023

Ginger Snaps trilogy

Ginger Snaps

Cast: Katharine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, and Mimi Rogers

Director: John Fawcett  

108 minutes (18) 2000    

Second Sight Blu-ray box-set    

Rating: 9/10

Review by Steven Hampton

[Released 30th October]

The Howling meets Carrie with extra weirdness. Socially inept, desperately unhappy, and late starting menstruation, the Fitzgerald sisters, Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins), sulk their way through dreary schooldays, and worry throughout lonely nights. They can’t fit in, so they don’t even bother trying - preferring instead to stage an alarmingly proficient series of fake death scenes (their photo evidence of which makes up a compelling backdrop for the opening credits), as an appallingly ghoulish hobby to shock parents, teachers, and terrify neighbours. And, as a predictable side effect, winning them fleeting classroom kudos for dark-side cool.

While the Goth girls are out at night plotting mischief, Ginger is bitten by a werewolf, and has her first period. Following the accidental death of a girl from their school, the sisters’ close relationship is threatened by Ginger’s animal sexuality, Brigitte’s concern for her sibling’s hormonal trauma (interpreted by the older girl as jealousy), and the frequent appearance of yet more blood. Before the next full Moon, Brigitte realises she must find a cure for the ferocity growing in Ginger, or many people will die. She gets help from a young gardener, who suggests a herbal remedy for the girl’s lycanthrope disorder, but even seemingly clueless mum, Pamela (Mimi Rogers), senses that for Ginger, there’s no going back.

Among the details of this clever re-interpretation of werewolf lore there’s a focus on the growing of a dog tail, prior to the main transformation scene of infected teen into ginger-wolf. This permits a narrative that dwells on genre themes of gender roles and bestiality, and the sort of burgeoning sexual perversity evident in Schrader’s remake of Cat People (1982), with signifiers of what critic Barbara Creed has called ‘the monstrous feminine’. Not to mention indirect references to venereal disease (as when Ginger’s sexual partner is horrified to find blood in his urine), incurable cancer, and, the HIV virus. Every excuse for the lurid spilling of blood is fully explored until the body-horrors establish a narrative trajectory leading to poetic tragedy.  

Despite the red stuff that runs, drips, and splatters everywhere, Ginger Snaps (as its title hints) is a black-comedy flush with an understanding of common teenage unease, misery, and stress. DIY body-piercing for Ginger to get a navel ring, is a startling and exceedingly witty update of the usual silver bullet cure for werewolf bites, and further demonstrates the high standard of inventiveness here, for which director John Fawcett, screen-writer Karen Walton, and the young stars, deserve much praise. Although this is letdown during the climactic scenes, by a modest production budget, when clear views of a wholly unconvincing monster’s attack introduce an unwelcome element of pure cartoon over-extension to the action, Ginger Snaps is an excellent horror thriller, with proof of a brave and lively intelligence at work beneath the visceral surface.

Ginger Snaps: Unleashed

Cast: Emily Perkins, Tatiana Maslany, and Katherine Isabelle

Director: Brett Sullivan

94 minutes (18) 2004

Rating: 9/10

Review by Debbie Moon

After the events of Ginger Snaps, surviving sister Brigitte is struggling to find a way to overcome her werewolf nature, while on the run from another of her kind. When she takes an overdose of her dangerous ‘cure’, Brigitte’s sent to a drug rehab project in an otherwise abandoned hospital. Teaming up with a pre-teen named Ghost, who’s obsessed with horror comics and soon works out what the new girl’s problem is, she has to escape before the change happens - or, indeed, her pursuer starts claiming innocent victims. But Brigitte may be in even more danger from an unexpected source...

This fantastic sequel to a low-budget hit, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed has all the twisted charms of the original - with genuine shocks and thrills, a dry and disaffected wit, and a sharp eye for the horrors of being a teenager. The hospital setting, a morass of teen bullies, exploitative staff, and a well-meaning mother figure who just can’t accept the real problem, puts a new slant on proceedings, and Megan Martin’s ingenious script keeps up the tension and reserves some terrific shocks for the final reel.

Emily Perkins gives another gripping performance as the haunted Brigitte, fighting for her life, but it’s no insult to her to observe that the breakout performance is young Tatiana Maslany’s as Ghost, possibly the world’s most disturbed pre-teen. Sharp, shocking and dryly amusing, Ginger Snaps 2 is that rare thing - a truly great horror sequel. With another movie soon to follow, catch up while you can.

Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

Cast: Katherine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, and Nathaniel Arcand 

Director: Grant Harvey 

91 minutes (18) 2004 

Rating: 8/10

Review by Alasdair Stuart         

Ginger Snaps is widely regarded as one of the best, and last, of the postmodern teen-horror subgenre made so famous by Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy. Its blacker than black comedy, acerbic wit and fervent, almost manic bond between its main characters has garnered the film a legion of fans and two follow-ups, filmed back to back. 

However, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning is more of a prequel than a sequel and is a genuinely unusual direction to take this franchise. For a start, it’s set in 18th century Canada at an outpost under siege from a legion of werewolves. Brigitte and Ginger are also there, albeit this time as the daughters of an explorer who drowned when their boat was overturned. As the film begins, they’re alone, on horseback, in the middle of nowhere. They’re cold, frightened and have no one to rely on but each other.

This neatly brings the incredibly close relationship between the two in the previous movies into a whole new light. Brigitte and Ginger are utterly co-dependent due to the terrible situation they find themselves in and as a result, they find themselves pushed into increasingly drastic courses of action. As the inhabitants of the fort turn on one another, and finally them, the sisters find that the only people they can rely on are each other. 

This very close, and slightly disturbing, relationship is beautifully drawn and played by Katherine Isabelle and Emily Perkins. Isabelle is hugely impressive as the haunted, frantic young woman struggling to keep her sister alive and herself human whilst Perkins, given the quieter role, is if anything more unsettling. There’s fervour to this incarnation of Brigitte that gives every scene she has a real sense of tension. Whilst Ginger may be the physically more comfortable one, it’s Brigitte whose refusal to back down and absolute refusal to abandon her sister who is ultimately responsible for some of the film’s most disturbing moments. 

With two performances of this strength at its centre, the rest of the film inevitably falls a little by the wayside. The inhabitants of the outpost are drawn for the most part from stock, whether the lecherous soldier played by J.R. Bourne, or Hugh Dillon’s fire-and-brimstone preacher. Only Tom McCamus’ Rowlands and Nathaniel Arcand’s Hunter are standouts. The first, the owner of the settlement, is a great character whose dark secret propels most of the film along. Superficially, he’s the traditional leader, a physically adept and resolutely fair man who in a simpler film would be the hero. Here though he’s far more than that, alternately an ally and enemy to the girls adding another element of chaos to an already unpredictable film. Arcand’s Hunter is much the same, one of the only people who seems able to come and go as he pleases and who never quite chooses a side. He truly comes into his own in the last 20 minutes, as does McCamus in fact, and their performances are at least as strong as the two female leads. 

What really impresses here though is the script. There’s an overwhelming sense of doom to the whole affair as the girls’ actions echo those they took in the earlier films. Even their love for one another becomes a dark, untrustworthy thing, bringing as much pain down on them as it eases. Most importantly though, the fact that the same actresses are playing earlier incarnations of the girls drives home the central idea of inevitability beautifully, as well as tying Ginger and Brigitte neatly into the history of the area.

All in all, Ginger Snaps Back is an intelligent, unusual and remarkably dark prequel. It maintains the same grim humour of the first film and expands on its themes in an unexpected and highly effective way. If only more horror trilogies were this good.

Extras:

GINGER SNAPS -

Commentary by Mary Beth McAndrews and Terry Mesnard

Commentary with director John Fawcett

Commentary with writer Karen Walton

Canadian Uncanny - Stacey Abbott on Ginger Snaps

A Blood Red Moon - interview with John Fawcett

What Are You Wereing? - interview with producer Steve Hoban

The Art Of Horror - interview with storyboard artist Vincenzo Natali

Featurettes:

  • Ginger Snaps: Blood, Teeth And Fur
  • Growing Pains: Puberty in Horror Films
  • The Making of Ginger Snaps

Cast auditions and rehearsals

Deleted scenes with optional director and writer commentaries

Production design Work

Creation of the Beast

Trailers and TV Spots 

GINGER SNAPS UNLEASHED

  • Commentary with director Brett Sullivan
  • Girl, Interrupted - interview with Brett Sullivan
  • The Bloody Lunar Cycle - interview with writer Megan Martin
  • Behind the scenes
  • Deleted scenes with optional director’s commentary
  • Audition tapes
  • Storyboards

GINGER SNAPS BACK: THE BEGINNING

Commentary by director Grant Harvey

Snap! - interview with Grant Harvey

Girls on Film - interview with producer Paula Devonshire

The Making of Ginger Snaps Back

Deleted scenes with optional director’s commentary

Grant Harvey’s video diaries

Monday 23 October 2023

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

Cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, and Brian Tyree Henry

Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson

140 minutes (PG) 2023 

Sony 4K Ultra HD    

Rating: 6/10

Review by Steven Hampton 

The complexity of alternative worlds in Marvel’s expanding multi-verse means that almost anyone, at any time, can be Spider-Man... so why aren’t you? Can you stand on ceilings, dangle from bridges, hop over highways, or jump between city skyscrapers? If there’s a radioactive spider number ‘42’, perhaps you are supposed to get bitten in this reality of Earth 2023. Emerging from a weirdly trans-dimensional ‘cocoon’ of spoofy super-action, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (2018) enabled an older, but still quite familiar, Peter Parker (voiced by Jake Johnson) to support his own replacement, youngster Miles Morales (voiced by rapper Shameik Moore), as the NYC neighbourhood’s friendly new kid on the block, gifted with 'the usual', plus invisibility and ‘Venom’ related energy powers.

We get intros for Spider-Woman, alias Gwen Stacy (voice by Hailee Steinfeld, so good as Kate Bishop in Marvel TV series Hawkeye), and other multi-verse Spidey variants, including a b&w Noir (voiced by Nicolas Cage). Apart from the ‘thwip’ of web-shot and many other sound-effect graphics, the picture evokes ‘splash pages’ from print-media, like motion-comics artwork fused with rotoscoped imagery, and split-screen visuals perhaps suggested by Ang Lee’s HULK (2003). “You got a problem with cartoons?” says Peter Porker, mutant pig, Spider-Ham. Well, yes... When any supposedly caricatured characters are hardly original ideas, there’s only mild amusement, instead of clever jokes, to be derived from their particular TV-grade sit-com dialogue.                  

Irreverence blends with poignancy, sometimes skilfully but often very clumsily, especially when the movie-makers are determined to be quite daft about sci-fi possibilities or superheroes’ moral dilemmas. Sadly, meta-fictional concepts are not culturally progressive story-telling, not when their collective impact on this century’s 'Golden Age of Superhero Cinema' is mainly just obvious whimsy and weakly satirical humour. Experimenting with animation techniques, although it's always fascinating to see, can be awkward to watch if the writing team failed to establish any boundaries or solid limitations on keenly creative artistry. So, Into The Spider-Verse felt like a breathless pursuit of the unknown, with exhilarating daredevil thrills intact, but with both feet in the clouds while its head slams into the pavement.


After the multi-verse development in live-action movie Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), this animated sequel, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (2023), has fresh inputs resulting in yet another hectic and dizzying spectacle that almost eclipses Marvel’s meta/ multi-verse spin-off stories in their animated series What If..?. Now, ‘Spider-Gwen’ meets Miguel (Oscar Isaac, of Marvel’s Moon Knight show), a time-travelling, humourless ninja-vampire spider-hunk from 2099, where he leads the Spider-Society protecting the canon events of a tangled timeline of multi-verse connections. Here's in-jokes about a Peter Parker, Spider-dad, whose Spider-baby feels like a Disney import. There’s also a Spider-Punk, of course, to play the anti-establishment rebel who’s like a bad influence upon sundry heroes. Miles (remember him?) breaks away from their conservative traditions but risks destroying the webs of coincidence that holds the sprawling ‘cosmos’ of arachnid-champions together. His loner efforts, under the mask, appear pointless while a faceless, pre-determined fate unfolds.


Mopey and slightly dopey soap-opera stuff about relationships always slows the pace to a crawl, even when climbing walls. For live-action movies, good actors might bring a sense of emotional depth or dramatic subtleties to some of those pivotal scenes of motivational appeal, but cartoonish characters generally fail, except in the rare animated productions that strive for genuine photo-realism (like Zemeckis’ Beowulf, Spielberg’s Tintin, or any of Final Fantasy franchised movies).

Because of humour’s profound associations with failure, cool comedy is always the hardest element to do, or get just right, with any charm or genuine wit. The lack of any consistent style or quality for numerous animated action-sequences means this distractingly frantic tempo can eventually detract from audience involvement in the story-telling verve. Super-villain the Spot was a scientist transformed into a malevolent force threatening everyone concerned. Futurism during the later 2099 scenes is notable for its space-elevator, and a Spidey matrix with techie avatars. The cliff-hanger ending of Across The Spider-Verse provides a twisty finale. Trilogy closer ‘Spider-Man: Beyond The Spider-Verse’ is reportedly now in development. 

Blu-ray extras:

- Commentary track 

- Featurettes include:

  • Creating the Ultimate Spider-Man movie
  • “I’mma Do My Own Thing” Inter-dimensional Destiny
  • Raising A Hero
  • Across The Worlds: Designing New Dimensions
  • Designing Spiders and Spots
  • Across The Comics-verse
  • Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Cast
  • Obscure Spiders and Easter Eggs
  • Scratches, Score, and the Music of the Multi-verse
  • Escape From Spider-Society

- Deleted scenes

- Music videos