Think horror, think Lost meets Jurassic Park! On second thoughts scrap that thought, but Tape 407 does involve a plane crash and some sort of dinosaur hell bent on killing the survivor.

After Dark productions have given us some great little horror gems over the last few years, some slightly better than made for TV productions, and some not, unfortunately this release falls into the latter category.

The premise is this: two girls are flying from NY to LA on NYE, one is absolutely determined to catch everything on her camera (yawn – as if we not had enough of these real events captured on camera films already – Cloverfield, The Last Exorcism and Paranormal Activity). The plane unfortunately does not meet its final destination due to turbulence and crashes into a Government Testing Area. The traumatised passengers are then hunted in the darkness by some unknown menace. Wow – two horrors for the price of one!

As with many of these recorded ‘real life’ event films, the fact that the footage has been found, does not usually bode well for the unfortunate victims.

What’s wrong with the film? The first girl holding the camera has the most annoying whiney American accent I have ever heard, so we can#t wait to see her demise! She proves to be more annoying than Jar Jar Binks! The film is split into two halves, the plane journey and then the aftermath. After the plane crashes only the fuselage remains, there are no flames, no smoke, just lots people running around shouting over each other looking like a walking advert for Dulux Crimson paint. It literally looks as if they have been painted with red syrup.

They are then systematically picked off one by one by the dark menace. The fact that it is set in the dark obviously means very little money needs to be spent on effects, as you never actually really see the creatures until the end, and in the meantime we are nauseously given the now compulsory shaking camera, often blinding at times as the lights bounce off the ground.

There is no tension and the victims always seem to do the wrong thing. Do I stay in the relative safety of indoors and wait until sunrise or do I run around cluelessly in the dark waiting to be killed by an unknown predator? And I’m sorry, but if you were in a plane crash would you not be more concerned about your survival rather than zooming into the faces of those dying! Or would people respectfully ask you to switch the bloody thing off?

I suppose the excuse for running with the camera with the light showing was to help them see? Perhaps I’m unnaturally gifted, but I can see quite well in the dark thank you very much! Turn the camera off please! This is unimaginative film making at its very worst!

Overall Verdict: If this is tape 407, let’s hope the other 406 have been destroyed!

Reviewer: Stephen Sclater

American teenager Aurore (Lizzie Brochere) gets her parents to agree to leave her alone in Paris while her father heads back to the States on business. The rebellious teen soon meets Chris (Pierre Perrier), a wanderer who gives her life a bit of excitement. They embark on a passionate affair that quickly turns into an all-consuming passion. Chris is a dangerous proposition though, who gets violently jealous if Aurore speaks to other men, but she’s smitten.

Chris has a secret though, he likes to pick up rent boys. While Aurore doesn’t seem sure about this, she goes along with it, allowing her boyfriend to go into his van with a trick he’s picked up. When she returns something terrible has happened and the rent boy is dead. Chris insists it was an accident and Aurore agrees to help him cover it up. Soon though it becomes apparent that this wasn’t a one off, but Aurore has been drawn in so deep, will she even want to get out?

Co-directed by Jean-Marc Barr, star of the likes of The Big Blue and quite a few Lars Von Trier movies, American Translation is an intriguing but rather strange film, which seems to both embrace and reject the US movie idea of a pair of lovers on a crime spree. As with many French movies since the New Wave, it is fascinated by Hollywood even while it tries to suggest something new and different. However its main problem is something that affects much film from around the world, a difficulty creating a fully rounded female character.

American Translation goes deep into Chris, and while some of its suggestions about how he got to be the way he is aren’t 100% convincing, he’s an interesting character even if he isn’t a very nice one – indeed much of the time he’s a complete bastard, not to mention a serial killer. You certainly want to know more about him though, with the movie dissecting his strange predilections, complicated sexuality and amoral behaviour. The problem is Aurore, as the movie never finds a reason for her to behave the way she does.

You’d need a pretty big impetus to just go along with it when you found out that not only does your boyfriend like picking up rent boys, but he also enjoys murdering them. However Aurore just seems to accept it. Yes she’s in love and she wants to rebel, but she’s left so blank compared to Chris that her reasoning seems impenetrable. It’s tough not to come to the conclusion that the film doesn’t understand women, and so doesn’t really know what to do with her.

Chris doesn’t understand English, so American Translation just gets Aurore to bluntly speak her thoughts in English, explaining it by saying that Chris likes the sounds even if he doesn’t know what she’s saying. It basically feels like the movie is admitting it has no clue how to present a fully rounded, complex female character who would believably get involved with the multiple killer, and so resorts to the cheap trick of getting her to essentially address the camera and say ‘This is what I’m thinking and how my mind works’. Even so it fails to get under her skin and her motivations remain inexplicable. Sure she wants to rebel, but the film doesn’t take her on a journey where it feels believable she’d go as far as she does.

It’s a shame as the Chris side of the movie is extremely good, as while he’s pretty horrible he’s also complex and enigmatic. Perhaps if the film had spent more time allowing him to seduce Aurore it might have worked, but she knows he’s potentially dangerous pretty much from the start and just blithely seems to go along with everything. Aurore could be some sort of statement about how passive and underwritten female characters often are in American films, but it doesn’t quite work here.

It’s a shame really as much of the film is very good and certainly keeps you watching. With a fair amount of skin and an intense performance from Perrier, it could have been so much more if it had paid as much attention to Aurore as it does to Chris.

Overall Verdict: An intriguing thriller that certainly gets under the skin of its murderous protagonist but undermines itself with a female lead who seems too passive and inexplicable.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Writer/director JC Calciano follows up his popular Is It Just Me? with eCupid, a rom-com looking at the gay seven year itch. Marshall (Houston Rhines) is about to turn 30, has been with his boyfriend for years, is stuck in a dead-end advertising job and feels like life has lost excitement. He’s yearning for a bit of fun and hotter guys in his life, especially as his boyfriend is so busy with his struggling business that it feels like they never have sex.

While surfing the web one night, Marshall finds a site called eCupid, but little does he know that agreeing to its terms and conditions will result in it completely taking over his life. Before he knows it, his boyfriend has moved out and eCupid is providing a succession of guys who are perhaps a bit more than Marshall can handle. Soon he begins to realise that the grass on the other side may be filled with hot guys and endless parties, but he may have been completely ignoring the joys of what he had already.

Bright, breezy and more than a tad silly, eCupid is the kind of film that makes for a decent hour and a half, even if it’s so lightweight it might fly away at any moment. Essentially it’s a fable, but the platitudes it wants to extol are obvious from a couple minutes in and then it’s just a case of watching each mildly amusing turn of events until we get to the inevitable resolution. The film has a lot to thank Houston Rhines as Marshall for, as it would undoubtedly have been a lot worse without his charming and rather cute presence as its centre. He pretty much carries what could otherwise have been an interminably trite movie.

While the rise of commercial gay movies, most of which go straight-to-DVD, is a good thing, there’s undoubtedly a tendency to put ticking the boxes ahead of a well-constructed plot and dialogue. Sometimes it’s almost as it someone specified the amount of shirtless guys and/or nudity – as well as how generally mild the overall tone is – and then wrote something around that. While eCupid is better than some, there’s still a feel that ensuring commercial appeal was more important than making it good. Admittedly you can’t blame someone for making a movie that’s designed to have as wide an appeal as possible, but there has to be a happy medium.

It might sound like I’m saying eCupid is bad, as it isn’t. It’s just that it never aims very high and so was never going to be more than mild entertainment.

Overall Verdict: eCupid is kinda fun and Houston Rhines is a bit of a charmer, but it’s difficult not to feel this rom-com should be better.

Special Features:
Morgan Fairchild Interview
Actor Interviews
Actor Auditions
Outtakes
‘Always With You’ Chadwich Music Video
Trailer
Photo Gallery

Reviewer: Tim Isaac