Todd Solondz is an award winning writer and director who has brought us such classics such as Welcome To the Dollhouse, Palindromes and the highly controversial and brilliant Happiness. Solondz’s greatest is gift is giving us a slice of life drama with characters on the edge of society that we normally wouldn’t care for. This is his first film since Palindromes in 2004, so has the wait been worth it?

Dark Horse is exactly what it says in the title – a film about a dark horse, an outsider, someone who isn’t thought likely to succeed, but who may just surprise us all. The dark horse in this film is Abe (Jordan Gebler), who’s the elder son of Jackie (Christopher Walken) and still works for his father, who runs a highly successful development company. Abe is a thirtysomething, morbidly obese manchild, surviving on a diet of Diet Coke, still living in his parents’ house surrounded by all his heroes in figure or poster form, varying from Dr Who to The Simpsons to Thundercats, and shirking all personal responsibilty in pursuit of his selfish, childish dreams. In the opening scene Abe meets Miranda (Selma Blair), who is desperately trying to avoid giving him her number, but eventually gives in due to her own lack of decisiveness and his persistence.

When Abe eventually meets up with Miranda, it’s obvious she is on a high dose of medication, as she seems very sluggish and ‘out of it’ in her communication. She also has some major issues to deal with. On their first date the over enthusiastic Abe suggests that they should marry – he is obviously searching for a real connection with anyone who can see beyond his limited adult attributes.

One of the funniest scenes is where Miranda realises that she should really be giving up all ideas for the future, including hope, and should indeed marry Abe. Then, when she kisses him for the first time, she says that it wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be! This just goes to show the level of depression that Miranda is suffering from. The remainder of the film deals with their relationship and the other issues that Abe has to deal with – i.e growing up, and the relationship he has with his despairing father.

Some of the best scenes are those where Abe is interacting with his empathetic mother, played splendidly by Mia Farrow – playing a character that could easily have been portrayed by Dianne Wiest – and also with his multi-faceted co-worker Marie played by Donna Murphy.

The film however starts to lose direction when Abe begins having conversations with the characters in his head as he is having doubts about his relationship and future. These small scenes start taking over the film and initially it’s tough to work out exactly what is going on, and we unfortunately also stop caring. Once it becomes apparent what has happened, audience concentration has lapsed and the film would have played out better if the story was just told straight, rather than the method used.

Overall Verdict: Some great characters, played brilliantly by all the cast especially Walken and Farrow, but the direction of the storytelling confuses what could have been a little gem. Look out for a certain toystore, and also check out the soundtrack.

Reviewer: Stephen Sclater

 

On the one year anniversary of his brother Tom’s death, Jack (Mark Duplass) is still an emotional wreck. His best friend Iris (Emily Blunt) suggests he gets away from it all and takes a break in her family’s isolated, holiday retreat.

However, on arriving he finds that the hideaway is occupied by Iris’ half-sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt). From then on we are treated to a feast of comedy, reaching its peak with the unexpected arrival of Iris and all that this brings with it. She is thrust right into the heart of an already complicated and all too hurried coupling between the two emotionally distraught individuals inhabiting the holiday home.

In a nutshell, this film is truly enjoyable and very little fault can honestly be found with it – it’s quite a delight. This picture is funny in all the right places, yet at times extraordinarily gritty and very cleverly and intelligently written.

In some of the scenes the characters’ delivery of the lines, together with the superb scripting is incredibly spot on and wonderfully executed, giving the audience no choice but to warm to them, especially in the case of Duplass’ Jack (Mark Duplass) and DeWitt’s Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt).

The performances can be viewed as significantly more impressive when it’s considered that many of the scenes were, in fact, improvised, giving things a uniquely natural, fresh and outstandingly authentic feel – and hopefully ensuring it’ll be the success it should be in UK cinemas.

Jack’s expressive, awkward, clumsy, tragic and yet comic character somehow makes him a highly appealing male lead. In Hannah, we find a slightly neurotic character displaying a sense of desperation, willing to go to extraordinary lengths to fulfil her deep seated desires. Together they produce a winning combination.

Blunt as Iris is a superb choice to play the posh, yet down to earth Brit among a sea of very real and ‘say-it-how-they-see-it’ Americans. The actress performs well, but doesn’t have the best of roles in the movie, although her acting is certainly on a par with the other two actors. Iris is not as humorous and lacks some of the complexity of the other two, possibly as a result of her slightly less dramatic life to that point.

One thing is certain, Blunt has mastered the art of crying in the most convincing, powerful and believable way, enabling the audience to become easily struck and moved, feeling the anguish experienced by her character.

The film ends on one of those annoying cliffhangers. For the most part, the audience is left eagerly hoping for a sequel, imagining just how chaotic, witty and hysterically funny it most probably would be. Hopefully, there will indeed be a follow up, because otherwise, this is a very cruel way to end a film!

But this movie is not really a comedy; it is a drama which does comedic moments immensely well. It is set against a backdrop of anguish, loss, regret, hurt and pain, but the humour and strength of the characters and the relationships between Jack and Iris, and Iris and her sister, triumph over all of these.

Award winning writer and director, Lynn Shelton (Humpday, My Effortless Brilliance) is well known for films examining human relationships and emotions. Here she does another stunning job portraying sibling rivalry and close sisterly bonds, producing a hugely compelling and engrossing motion picture.

Overall Verdict: A great film – 90 minutes of my life well spent. Given the chance I’d watch it all over again. Fantastic!

Reviewed by Dee Davis 

With all the worthy, socially conscious cinema on display at this years’ Edinburgh International Film Festival, it’s with some degree of guilt that I say my favourite so far is a whimsical, comedy creature feature. It’s a rare film that manages to be both sweetly charming and horrifyingly disgusting, but that’s exactly what Grabbers is; it’s charmingly disgusting or disgustingly charming, if you will. It’s a throwback both to the monster movie heyday of the 50s and to its resurgence in the 80s that makes impressive use of a meagre £4,000,000 budget.

Grabbers begins with an awesome satellite shot of Ireland and the British Isles as we see a comet plummet into the Irish Sea. We then get a brief, genuinely scary sequence in which an unseen terror makes short work of the crew of a trawler. But after this prologue the scares mostly take a backseat, because Grabbers is a horror-comedy with emphasis on the comedy. The action takes place on the idyllically dull Erin Island, which is the jurisdiction of the dishevelled and drunken Garda Ciarán O’Shea (Richard Coyle) and the by-the-book teetotaller Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) whose been transferred from Dublin on a working holiday.

O’Shea is perfectly happy with his uneventful beat as it gives him more time to drink, but when locals start going missing, a pod of dead whales washes up on the beach and eccentric fisherman Paddy (Lalor Roddy) claims to be keeping a sea monster in his bathtub, it seems life on Erin Island may be about to become more interesting.

Perhaps the greatest compliment you could pay a horror-comedy is to say it would be entertaining even without the horror element, which is the case with Grabbers. Kevin Lehane’s tight, witty script calls to mind last year’s The Guard and even Local Hero with its cast of eccentric characters and sparkling dialogue. But that’s not to say when the monsters turn up they’re not welcome.

Director Jon Wright wisely puts off revealing them in all their tentacled glory until towards the end and although when they do finally appear it’s courtesy of some not particularly impressive CGI, their unique design and uniquely horrific methods of dispatching victims means you won’t care. But Grabbers true genius emerges when it’s revealed that the blood-sucking beasts are allergic to alcohol – the islanders realise that the more wasted they get, the less appetising they are. This brilliant concept makes the final act a shambolic struggle for survival, featuring some first class ‘drunk-acting’, especially from the adorable Ruth Bradley.

Horror-comedies are notoriously difficult to get right; in the effort to be both funny and scary they often fail to be either. Grabbers succeeds by getting the tone just right; it aims to be a comedy film with monsters not a horror film with gags. The recent high water mark for horror-comedies is Shaun of the Dead and it’s no exaggeration to say that Grabbers is just as entertaining and involving as that modern classic. Grabbers doesn’t have a UK release date yet, but once it does it will surely become a beloved cult favourite, it has all the ingredients: cool monsters, characters you genuinely care about and eminently quotable dialogue. ‘Tis no fecking lobster.

Overall Verdict: Cult status surely beckons for this brilliantly well-written, frequently hilarious and occasionally scary monster movie.

Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon

Upon hearing tell of Joe (Matthew McConaughey) – a police detective who moonlights as a hitman – Chris (Emile Hirsch) convinces his dim-witted father Hansel (Thomas Hayden Church) to help him arrange the death of his estranged mother to cash in on her life insurance policy, thus enabling him to pay off a debt to a local gangster. Caught in a Catch-22 of payment required up front but having no money until the deed is done, Joe instead decides to take Chris’s sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a “retainer,” a situation she proves not exactly averse to.

The simplest of plots often yield the most effective of stories. The stage play origins of Killer Joe are made clear with lengthy scenes in single settings that are more focused on the characters than exposition. As the driving force of the film, Chris is given the most room for development, with his unravelling scheming eventually resulting in his realisation that he’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is.

Hansel is almost pitiable, having an IQ roughly equal to his chest size; when asked if he was aware of a late revelation, he simply replies “I’m never aware,” ironically showing more self-awareness here than at any other point. When it becomes clear that Chris might not be all that brighter than his father, you’re not too sure which of them to feel sorrier for. Gina Gershon as Hansel’s new wife Sharla is ambitious and selfish, although the true extent of her manipulations comes late in the film.

Out of the whole severely dysfunctional family, it’s Dottie who is the most intriguing. Her true age is never revealed, and with her almost dreamlike outlook on life combined with the ethereal quality of Temple’s features, she could be anywhere from 16 to 25. One moment she can be shy, naïve and innocent, while in the next she becomes a smouldering ball of sultry desire. You’re never sure quite how perverse any kind of sexual attraction to her would be, and that’s probably the point.

However, as you’d expect it’s the eponymous character who proves the most interesting. McConaughey’s Joe is a man of magnetic intensity. His every action is an exercise in economy of movement, and each word out of his mouth is clear, concise and never extraneous. His arctic glare suggests you only continue breathing at his indulgence; as Dottie observes in her inimitable manner, “Your eyes hurt.” He remains utterly inscrutable throughout proceedings, his perversions of dominance the only inkling of his true character we ever receive.

Inevitably, Robert Burns’s oft-quoted maxim on the unreliability of forward planning comes into play, and it’s how everyone reacts at this juncture that reveals what they’re truly capable of and makes you question just how much sympathy any of them really deserve.

Overall Verdict: Along with overlooked 2003 effort The Hunted, Killer Joe is easily William Friedkin’s best film in the last two decades. Simple, dark and uncompromising, it’s a trailer trash noir that pulls no punches right up to its tragic denouement and will stay with you long after the credits roll.

Reviewer: Andrew Marshall

 

Produced and co-written by Oren Peli, the guy behind Paranormal Activity, and directed by visual effects guru Bradley Parker, Chernobyl Diaries initially looked like good news for the horror fraternity. An intriguing, low-fi horror exploring the frightening possibilities of radiation poisoning, Chernobyl Diaries could have easily been a surprise summer gem. Sadly, it isn’t.

The film focuses on six tourists who decide to indulge in a bit of ‘extreme tourism’ while visiting Ukraine. With their soldier-turned-tourist guide leading the way, the young travelers visit the abandoned city of Pripyat, a creepy location just a stone’s throw from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that was evacuated and abandoned following the nuclear disaster.

When their only means of transport is somehow sabotaged, the group of tourists find themselves stranded in the abandoned city, only to discover that some of Pripyat’s population may have decided to stick around after all.

For the first Act, Chernobyl Diaries keeps things interesting purely because we don’t know exactly where the film is going to take us. Flirting with a number of possible directions, from standard slasher fare to found footage thrills via a touch of Cujo, Chernobyl’s reluctance to commit keeps you on your toes for only so long, before things take a yawn-inducing turn for the worse into slasher territory.

With a setting that is genuinely eerie (it was filmed on location in Serbia and Hungary), Parker understandably tries to make good use of his surroundings, maneuvering his ill-fated band of victims through derelict warehouses and apartment blocks, putting them through the grinder like an apocalyptic assault course. Unfortunately, Parker doesn’t have any other ideas up his sleeve and so unleashes a barrage of horror clichés and underwhelming boogeymen (which kind of look like the dudes from Bad Taste). The result is a tiresome and tedious 86 minutes.

There are a couple of good scares to be had, and Dimitri Diatchenko gives a memorable performance as the hard-as-nails tourist guide, but ultimately Chernobyl Diaries falls flat and fails due to a serious lack of originality. Shame.

Overall Verdict: Initially intriguing but ultimately unoriginal slasher fare.

Reviewer: Lee Griffiths

It turns out Abraham Lincoln wasn’t just a lawyer who became the President of the United States and led the winning side in the Civil War – he actually did it all to battle the undead. Well, at least that’s what happens in this version of history.

As a child, Abe watches as a vampire sucks the life from his mother, an event which shapes his entire life, so that once he’s grown (into the form of Benjamin Walker), he wants nothing more than to kill the man responsible. After an attempt to shoot the vamp goes wrong – he’s not using the sort of ammunition that can kill bloodsuckers – he’s saved by Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper). Turns out Sturgess makes it his mission to destroy bad vampires, and trains Lincoln up to take on the undead.

Luckily in this world, humans can become supernaturally powerful (it’s something to do with anger or pain or truth or something – the film doesn’t seem quite sure why Abraham can chop down a tree with a single axe blow), which is handy when it comes to destroying the incredibly vicious vampires. At first Abraham just takes out bloodsuckers one by one, but soon comes to believe he needs to take bigger action and run for office. He has always believed that slavery is wrong, but when he realises that vampires are essentially using slaves as both a buffet and as a basis to try and take control of the country, he’s spurred into action.

It’s a slightly insane story and the film is just about as nuts as you’d expect, complete with action sequences that don’t just stretch credibility but blow it completely out of the water. That’s not to say they’re bad, as there are several action sequences that are quite a sight to behold, such as one where Abraham battles his mother’s vampiric killer in amongst a herd of stampeding horses. There is a slight mismatch between the insanity of the action and the rather po-faced attitude of the rest of the film, but when it comes to sporadic excitement, the film does deliver.

The problems come elsewhere, with a script that’s all over the shop. And I do say the script, as the problems are similar to the ones that bedevilled Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, and it can’t be a coincidence that they were both written by Seth Grahame-Smith (with Vampire Hunter also based on Seth’s book). There are plenty of good ideas, but the film has a tendency towards the random, uncertainty over what it’s doing thematically and every time it seems like it building towards something more than just silly vampire action, quickly undermines that with a trip back to the arbitrary.

This is particularly true of the supporting characters, who are rather short-changed and treated like chess pieces to be moved around to serve the plot, rather than seeming like actual people. Again it’s the script that’s the issue here (and it’s what was most frustrating about Dark Shadows), which only has a clear idea on who Abraham Lincoln himself is. It’s a bit of a shame, as potentially this could have been a film that wasn’t just about the silly but fun idea of Abe Lincoln killing vampires, but could have used it to tell quite a powerful symbolic story. It tries to do this but fails. This is nearly all down to a muddy script and the fact it’s clear the film has been fiddled about with a lot during editing (as revealed by some rather obvious continuity errors).

With Honest Abe, the screenplay knows what it’s doing and Benjamin Walker delivers a great performance in the role, offering just the right level of stern resolve and humility. Walker is certainly a talent to keep an eye out for, and is one of the few actors you would take seriously as both President of the US and an axe-wielding bloodsucker killer.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a film that promises a lot and only partly delivers. The action is great fun, with director Timur Bekmambetov showing he has a real eye for visuals, especially when it comes to highly stylised fighting – as he previously proved in Wanted – but the things that surround that are rather problematic. If you just want OTT action sequences with plenty of blood-soaked vampire axe-killings, you’ll be okay with the movie, but if you expect a bit more than that – most particularly having one than one fully developed character – you’ll find the film frustrating.

Overall Verdict: Some good action, but the script’s randomness, underserved supporting characters and a rather confused feel mean that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ends up as a stylised mess. It doesn’t completely lack entertainment value, but it could have been much more than it is.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac