No.236 : When Night is Falling (1995)

When Night Is Falling at the IMDb

Softcore lesbian action now - well it can’t all be Werewolves and Winters! This is a strange film to categorise - there is something there for those seeking mild titillation but it is also a love story and maybe a bit of wish fulfilment for those with their preferences nailed inside the closet.

The film sets its cards of the table from the start with two naked ladies cavorting underwater to some dreamy music as the titles roll. We don’t know who they are but it is probably just letting everyone know early doors what to expect and to double bolt the door  in case of unexpected visitors.

Our heroine, Camille, teaches myths at a buttoned down seminary college. She wears bland and unsexy clothing and even drives a grey Volvo - they may be trying to suggest she’s not much of a risk taker! She has a partner, who had the fish tank blown up on him in the first ‘Mission Impossible’ film, and the two hope to wed soon. He is out of town on business a lot but they hope to secure a job together at the college where they can work closely together teaching wholesome values to all the students.

Hopefully Camille is better at teaching than looking after her dog as it escapes from her home and is later found dead in an alley. She is suitably upset but bungs its body in the fridge and heads off to the laundrette. At this point she is so stuffy she wears a buttoned up cardigan to do her laundry, but still manages to catch the eye of Petra who gives her arm a suggestive rub when she hears of the dog’s demise. Camille is aghast and runs home, but we suspect she was a bit tempted to know her touchy friend a bit better.

Later on she discovers that she has switched laundry bags with Petra, but luckily she has her card so that they can exchange their smalls - oldest excuse in the book! Before the undie exchange can take place however, Camille and her partner Martin have an important interview with the stuffy college elders. Strangely Camille dresses from Petra’s laundry bag and chooses a top which has her knockers practically hanging out. It’s therefore surprising that the interview goes badly!

Camille then goes to exchange her clothes with Petra and discovers that she works in one of those S&M circuses that we’re always hearing about. Petra again tries it on but a weakening Camille says no once again. A clearly torn Camille must choose between her safe but dull partner and a life with a travelling circus with a hot and sexy lady lover. What will she do? Check the poster if you need a hint…

I quite liked this film and not for the reasons you are no doubt imagining. If you were looking for sexy thrills this tame effort with lipstick lesbians would hardly get you motoring, but it was quite touching and almost innocent in it’s attitudes towards lesbian love, which they make out as forbidden fruit rather than an accepted state of being. Still it was made in 1995.

The look of the film is strange; it looks like one of those Hallmark films with a fuzzy focus and a single camera - cheap in other words. They did try to mix it up however with a hang-gliding class shoehorned in for no other reason to run that old ‘I’m never doing it’ before a sharp cut to them soaring in the sky routine. I think even my talents at missing metaphor failed here as her taking a chance at one thing, which she enjoyed, may have been a foreshadowing to something else?

I did feel sorry for the boyfriend who had no chance when the sexy Petra came on the scene. He was given a gentle landing with the promise of some romance in the pipeline for himself, but over all he was reduced to being a peeping Tom squinting into a circus wagon - we’ve all been there!

The agenda was clear from the start and whilst no one was jeering the fledgling lovers all the stuffed shirts who represented society were suitably outraged. If the film was trying for controversy it failed however, as you ended up thinking ‘good for them’ rather than society was doomed.

The sex scenes were few and not too graphic and although 27 year old Camille’s change in allegiance wasn’t believable it was better than the ‘dead’ dog and the circus ringmaster who had all the showmanship of John Major.

Overall a fun and heart-warming distraction which rose above its budget limitations to produce something worthwhile and memorable.

Best Bit : Oh I’ve hurt my knee - better take all your clothes off…

‘W’ Rating 16/23

No.235 : Wild Target (2010)

Wild Target at the IMDb

Some people say British comedies are all the same predictable rubbish and feature the same old faces. Well if it’s ‘Wild Target’ they are commenting upon it’d be hard to argue with them!

Bill Nighy plays a hit man with mother and emotional issues. He’s had a long and successful career as an assassin, which he puts down to meticulous planning and not getting emotionally involved. We can see he’s hurting as he learns French from a tape and has dinner on his own, but surely nothing can break his granite like façade?

Meanwhile free spirited Emily Blunt is organising an art scam. She has hooked poor sucker Rory Kinnear to paint her an exact copy of an old master which she will then sell to Rupert Everett having shown him the original (Rory works at the National Gallery) before switching to the fake. The plan goes well and she makes £900k but the scheme falls apart when the paint is discovered to still be wet - art forgery mistake number one, you’d think!

Anyway Rupert hires Bill to kill Emily and after following her about town for a day Bill starts to take a shine to the thieving harlot. He is however about to shoot her when a rival hit man, Rab C Nesbitt, shows up and Bill has to decide to take the contract or the girl. Things are further complicated when Ron Weasley shows up and Bill, Ron and Emily have to escape together.

The remainder of the film is more or less padding as the three unlikely bedfellows get to know each other and themselves before evil hit man, Tim from the Office, tracks them down for a final showdown.

I don’t think I cracked a smile once during this alleged comedy. I normally quite like Bill Nighy but his character here was such a cliché it was hard to care. The meticulous hit man undone by a target plot is a lot older than Bill and frankly he is getting on a bit for his romance with Emily to be believable or even seemly. She is meant to come across as a free spirited rock chick but only manages ‘shallow thieving bint who gets lots of folk killed’.

Ron’s part is pretty superfluous and although he’s meant to be the son Bill never had he’s more like the guy who can’t act who’ll bring in the Harry Potter audience. Things should have been improved by adding Tim from ‘The Office’ to the mix but he lacked the menace his character was supposed to exclude and his comedy dentures were a mistake.

The climax, which has the most blatant foreshadowing I can remember (“be careful with that gun it explodes when fired”), was terrible but at least welcome as it signalled the film was nearly done.

I wasn’t bothered by the film’s shaky moral compass, only by it’s dearth of laughs and predictable plot.

Best Bit : Bill listens to his radio set
‘W’ Score : 9/23

No.234 : We Are What We Are (2010)

We Are What We Are at the IMDb

 I don’t normally add release dates to my titles but this Mexican film was remade in America in 2013 and we may have a look at that later, but I doubt it unless it is rated a lot higher than this frankly dull and unappetising feature.

The film concerns a family of cannibals living in plain sight in a modern Mexican city. It opens with an older man staggering through the streets, pausing only to throw up some dark fluids and to ogle some swimsuits mannequins. He’s warned off by the store owner before he keels over and dies - he won’t be shopping there again! As soon as he hits the deck a clean up crew is on the scene to remove his body and his vomit before fashionable consumers pass the spot as if nothing had happened.

This shows right away that the city is somewhat removed from what we would see as normal and I’m sure it’s also making some point about consumerism that I’m too slow to fully comprehend. The action then moves to a small market where two brothers run a watch repair stall. Their customer service is somewhat lacking when an unhappy customer gets a bunch of fives for compensation and their day is further spoiled when they are informed that the man we saw dying earlier was in fact their father.

They head home to tell their mother and sister of the news and a family crisis meeting is held. Dad was the chief provider for the family and mum is concerned that the two boys may not be up to the job of replacing him. It’s not immediately clear what they are up to but matters are soon resolved when we witness the father’s autopsy which includes a finger, complete with nail varnish, being removed from his stomach. Clearly not one to chew his food!

The family are cannibals and they need a body on a regular basis to both eat and to complete their rituals. Meanwhile the wacky autopsy experts hand their findings and the finger to the equally offbeat police who are less than interested. What follows is a quest for food and a somewhat haphazard police investigation which leads to an inevitable conclusion with plenty of gore along the way.

I expected more of this film given it was deemed worthy of a remake and its interesting premise. I think my problem was that I just didn’t care about the family nor was I totally grossed out by their antics. There were a few kills but most of the nasty stuff happened off camera or behind a large plastic sheet. We never really got to the heart of their motivation and they seemed more or less normal which wasn’t unsettling at all.

The whole film has a skewed from reality vibe but that just took it further from the realms of horror for me and into a fantasy world where nothing really mattered. The two brothers were OK but a bit too brooding and lacking in character for me. For cannibals they were fussy eaters with prostitutes and homosexuals both off the menu despite their easily available flesh. I’m sure this was a commentary on society in general with the cannibals more caring than the world at large but that was kind of undone with some of their generally shabby behaviour.

Something may have been lost in the Spanish translation but or me this was just a bunch of weirdoes hitting people with spades and chomping down on fake flesh with little or no point to the whole enterprise. I wasn’t shocked or horrified - just a bit bored and in an 80 minute film about cannibals that’s pretty poor going.

Best Bit - Off to the dancing’!
‘W’ Rating 12/23

No.233 : Wing Commander (1999)

Wing Commander at the IMDb

 Films based on video games are invariably great so this should be a lot of fun…

Oh well, let’s have a look anyway. This 1999 film is based on a video game series I haven’t played but it has a pretty strong cast and has some decent special effects so hopefully it won’t be a total waste of time.

The film is set in ‘Earth Year 2654’ and opens with JFK’s speech about the benefits of space exploration before giving us a potted history of the future leading up to the ‘present day’ where mankind is engaged in a war with the Kolrathi, strange cat like beings who have shinier spaceships than us. An initial skirmish goes badly when the bad guys knock out one of our ships and steal a navigation computer that will allow them to find Earth.

The field command, lead by David ‘Poirot’ Suchet and David Warner (for once not a baddie) have to get some intel to a remote station and the only vessel capable of getting there ahead of the aliens is the lowly ‘Dilligent’ crewed by Fred out of the Scooby Doo films and strangely Shaggy as well. This pre-dated Scooby by a couple of years so someone must have thought they had chemistry together or maybe there was just a lazy casting agent with some Tip-pex.

Anyway our men get the orders delivered and join up as pilots in Saffron Burrow’s fighter squad. She’s the ‘Wing Commander’ of the title which is strange as she isn’t the focus of the film and isn’t in it too much, but a franchise is a franchise I guess! There are a few bits of conflict, mainly about Fred’s ancestry and Shaggy’s recklessness but the remainder of the film is a cat and mouse chase with the bad guys as our heroes try and save Earth whilst trotting out as many sci-fi clichés as possible.

This is a really poor film that demands a lot of the viewer who is willing to stay the course. It is hard to be invested in any of the characters who are all thinly drawn with arcs so dismal that they look a lot like straight lines. The hero Fred faces challenges as he has a ‘Pilgrim’ mother - this is an untrusted alien race and his heritage allows lots of prejudice and conflict - bit like Misters Worf and Spock really. That’s a bit unfair given Worf came later but it’s just such a familiar sci-fi trope that it is hard to get interested. He even has an ancient amulet - a bit like Lone Star off ‘Spaceballs’!

The action scenes are reasonably well done with 3-D space well rendered and the dangers quite real. The problem is that one battle lurches into another and it’s hard to keep the energy and indeed interest up. I started to lose track of what wormhole was what and where we were in relation to the eventual victory, which was never in doubt. There really just was nothing to get invested in and despite some noble sacrifices and heartbreaking losses it showed its video game roots with immediate respawns of near identical characters taking up the slack.

It wasn’t downright terrible but it just lumbered along and given the bad guys would have been laughed off a 1970’s ‘Dr Who’ episode for being unconvincing it’s no surprise that the inevitable victory was tinged with so much ‘so what?’.

It’s a shame a good cast wasn’t better utilised and I got the feeling several of them had ten minutes on set to secure their pay cheques and places on the credits to make it look a more worth endeavour than it actually was. Forgettable cookie cutter stuff.

Best Bit : First space battle was good - fourth replay less so.
‘W’ Score 8/23

No.232 : When the Game Stands Tall (2014)

When the Game Stands Tall at the IMDb

 High school American football now, as the record breaking high school team De La Salle’s 151 game record gets the Hollywood treatment. Clearly winning 151 games in a row isn’t interesting enough as the film gets the dreaded ‘Inspired by a true story’ tag which effectively means loads of it might be made up - and according to Wikipedia it is.

Still, it isn’t billed as a documentary so let’s see if it stands up on its own two feet as a compelling sports drama.

Jesus Christ himself, Jim Caviezel stars as coach Bob Ladouceur who has lead the school to 12 straight school championships. As well as football coach he’s also scripture teacher and is married to Laura Dern, which is nice. The film opens with the Championship winning game and the pressure on the teams to maintain ‘The Streak’.  Predictable problems soon arise when star players are distracted by lucrative college offers and pushy parents tries to push their own kids into the team.

Bob has is own issues when he has a heart attack and is also tempted by offers to coach elsewhere. He also has a son on the team who isn’t that good and who takes the huff with his bedridden Dad when told that Pop may not be able to coach sports whilst he’s still warming a hospital bed.

The close season is a busy time as a player gets gunned down at a party and the new roster of players aren’t as keen on sharing their thoughts and holding hands, which helped the previous lot so well. Trouble is also brewing in the league as rival teams accuse Bob of tempting all the best players and basically cheating to keep his streak alive.

They may have a point as Bob retaliates by playing a higher ranked team and immediately loses the streak. After a second loss things threaten to go pear shaped especially as Kurgan out of ’Highlander’s son is closing in on a touchdown record that would make his old man happy and potentially enhance the boy’s future.

Things do improve and a mini streak sees the team to the championship game but can they win and will the lessons they have learned make them better people?

I was really disappointed in this film which had the potential to be good but ended up a cliché ridden mess. As soon as they left the path of truth and introduced extra dramatic elements all was lost for me. Facts were discarded and others made up which made all the achievements and sacrifices pointless.

The sub-plot of the Kurgan pressurising his son towards the touchdown record for his own aggrandisement was so well worn and hackneyed that you knew how it would play out. Every time the dad was on screen he was jabbering on about ‘the record’ and given the message that the team is more important you won’t need two guesses to see how that one plays out.

Caviezel is OK in the lead but he lacked the inspirational qualities the role demanded. His scenes with his wet son were a bit cringey and he had no spark at all with the lovely Laura Dern, who was criminally underused.

There were long periods with no on field action at all, with large swathes of the film taken up with the familiar territory of young black athletes being tempted by cars and the like and a chance to escape their tough existence.

There was nothing new in this film and given it deviated so far from the source material it failed as a biography or as a true story either. A pointless exercise all round.

Best Bit : Need a time out for that one.

‘W’ Score 6/23

No.231 : Where the Green Ants Dream (1984)

Where the Green Ants Dream at the IMDb

 This was German director Werner Herzog’s first film in English although the copy I saw was dubbed in German and had English subtitles - long way for a short cut!

The film is all filmed on location in Australia and deals with the cultural clash between some native Aborigines and a mining conglomerate who want to extract uranium from land the Aborigines see as sacred. Although an environmental warning, the film is also a parable of sorts and although the subject matter may seem a bit dry it was interesting enough to keep me engaged.

From the off you get a fair idea of where the film’s sympathies lie with a long tracking shot of piles of debris left over from previous excavations. It’s clear that a mess has been made of large swathes of the country and to reinforce this there is stock footage of extreme weather which either indicates climate change or an angry God - I’m going with the latter!

Mining engineer Bruce Spence (Gyro Captain out of the ‘Mad Max’ films) is in his office dealing with an old lady who seems somewhat out of place in the middle of the Outback. She has lost her dog in the mines and asks if it can be found. Bruce fobs her off, but she is a persistent old bird and her quest continues throughout the film, running parallel with the main narrative. I’m pretty sure the lost dog is a metaphor for something, lost innocence maybe, but it’s not made clear and as regular readers will attest, nuance isn’t my strongest suit.

Anyway, the new mine needs some bore holes and progress is halted when some Aborigines show up and block the bulldozers. The workers are keen to shove them off but Bruce, perhaps fearing bad publicity, engages with them to see what it would take to move them on. He has all the right permits but the Aborigines claim ancient title to the lands where, they claim, the green ants dream. In their folklore if the green ants are awoken the world will end. Frankly I was hoping this would happen but seemingly the budget wouldn’t stretch to it.

The mining bosses come in with a raft of offers but all are turned down. Bruce starts to see what he’s up against when he encounters another group in a supermarket huddled round the spot where a favoured tree once grew that was cut down for the store. The bosses decide to seduce the tribal leaders with a trip to the big city and shower them in tat such as a digital watch that no one can turn off - another metaphor?

On the trip home the Aborigines are impressed with a large aeroplane and a goodwill offer is made to supply such a machine to the Aborigines despite them having no airport or conceivable use for it. With this sweetener in place the action transfers to the court room where ancient claims are weighed against the law of the land. Will the miners be sent on their way and the Aborigines left with their land’s mineral wealth intact? What to do you think?!

I quite enjoyed this film but it was too indistinct in what it was trying to be. A factual drama? Part documentary? Social commentary? Fantasy parable? I’ve no idea. Lots of stuff was laid on thick with the evil suits clearly trying to screw with the local heroes. There were a lot of metaphors such as a lift that kept breaking down, perhaps suggesting that progress wasn’t all it was meant to be. I never figured out the relevance of the lost dog although the big green plane was a bit more obvious.

Bruce Spence was the only actor I knew in the film and he did a decent job of holding it together. Most of the Aboriginal cast were not actors but they all had great faces and presences. Things like their drinking problems were touched on but for the most part they were the innocents being treated badly by corporate interests and progress in general.

The film was pretty clear where its sympathies lay and this was shown via Bruce’s character who starts off seeing the Aborigines as a nuisance before gradually going more and more native himself. The politics were not of the subtle variety and there was a lot of mystical stuff going on, such as a key artefact being presented to the court that we, the viewer, weren’t allowed to see but overall there was enough to like to justify a recommendation - just.

Best Bit : Pit vigil with Pal
‘W’ Score 14/23

No.230 : Wicked Little Things (2006)

Wicked Little Things at the IMDb

 Child abuse and retribution now - it’s like Operation Yew tree : The Movie!

The film opens with scenes young kids being forced to work down a mine as the credits roll past. You might think they would be no good at digging coal but their presence is qualified by someone looking for a small kid to squeeze into a narrow fissure to lay some dynamite. This would seem an exceptional task and you’d think some Irish navvies would be better suited to the whole mining game. Still, if you go that route you miss out on the hole ‘Village of the Damned’ vibe later on.

We soon jump to the present day and a young Mum and her two daughters are heading out into the sticks. They stop at a grocery store and get warned off by the less than convincing shop keeper but they plough on regardless. All those missing person signs are no doubt just some local colour. We learn the lady is a widow and the family are moving into her husband’s remote ancestral home. The house is a total crap hole and has all the usual features of slamming doors and things that go aaarrrggghhh! in the night.

The youngest daughter Emma, played by a 10 year old Chloë Grace Moretz - Hit Girl from ‘Kick Ass’ - adapts best and soon makes a friend whom the Mum assumes to be her latest imaginary chum. The older daughter hooks up with some local youths and is getting her tonsils tickled in no time fast. Things don’t stay happy for long however, as the acting talent free neighbour shows up to warn of the dark forces in the woods. The family dismiss him as a nutter, but we the viewer witness him leaving a pig out for a horde of carnivorous children to scoff.

The family also have issues with the local landowner who wants them off the property so he can build a luxury resort, but evidence is the cellar suggests he may have inherited money earned off the blood of others.

As night falls, Hit Girl goes missing and an ill advised trip to the old mine leads to a confrontation with a horde of spade wielding, pasty faced psychopaths in matching hats. Can the family be saved and the cursed lifted?

I quite enjoyed this predictable slice of horror hokum. There was no real mystery going on - we knew it was killer kids from the start and so it panned out. No effort was made to explain the reason for their continued existence although that ‘in the woods’ staple of animal carcasses hanging from the trees was trotted out. To be fair they did look a bit sinister in the misty forest with each dressed like Damien in the first ‘Omen’ film - nice of the slave driver mine owners to get them all matching hats!

There were the usual couple of unearned scares and a ridiculous scene where a man is killed on an upper floor and all those below let the blood drip down all over their faces for no apparent reason. There was a decent bit of menace and a couple of grisly kills but nothing too imaginative or horrific.

The main cast were fine but the kook in the woods character was terrible and he was more of a mystery as to how he got cast than mysterious.

There were no real surprises offered and no new ground tread. If you catch this on a dark Halloween night you might get the odd scare but for the most part it was as scary as a 8 year old’s birthday party which is scary enough for me!

Best Bit : There’s strange things goin’ on in them woods!
‘W’ Score - 14/23