Online unease

With most cinemas closed once again, why not stay home and scare yourself silly with a topical horror movie for the age of the Zoom call? Plus: more digital and home entertainment releases.

Host

Dir Rob Savage, UK 2020 On digital platforms

It had to happen. At the beginning of this year people were digging out older films like

Contagion, Outbreak and even

Dawn of the Dead to give them some pointers about what do to if things ever got that bad, or perhaps just as a sort of morbid fascination with the end of days. But by the middle of the year the Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant restrictions were inspiring new productions. Host, made by the Shudder channel, is a fine example of that.

The premise, in more normal times, would have been routine: a group of friends gathers for a séance and it all goes tits-up. In the time of coronavirus, however, the séance is being hosted on Zoom and the participants are all in separate locations. No holding hands around the table here then.

I’m usually highly suspicious of these à la mode films: no-one remembers The Net or feardotcom any more do they? Host is very

Sure, this is an exploitation movie, but it’s a superior one

much a 21st century production: I never thought I’d see a film where fear could arise out of an Ocado delivery, or a dropped Internet connection. But, to my surprise, it actually works incredibly well. The way director Rob Savage turns the real-life social distancing restrictions into an advantage and incorporates them into the story is superb. As per Zoom calls, the cast are all on screen at the same time in their separate windows, so the viewing experience is markedly different to that of most films in that the viewer can choose where to focus their attention. There may be dialogue being spoken in one window whereas something visual is taking place in another, and in yet another someone may be reacting to either of the first two.

Remarkably for a movie that runs less than an hour, it takes its time setting up its characters and situation, which is always to a film’s benefit. The acting helps tremendously too: you probably won’t have heard of any of the cast but they all do a fine job. The only criticism I would offer is that the short running time means the director leaves himself far too much to do in the last 10 minutes or so and it starts to feel rushed and, as a consequence, less effective. But that’s a minor quibble. Sure, this is an exploitation movie, but it’s a superior one.

Daniel King

★★★★ ★

Archive

Dir Gavin Rothery, UK 2020 On UK release + digital platforms

In the near-ish future, robotics expert George Almore (Theo James) is working on producing a human equivalent AI. But he is concealing his true goal from his employers: bringing his dead wife Jules (Stacy Martin) back to life. The ‘Archive’ of the title is a service that (somehow; it’s never really made clear) retains the consciousness of departed loved ones in a memory bank to allow relatives to speak to them for a limited time – 200 hours – after death. Almore wants to implant this retained consciousness into a state-of-the-art robot, preserving it, thus effectively giving his wife a second life.

Confused? You shouldn’t be. The plot may be word salad, but essentially it’s a race against time for Almore to complete his work before the antagonists, represented by his rather sinister employer Simone (Rhona Mitra) and an Archive agent (Toby Jones) both desperate to get their hands on the fruits of his labours.

Aside from being an engrossing sci-fi thriller, Archive offers an exploration of themes such as grief, free will, jealousy, and consent. It’s a neat trick to explore such uniquely human emotions via robots. But perhaps more than these, the film is about time: whether that be the past, or the attempt to recapture or remake lost time in the future. As Willie Nelson croaks on the soundtrack “…ain’t it funny how time slips away?”

However, one should not be expecting much in the way of profundity here. This isn’t Proust. Archive is above all things a designer’s film, which should come as no surprise because writer-director Rothery has come up through the industry as exactly that, most notably on Duncan Jones’s excellent Moon, a film this closely resembles. This is Rothery’s first feature as a director and for quite understandable reasons he has leaned heavily on things he’s comfortable with.

On the plus side, he has produced a film which looks much better than its relatively low budget would normally

allow. Almore’s research facility alone is a thing of wonderment, as if Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater had been modernised by Roger Dean. The film is full of spectacular drone shots of wintry forests and majestic waterfalls which are stunning but, and this can be the downside of having an artist direct a film, they advance the plot not at all. It’s a charge that was often levelled at David Lean. Think of Lawrence of Arabia and those incredible shots of camels moving slowly along the horizon and Peter O’Toole wandering off into the blazing desert, and yet what do we really know about TE Lawrence by the end? Not much. It’s the same here.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to enjoy. It’s refreshing to come across a thriller where there’s very little violence and people are motivated by love rather than revenge. It’s also good to see a genre film which has genuine ambition in terms of the themes it chooses to explore. Okay, it might not reach any great understanding of them, but the attempt is made. Theo James and Stacy Martin don’t quite have the acting chops to carry a film virtually by themselves, but they do at least make an engaging couple. Worth a look.

Daniel King

★★★ ★★

The Dare

Dir Giles Alderson, UK/US 2019 Lionsgate, £5.99 (DVD) + digital

There are lots of ways a film can be bad: some are entertainingly bad, some are boringly bad, and some films are so bad they can actually make you angry. The Dare, I’m sorry to say, is in the latter category. It is so unoriginal in thought, so desultory in execution and so low in ambition that it almost constitutes a slap in the face to the viewer, as if to say ‘Sucker!’

Normally at this point there would be a short summary of the plot; however, the plot in this instance is so over-familiar and threadbare that ‘A man wakes up chained to a wall in a dingy room…’ tells you all need to know about what you’ll see and what will transpire. There will be an abattoir, fingernails coming off, torture, masked killers and so on, almost literally ad nauseam.

The Dare isn’t the only film to have ripped off Saw – but, for heaven’s sake, Saw came out 16 years ago. Even then it wasn’t any great shakes, but it did at least have originality on its side and a (sort of) name cast in Cary Elwes and Danny Glover. The Dare has none of that: with all due respect to them, the likes of Bart Edwards, Richard Short, and Alexandra Evans are not, at this stage of their careers, going to draw the crowds. The most well-known actor involved is Richard Brake, a genre veteran and fine actor to boot, but even he is unknown to most save the cognoscenti.

So the film grinds remorselessly on for well over 90 minutes, painfully aware of its own mediocrity, dragging itself out in the vain hope that, somehow, something might spark it into life if it just keeps going long enough. That moment never comes and the film finally throws in the towel with an ending so predictable and cynical that one can only wonder why those involved cared so little for the project. Even Jess Franco took more care over his films than does Giles Alderson here.

It may be that The Dare will eventually find a niche but, if so, only as a drinking game. You know the kind of thing: take a drink when you see some rusty tools; take a drink when someone says “Fuck you! I’m getting out of here.” Well, quite.

Daniel King

★ ★★★★

Echoes of Fear

Dir Brian Avenet-Bradley, Laurence Avenet-Bradley, US 2019 On digital platforms

Student Alysa temporarily moves into her deceased grandfather’s house to prepare it for sale and finds it haunted by restless spirits in Brian and Laurence Avenet-Bradley’s cheapo effort. In these postmodern days, haunted house tales really need a hook. Here they go for broke, including not just ghostly apparitions but also scary squatters and masked maniacs. There are the glimmerings of something interesting hidden in the film’s darkest recesses, but they are lost in the ready-meal mechanics that surround them and hampered by a script that consistently misses its beats.

Low budget needn’t be a problem, especially when it comes to horror, but here the video-ish murk of the picture only adds to the dreariness that abounds. It’s non-stop clichés and hoary tropes, all played without a hint of irony. Dodgy neighbour, jerk boyfriend, best friend who is conveniently well-versed in the supernatural? Tick, tick, tick. Weird toy moves on its own? Tick. Shadowy figure passes by while protagonist is looking the other way? Tick. Shot is held for far too long to ‘build tension’ before a demon leaps out for a boo? Tick.

The generic but serviceable atmospherics – rattlings, rumbling, a pale face emerging from a dark doorway – are let down by the endless cheap jump scares and the listless direction. There are interminable scenes of the heroine discovering strange objects in hidden rooms, while so much attention is focused on her pet hamster that I began to wonder if it was going to turn out to be possessed (it isn’t, sadly). The ending is woefully flat and unsatisfying, not even offering the easy emotional pay-off that has been promised from the very start. Avoid at all costs.

Martin Parsons

★ ★★★★

The New Mutants

Dir Josh Boone, US 2020

Walt Disney, £14.99 (Blu-ray), £11.99 (DVD) + digital platforms

The New Mutants represents the last gasp of Fox’s 20-year stewardship of Marvel’s X-Men. The words “not with a bang but a whimper” sprang to mind when, after a repeatedly delayed release saw the project in limbo for nearly three years, the film finally emerged for a brief cinema run in the middle of a global pandemic. Now, it finally dribbles onto DVD and Blu-ray, a forgettable coda to Fox’s wildy uneven series of 13 X-movies.

When the first X-Men film came out in 2000 it was rightly seen as a game-changer for superhero cinema, laying much of the groundwork for what was to follow; The New Mutants, in stark contrast, feels thin and generic. It’s a shame, as the comic series it is based on – the very first spin-off title from The X-Men – was one of the great titles of the 1980s, featuring writer Chris Claremont at the top of his game and introducing the genuinely envelope-pushing art of Bill Sienkiewicz to a wider audience. It was also a lot of fun: focusing on a new generation of mutants, with a strong emphasis on ethnic diversity, interpersonal relationships and teenage angst, the book managed to navigate different, often darker, waters to its parent title while remaining an addictive and life-affirming monthly read. Unfortunately, none of the joy and little of the fun survives Josh Boone’s decision to transform the source material into a painfully earnest young-adult horror flick with dour visuals and feeble scares. Instead of navigating their growing pains under the tutelage of Professor X, Boone’s youngsters find themselves imprisoned in a decaying hospital facility where they are monitored by a mysterious Dr Reyes. Who thought hiring just one member of staff to oversee five powerful wild talents was a good idea? Well, we never really find out anyway.

It’s easy to see why Boone was attracted to the comic’s ‘Demon Bear’ storyline as a peg for the movie, but when you replace Sienkiewicz’s gorgeously dark artwork with workmanlike direction and so-so special effects, the results feel like short change. It’s not that it’s bad, just bland. The young cast do well. The blossoming romantic relationship between Dani (Blu Hunt) and Rahne (Maisie Williams, of Game of Thrones fame) – something the comic wouldn’t have attempted in the Eighties – feels both natural and touching. Anya-Taylor-Joy makes a picture-perfect Ilyana. Charlie Heaton ( Stranger Things) as Sam Guthrie is a bit too miserable, though, and why Henry Zaga, amiable as he is, was cast as the Afro-Brazilian Roberto is hard to fathom.

David Sutton

★★ ★★★