The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Ghostly 1960s time-travel thriller fails to sparkle
Damon Smith reviews the latest new cinema releases
LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (18)
A shrinking violet with a penchant for Dusty Springfield gets a terrifying glimpse of the sordid desires of 1960s London in director Edgar Wright’s time-travelling horror thriller, which leaves us wishin’ and hopin’ for originality the longer it drags on.
Structured as a murder mystery that repeatedly blurs present and past, Last Night In Soho conceals its ho-hum narrative behind layers of dazzling production and costume design and the luridly lit cinematography of Chung Chunghoon.
He works closely with Wright to construct intricately choreographed sequences festooned with mirrored reflections, which allow lead actresses Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy to seemingly inhabit the same environment, even though their tortured characters exist in timeframes more than 50 years apart.
The director’s gift for enlivening scenes with canny soundtrack selections (the film’s title references a 1968 track by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich) includes an inspired use of Cilla Black’s You’re My World.
The script co-written by Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns sidesteps logistics – could a teenager feasibly cover the rent of a central London bedsit and the associated living costs from late-night bar work? – to engineer mild spectral scares.
Dame Diana Rigg delivers her final screen performance as an eccentric landlady while Terence Stamp merrily chews scenery as the tangled connective tissue between the film’s blood-soaked timeframes.
Painfully shy teenager Eloise
Turner (McKenzie) inherited her love of swinging 1960s fashion and vinyl from her mentally ill mother, who harboured dreams of designing couture in London before she took her own life.
Eloise’s parent also bequeathed her daughter another precious gift: psychic sensitivity to phantoms of the past. The aspiring designer is accepted into London College of Fashion and she bids farewell to her fretful grandmother Peggy (Rita Tushingham) in Cornwall to travel to the bustling capital.
Snooty, attention-grabbing roommate Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen) is less than welcoming at the halls of residence. Consequently, Eloise takes up lodgings in the musty
Fitzrovia attic of Miss Collins (Diana Rigg) where the student experiences unsettling visions of aspiring singer Sandie (Taylor-Joy) and menacing admirer Jack (Matt Smith), who meet in 1965 London in the glittering surroundings of the Cafe de Paris.
Timelines become dangerously blurred as Eloise inhabits Sandie’s body by night and dyes her hair blonde to take on the chanteuse’s striking appearance by day.
Last Night In Soho becomes increasingly laboured as Eloise joins forces with kind classmate John (Michael Ajao) to unravel Sandie’s grim fate and repair her fracturing sanity. Strip away the nostalgic styling and Wright’s film is a familiar ghost story without a lacklustre payoff.
McKenzie and Taylor-Joy are wellmatched heroines at the mercy of plot mechanics, the latter teasing the underlying menace with her haunting cover version of Petula Clark’s “Downtown”.
Bright lights, big city, bigger disappointment.
5.5/10
CHUCK STEEL: NIGHT OF THE TRAMPIRES (15)
Justice walks the streets of 1980s Los Angeles as a politically incorrect, chauvinist police detective in writerdirector Mike Mort’s foul-mouthed spoof of buddy cop comedies and B-movie horrors. Dripping with stopmotion animated gore that nods and winks to Gremlins and The Golden Child, Chuck Steel: Night Of The Trampires begins strongly with a nighttime attack by the titular bloodsuckers before a nostalgic, big-haired blast of Burning Up by 1980s rock band Tobruk.
Lethal Weapon is an obvious inspiration for Mort’s profanitystrewn script (Danny Glover’s catchphrase as Sergeant Roger Murtaugh is lovingly recycled) along with Die Hard and Fright Night while the film’s animation style pays homage to a pioneer in the field when a trampire hunter leaps onto fanged prey with the battle cry: “Harryhausen!”
Unfortunately, Mort’s picture runs dry of creativity before the final splashes of holy coffee have restored peace to the city. Indeed, the more time we spend in the company of the “misogynistic Neanderthal” hero, whose life philosophy is to never stick an appendage in a manhole, the greater our desire to see him with a stake through the blackened heart.
Action sequences are amusingly overblown, including a car chase that culminates in an exploding petrol tanker and collateral damage which Steel estimates to be, “more than a little, but less than a lot”.
ANTLERS (15)
Middle school teacher Julia Meadows (Keri Russell) shapes brilliant young minds in an isolated Oregon town, where locals heed the legend of the Wendigo, a mythological deer-like creature and evil spirit rooted in oral traditions of the Native American Algonquian tribes.
Julia gravitates towards one of her students, troubled child Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T Thomas), who harbours dark secrets connected to the ancestral creature.
The teacher joins forces with her brother, sheriff Paul (Jesse Plemons), to protect the boy from malevolent forces which inhabit the surrounding area.