THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist on this month’s weirdest straight-to-video picks
DIRECTOR-WRITER PETER Hyams’ Jean-claude Van Damme picture Sudden Death was the best cut-price Die Hard. Dallas Jackson’s remake Welcome To Sudden Death stars muscular former Spawn/
Black Dynamite Michael Jai White as a security guard johnmclaning a crew of baddies who’ve taken over a sports arena, with value-for-money Michael Eklund as top heavy. The original’s eccentricity — who could forget JCVD fighting a giant plush penguin? — is excised in favour of family-values blather about White’s cute kids. Gary Owen’s bumbling janitor sidekick seems transported from an Ernest movie — a shame there was no ‘Ernest Dies Hard’ — while Anthony Grant’s supremely annoying hip-hop celeb unaccountably survives the massacre. An oddity: in the original, the target of the extortion scheme is the Vice-president… here, it’s a tech billionaire played by Sabryn Rock, who’d be good casting as Kamala Harris.
Giving short measure by clocking in at 75 minutes, writer-director Taylor Chien’s The Resort weirdly spends a great deal of time on ideal holiday footage as four exceptionally good-looking young Americans hike through lush greenery and frolic in a fountain on a trip to the cursed island of Kilahuna. Eventually, they defy “Keep Out” signs to visit an abandoned, impressive hotel complex purportedly haunted by the J-horror-style, malevolent ‘Half-faced Girl’. In a rush, the mode of horror shifts from Blair Witch jitters to face-ripping gore and cackling demon possession before one last twist — involving survivor girl Lex (Bianca Haase), who has been explaining it all to an understandably bored cop from her hospital bed — and an is-that-all-there-is? fade-out.
In contrast, Michael Nader’s The Toll is 80 minutes of effective, flab-free terror, with character interplay that’s suspenseful (and witty) and a few surprises after the plot takes the expected wrong turn. An Uber-type driver (Max Topplin) rejects a couple of male clients in favour of picking up an attractive woman (Jordan Hayes) from an airport at three in the morning, then creeps her out with awkward, inappropriate chatter. When they break down in the woods, the pair have to struggle to overcome mutual suspicion as they find themselves at the mercy of the Toll Man (Daniel Harroch), an urban-legend figure who expects payment in blood before the journey can be resumed. “Why would you bring up that movie now?’ squeals the driver as his passenger mentions The Strangers — though she’s just as rattled by the bow and arrows he keeps in his car. The Toll Man manifests in enough unsettling forms to suggest franchise potential. Hayes and Topplin, alone on screen for most of the movie, are on cracking form.
Adapting his own novel, Italian writerdirector Donato Carrisi does extraordinarily clever things in Into The Labyrinth . In English-speaking scenes, a calm psychiatrist (Dustin Hoffman) tries to help a bedridden woman (Valentina Bellè) remember her spell of captivity in a labyrinth where her abductor forced her to play games. In Italian-speaking scenes, a dying private eye (Toni Servillo) investigates a series of related cases, involving a rabbit-masked maniac, an antique comic book, and a succession of fiendish abuses. It has a striking look, with some extremely oppressive David Lynch-style art direction, and tells its tricky set of interlocking stories with some confidence. It’s also smart enough to realise you’ll solve some of its puzzles easily, only to present you with others that are trickier to see through.