Collins 1972 A.D

(Dark Shadows, Tim Burton, US, 2012, 113 mins)

When Tim Burton, not so much the grand auteur, more grand guignol of pestiferous American cinema, debuted with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure all those years ago, who would have wagered that his sweet spot, that is to say, the span of his best work, would be a mere five years? When Batman Returns was criticised for being plot-free, Burton shrugged his shoulders and conceded that storytelling wasn’t his strongest suit. This hardly mattered to those who were seduced by its gothic aesthetic; it was a mood piece, everyone understood that. Burton was Angela Carter with a movie camera; he favoured overstatement and excess; but where was the blood-red meat?

The likes of Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward Scissorhands buy you a gargantuan stockpile of goodwill. Over the next 16 years Burton slowly depleted it. Mars Attacks proved that kook was no substitution for wit, Planet of the Apes had none of his signature style; he then botched a story that many thought tailor made for him, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Sure, it was about confectionary but who would have banked on Burton’s version being so confected (or having such a saccharine ending)? Those who heralded Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street as a return to form forgot that the musical, inherently shallow, flattered Burton; he had a great eye, but, Todd confirmed, no voice.

In many ways Dark Shadows plays like a Burton parody; it seems as though the wag behind it, whoever they may be, has perfectly understood the director’s shortcomings and has reproduced them mercilessly. You have to admire the effort invested in the film’s ornate, but curiously unaffecting design; that each scene is a tableau; that the humour is undercranked. Johnny Depp personifies the problem; he’s simultaneously too much and too little, a difficult trick to play on the audience. He plies his shtick, making his Barnabas Collins a morbid, verbacious dandy (I thought of a superior Kenneth Williams in Carry On Screaming). It’s a slight turn; inert like those scenes.

Just as Burton meanders from one inconsequential sketch to the next, so too does Depp, and all the while there’s nothing to grab us. You can tap your toe to a colourful Carpenters’ song, enjoy Bruno Delbonnel’s efforts in lighting Alice Cooper so he’ll appear 40 years younger than he is, and admire the fancy dress, but you’d trade it all for sharp gags, cultural comment (there is none bar a dig at those naïve hippies) and a story you cared about.

Dark Shadows’ structural problems are of the arse and elbow variety. Tonally it’s a head case. The breezy, cartoon vampire that emerges in 1972, a year chosen for its evocation of Hammer and Christopher Lee’s Dracula (who cameos as a fisherman), violently slaughters the first men he sees, ripping their throats and casually tossing a body headfirst into a power generator. Our hero. A scene from a Hammer Horror has been accidently cut into an episode of Scooby Doo. A comedy sex scene and a blowjob from Helena Bonham Carter’s guileless shrink awkwardly stand out; you’d kill to see what horrors lie on the cutting room floor.

Burton’s parodist is at their most cruel, however, drawing attention to Tim’s shortcomings as a storyteller. Perhaps screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith, author of the droll Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, also assumed the director’s chair, for he seems intent on giving us a masterclass in how to lose an audience. You could be forgiven, for example, for thinking that this was the governess’ story; Barnabas’ reincarnated love (though confusingly plagued by her own ghost), returning to her old haunt to reignite her love affair with the master of the house.

Indeed, it starts that way only for Victoria to quickly fall by the wayside. Reader, I can’t even verify that she’s in the second act; I barely saw her. Instead, there’s a shift to Barnabas’ attempt at reviving the family’s fortunes, while fending off his rival – superbitch (and witch) Eva Green. Now the movie’s about a spurned woman getting her revenge on a former lover (though technically she already did by turning him into a vampire and putting him in a coffin for 200 years). We’re invited to be on the edge of our seat, watching two fish factories vie for supremacy. No, that’s not a joke. Hang on, you say, wouldn’t it make more sense if the governess was centre stage at this point, with Barnabas torn between two women? You bet it would, but the parodist shows that by concentrating on the eccentric lead and tossing in some flam about the Collins fam – all of whom are ornamental, you can easily lose your focus and consequently sabotage the audience’s ability to invest in the story.

By way of comparison consider another TV adaptation, Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family. The tone was consistent throughout, the black humour sharp and witty, the story simple and clear, freeing Sonnenfeld to have fun with the ghoulish design and vivid characters. Dark Shadows has similar ambitions but ends up being a mirthless monster mash that just manages to remember what it’s about, a minute before the end – all concerned praying it’s not too late. It is.

International Rescue

(Safe, Boaz Yakin, US, 2012, 94 mins)

Remember I told you; the American movie is changing. It was ever international; built by immigrants, refined by émigrés, informed by foreign filmmaking cultures –German, Japanese, French; but American movies have always remained quintessentially star spangled. They’ve internalised the raw material sourced elsewhere to bang out something culturally distinctive; the mark of a film industry in rude health.

When I was a young critic, maybe six or eight (I skipped seven as it was deemed an unlucky number in my household), writing for the Primary School Review, it was this window on another world – a colourful, brash, fantastic place full of uninhibited characters and buzzing metropolises, that made watching American movies so enjoyable. American hegemony seemed impregnable and it had a lock on the big screen.

As a Brit, it was an easy industry to embrace; there was a shared language and thanks to US cultural imperialism half our pliable population had started to use the same idioms as these movies’ characters anyway, including calling films movies. It didn’t matter to someone sitting in a London cinema that the film hadn’t been made for them; we knew very well the intended audience was sitting thousands of miles away. Going to the flicks was about entering another world, and if that escapist utopia had the stars and stripes billowing in the background, fine.

All of which, because I hadn’t forgotten, brings us on to Safe, the latest modestly budgeted actioner anchored by cockney murder merchant Jason Statham. Stath, as he’s known domestically, isn’t a huge box office draw stateside. Twenty years ago that might have consigned his big screen career to the grave but these days it’s no big deal; it’s all about yuans, roubles and euros, old darling.

Uncle Sam’s product has always played well in the UK but emerging markets, territories that historically cocked a snook at L.A imports, have woken up. China and Russia in particular, are expanding like engorged genitalia, and the money men are watching. Safe is a thriller with an eye on three big markets; its characters are gangs of corrupt New York cops, Chinese Triads and Russian gangsters. They’re all equally grotesque, lest anyone take offence, though the Americans, least likely to turn out, might be the most perfidious of all. The New York setting is almost an irrelevance; Safe could play out in any major city and the belligerents swapped round. It’s designed to be indistinct in that way; the latest example of Hollywood moving from the mere inclusion of foreign characters to changing the character of its product to make it more palatable to international audiences.

For the big studios, still primarily interested in domestic buttocks, internationalism means adding global seasoning to its biggest blowouts. It’s the inclusion of Black Widow, a Russian character in The Avengers; it’s Captain America balking at old fashioned nationalism; it’s Japan and the US fighting side by side in Battleship. They’ve already gone further. Iron Man 3 is being co-produced in China; the movie will have a distinctly Sino-American complexion. Maybe that it’ll improve it, like it didn’t in Lethal Weapon 4.

Boaz Yakin can’t be blamed for taking the New York out of New York; he wants his movie to be like a silent picture that could play anywhere, sans potential alienation. None of this blunts the film’s edge. Fans of the Statham sub-genre who show up expecting something frivolous and far-fetched, with the Sydenham Stall holder’s signature one liners, might be surprised by how straight laced, how brutal Safe is. The violence is matter-of-fact, the style kinetic, sometimes frenzied. It’s a lean movie; efficient like a professional hit. It establishes a hell of a lot very quickly and moves relentlessly thereafter, somehow finding time in just a very few scenes to establish a relationship between the cockney rebel (lumbered with a mid-Atlantic twang) and Catherine Chan’s adroit child. Her character’s gutsy; the movie’s gutsy; in any language this is exhilarating stuff.

Does it matter that the backdrop is blank city? No; though cultural specificity may have given the movie more character. The city, after all, can be a character in itself; the locals add spice and geo-specificity anchors a story. Film Noir was conceived in Germany but born in America. You could have made generic crime thrillers set nowhere in particular, or with passing reference to a locale, but they’d have been lesser movies somehow. The danger with the current direction of travel is that one day we’ll go the flicks and we won’t know where we are. Everything and everyone will be anonymous. Consequently we may not care much what happens to these cipher-citizens of everytown.

Olsen’s Twins

(Silent House, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, US, 2012, 85 mins)

Warning: This review reveals a plot twist.

The trouble with a movie built on a gimmick is that inevitably form smothers content. It’s like a dull tract written with calligraphic finesse. The filmmakers hope that you’ll be so enamoured with their stylistic flourish, that you’ll be fooled into thinking you’ve enjoyed a story crafted with equal care.

This gap between technological fetishism and story craft now has a name: Olsen’s Cleavage. It’s been so christened in tribute to the literal gap between Elizabeth Olsen’s breasts, that dominates two thirds of Silent House. Like its parent picture, the Spanish La Casa Muda, the film employs a real time conceit, but with little happening and nothing to concentrate on but those pert hemispheres, it’s fitting that they should now be forever associated with the vacuum left by this approach.

If “real terror in real time” is the boast, what’s the reality? It’s a movie in which style strangles storytelling possibilities. Stuck in a house with what appears to be a TARDIS sized interior, and with the lecherous camera never more than a few feet from Olsen, directors Kentis and Lau paint themselves into a corner, unable to utilise the many glorious devices filmmakers have invented over the last century to spin a many fibred yarn.

Constructing characters is difficult when they’re only present for a few minutes or, in Olsen’s case, present throughout but limited to looking frightened and hiding under furniture. You can’t hold a look, you can’t cut away to suggest a relationship between an object and a character, you’re bound by a linear straightjacket and building tension is tough, because your movie’s architecture is modelled on a survival horror game like Silent Hill, in which a single character explores an environment, picks up objects, and makes the odd unpleasant discovery. Given these handicaps, it’s little wonder that Kentis and Lau are so dependant on those mammary glands to sustain audience interest. After this and Martha Marcy May Marlene there’s a real danger that they may get their own credit in future.

No terror then, so what of real time? When Hitchcock made Rope, the amount of film he could shoot in one take forced him to cheat. Today it’s possible, with choreographic chutzpah and a digital camera, to shoot a ninety-minute movie in one go, but Kentis and Lau, perhaps outwitted by their labyrinthine set, opt for invisible cuts. The problem is those aforementioned breasts. If you’re going to focus on them, as I’m doing, then you best not soil them with blood splatter. If you do, and the pattern of those crimson smears periodically changes, attentive audience members, who’ve got nothing else to focus on, may start noticing and realise that they’ve been the unwitting victims of a changeover during one of many scenes in which the camera spasms, drops to the floor, passes behind a wall, or loses focus as it struggles to keep up with the mugging, blubbing Olsen.

The film’s denouncement is further evidence that the logistics of “real time” were being worked out while Lau’s screenplay was still a few notes scribbled on the backs of bus tickets. In the dying minutes we learn that Olsen’s ordeal is the quasi-hallucinogenic manifestation of a repressed childhood memory; a rather nasty one involving her Dad, Uncle and that creepy dilapidated house. But hang on, you cry; didn’t we witness scenes earlier on, in which the audience was baited in a traditional way – a figure appearing in soft focus behind an oblivious Olsen, ready to strike? What exactly were we seeing there? If we only glimpse these ghostly figures when Olsen imagines them, why would she be unaware of their presence? It’s a cliché from traditional horror fare that doesn’t work in this context. Blowback from an approach to making a movie that maps out style, then sketches in the rest, almost as an afterthought. Just imagine if they’d tried it the other way round.

Space Junk

(Lockout, James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, US, 2012, 95 mins)

Question: What do you get if you feed Guy Pearce, outer space and Escape from New York’s script into B.A.N.G: The B-Movie Action Narrative Generator (the screenplay software that’s been the silent writing partner behind Hollywood hits for years)? Answer: Lockout. No, I don’t get it either. Fans of Luc Besson, forever in mourning for his childhood, whose movies are thrown up in tribute, will enjoy this generational throwback; the rest of you had better make plans.

If Besson’s Le cinquième élément brought to life his teenage dream, without adult refinement, then Lockout, borne of his brain and produced by he, is an unashamedly reverential regurgitation of a thousand and one 80’s genre movies, complete with don’t-give-a-fuck quip spewing protagonist, feisty damsel in distress, testosteronic mayhem and an orbiting space prison shot at Belgrade’s generic science fiction movie space facility world. That’s not a criticism; if man ever ascends to the stars and makes a go of colonising space, the dream that every child of Star Wars shared, then they’ll be crushing disappointment if our bases don’t have hexagonal corridors lined with extraneous tubing, keypads, yellow siren lights and automatic doors that hiss shut to reveal a stencilled serial number in a futuristic font.

If you know Snake Plissken isn’t a cocktail, you’re already familiar with the plot; what surprises is how much guilty pleasure directors Mather and St.Leger, who sound like islands off the coast of France, rather than filmmakers, wring from Lockout’s 95 minutes.

Guy Pearce, hulked on protein shakes, is instantly likeable as the reluctant action man who opens the movie with lines like, “his name was fuck you. He was Asian.” Ten relentless minutes later, and with not a frame wasted in setting up the president’s daughter as space-hostage premise, Pearce is heading to orbiting prison M.S: One (we know because this is the kind of movie that tells you where you are every few minutes in case the audience can’t follow the transitions between locations), on a rescue mission. Does he want to go? “I’d rather castrate myself using blunt rocks” is the reply that proves B.A.N.G’s John Carpenter plug-in is the best on the market.

Once looping the Earth, the movie loses its mind and you had better follow suit, else you’ll wrestle with questions like, why would prisoners, when faced with space-bombs marked “voice sensor”, speak, effectively committing suicide, or how does a space suit protect you from the Earth’s atmosphere, when you skydive from low orbit (only to be met by clairvoyant police on the ground who instantly arrest you)? Damned if you know? You would be.

In its one nod to realism, the prison’s murderers and rapists are spearheaded by a couple of Scots, so we can be in no doubt as to how degenerate and violent they are, but the rest is gleeful schlock. It hardly matters that the bulk of Lockout is bookended by what feels like a completely different movie; it doesn’t even consider the possibility of taking itself too seriously, so why worry? There’s even a ticking bomb climax for God’s sake. The 12 year old Luc would be proud.

The Main Event

(Marvel’s The Avengers, Joss Whedon, US, 2012, 142mins)

There’s never been a release strategy quite like it; a series of movies, five in all, acting as character introductions for an epic on screen meet up. Marvel are coy; they call it their cinematic universe, but we know it’s a super-franchise, a property pile-up, or, if you stubbornly insist on looking at it from a storytelling point of view, the canny layering of character and context. If these previews of coming attractions have never bested b-movie material, comic book fans were tolerant; they knew they were chewing on starters. All eyes were on the main course.

You might think The Avengers, renamed Avengers Assemble for Britons, in a slight to their intellect, is a new staging post in a cycle than began a thousand years ago with Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000). This original screen super-group did it the hard way; there was no ten-hour prologue. Introductions were brief, growth limited; valuable screen time was invested in orienting the audience in the movie’s world; how quaint that seems now. Marvel’s Avengers need no bedding in; there’s not an ounce of fat on the finished product, but there’s no character development either. Joss Whedon cuts to the quick; this is straight out of the bottle and into the glass. Does it matter? Only if you care to savour the moment, or allow characters space to breathe. Whedon’s movie is strictly utilitarian. It gets the job done, but there’s more to good movies than joining the dots.

Perhaps conscious that in storytelling terms, it’s all a little rough round the edges, Whedon applies his special balm to the affected areas; he mollifies with humour. If that’s a substitute for heft it works rather well. His team of super-heroes have smart mouths. Tony Stark, again imbued with Robert Downey Jr’s easy charm, becomes Whedon’s mouthpiece; he keeps it light and jaunty, turning his co-stars into straight men.

While you’re enjoying Iron Man’s dismissal of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor as “Point Break”, you’re distracted from the fact that there’s no organic relationship between these characters. Bringing disparate heroes together requires high-end orchestration. Is it beyond Whedon’s gifts? He tries hard. Black Widow (such curves!) and Hawkeye share a past, Stark and Bruce Banner are gadget fetishists, Thor and The Hulk, alpha competitors, with a nice line in mutual animosity. Fine though this is, and effective in lifting the film’s middle section, it doesn’t feel like a movie with a beating heart, rather one of Stark’s mechanical substitutes.

That isn’t to say The Avengers runs cold. Whedon’s affection for the characters, borne of the very fandom he hopes to masturbate, shines through. If we can’t have characterisation, we’ll take quips, and one-liners that hit like Exocet missiles. “Mewling quim” might be the insult of the year. But in place of the A-picture depth that remains an unmined commodity in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, there’s an attempt at reviving the kind of simple, clean-cut heroism embodied by the likes of Captain America.

Whedon uses the stars and stripes man to make frequent call backs to World War II and the good fight. The New York City that gets pummelled by an otherworldly enemy is not the city of 9/11 but the simpler movie stronghold of yore. Whedon rolls back the moral complications and chiaroscuro landscape of the Noughties, opting instead for binary distinctions, colour and razzamatazz. If Alan Silvestri’s score wasn’t so anonymous, you could almost believe it was the 1980s.

What reminds you that Marvel’s movie is modern, and sadly no marvel, is that it talks a good talk in being old fashioned without utilising classic storytelling values, the kind that might have impastoed those comic book panels. The on-screen team up is mirrored behind the scenes; every major effects house has come together to stuff the frame with computer generated destruction. But this, like its predecessors, is still a b-movie. There’s no moment in The Avengers to compare with the slaughter of Bruce Wayne’s parents in Batman (1989) or Jonathan Kent’s collapse in Superman (1978). These were the scenes that defined characters and added emotion. They reminded you that you were watching a movie and not just enjoying a product. We’re still waiting for Marvel to serve us a main meal that feels that satisfying. In the meantime, Tony Stark reworking the “I’ve got a Donk” joke from Crocodile Dundee II will have to suffice.

Old Reviews Assembled:

• Iron Man 2 
• Thor
• Captain America: The First Avenger 

No Great Sheikhs 

(Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Lasse Hallström, UK, 2012, 107 mins)

One of the charges levelled at British films is that often, in ambition, in composition, they’re indistinguishable from television. That needn’t be surprising; TV has a huge stake in UK celluloid – it’s half the industry and shapes the thinking; but the indictment might be increasingly unfair, after all the programmes made for your drool box now take risks that are anathema to the taxpayer funded Britflick (shouldn’t these movies be free if you’ve already paid for them?).

Exhibit Z991: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a quaint, fairly timid romantic comedy drama from BBC Films, that plays like The Thick of It with its balls cut off. If its best poster quote comes from Woman and Home, ‘tis no shock; this is genteel satire draped over a love plot with familiar, Bridget Jones hugging complications. Of course we expect the dreary and anal Ewan McGregor to ultimately hook the pretty but personality-free Emily Blunt, but there’s her solider boyfriend in the way, like an IED hidden by the road side, and his dowdy wife, who has none of Blunt’s sex appeal. Oh, the humanity!

Both are united in their love of wasting taxpayers money on a government backed fishing project, devised as a good news story for the Middle East. The film revels in the project’s unfeasibility, but these are scrunched script pages from Armando Iannucci’s waste bin. There’s no spark to the film’s humour – no edge. Instead, Kirsten Scott-Thomas is a Matalan Malcolm Tucker, armed with but a slew of fucks and a haughty tone to stimulate our pleasure centres. We know the civil service bureaucracy is ridiculous because they have silly, snake shaped furniture. When you see this gentle mockery aimed at Middle England audiences, you immediately understand why Britain hasn’t had a revolution in five centuries.

Perhaps Paul Torday’s source novel was full of bite and charm, no one knows; what’s certain however, is that Simon Beaufoy’s adaptation is anaemic. Chief amongst Yemen’s problems (internecine conflict aside) is the central pairing of McGregor and Blunt. Perhaps it’s possible for a character to be simultaneously stiflingly and charming, but McGregor fails in his attempt at internalising the same. You think of the energy he brought to his early roles, the promise he showed, and wonder how he became so safe and uninspiring. Blunt, who’s asked to do little more than be teary and sexually unobtainable, excels on both fronts, but given the lack of crackle between these two unlikely bedfellows, there’s no question of hope for their relationship welling within the audience; it was never there.

It may be a holdover from Torday’s book, but the plot seems unduly complicated. Both human contraceptives, that’s Blunt’s squaddie boyfriend of three weeks and McGregor’s dutiful but dull wife from a now passionless marriage, fill screen time but could safely be excised from the narrative. Do we really need these extras when our characters have got enough to surmount as it is, namely diametrically opposed personalities?

These straw-partners are clutter on deck; we’re waiting for them to disappear from the moment they arrive. Beaufoy makes it easy for the couple to extricate themselves without losing audience sympathy – Blunt barely knows her man and McGregor is trapped, having married young – so why bother? Where’s the risk? What this story needs is conflict, not complications plucked from an agony aunt’s letters page.

Rape Threat: The Movie

(Gone, Heitor Dhalia, US, 2012, 94 mins)

Much has been made of the inability of Amanda Seyfried and her seductive orbs (I refer to her eyes) to open this reluctant vigilante movie. How to explain it? Writer Allison Burnett has astutely tapped into the fear of sexual violence that stalks the female of the species; maybe too well. Early scenes construct the victim’s subjectivity with caked on menace. The dark streets Seyfried surveys are morbidly quiet and empty. When her footsteps are joined by a second set from an unseen source, the heart rate keeps tempo and quickens. Amanda has three locks on her front door. Before we know why, those wide, penetrating eyes have already told the story.

Perhaps ladies don’t mind this heightening of their own deep seeded fears provided their man’s in tow; a cine-substitution for a can of mace. But early word on this thriller’s treatment of the cock and ball brigade may have taken a bite out of Adam’s apples everywhere. The producers must have hoped that Amanda’s allure would offset the handicap of having no strong, sympathetic male characters, after all the absence of female characters in movies has been de rigueur for decades. It’s enough they form a pleasing shape in front of the lens, looking good and doing nothing.

Sadly for Gone it looks like the male of the species notices when they are comparably sidelined. Should this matter, you ask? After all, Seyfried gives a tremulous, edgy performance; she holds the attention in every scene; those orbs are like a hypnotist’s spiral, I tell you. No, the problem is that Gone hates the male of the species and somehow they found out.

Every man in this movie is docile, ridiculous, emasculated or savage. Given both the writer and director sport a groinal appendage, we may be looking at a 94 minute apology; guilt at an innate predatory sexual impulse. In that event, Gone overcompensates. It’s all very well giving Amanda the power to vicariously avenge sex attacks, but it doesn’t do much for gender relations.

Mind you, it’s little wonder that Amanda has no faith in the law. It’s an ass, represented by the likes of eye rolling police chief Michael Paré and Daniel Sunjata, as the unhelpful detective whose feeble investigation into Seyfried’s kidnapping (a week’s survey of a 5,000 acre park) has, we suppose, allowed the killer to remain free and kidnap her sister. Once on the trail, and showing an astonishing aptitude for police work, every man Amanda meets (not easy to say at speed), looks to have been requisitioned from the rape department at Central Casting. From Wes Bentley’s conspicuous red herring, dead eyes and all, there’s simply no escape from the gaunt, the unclean, the shifty and the out and out creepy.

Naturally, Heitor Dhalia’s job is to keep us guessing, but the Brazilian is less adept at maintaining suspense than demonising his own sex. The baffling inclusion of a heavy breather in the opening scene, surveying Amanda’s exploration of the forest, kills the question of whether she is, as the police claim, a nut job that’s imagined her whole ordeal. With that settled, there’s little else to do but spin out the question of her stalker’s identity, but attentive audience members, and perhaps inattentive ones, are tipped off early enough to frustrate Dhalia’s attempts at implicating the rest of the species.

Despite these notable lapses in technique, Gone still captivates in spurts. The audience is well conditioned to share in Amanda’s anxiety from the get go and her final trip to meet her foe is nicely teased out, with enough dead of night atmosphere to induce jitters. If it has any value at all however, it’s Seyfried that adds it. She may not have convinced anyone, male or female, to show up, but her committed turn adds urgency and drama to scenes that would have corpsed otherwise.

A Big Surprise

(The Cabin in the Woods, Drew Goddard, US, 2012, 95 mins)

Warning: This review discusses the plot in depth and reveals the fate of a major character

The question for horror filmmakers for the last 16 years has been what do you do with the teen slasher movie after Scream? It probably didn’t occur to Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven that their self-aware take on this exhausted sub-genre would look to others like a full stop, but it did. Post-modernism then, has been done and you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that there’s not much left; you can’t return to the days of teen archetypes making brain-dead decisions and facing immortal adversaries. Even the smug cine-literate kids are dead now. It’s over.

But hang on, says Joss Whedon, maybe not. The Cabin in the Woods can genuinely claim to be a new spin on this dog-eared old story. It refashions the likes of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, making it the mere outer shell of a Russian doll plot that turns those well-known contrivances into back-end machinations from hidden characters, and introduces a motive so incredible that it almost kills the picture. This may be the first movie in a genre often known for its meathead simplicity, that’s nearly undone by the scale of its ambition.

From the outset it’s clear this is no conventional butcher’s shop window. We get the foreboding score, ancient hieroglyphics, with images of human sacrifice, and we know where we are, but then, suddenly, there’s a sharp cut to a office vending machine and a seemingly unending conversation between two innocuous looking company men. It looks like a scene from a different movie has been spliced into the reel by mistake but this is just the beginning of director Drew Goddard’s Outer Limits-style advance on our rock bottom expectations. Indeed by the time we’re looking through a girl’s window, watching her mooch around in her underwear, we’re forewarned that the rulebook has been torn up. For the first time since Drew Barrymore’s nuisance phone call, all bets are off.

Thereafter The Cabin in the Woods continues to intrigue, amuse and surprise; in fact it’s not until it’s over, and the afterglow of a good movie starts to dim, that you realise that it didn’t make a lick of sense. If that sounds mean-spirited, given Cabin’s monstrous entertainment value, maybe it is; it hangs together well enough while you’re watching it; but movies aren’t designed to be seen just the once, and the ones that dare to woo the brain, like this one, make that approach in the full knowledge that each revelation will be tested upon repeat viewing. Ideas that don’t quite cohere, like floes in an ice field, get pulled apart as you look at them.

At the climax of Cabin… we’re left with enough questions to make you boss-eyed. Amongst them, if Curt doesn’t have a cousin, as suggested at the end, where and how was the idea to visit the Cabin implanted? Does the company have so much control over individuals that it can manipulate them onto the horror grid? How is such a facility constructed? By whom? Can a sacrificial ritual that pivots on free will work when none of the protagonists would choose to die if they had the choice and in the event, can only be forced to play their parts by being drugged and manipulated? If all life signs are monitored why weren’t the gallery guys aware that Marty was alive? It was a good twist for the audience, but a glaring error for the company, as he was around long enough to work out a way into the facility and save the virgin from certain death. If the ritual sacrifice is for the benefit of evil Gods, why are there so many different versions, including one in which none of the sacrificial archetypes are involved? In fact, why are the rituals modelled on horror movies at all? Did these supernatural beings only become conscious in the 1970s? How was it done in ancient times? When did these God’s become active again? How?

I could go on but I think you get the idea.

Assuming you neither care nor consider any of the above, The Cabin in the Woods is great fun though ironically, it doesn’t work as a horror movie. A minor flaw in the film’s architecture, the upfront flagging of artifice, means that the woodland menace besieging the teens never feels like a real threat. In any event, we know it to be a sideshow, a precursor to the real story, so can’t invest it as we would in a conventional stalk and slash-a-rama.

Goddard knows that he’s got better cards to play that the blood stained ones we know by rote and this may explain why the predatory parts of the movie are so flat and uninspired. The chutzpah comes later, in the problematic final act, in which a smorgasbord of horrors is unveiled.

There’s a nice, backhanded swipe at audience indifference to violence, as the show’s “producers” toast their success while a girl is brutalised on screen behind them; the one true horrific scene as a consequence. A gratifying orgy of death follows, in which the audience is brutalised by proxy. It smells like full-blooded satire. In a genre that’s creatively spent and gets off on ritualised forms of on-screen slaughter, perhaps this, and not Scream’s self-fellating take, is the full stop we’ve been waiting for. If it is, there are worst ways to go.

War Games

(Battleship, Peter Berg, US, 2012, 131 mins)

Warning: This review discusses a key scene.

What nation possesses naval might sufficient to take on the United States? That, one assumes, was the question that dogged the men with the unenviable job of, I suppose you could say adapting, the Hasbro game Battleship for the big screen. As the US Navy has more tonnage on the ocean that the next 13 navies combined, it was going to be tough finding a fleet fit for purpose. And which country do you mark as an aggressor? This is supposed to be fun. No one wants to offend a trading partner. Even the Chinese go to the movies.

The solution? Extra-terrestrial seafaring conquerors, invited by us naturally, in an idiotic attempt at friendship and interstellar communication. These malevolent mariners, whose military spending exceeds even that of Uncle Sam, mean business but the Pacific fleet, assembled at Hawaii, to stroke the home crowd’s cultural memory of Pearl Harbor, knows a little something about surprise attacks from malevolent foes and so the war with Japan is restaged for the Call of Duty generation, sans the politics.

But hang on, before you tut at the anticipated jingoism payload, delivered from the hulk of the U.S.S Michael Bay, you should know that the old enemy, those one time Hirohito drones, are now freedom’s friends. You see the world’s navies have assembled for wargames exercises and – well, let’s just say old grievances are put to one side. This of course, is the internationally friendly version of warfare, but because the home crowd expect to see their tax dollars in action and have reassuring reminders of the nation’s moral superiority shot across their bow, Battleship doubles as a recruiting video for Yankee sailors. It’s the very reason the Navy co-operates with Hollywood so emphatically.

Even a disabled veteran gets to do his bit.

One incredible scene, that will surely decide whether or not you’re fully on board, finds a desperate and sunken Taylor Kitsch in need of a vessel to strike at E.T’s communication post. His crowd pleasing solution is to commandeer the mothballed U.S.S Missouri, fully crewed with waiting WWII veterans, thanks to an earlier medal ceremony. After ten minutes work, two minutes of which involved removing a vending machine from the boat deck, she’s ready to go (forearmed like any good museum) and the old boys are back in action, giving the aliens a taste of good old fashioned heroism. You couldn’t make it up, yet somebody did.

Battleship should be nigh on unwatchable, after all it takes it cues from the Bay school, right down to the garish colours, Barbie doll girlfriend character, wall to wall CG destruction and broad comedy, yet somehow, astonishingly, something joyful and good natured emerges.

Director Peter Berg, whose Hancock showed he’s got an assured touch when balancing laughs with high concept spectacle, repeats the feat here. Improving on Bay’s “fucking the frame” mentality with a scintilla of story-telling nous, Berg takes time to introduce some characters and develops them to the point where we’re just about ready to care about their fate. Once the invaders hit the water, there’s a relentless hour of competently orchestrated mayhem, but Berg, having built his stock of goodwill in the opening act, holds our attention thereafter. I confess I may have even felt short changed when the action abruptly ended. Wanting more wasn’t in the script.

Loud, ridiculous and US Navy propaganda it may be, but Battleship transcends its inauspicious origins to become a dumb actioner with a sense of fun. You could ask for more but you wouldn’t get it.

Tourist Trap

(The Cold Light of Day, Mabrouk El Mechri, US, 2012, 93 mins)

Warning: This review reveals some details of the film’s plot

I’m at a loss to understand why any American travels to Europe at all. It’s such a foreboding place, full of language barriers, murder, missing relatives… From The Vanishing to Frantic to Unknown, it’s long been shown that if you want to lose something; your wife, your identity, your job; the Euro Zone is the place to do it.

The Cold Light of Day forces our attention on Spain and an imperilled traveller in the hulking form of Henry Cavill. He doesn’t exactly show up with a copy of Lonely Planet stowed under his arm, nor does he stop to ask everyone if they speak English, the usual red flag to Euro gangsters, but then he doesn’t have to; his American fam are already there: Brooding Bruce Willis, a younger, weedier, spectacled brother who’s obviously not going to be involved in the action to come and two ornamental women; a wife who looks motherly, later vulnerable and brother’s girlfriend, who gets a character building bikini sunbathing scene on the deck of the family boat.

When Bikini Girlfriend has an accident, thanks to an errant wave and a loose mast, Cavill, being the only family member with the requisite muscle mass required to swim ashore, is promptly dispatched to buy painkillers. When he returns both boat and fam are gone, and so begins a faintly Hitchcockian hunt for the missing brood, in which pensive Paterfamilias Willis returns for just long enough to establish his identity as a CIA agent and the Maguffin’s as a briefcase that everyone will kill for. Job done, he’s murdered, leaving the inexperienced (but psychically well prepared) son to dodge the bullets.

That Cavill doesn’t know anymore than we do works to Day‘s advantage because this makes its ramshackle, sometimes chaotic construction an extension of the leading man’s blindsided understanding of events. Director Mechri doesn’t think we should be any clearer about the line of incident than Cavill. Consequently his zealous editor judiciously subdivides each slice of action.

If there’s an awkward disconnect between some performances and the emotional register of early scenes (formative exchanges between Cavill and Willis look as though their lines have been dubbed onto footage from a different movie) it’s not the end of the world; …Day soon settles down, becoming an occasionally involving, always brusque chase movie that doubles as a whirlwind tour of Madrid.

Minor visual flourishes from Mechri aside, this is mostly routine stuff, (though Cavill’s feminoid is reassuringly not a lover plucked in extremis but something more interesting) begging the question, why did the likes of Willis and Sigourney Weaver sign up? A free holiday in Spain is a tempting answer; this alone, surely, explains the blink-and-you’ve-already-missed-it performance from Colm Meaney as the government agent with two lines. Of course 38 seconds with Meaney is a thing of beauty, and he certainly gilds those fleeting pronouncements (it’s all in the intonation) but was it really worth the great man’s time? I could have played that part.