Past Misdeeds: U.F.O. (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Warning: if you're looking for a "Van Damme movie" with this one, you'll be horribly disappointed. This is rather a movie in which Van Damme's daughter plays a lead role and Dad pops in for a cameo, as any responsible father would.

British friends Michael (Sean Brosnan), Robin (Simon Phillips), Dana (Maya Grant), Vincent (Jazz Lintott), and American Carrie (Jean-Claude Van Damme's daughter Bianca Bree), whom Michael just picked up, probably expected their night out on the town to end with mere hangovers the next day. They get their hangovers all right, but the following morning also finds the area they're living in, and who knows how much of the UK, without electricity, without working phones, and without cellphone coverage. There's also a curious encounter with a ranting tramp (Sean Pertwee in another of the film's cameos) and his spirited yet vague ravings about the end of days. It's more than enough to put everyone on edge, yet on the other hand, how bad can things actually be?

The next day, things become even more curious when all clocks stop and a giant UFO begins hovering in the distance. There are no aliens in sight, no directs attacks, no nothing. Still, our protagonists decide that it's time to stock up on supplies and hole up in their house until they find something better to do. From here on out, everything fastly turns bad for everyone involved: people in movies, it turns out, don't need to be attacked directly to start turning on each other very quickly in a situation like this, and soon, our protagonists find themselves confronted with the vagaries of looting, violent assholes, their own violent natures, and a lot of quotidian terror.

And that's before it turns out there are alien agents around who have taken human form, and the military attacks the alien ship. In between, there's also time for JCVD to pop in, talk into the camera as is late period Van Damme's wont, have one actually pretty awesome action scene, and die.

Given that U.F.O.'s director and writer Dominic Burns was responsible for the pretty damn bad Airborne, I did not go into the film with much optimism. Lowered expectations can lead to positive surprises, but I'm not sure U.F.O. actually needed these lowered expectations to make a positive impression.

Early on U.F.O. is a rather frustrating watch: Burns introduces his main characters in what may be the most annoying club scene I've had to witness in a movie in years, making them look like the kind of total twats you really, really do not want to spend the next ninety minutes with, shakes his camera like an epileptic or a found footage movie, rolls and shimmies and waves his camera around for no particular reason, also likes to tilt the camera sideways with no rhyme or reason, and then adds utterly superfluous short flash-forwards in case there's be anyone left in the audience not already cursing the director after fifteen minutes of movie.

Even later, Burns doesn't let go completely of these directorial tics whose presence I find as puzzling as I find them annoying, but he does calm down a bit and keeps the shaking to the more dramatic and action scenes (though the choreography of the latter really suggests it would have been quite okay to film them so we can actually see what's going on), and leaves off the flash forwards (here, have a random shot of Jean-Claude staring into the camera) completely after half of the film is through.

By that point, a few other things about U.F.O. have become better and clearer too. The badly introduced characters turn out to be a bit more complex and interesting than expected, feeling - though they are based on clear character types - more real and fleshed out than the clichés that often fill our apocalyptic SF/horror films. This even leads to some actual surprises later on: U.F.O. turns out not to be a horror movie where you can tell after ten minutes who will live, who will die, and who will croak first. And that's not something I can say about many low or high budget horror and SF movies.

Burns's script is also surprisingly interesting, with a basic survival plot that keeps completely inside genre rules and tropes but - once the film gets going - does quite a few clever things with them and uses the film's clearly limited resources with creativity and imagination, building an invasion (or is it?) scenario that feels more plausible than its actual silliness would suggest. Even the Van Damme cameo is used with dignity and style (in this the film is the antithesis to his appearance in The Expendables 2), giving the man opportunity to do that glowering into the camera thing he has learned to do so well over the years and have a short but sweet fight. Van Damme's appearance even feels like an actual part of the movie and not something that was shoe-horned in because (one suspects) casting Bree (who is cute and an okay-ish actress here) also provided half a day of JCVD.


When Burns isn't trying to burn the audience's eyeballs out with the shaking and the tilting, he has some rather fine directorial moments. The scene with Dana trapped inside the darkened house with something that may or may not be in there with her is particularly suspenseful and tight, even. In fact, it's at that point (or perhaps two or three scenes earlier) when U.F.O. turns from "neat with moments of horrible direction" into a really likeable low budget movie that's rather exciting, a bit clever, and absolutely worth it to get through the first thirty or forty minutes.

On Exploder Button: Universal Van Damme: U.F.O. (2012)

Sometimes, it pays off to be patient with movies. Case in point is this low budget Van-Damme-cameo epic about an alien invasion that starts off incredibly annoying but later turns into a seriously entertaining bit of budget SF/horror/action cinema as our ancestors liked 'em.

I provide more details over at Exploder Button, where Van Damme will stare into your very soul!

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,sf,horror,dominic burns,bianca bree,sean brosnan,simon phillips,maya grant,sean pertwee,jean-claude van damme

In short: Airborne (2012)

Flight control boss Malcolm (Mark Hamill) is just beginning the last shift before his retirement, and we all know what this means in a film so clichéd the first three sentences we hear in it are of the "sometimes bad things happen to good people" type: it'll at least be the worst shift ever.

And here things begin so well for him, with bad weather reducing the whole night's flight plan to a single flight. Alas, that flight is transporting trouble in form of an ancient Chinese vase containing a god of death, various violent psychopaths, a fake-out terrorist, and more stupidity than anybody could have thought possible. On land, Mal will soon enough make the acquaintance of two particularly badly acted SIS agents, and later suffer under the worst cover-up attempt ever (I have the suspicion letting the whole night shift of a flight control centre disappear might not work, dear THEY).

Oh dear, this is really not very good. I do appreciate the puppy-like excitement with which Airborne attempts to squeeze every movie cliché you might possibly conceive of into one airplane and a flight control station, but it becomes clear very fast that the film is categorically averse to doing anything of interest with its clichés. This is the kind of film were even the twists on a clichéd situation themselves are again clichés, possibly in the hope that all the been there, done that, bought no t-shirt gubbins will cancel each other out or perhaps that it'll reach a critical mass which will create a clichésplosion that'll awaken the Great Old Ones. Obviously, said twists are also so numerous and obvious I could not help but groan in annoyance when encountering them.

If you're now hoping to hear something positive to make up for the pain, I'll have to disappoint you; there's just nothing here beyond an incessant barrage of clichés without a sense of fun or one of irony. And even though Airborne is plenty dumb, it's never dumb enough to be funny.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,horror,dominic burns