In short: Wilderness (2006)

Following a suicide in their dorm caused by quite a bit of brutal bullying, a group (among them characters played by Toby Kebbell and Stephen Wight) of juvenile delinquents from an institution badly taking care of violent offenders is sent to an isolated island to learn whatever it is the powers that be believe they can learn there. Since the boys’ only accompaniment is the same guard who already did sod all of use inside (Sean Pertwee), one might be sceptical about the sense of the whole affair. The situation quickly turns out to be even less well thought through than believed, for another institution, this time one for girls, has sent a couple of their inmates (Lenora Crichlow and Karly Greene) and a rather more competent seeming guard (Alex Reid) for a similar outing. Which might lead to the sort of mixer nobody wants.

However, it turns out the two groups have a rather more pressing problem than their own dysfunctionalities and general societal incompetence. A murderous gentleman in a ghillie suit and his attack dogs haunt the island, and he seems to believe there’s hunting season for young offenders and their guards. And because this is a grim and gritty British movie, there’s little hope of the kids coming together instead of apart under pressure.

As the plot should make clear, M.J. Bassett’s Wilderness (last seen here when I talked about Solomon Kane, I believe) is a rather grim little movie whose characterisation ethos seems mostly grounded in ideas coming from British social realism. So there’s a certain hopeless, grimy greyness to emotions and expressions. Nearly every character here is their worst self practically all of the time, which does after a while get a bit tiresome in much the same way a film relentlessly optimistic about human nature can get. To be fair to Bassett, and Dario Poloni’s script, they do take care that character behaviour does make sense and stays coherent – apart from the obvious lead character, the kids do just always make the worst decision for themselves or others they could. It’s not unbelievable given the situation and the lives the characters come from, mind you, just a bit monotonous.

On the other hand, this unrelenting grimness does provide the film with ample opportunity to show kids and Pertwees being killed in pretty gory and gruesome ways. There’s a willingness to go there (where “there” for example means showing Sean Pertwee getting ripped apart by dogs) that’s hard not to admire, an abrasiveness I didn’t necessarily like or love but respect quite a bit. There is something to be said about a film being consistent even when it is the sort of consistency that’s going to make it difficult to market to an audience.

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

Ultramarines (2010)

Grim future. Only war. Etc. and so on. An Imperial shrine world is sending an automated distress call; all further contact with the full company of space marines stationed there to protect a holy relic is lost.

As this is the Warhammer 40K universe whose military organization is utterly atrocious whenever a plot demands it, there's not much of a military force close-by to answer the distress signal weeks later. Only a rookie squad (with an experienced captain and a war-weary apothecary) of Ultramarines is near enough to be of any assistance. After holding some "WE ARE SPACE MARINES! RWOAR!" speeches, of course.

When the group lands on the planet, they soon enough find traces of a massacre committed by chaos forces. The logical course of action here is obviously for the twelve marines to somehow try and reach the location of the distress beacon, in the hope that twelve marines will survive what just slaughtered a hundred of their brethren. For the Emperor, etc. I'm sure it'll end with a perfectly low body count and without anyone encountering a very stupid plan to corrupt the whole Ultramarines chapter.

When I first heard of Ultramarines, the first official Warhammer 40,0000 movie, I wasn't exactly hopeful about it, especially seeing that it's fully computer-animated, a type of animation that only promises catastrophe when put in the hands of a company like Games Workshop that can be pretty sure fans will lap up everything it puts out regardless of quality. A bit of hope developed with the information that Ultramarines would at least be written by Dan Abnett, whose work-for-hire novels in the franchise often are real highpoints of their special little niche.

And indeed, apart from the hideously contrived set-up, and the rather stupid evil plan (which is to say, the whole of the film's plot) Abnett's script is the best part of the movie. Don't take that as high praise, though. Abnett's writing here is quite unexciting and completely unoriginal, front-loaded with every "For the Emperor!" style phrase the Warhammer universe provides, and contains nothing of the writer's trademark ambiguity. At least it's vaguely competent and constructed with professional knowledge of dramatic beats.

The voice acting is pretty alright, too, although I'm not sure if the movie wouldn't have fared better cast with experienced - yet still cheaper - voice actors instead of people like Terence Stamp, John Hurt and Sean Pertwee, whose acting chops just aren't needed for what's in the script (nothing). Though I have to admit it's pretty funny to hear Hurt say the "grim future" wall of text.

The producers could have used the money saved on the stars and put it into the place where it's desperately needed - the animation. As it stands, Ultramarines' animation is a complete embarrassment, falling far behind even the standards set by the CGI cut-scenes of the first Dawn of War videogame (made in 2004, ages ago in this area). I really hope you like to watch jerkily animated characters with putty faces from the uncanny valley jumping (is there grasshopper DNA in Space Marines, by any chance?) and moonwalking through grey and brown low-detail backgrounds, because that's all Ultramarines' animation department is prepared to deliver. On the design side, the whole affair reeks of cheapskating too - everything that isn't a space marine looks as if it were scrapped together in just about five minutes by a trainee. All in all, the animation doesn't look like an actual finished movie should look, but rather like an early draft for one.

Martyn Pick's direction fits this cheap and/or lazy approach perfectly. There's no sense of visual imagination, nothing that doesn't look like mere performance of a contractual obligation on screen. Of course, given how shoddy the animation itself is, I'm not sure what even the best of directors could have made out of it. This is after all a film so cost-conscious that most of its action sequences take place in the dark or during sandstorms so that there's no need for detailed backgrounds in them. Not that there are many detailed backgrounds outside of the action scenes, either. Well, at least there are lots of shots of bullet casings falling in slow-motion.

And why should there be any actual creative effort put into the movie, as long as there's a big "Warhammer 40,000" on the DVD cover? Surely, fans don't deserve quality.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,animation,warhammer,sf,action,john hurt,sean pertwee,terence stamp,reviews