Mr. P's Film and DVD Review Blog
A personal blog about new cinema films, DVDs and films-on-demand.
Friday 11 October 2024
FILM: Terrifier 3 (dir: Damien Leone, 2023)
Thursday 10 October 2024
VOD: Kill (dir: Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, 2024)
VOD: The Boy And The Heron (dir: Hayao Miyazaki, 2024)
After his mother dies in a dramatic hospital fire opening to this long-gestating movie, young Mahito relocates to the countryside with his industrialist father and his pregnant new wife, where a mystical heron guides the boy on a fantastical spiritual journey. This gentle and contemplative film wanders along at a steady pace, with simple but beautiful animation, the charming and elegiac music score by Joe Hisaishi that contributes much to the feel of the film, and the starry English dub works fine. Like the best of Miyazaki/Ghibli, it offers real imagination on the screen with hints of bigger issues not too far away (war, mortality, family, philosophy and the journey of life), Quirky characters give flavour to the often tranquil moments, from the comedically malevolent heron to the elderly retainers on the country estate. The film is full of story and visual ideas, perhaps a shade too long but a delight nonetheless.
VOD: The Strangers Chapter 1 (dir: Renny Harlin, 2024)
The Strangers perhaps relied more on claustrophobia and cinematic technique rather than a strongly-developed story, and this largely redundant thriller prequel offers more of the same but less effectively, as a young couple on a trip stop to eat in a small backwoods town, develop car trouble and have to stay in a remote woodland AirBnB, only for the familiar masked home invader trio to show up. Cue weirdly-behaving townsfolk, lots of shots of backlit trees at night and Moonlight Sonata, and a lot of this film feels very familiar both generically and touchstones from the original movie. It plods along and is adequately (if unexcitingly) executed, delivering everything you would expect and nothing more, with even the 'shock' mid-credits scene being utterly predictable. With the threat of a 'To Be Continued' screen, as two further entries to make this a new trilogy were filmed alongside this one, the world is hardly likely to be holding its breath for their release.
VOD: Sting (dir: Kiah Roache-Turner, 2024)
With France offering Infested and the Arachnophobia remake on the way, Australian production Sting offers the arrival of a space-spider in a meteor shower during an ice storm which is 'adopted' by a emotionally-isolated girl, but it grows rapidly and terrorises the pets and residents of a New York apartment building. The slow first act sets up the central family's dynamic well if in a somewhat dull manner, but the interest level picks up a little as the evolving spider becomes more voracious and graduates from attacking animals to the humans. Sting is made competently and acted adequately, although the whole film is perhaps too slow-moving for its own good and does nothing really new within its genre confines, right down to the very final shot/reveal.
VOD: Infested (a.k.a. Vermines) (dir: Sebastien Vanicek, 2024)
In this French spider movie, the residents of a brutalist gloomy suburban apartment block face off against a growing invasion of poisonous spiders as they are put into quarantine after young bug-collector Kaleb acquires a desert spider that escapes and multiplies. Unusually for the genre, the film has a gritty urban setting and a mostly young adult cast, led by a committed performance from Theo Christine. The very active use of camera works well in some of the action scenes, whilst in others it merely looks jumbled and not aided by streams of dull dialogue and a persistently dark mise-en-scene, especially in the final act that resorts to a lot of shouting in near-darkness. There is a genuine attempt to move away from typical Hollywood style in order to show how supposedly ordinary people would react in this situation, with its limited effects work used sparingly but purposefully and effectively. The film is moderately interesting if underlit and occasionally over-melodramatic take on the bug/invasion movie.