Film Review - Zombieland: Double Tap (15)

When you love something, you shoot it in the face... so it doesn't become a flesh-eating monster.

2009's Zombieland was a Halloween-y delight - a bloody and hilarious sugar-rush of comedy horror featuring an all-star quartet. Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin drove the slick 90 minute juggernaut with their bickering banter, while the movie also boasted a memorable 'as himself' cameo by a certified comedy legend. If it didn't scale the giddy heights of greatness achieved by Brit rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead, it's still a solidly rewatchable 8/10. One decade later and the original gang has finally been reunited for a deeper foray into the Zombie Apocalypse. And if the results are mixed, the movie still lands on the side of 'worth the wait'.

Zombieland ended with Columbus (Eisenberg) rescuing his beloved Wichita (Stone) and her sister Little Rock (Breslin) from a marauding hoard of undead at an amusement park with more than a little help from his reluctant redneck buddy Tallahassee (Harrelson). Having survived the mayhem, they finally acknowledged each other as surrogate family and drove off into the post-Apocalyptic night together. Years later they're an elite zombie-fighting foursome, who've made a home for themselves in some styling all-American accommodation. I mean - think big here. Tensions, however, are rising within the group. The now teenage Little Rock finds Tallahassee an overbearing father-figure, while Wichita's commitment issues with Columbus are about to come to a head. It culminates in the younger sister's running off in the company of a California hippy-type (much to Tallahassee's comic chagrin), with the other members of her dysfunctional pseudo-fam in pursuit, exchanging sarcastic zingers all the way.

The chief joy in Zombieland: Double Tap (the post-colon part of the title stems from one of Columbus's key rules for survival) is simply hanging out with the gang again. It presumably took years to get the big four on the same set at the same time, but they switch on their old chemistry with apparent ease. Harrelson has the same irascible swagger as before and his exchanges with Eisenberg have lost none of their needle. Stone meanwhile demonstrably loves stepping back into Wichita's kick-ass boots and has advanced to a doctorate in snark during the interim. There are welcome new additions too. Little Rock's road trip with her lame counter-culture boyfriend Berkeley (Avan Jogia) are consistently amusing. Rosario Dawson's Nevada is the perfect rootin' tootin country-girl foil for Harrelson. And Zoey Deutsch steals a bunch of comedy moments as Wichita's polar opposite - an amiable pink-clad airhead called Madison.

The action kicks in with the same fourth-wall-breaking, gleefully violent comic chutzpah as last time and the early scenes are a particularly rich source of funny moments, mining new veins of humour. Production values are second to none throughout, with the world-gone-to-crap set design particularly vivid in the final act. It's then that we get introduced to hippie eutopia Babylon, a truly original zom-genre location, which provides an action climax big enough to surpass the original movie's 'Pacific Playground' undead face-off.

But there are deficiencies too - significant ones, the chief among them being the lack of a truly coherent narrative. While the first film's storyline was similarly loose, it didn't awfully matter, as the bonding of the main four knitted everything satisfyingly together. This time something tighter is required. There's the whole 'journey to Babylon' rescue plot, but the movie's mid-section goes meandering, without contributing anything of significance to the whole. A subplot involving the arrival of two other survivors isn't as funny as it's trying to be, and only underscores the film's other occasional flaw - a rehashing of 2009 references way too laboured to raise a smile.

All of that's a pity, because I was game to enjoy this sequel and overall I did; much like IT: Chapter Two it'll still nestle on my shelf next to its predecessor and get taken out, warts and all, for the occasional spin. Zombieland: Double Tap justifies itself as a sequel. The Four, with their flip cynicism and suppressed affection for each other, were too much fun not to be revisited and some closure has finally been given to their end-of-the-world travails. As a second slice of zombie carnage played for character-based laughs, it ultimately proves welcome.

Gut Reaction: First act - big laughs. Second act - sticking with it in hope. Final act - thankfully brought my smile back.

Memorable Moment: Wichita, meet Madison. Awkward...

Ed's Verdict: 6.5/10. I can't say it's great, because the flaws struck me too hard. But it has a clutch of lovely moments and does right by the characters we first loved ten years ago. And that, thankfully, proves enough. 

Filmic Frighteners 2019 - The Shining (15)

Redrum. Redrum. REDRUM.

The Gist: Jack Nicholson is Jack Torrence - a struggling writer, who takes a job as winter caretaker in the Rocky Mountain-ensconced Overlook Hotel. To this rambling art-deco mansion he brings his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son Danny, intent on using Colorado's long cold-season to pen a literary blockbuster. But the Overlook has a dark and bloody history, one that seems literally to haunt its rooms and corridors. Little Danny can see it all too, with the extra-sensory perception he has come to know as 'the shining'. But as the snow storms hit and communication with the outside world is cut off, he and his mother can do nothing to prevent the Overlook's evil twisting his father's mind to insanity and violence.

The Juice: The Shining is widely regarded as a horror classic and a (dare I say) shining example of director Stanley Kubrick's genius. Who am I to question that? Well I'm Ed of Ed's Filmic Forays, so allow me to do so, just a little. Look - where visuals and soundscape are concerned, there's a rich perfection to this film that begins with the vast hotel and leads into the horrific fates befalling the central characters. Moments like Danny being tracked at ground level around the Overlook as he pedals frantically on his tricycle, Wendy discovering what her husband has really been writing and Jack chopping his way through anything that gets between him and his prey are deservedly iconic. Kubrick (as ever) knows the story he wants to tell and is supremely well-equipped to tell it. But it's the story itself I find problematic, as did the writer of the source novel - Stephen King. 

I'm fine with many of the liberties taken in adaptation. The maze that replaces King's creepy topiary animals in the hotel grounds works in well with the place's labyrinthine interiors as a metaphor for what is happening to the Torrence family. The relative lack of exposition regarding the hotel's history gives an eerily impressionistic feel when ghosts appear in the bar and the bathrooms. I'm even down with the movie's deep-freeze ending as replacement to the novelist's hot and literally explosive one. But the central character of Jack is all wrong. Nicholson's memorably intense performance as the demented writer/caretaker is undeniably entertaining, and once seen never forgotten. But it also lacks nuance. Frankly he's too crazy too soon, with no sense - however flawed - of a loving husband and father going off the rails. Hence when he descends into madness there's no real surprise, or horror, or tragedy. Basically there's no character arc. As for Shelley Duvall, she plays Wendy's terror memorably (not least due to that floppy arm thing she keeps doing), but it would mean so much more if we'd felt a hint of some loving connection in the first place. No?

The Judgement: 7.5/10. The Shining looks and sounds magnificent and is so replete with stick-in-your-brain images that I have to score it high. But not top-storey high. While young actor Danny Lloyd is terrific as his knowing and increasingly traumatised namesake, the overall Torrence family dynamic is underdeveloped. The film-making technique of this much-lauded horror is unimpeachable. But emotionally the whole thing strikes me as hollow.

Personal Fear Factor: Jack's nutzoid schtick makes me laugh and there's an undeniable chill in his terrorising of poor Wendy in the film's latter stages. But it's Danny's psychologically scarring encounters with the Overlook's ghosts that really hit home.

Filmic Frighteners 2019 - The Conjuring 2 (15)

They're calling it 'England's Amityville'.

The Gist: Demon-detectors/partners in exorcism Ed and Lorraine Warren are back (played once again by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), this time to investigate an apparent haunting in London's borough of Enfield. Janet, the younger daughter of the Hodgson family, has been foolish enough to go messing around with a ouiji board, whereupon bizarre happenings commence to terrify her and the rest of her family. When local TV takes an interest, the Catholic church is alerted and the Warrens fly in from the States on their behalf to see if something truly devilish is going on. They bring with them their usual healthy skepticism, but something truly scary is afoot (afloat?) and this time around it may be Ed Warren himself who has most to fear from the malevolent entity at work.

The Juice: Horror maestro James Wan is back at the helm of this 2016 sequel to his original hit (click here for review), and uses his sure hand to wring new scares and suspense from the box of hackneyed possession-movie tricks. The change of location from 2013's rural American farmhouse works well, although the 'Gor Blimey' scene-setting dialogue is laid on a bit thick and it's genuinely odd how a humble semi-detached Enfield property has cavernous interiors, like it's some kind of Tardis. Still, the latter gives Wan's camera lots of space for tracking and panning through darkness, turning this ordinary dwelling into a enjoyably Gothic spook-house. There's the same slow-burn as last time, with a spinning zoetrope toy, a macabre use of nursery rhyme and a spectral nun (yes, that'd be the nun who later shows up in The Nun) to crank up the fear levels. The Hodgsons are a convincing and warm-hearted family unit with Madison Wolfe a stand-out as the vulnerable (and possessed) Janet. But the heart of the movie is once again Wilson and Farmiga as the thoroughly grounded and compassionate ghost-busting power-couple heroes. Oh, and talented Brit character actor Simon McBurney is great as documentarian Maurice Grosse. Worth a mention.

(That's not him. That's Madison Wolfe being scary.)

The Judgement: 7/10. While more outlandishly daft than first time around, this is still a superior fright-fest due to Wan's deft direction, the authenticity of the performances and a reliance throughout on practical effects over CGI. (When it does resort to computerised images, they're genuinely creepy too.) It's stylish, nicely paced and packs a couple of simple but bravura sequences involving the Warrens' supernatural experiences. Ideal shuddery, jumpy Halloween viewing.

Personal Fear Factor: The Conjuring movies don't so much scare as entertain me. Having said that, this one did deliver one or two delicious chills along the way.

Film Review - Judy (12A)

I just want what everybody wants. I seem to have a harder time getting it.

For me, as with most of my UK generation, Judy Garland meant a pigtailed girl in a pinafore, who spun over the rainbow in the family homestead on our TVs every Christmas Day. Judy references 1939 technicolour classic The Wizard of Oz right at the start, but deals much more with the grown woman who felt - with some justification - that she would never fly over that rainbow. Rupert Goold's new biopic is very much a tragedy, one that resonates due to an appropriately starry turn from Renee Zellweger.

In the late 1960s Garland is long past her heyday and her lucrative film career. She's trawling cabaret venues with her two younger children in tow, popping uppers and downers and trying to keep all three of them with a roof over their heads. With the threat of losing custody of the kids hanging over her, she accepts her agent's offer of a season in London's Talk of the Town night-club. But the demons that have plagued her since her child-star days follow her across the pond - compromising but never quite extinguishing her genius.

The film to which Judy is most strikingly comparable is Stan and Ollie, both dealing as they do with great performers living off former glories and struggling to make sense of their lives in a more mundane context than they were once used to. But where the Laurel and Hardy biopic was bittersweet, this true story is marinaded in pure sadness. The focus is on Garland's fading star, with her various movie triumphs alluded to throughout - both in the Oz production flashbacks where we see the malign influences that created such a vulnerable adult (mogul Louis B. Meyer does not come out of this well), and in the stage re-enactments of songs from Meet Me In St Louis or A Star is Born. It makes for a more cohesive and interesting portrait than the traditional 'greatest hits' biopic, in that we get a sense of an entire life, scars and all, through the prism of that life's final act.

Such a film stands or falls with the quality of its central performance and Zellweger has earned all the award nominations that will surely be rained upon her next year. It's not that she's totally lost in the role - anyone familiar with Bridget Jones will recognise certain Zellweger facial mannerisms creeping through - but the emotion runs deep and the mix of humour, fragility and star quality is quite intoxicating. It's the stage performances where she really comes into her own, however. Having already proved her vocal talents in Chicago, here she simply stuns, capturing how Garland transcended the misery of her life in those moments of inspired theatricality and pure talent. It's in these sequences that the movie's often gloomy colour palette transforms into the warmth and vibrancy of the Hollywood era that made the girl from Grand Rapids, Minnesota a star.

There are other glimpses of warmth here - including some with Garland's London PA Rosalyn (Wild Rose's Jessie Buckley) and her band leader (Royce Pierreson), plus one notable, if apocryphal sequence involving two of the entertainer's dedicated British fans. Director Goold brings a touch of class from his Hollow Crown Shakespearian TV dramas and on a technical level it's a slick, compelling experience. But for all that, and for the singer's moments of on-stage heroism, it's an unflinching and unsentimental portrait of showbiz damage and a life wrung out by the Studio System. Not awfully feelgood - but at least the songs zing your heart strings. And they're belted out the way Judy would have wanted.

Gut Reaction: The musical numbers are uplifting, the moments of friendship touching. And the rest rips your goddamn heart out.

Memorable Moment: Judy's unlikely new gay BFFs.

Ed's Verdict: 7.5/10. Zellweger embraces the triumph and tragedy of Judy Garland's life in a performance that's all her own. A beautiful but bleak portrait of fame and the terrible price with which it sometimes comes.

Filmic Frighteners 2019 - It Comes At Night (15)

If you're lying to me, I will kill you. No doubt about it.

The Gist: In a post-apocalyptic wilderness a teenager named Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) lives with his parents Paul and Sarah (Joel Edgerton and Carmen Ejogo), as they train him up in the unforgiving rules of survival. Plague is the enemy, along with any other humans - who might carry it, or simply have predatory intentions. Or both. When Will (Christopher Abbott) trespasses on their territory, dad Paul's most defensive instincts are provoked. Tentatively he and his wife agree to welcome the newcomer and his family. But the group's fledgling bonds of friendship threaten to be torn apart by fear and mistrust. Particularly when night falls...

The Juice: Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults, It Comes At Night is a dark labour of love, and a deeply human story (rather than the generic monster movie suggested by the movie's original trailer). It's foremost a study in paranoia, where the scariest things to actually come at night stem from within. The anonymous woodlands are a dank, unfriendly character in their own right, with the main family's house doing little either to warm you up. Natural lighting is used throughout and the result is bone-chilling like a northern hemisphere November. Shults (similar to fellow A24 director Ari Aster) rejects jump-scares in favour of the steady accumulation of menace - slow zooms and tracking shots that capitalise on the half-lit locations and close-ups that linger on the characters' taut faces. Of the tight-knit and talented ensemble, Edgerton is a stand-out, fully inhabiting his intense and uncompromising dad. Harrison Jnr meanwhile serves as a remarkable barometer of building tension and Riley Keough - as the mother of the stranger family - will take your breath in one riviting later scene.

The Judgement: 7.5/10. It Comes At Night isn't the end-of-the-world zombie flick you might expect - just possibly it's something even more unsettling. A dark, existential mood piece, it simmers with mistrust, grief and frustrated need, with each plot twist tightening the emotional rack. I love independent horror for giving us neatly crafted and unsettling character pieces like this.

Personal Fear Factor: It didn't have my pulse racing or my fingers clawing at the sofa cushions, but it did weigh pretty heavily on my soul. And the dream sequences are just plain freaky. 

Film Review - Joker (15)

I used to think my life was a tragedy...

News that director Todd Phillips was delivering a new take on DC Comics' most notorious super-villain prompted questions as to the guy's wisdom. A decade has passed since Heath Ledger's performance in the role, but the impression he made as Gotham's most wanted is indelible. Why go there again, less than a cinematic generation down the line? Any reservations, however, have been wiped away by a radical reworking of the story and one stunning reinterpretation of the character. 

Joaquin Phoenix is Arthur Fleck - a failing professional clown and would-be stand-up comedian in early 1980s Gotham City. Living with his ailing mother (Six Feet Under's Frances Conroy), he's an isolated man with a medical condition that causes him to laugh compulsively, and not necessarily when anything humorous is going on around him. His boss is worse than unsympathetic, he's a target in his job for street gangs and the therapy he so desperately needs is in danger of being withdrawn. Meanwhile around him the city is seething with social unrest, garbage mounting up as strike action bites. Then one freak event changes Arthur's life - and that of Gotham itself - forever. This unlikliest of characters, one dislocated from the rest of society, could turn out to be the city's destiny.

Director Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver (8 Mile, The Fighter) make two choices that provide Joker with its own life and dark heart. First is the decision to focus on the villain origin story; what could have felt empty due to the absence of a caped nemesis, turns out to be an intricate and fascinating character study, plotting one lost soul's drift into deranged criminality beat by beat. Expect none of The Dark Knight's blockbuster set-pieces. This is something much more intimate, while no less compelling.

The other key choice is to mirror the early films of Martin Scorsese, namely Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. The similarities would be apparent even if the makers hadn't openly name-checked their inspirations. Joker is in effect a merging of those two Robert De Niro-centric movies, with both stories reimagined in terms of the super-villain genesis tale. Gotham, while sporting some classic loactions from the comics, is as much New York circa early-80s, while De Niro himself features splendidly as Murray Franklin, an old-school talk-show host reminiscent of the one played by Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy. Phillips' direction substitutes grit for slickness and graininess for gloss, and even though Arthur's world sometimes bursts into clownish primary colour, the overall tone is dark. Like - really dark, a feeling deepened by Hildur (Chernobyl) Guonadottir's dread-summoning score.

Crucial to this tale is Phoenix's Arthur. It's an utterly immersive performance that only begins with the actor's emaciated frame (he gets shockingly skinny for the role, like he got uncomfortably heavy-set in You Were Never Really Here). The pre-Joker Fleck is a broken and abused creation, his humanity gradually being twisted into something self-deluding and dangerous by a society that doesn't give a damn about him. It's a mesmerisingly nuanced performance - heartbreaking and unsettling, played out in obsessive physical detail and full of dark humour, the kind where the laughter dies in your throat as the character's psyche fragments before your eyes. Your response to Arthur's progression into Joker-dom (if it's anything like mine) will be... complicated. You'll want poor Arthur to have his moment - but not necessarily the kind that transpires.

Joker is a savage, cynical and darkly comical movie, which like the aforementioned Scorsese titles observes a wince-inducing anti-hero in a world that courts pychosis and sociopathy. Fears that the film might incite violence miss the point, as do comments that it lacks the depth of its two real-world movie antecedants. Arthur's tragic story delves into mental illness and the consequences when its sufferers are marginalised and ignored. It also points out what we've already been learning - that the disenfranchised in a greedy society will look to anyone, no matter how deranged, when they feel they're running out of options. Now that's not bad from the director who brought you all three movies in the Hangover trilogy. Put on an impressed face - if not a happy one.

Gut Reaction: Disturbed, excruciatingly entertained and weirdly exhilerated at one point. Plus awed throughout by Phoenix's genius, awards-baiting performance.

Memorable Moment: Slow-mo steps-descent - he's got the moves like Joker.

Ed's Verdict: 9/10. Drawing as much on classic urban drama as comic book tropes, Joker is a unique one-off - a disquieting portrait of one man's slow evolution into psychopathic insanity. It just so happens that the psychopath in question is a clown.

Film Review - Ready or Not (18)

I'm giving you an out. Right now.

There's an honesty in the above poster for Ready or Not. What you see is pretty much what you can expect to get - a fun, lurid slice of American Gothic. Following last week's Ad Astra, a film with pretentions of greatness that proved a crushing bore (at least to me), it's refreshing to watch a pacy little comedy-horror with a 90-minute running time and a raucous sense of fun. Not perfect by any means, but a nicely nasty slice of Friday night entertainment

Samara Weaving stars as the orphaned Grace, a girl on the verge of marrying into the old-money Le Domas family. Her new in-laws have made their money from games (of the Monopoly variety) and are steeped in arcane gaming mythology within their grand country pile. What new husband Alex (Mark O'Brien) has failed to explain to Grace is the reason for his long-term familial estrangement - a sinister ritual undergone by any new addition to the Le Domas clan. At midnight on the wedding night she must draw a card to select a game in which they will all take part. Most are innocent, one is not. 'Hide and seek' as played by this family has lethal consequences - and soon the bride is running, hiding and then running even faster for her life.

Made by an actor/cinematographer duo (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) steeped in horror cinema, Ready or Not is made with a shlocky sense of glee. This film is much more committed to making its audience laugh than shiver, nor does it hang around long before diving into the action. There's the wedding - a sweet couple surrounded by caustic comment and some memorably unnerving glares - after which Grace is swiftly immersed in the arcane madness of life (plus a lot of death) with her new relatives. The Le Domas mansion has a convincingly creepy grandeur and the array of weapons selected by the game's 'seekers' will in itself raise smiles. This story gets very bloody very fast, but it's played successfully for laughs with one moment of ineptitude raising the biggest audience roar of the night (in my screening at any rate).

Weaving (niece of The Matrix's Hugo) puts in a 'where the hell did she come from?' performance as the beleaguered bride, taking Samara on a gritty and sometimes hilarious ride. Endearingly funny newlywed turns into bad-ass survivor via some truly gruelling twists. It's a comedy turn on a par with Jessica Rothe's in Happy Death Day and the single best reason to view the movie. The extended Le Domas household compliments her well, with Henry Czerny more unlikeable than ever as the austere paterfamilias and Andie McDowell embracing the crazy as mom. It's nice to see The O.C.'s Adam Brody in the thick of it too as Grace's drunkenly cynical brother-in-law Daniel.

Ready or Not is no classic. However many darkly winning moments are in there, the script simply isn't sharp enough and the motivations behind the Le Domas homicidal tradition will test the most well-sprung suspension of disbelief. Add to that a directorial inexperience that flubs a few of the crucial horror moments. Still it looks good, is played at all points with macabre enthusiasm and follows its grisly premise through to a deliriously daft climax. As blood-spattered brides go, Grace gives Uma Thurman's Kill Bill heroine some decent competition. You'll be rooting for her to make it through her eye-opening, deeply unromantic wedding night.

Gut Reaction: Not a hint of the scares, but a few moments of painful horror cringe and some serious guffaws of laughter. Yes - that's guffaws.

Memorable Moment: A lesson in crossbow safety.

Ed's Verdict: 6.5/10. If ever a film knew what it's trying to be, it's this one. A brief weekend blast of horror hysteria - memorably funny with a storming lead performance. There goes the bride.