GFF 2015 Review - 88 (2014)

Genre:
Thriller
Screened:
2015 Glasgow Film Festival
Film 4 Frightfest Glasgow
Rating: 18
Director:
April Mullen
Cast:
Katharine Isabelle, Christopher Lloyd, Tim Doiron, Michael Ironside
A young woman (Katharine Isabelle) wakes up in a diner with no idea who or where she is and after finding a gun in her backpack, she staggers from hint to hint in order to track down and kill the man who killed her lover. It’s a great idea and it looks fresh too, but April Mullen’s 88 is a complicated feature.

Unlike Stuart Simpson’s garage femsploitation trip Monstro!, 88 doesn’t give itself fully to silly ideas and pulpy lineage. Mullen appears wary of what outright camp can do to audience involvement in a solid story, but isn’t sure how far to push it. The story starts off pretty perfectly, nuanced and intriguing, Isabelle props the film up on her startlingly honest performance before switching to badass and hooking us in for a good time. Only, as the film starts to bend over backwards to accommodate its convoluted path, it becomes increasingly confusing.

88 isn’t interested in telling us its story in a linear way, but it’s also not that bothered about keeping us involved in the intricacies of its plot. Instead we’re emotionally hijacked by a superficial relationship and quietly asked to care for a typically handsome and dull love. Think of 88 as Romeo and Juliet meets Momento on the highway of bad taste. The fetishisation of milk, Isabelle’s often insane dialogue, and that red dress aren’t problems until the film starts taking itself too seriously. There’s fun to be had but some of the really heart-breaking scenes with Isabelle are boisterously undermined by how blasé and ridiculous the script demands her to be. Mullen herself pops up as an eccentric arms dealer, but it comes across as far too try-hard. When the film wastes time on dumb details, but can’t put together a convincing shoot-out, there needs to be a readdress of focus.

Isabelle grabs our attention and wrestles it into a firm headlock, her slinky femme fatale pissing a path through supermarkets, shooting her way through bowling alleys, and generally giving us more bang for our buck than we could ever have asked for. Christopher Lloyd seems somewhat out of place as possessive pimp Cyrus, never going for hammy, instead meeting Isabelle halfway for oddly touching character drama. 88 scribe Tim Doiron pops up as sidekick Ty but his zany dialogue and irritating performance are a surplus woe, adding unrequired childishness to an already silly film. Michael Ironside appears up for a fantastic wee turn as a sympathetic cop and one can’t help but feel his storyline, and potential further involvement, could have been more interesting than the chosen path.

88 has frankly mad use of flashback that won’t be for everyone, but at its heart there’s a fun tale of revenge and memory loss fronted by an impressive scream queen. There’s something being held back in the punch, something that could have made things a little more solid, but Mullen’s road movie is still a blast.

★★★
Scott Clark

DVD Review - Torment (2014)

Genre:
Horror
Distributor:
Altitude Film Distribution
Release Date:
26th January 2015 (UK DVD)
Rating: 18
Director:
Jordan Barker
Katharine Isabelle, Robin Dunne, Peter DaCunha, Stephen McHattie, Noah Danby
Buy:
Torment [DVD]

Jordan Barker’s Torment probably wont be as tormenting as you’d like it to be, but its still worth a look if you’re a fan of home invasion narratives. Newly weds Sarah and Cory Morgan (Katharine Isabelle and Robin Dunne) travel to their country home to put the past behind them and start a new family, with them is Cory’s 7 year old son Liam who is still dealing with his mother’s death the year before. When the family arrive, evidence of squatters begins a night of violence and abduction.

Torment borrows a lot of narrative techniques from some of the best horror films of the past decade, (The Strangers, Sinister) but never really forms its own world or characters. A middling set of stakes and too few spooks keep the film from really demanding our attention or imposing some kind of memorable experience. It doesn’t help that Adam Wingard’s You’re Next has essentially given the home invasion sub-genre a kind of spring clean, showing how dynamic, enjoyable, and terrifying a film can be when properly balanced. Comparisons are unfortunately against Torment, which is a shame because there are some great elements here.

                Starting with the obvious, Liam’s teddy bears, once decapitated, produce some startlingly eerie old-school masks which never quite lose their creepiness. Which is important because once Mr Mouse starts talking any terror, you might have felt, will be drained away via poor dialogue drawled in a strange Bane impression. Silence, perhaps, would have been golden. Similarly the sound tracking reaches a crescendo far too soon in the film’s prologue, undermining the tension and leaving the viewer a bit bewildered in the face of the opening credits. Thankfully the music finds its footing later on, helping keep the pace up in the more action-based second half of the film, and proving especially great in a gruelling suffocation sequence.

Isabelle looks like she’s having the best time being terrified, but she’s hardly flaunting the degree of skill she paraded in American Mary. Stephen McHattie ( Lance Henriksen: Mark 2, or is Lance Henriksen a Mark 2 McHattie? ) pops up for literally 2 scenes then gets blown up so yeh, no cool old guys to save the day here. Add Dunne’s pretty uneventful inclusion and the casting becomes a bit lacklustre.

Barker clearly has some great ideas on how to shoot basic manoeuvres which could otherwise have looked dull. Playing with the focus whenever one of the assailants enters a room works well as a means of obscuring, as does fading the gruesome family in and out of shots throughout the house. Barker keeps the camera roomy around his subjects to hint that – at any second – another character could appear. The general effect is to transform his human threat into a near-supernatural  omnipresence we never quite get a handle on. Of course all this is somewhat ruined by the dopey revelations that come later.

Dodgy dialogue and a meandering sense of panic eventually bog Torment down in its own lack of creativity, however there’s successful suspense and a few nifty set-pieces to maintain your attention for a fun and forgettable night of home defence.

★★1/2
Scott Clark

American Mary Review

The Soska Sisters’ ambitious yet flawed debut feature Dead Hooker in a Trunk was just enough to get their feet in the door, something we can all be pretty grateful for considering the impressive cult legend that is their second feature film: American Mary.

                Katharine Isabelle stars as Mary, a dedicated and gifted young medical student struggling to make ends meet. After she responds to a Job advert for a local strip joint she is forced to use her skills in shady circumstance for the club owner. The result is $5000 and the promise she will keep her mouth shut. Soon, news of Mary’s skills reaches the black market and she begins to spiral into an underworld of people infatuated with body modification. Whatever needs done “Bloody Mary” can do… for a price.

                Everything that was perhaps amateur about Dead Hooker is sorted in American Mary, a film that is, for all its guts and glory, a fairly muted affair centred around a great principal idea. That’s no said to muddy the sisters’ use of gore (since this is a film at points dripping with the stuff) but the strong point is in the fact it doesn’t rush into being a horror film. At the very least that it doesn’t seem too interested in being a conformist piece of slash-happy Friday night fun.  Too often Indy horror dwindles in the plot department letting any terror miss-fire since we don’t actually give a shit about what’s going on.  Here the Twisted Twins have parodied American ideals, hinting that the macabre side of life is almost unavoidable in this: a film that narrates the collision point of sex, money, and the American Dream.

Isabelle is largely to thank for the success of the film, having spent plenty of time being fodder for serial killers (Freddy vs. Jason comes nostalgically to mind) she gets a shot at being an unexpected but formidable force. A careful balance of stone-cold calculating and human guilt hedges in the possibility of the ridiculous. If there’s any gripe about her performance it’s that she’s not given enough scenes to explore the more guilt-ridden side of Mary.

                Very quickly the film reveals a slick black heart wrapped in blood, mayhem, and sex.  The Soska’s obviously have a direction they want to take their own brand of visceral charm, but at times this seems too recycled. Moments that should have been truly deranged are lost in translation, the shock factor reined in by repetition. Cult imagery rears its triumphant head at numerous points, proving the Soska’s have the capacity for impressive mise en scene. An example?  Isabelle decked in stripper-wear performing surgery in a strip club basement jumps to mind first. It’s the sort of thing that sticks in your head.

                Plot-wise the film is pretty fluid, a nice birth-of-the-monster origin story makes the first half a hoot, but there seems to be some trouble with which direction to take the film in once Mary is taken advantage of. The revenge idea is great and certainly gives the film drive, but act two just seems a little bare, add this to the out-of-nowhere ending and the film seems to degrade slightly from its strong opening.

American Mary takes the passion and rage of a revenge film mixes it with modern gothic, anchors it with a great central performance, wraps the whole sordid affair in a slick and black shiny wrapping then lets it spin into an urban legend. Perhaps the spinning goes a little too far out of control and some wobbly decisions leave the film on a downer, but at this rate of improvement the Twisted Twins’ next piece should be genius.

SCOTT CLARK

★★★☆☆

UK Rating: 18
DVD/BD Release Date: 28th January 2013 (UK)
Director: Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska
Cast:  Katharine Isabelle, Antonio Cupo, Tristan Risk