Mini-Review - Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack (2012 - Dir. Takayuki Hirao)

Due to the time pressures of not having been too well recently and trying to get more painting done to start a new art career, I've been struggling to get many reviews written. So what I've decided is that I'll write longer reviews for really good (or bad) films and for the more average of offerings, I will do a little mini-review. Here we go then with my first. Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack.

It all starts off as pretty bonkers, yet entertaining, with scenes of fish walking on metallic legs attacking people left, right and centre and even a cheeky threesome (fish not included).

Then, at about the halfway point, the fish creatures are replaced by human creatures and the whole thing - whilst continuing the bonkers theme - falls apart into a turgid mess. A disappointment after the promising first half.

2/10

evlkeith

Review - The Pack (2010 - Franck Richard)

(Due to the fact that I've already reviewed The Pack, the competition rules state that Doccortex has to review it instead. So here's the final review of the FA Cup of Actors as Émilie Dequenne faces Ellen Page, who scored a respectable 6.5 with The East - evlkeith)

It’s the final of the FA cup of actors and I’m faced with reviewing this offering from the tournament favourite Émilie Dequenne with equal amounts of anticipation and trepidation. After her steadfast campaign through to the final of the World’s premier acting knockout competition, her ultimate success relies on what I think of this grubby looking little horror film. My hopes are not high, but maybe her impressive pedigree in the game will pull her through this final challenge.

It’s strangely likeable for a French horror film but no less predictable, with grotesque characters performing unspeakable horrors to passersby in the rural heartland of the country. Dequenne, however somehow manages to hold our interest with a smouldering, tobacco stained performance as the hapless road tripper Charlotte. She single-handedly turns the film from something I would have mercilessly fast forwarded into a positive experience holding your hand as you charge headlong through a nightmare world of fat women in chain mail, hell’s angels and miners. (Yes, that’s coal miners.)

The rest of the cast, action and plot seem to swirl around her classy performance in a somewhat shambolic fashion. After picking up a mysterious hitch hiker Charlotte ends up a captive in a dubious bar/café establishment which not only serves up croissants, coffee and onions to French rural folk, but also acts as a feeding station for a gang of mutant zombie coal miners who rise from the earth now and again for a bite to eat. 

Although the miners are heavily stylised and moderately ferocious they’re no way near a frightening as their South Yorkshire cousins who chased me around a local golf course as a teenager due to the ‘Did you shout fore?!’ incident. Needless to say it all ends in tears as bikers, fat woman, zombie miners and an attractive French actress all meet up for the shack based resolution rumble.    

It’s a cut above the other French horror films I’ve viewed due the dark humour, the atmosphere and Dequenne’s excellent performance. Ultimately it’s fun, a little gory and engaging stuff but lacks anything particularly memorable or especially scary, (and to be honest evlkeith’s original review was way more entertaining than the actual film!) And for that reason…I’m sorry Emily because you were great…I’m rating the film just a little better than average at 6/10. I just hope that’s enough but I know how highly evl rates Page so I'm not hopeful…
6/10
Doccortex

How close was that? It all came down to half a point. But Ellen Page is the winner of the FA Cup of Actors. We will have the crowning ceremony soon... - evlkeith

Review - The East (2013 - Dir. Zal Batmanglij)

And so we get to the final of the FA Cup of Actors. Ellen Pages pits her wily scissor kick skills against the solidity of Émilie Dequenne's back four. Ellen Page kicks off with her effort - which I'd fancied watching for a while - The East.

Sarah (Brit Marling, who also co-wrote this along with starring in obscurendure favourite Another Earth) works for an elite intelligence firm looking after the interests of their big business clients. She is tasked with infiltrating a group of anarchists, The East, who have been naughtily upsetting these big business types, for example, pouring a load of oil into the house of the CEO of a company that has allowed a huge oil spillage in the ocean; an eye for an eye, no more, no less. As often happens in these situations, Sarah becomes attached to the group and everything gets a bit morally grey.

This for me was the greatest aspect of this film; I was constantly thinking about whether what The East were doing was justified or not. There is no doubt about the companies being entirely dodgy - as they generally are - but do they deserve some of the group's punishments? And just as Sarah becomes emotionally involved with the members, so does the viewer. It's all rather cleverly done. 

Initially I was thinking that both Brit Marling and Ellen Page had been miscast. I just couldn't see them being part of this group. As the plot develops it turns out that the members all came from middle class families, but they were sick of the  consumer crazy madness we now live in and the companies that drive it. They go dumpster diving to get their food, and they don't do too bad. I'm not convinced I could do it though. Added to this the characters in the group all have a grudge to bear against one of the corporations they are up against, so by the end the casting was spot on.

But given that this is Ellen Page's entry she isn't actually in it that much, and it isn't one of her better performances. If she goes on to win the competition, she has done so on the back of far greater performances than her own: Brit Marling's here and Cillian Murphy's in Peacock. Even so, the FA Cup has been about how wisely the actors choose their projects so it's maybe fair enough.

But Brit Marling owns this film. She goes from company drone to portraying a full on anarchist in a very convincing manner. She flits between the different states as she goes back to her real life. Through her acting it is easy to see her attachments growing to the group, but is she able to keep enough of a distance to continue doing her job professionally?

Easily the worst thing about The East is the most useless, tame version of spin the bottle I've ever seen. It's rubbish. There's plenty of hugging and a bit of lady kissing lady action. But the kinkiest it gets is when one character kisses a lady's belly button. Once. Big deal. 

The East gives the viewer plenty to think about after the film has finished, which is pleasant. (It makes you wonder whether the actors involved lead a less consumer driven lifestyle now.) But this film is more likely to change someone's viewpoint (as Fight Club changed mine) than Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy. It's the moral quandaries that raise this above the average and give it a healthy rating of...
6.5/10
evlkeith

If you like this you could also try:
Dawn of the Dead, Fight Club.

Review - Peacock (2010 - Dir. Michael Lander)

Here we are at the semi-finals of the FA Cup of Actors then and our first match is between Ellen Page and Jennifer Connelly. Now, when Peacock came up for Ellen Page I thought that she'd blown it. I didn't fancy this in the slightest. I'm not that keen on Susan Sarandon and I haven't liked anything that Cillian Murphy has done, (either of the first two Batman films or "it's not a zombie film" 28 Days Later) he's way too slinky for my liking. Things aren't looking good for Pagey (a bit like when half of your players have the flu and the opposition forces you to change ends after the toss).

But crikey, (and maybe even blimy) it's actually not too bad. In fact, it's pretty good. And shock of shocks, Cillian Murphy's performance is great. Let's find out more...

For once I'm going to quote directly from IMDb to give you a little portion of background info: "A train accident in rural Nebraska gradually unveils a mystery involving the town's bank clerk." The reason why I've thieved this is because it gives away nothing, which is dandy. It's good to see that the person writing this knew that to say any more would be to spoil everything about the film.

The director describes this as psychological horror, which I would agree with. It's part drama, part mystery, part thriller and part horror. Fitting it into an existing genre is very difficult, which is generally a good thing; it shows the film-makers have tried something different. Another positive is that the ending is ambiguous leading to plenty of post-film chat.

Cillian Murphy is the major revelation of Peacock. This is a mightily impressive performance, without which the film wouldn't work, and at worst would become laughable. One scene in particular, where there is a certain amount of deception going on, borders on stunning. Changing my mind about someone is pretty hard going so well done Mr Murphy.

Ellen Page, meanwhile, is badly miscast. Her acting is up to her usual standard but I just can't see her as living in a trailer park, and selling her body for cans of Special Brew. Added to that, she doesn't look like a natural born smoker. I can see why they jumped at the chance of having Pagey in their film but for me it was a mistake. If she gets through this semi-final, she's pulled it off by bringing in the ringer Cillian Murphy who should have been in the running for an Oscar.

I've found it really hard to give this a rating. It's worth seeing for Murphy's performance alone (which I would give a 9/10). Overall though, I'm glad that I've seen Peacock but it's not a film that I would watch again, basically down to personal taste. If you like Psycho and Lars and the Real Girl then you will probably enjoy this. 
6/10
evlkeith

If you like this you could also try:
Psycho, Lars and the Real Girl.

Review - The Violent Kind (2010 - Dir. The Butcher Brothers)

For the first half hour of the film you’re never quite sure what genre the film is heading for. It’s an unusual and pleasant feeling as we criss-cross from biker gang violence into spooky supernatural happenings and back again. In fact the first half of the film is a thoroughly enjoyable romp at the junction of gritty motorcycle gang street and spirit possession avenue. In fact I had little idea that this was anything less than a big budget production with some quality acting, with Cory Knauf and the tasty Taylor Cole the most noticeable.

Possibly the most notable feature of the film is the amount of punching in the face that takes place. It’s a veritable festival of bare knuckle fist fighting throughout in a semi-slapstick fashion that reminded me of a combination of Rocky, Bottom and The Sweeney. A heady cocktail if ever there was one. If you like seeing people, and sometimes demons, get punched in the face, then you’re in for a treat.

Sadly however, this is a game of two halves and just as the film reaches fever pitch everything goes pear shaped. After the half time jaffa-cakes it all looks cheap and amateurish, and not in a good way either. The actors drafted in are not a patch on the originals and you really want to put your head in your hands, with Pussywagon and Trixie straight out of pantoland. The plot changes from a decent horror story into a jazz hands infused, Clockwork Orange meets Grease parody of Rebel Without a Cause on steroids. In a capitulation not seen since Halifax Town visited Belle Vue in the early 90’s, the film snatches defeat from the jaws of victory in a big way.
(That was a bad, bad day - evlkeith)

The spooky and atmospheric ending is too little too late as I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth, and a feeling that I’d been cheated out of watching the actual second half of The Violent Kind. If you want to make a rubbish film then make a rubbish film, but don’t make half a good film then dash our hopes by drafting in the acting equivalent of Chico and the Cheeky Girls from the X-Factor halfway through. We were robbed!

7/10 for the first half, 0/10 for the second half.

0/10 overall for cheating us.
Doccortex

If you like this you could also try:
Doing something really great - like eating toast spread thickly with gorgeous Marmite - and then do something fairly horrible, drinking liquidized cat vomit, for instance.

Review - Space Battleship Yamato (2010 - Dir. Takashi Yamazaki)

Based on the anime series from the seventies, Space Battleship Yamato is a live action space based actioneer. I've never seen the original anime so I can't comment on how well it translates from 2D. From looking at screenshots though it seems that the character and ship design are pretty much spot on.

The Earth is under attack from an alien race known as the Gamilas. The planet is generally in a radioactive state so the Earth Defense Force decide to launch a counter attack at the pesky aliens. After a severe whooping things go from bad to worse until some crafty alien tech falls (literally) into the hands of our human chums. They rebuild the Space Battleship Yamato using this new and fancy technology and go in search of Iskandar, the co-ordinates of which came with the alien tech.

Space Battleship Yamato reminds me of two films in particular - well, actually a lot more than two but I'll come to that soon. The first would be Hell's Ground, a little known zombie film hailing from Pakistan. This was a film that heavily borrowed from loads of other horror films, but did so in a way that was fun and entertaining. Space Battleship Yamato homages Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica, Star Trek and to a lesser extent Serenity, and just about gets away with it. This is probably due to its desire to put on a large epic scale show despite a relatively meagre budget for this type of sci-fi thing ($23.9 million). I got carried away by the sheer exuberance of it all. Saying that, I'd be moaning if a big budget film had done the same. Maybe more time should have been spent at the script and planning stages to develop some more original ideas. That probably comes down to money though.

The other film it reminds me of is Casshern, another live action adaptation of an anime. Casshern is overlong and the pacing is all over the place. When I watch it I always end up slightly disappointed and think about what could have been if the editing had been different. Yet I still keep going back to it. Space Battleship Yamato feels very similar. The final act should be an action spectacular but it gets bogged down with lots of emotional chatting. It really drags. But again, I felt the need to watch it again.

This hasn't been too positive so far so you may be thinking, why bother watching it again. It does get some things right. The space battles, despite being way too short, are some of the best I've seen in years. They take their cue from bullet hell shooters and are suitably exhilarating with ships swooping through a barrage of laser fire. Admittedly the ships can do some pretty stupid things such as grow arms that can pick people out of space and give them a little cuddle, but that's all part of the fun.

The effects are pretty great too given the budget. They have stuck to one of the strengths of CGI: rendering hard metallic spaceships. There are some creatures and they don't look too hot but at least they are simple enough to be effective. They are normally only seen from a distance and in hordes so the effects don't come under too much close scrutiny. One of the highlights - and quite rightly so - has to be the reveal of the titular battleship as it rises from beneath the ground. It's a quality design and there's something delightfully quirky, in a Terry Gilliam way, of seeing what is basically a naval vessel charging about through space.

The characters are all fairly standard issue with only Yuki being that interesting (and I think that's only because she's stunningly attractive). Yet at the end, when little photos are shown in the credits of all the characters - many of which are killed within the film - I found myself looking back on them with fondness and wishing that they could all be in a sequel. There is something endearing about the whole production that is hard to put my finger on.

One example of this endearingness is also one of the funniest moments of the film. When something positive has happened in a space battle the action cuts back to the bridge and the characters cheer and give cheeky little fist pumps, yet it's all done without any accompanying music. It feels distinctly odd, but due to the fact that it happens about three times it gets funnier each time.

The music is also another source of quirk. When I watched some visual effects extras the soundtrack was playing along with the footage and I thought, crikey this music is pretty good. But in the film it's feels out of place at quite a few points, and at worst, exceedingly cheese ridden. There are also moments where you would expect music where it just doesn't appear (like the celebration scenes above). Again in all comes down to the editing.

Another positive though: the lead character Kodai has lovely luxurious locks.

It's hard for me to recommend this but it's struck a chord with me. I'm even considering shelling out £15 for the blu-ray.
6/10
evlkeith

If you like this you could also try:
Any of the above films that it thieves from.

Review - 7 Days (2010 - Dir. Daniel Grou)

After making a resolution through watching the likes of Martyrs, Them and Eden Lake to avoid nasty, ‘real’ horror films, I found myself suckered into watching 7 Days. The cover looks like the standard Japanese ghost story and I honestly thought that was what I was about to experience. Usually not reading the blurb is a positive move, however in this case it was possibly a mistake, because 7 Days is one of the worst examples of the ‘nasty & real horror’ genre. And just like Martyrs, Frontiers and Switchblade Romance it’s French! At the risk of upsetting yet another nation; What’s wrong with these people? Lighten up a bit! (Cheers. That's all of our French readers gone. And for an alternative view on Martyrs, click here - evlkeith)

If you need a heart warming and uplifting experience this is possibly not your best film choice and there’s a big spoiler in the following paragraph. When Dr. Bruno Hamel’s (Claude Legault) daughter is abducted, abused and murdered, the good doctor manages to kidnap the perpetrator and then torture him for seven days. End of story. He uses all that medical training to good effect, but ultimately there are few other positive aspects.

It does have its interesting points however, as we can all empathise with his extreme pain, and on a reptilian level, his actions. But it’s unnerving how the nation seems to support his actions on TV, how the officer in charge (Remy Girard) empathises so deeply and how the public aid his escape. I’m guessing this may be very true to life under the circumstances. The film asks you if revenge is ever justified? But leaves you in a depressing grey area clouded by instinct, grief and doubt. Let’s just say it does its job, but it's extremely disturbing viewing. 

In many ways a good film, but without the sense of hope that I need to propel me through the darkness. Not something I enjoyed and not something I’ll watch again, but it challenges your beliefs and attitudes to retribution in a brutal fashion. Not one for Grandma and best avoided if you have a weak stomach.

2/10
Doccortex

If you like this you could also try:
The Horseman, Big Bad Wolves.