Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
Here Comes the Devil
When I spotted Here Comes the Devil (AKA Ahí va el diablo) was showing as part of the Leeds International Film Festival’s horror and genre film strand I was more than a little excited. Earlier this year it screened to audiences in Austin’s Fantastic Fest and to say that it had done well there is something of an understatement: Here Comes picked up awards for best actor, best actress, best screenplay, best director and best picture in the horror category. There are only two explanations for this: either the other films in competition were hardly strong, or Here Comes is really something quite special.
**So of course I had to go and see it. **
Some hours later, I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. It’s a solid little film, it ticks a lot the boxes you’d expect and a few you might not, but it doesn’t really offer much by way of surprises. I definitely came out grinning, but I don’t think it made my jaw drop.
The premise is pretty familiar. Some children disappear and then turn up the next day. Only, when they re-appear they’re… different. Cold, unemotional, quiet. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I tell you there’s some supernatural/possession stuff going on. Most of the rest of the film focuses on unravelling the changes that have taken place, whilst Sol and Felix (the parents) struggle to cope with what has happened.
Director Adrían García Bogliano (I’m definitely going to check out more of his films) has explained that he was keen to step away from the slasher/giallo genres that he was comfortable in and embrace the challenge of supernatural horror. It’s an interesting challenge, one that wasn’t entirely successful but is never dull. Here Comes has the prints of giallo and slasher all over it: in often seems to reveal too much visually, keeping hold of the mystery but losing a lot of the horror atmosphere in shock scenes. Similarly, it never quite escapes from the clichés of supernatural horror: the darkened eyes, the creepy man, the local legend, the levitating body - they’re all here. At times, this all seems laid on a little too thick.
But these are minor gripes. Genre film is - by its very nature - bound to be somewhat generic. And the collision of giallo, slasher and supernatural is not really a bad thing (although perhaps some of the scenes are too implausible or too obviously gratuitous). It’s a fun film. The real problem is that it suffers from what I have termed Stupid People in Horror Syndrome (SPiHP). Some of the characters are just way too dumb. None of them talk to each other, none of them just talk to the police, none of them think about what they’re doing. There are only two things you should feel for the sufferers in horror movie: you should either identify with and feel sorry for them, or you should just look forward to them dying. Here Comes does work hard to make you care about its lead characters but my will to see Sol live, as she repeatedly went off alone to do stupid things, was crumbling. Which was a shame.
None of this should detract from the fact that Here Comes is a good fun film to watch. I’m not usually much of a fan of possession-type films but I thoroughly enjoyed this and would definitely call it one of the better modern horror’s I’ve seen recently. A solid, exciting genre flick for sure, although I’m still not sure quite how it won so many awards…
Argo
Last night the Leeds International Film Festival kicked off with Argo, which Ben Affleck both directed and starred in. Now, I don’t really pay that much attention to Hollywood projects very often, so I’ll admit that I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, even though it’s apparently big news.
I was pleasantly surprised. Sort of.
Argo has at least two films in it, and at least one of them is quite good. It dithers a bit between whether it wants to be serious or comic, commits to neither and kind of crosses back and forth somewhat awkwardly. The opening, in which the (real historical) Iranian hostage situation unfolds suggests the film was keen to take quite an interesting approach, treading quite carefully in what it did. There does seem to be a degree of sympathy towards both the American embassy staff and the rioting Iranians, neither side being explicitly vilified. The behaviour of the embassy staff, whose first priority when the building is attacked is to shred all their documents, gently suggests that possibly they were doing work that went a little beyond their diplomatic roles.
All this nuance and subtly vanishes, however, almost immediately after the scene is set. From about 20 minutes into the film we revert into classic thriller mode: there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are threatened by the bad guys. The good guys must try to escape. This, in itself isn’t really a problem. Argo is billed as a thriller and absolutely delivers on its promise. The film is tense, exciting and well-paced, scenes of life-or-death suspense alternating with gently comic moments. As a thriller it ticks a lot of boxes.
Sadly, having set the scene very firmly in Iran and very explicitly as ‘based-on-true-events’ story, the humorous-thriller tone of the film is, to my mind, slightly at conflict with the political side of things. There’s no escaping or forgetting the fact that Iran and America are still far from good friends and that the West is decidedly prone to Islamophobia: in Argo it seems that pretty much anyone with a beard (or at least, a beard longer than Affleck’s own) is an enemy. From about halfway through it has become very clear that anyone who approaches the heroes who looks even slightly a bit like a Muslim is absolutely bound to be a murderous, brutal agent of the state. Which is a bit of a shame.
Really, they ought to have pushed it one way or the other. This could have been a good, serious (though possibly rather weighty) look at relations between Iran and the US or it could have been a kick-ass entertaining thriller with no need to be grounded in the real East-West conflict that it patently doesn’t really care about. Instead, it staggers between the two, reassuring audiences that America are the good guys, Iranians (real: anyone vaguely middle-eastern) are the bad guys and the US will surely triumph.
For all that, it is still quite a lot of fun.
Halloween Bloodbath
It seems like I haven’t really had enough horror films featured on Chopping Mall lately. Which is a shame: horror films are really what this blog is all about. Even the name comes from a horror film. Perhaps there’s no better time than Halloween to catch up on some splatters, slashers and spooks. So here is Chopping Mall’s extra special Halloween Bloodbath Horror Film review! Here we go….
Aerobicide
Now this was really quite something. It’s a while since I’ve watched anything that screamed 80s any louder than this. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything more 80s. This is a film set in an aerobics class, with pumping disco music throughout, enormous haircuts, occasional moustaches and lots of lycra. This could almost be a museum piece: look at what people wore in those days!
Once you get over the disco beat, though, this is pretty standard slasher fare. The film is set in and around Rhonda’s Gymnasium. Sadly, Rhonda’s place seems to be plagued by murders. A woman is stabbed in the shower. Things go bump in the night. Etc. We get the usual crew: a slightly creepy police man who could be capable of murder; a slightly creepy strapping-handsome-gym-beefcake who could be capable of murder; some ditsy ladies who clearly aren’t capable of very much apart from aerobic and squealing; Rhonda and a creepy lecherous idiot guy who we’re clearly supposed to suspect as the murderer but patently isn’t.
It’s not really very much fun. The gore is disappointingly minimal - although the stabbing in the shower isn’t bad - the fight scenes are hilariously awful (complete with video-game-esque THWACK sounds), the acting isn’t much better and the plot is nothing if not predictable. But perhaps I’m being too hard on this one: it’s not without it’s charm. I’d imagine that after a few beers, or just put on as background noise, this wouldn’t be so bad.
Bikini Girls on Ice
I saw this listed as one of those “so bad you will not believe your eyes” titles and …oh boy… it certainly was. BGoI is clearly one of the many victims of the “good name - crap film” syndrome that plagues modern B-movies (See Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Or, rather, don’t). But how could this be? How could you go wrong with a title like Bikini Girls on Ice? What kind of idiot would you have to be to screw that up.
Sadly, screw it up they did. BGoI - which is sadly not about ice-skating women - follows a handful of women who, whilst on their (apparently very long) way to a bikini-car-wash fundraiser, break down at an abandoned garage. Blah, blah, the usual business. There is, of course, some murderous psychopath lurking in said abandoned garage who picks off the stranded visitors one by one. At first they assume that the missing people have just wandered off but, once they’ve found some body parts, they realise they’re living through a nightmare. Blah blah blah.
Seriously. This was astonishingly dull. Not only did it have absolutely no sense of tension or surprise (you absolutely knew what was going to happen ages before it did) but they completely forgot to create a convincing explanation for why the killer was killing! It’s not even like I have high standards - the eventual motive in Aerobicide is rubbish - but I do expect at least a gesture at a decent motive. That’s really what a slasher is all about: without an explanation of the killer’s motive, a slasher becomes just a string of pointless death scenes. To get away with that, you’d have to at least make those death scenes really spectacular. Sadly, these ones aren’t.
Ultimately, Bikini Girls on Ice makes 80minutes feel like a very long time and gives little by way of entertainment.
Killdozer
Aaaand finally: here’s something to really get excited about. Killdozer, also blessed with a brilliant name, manages to live up to it. I would call this a by-numbers killer-vehicle-terrorising-everyone flick, but I’m not sure there even is a by-numbers layout for this …er… niche genre.
There’s surprisingly little to say about it: conveniently cut-off from the rest of the world on an island in the middle of god-knows-where, a small team of basically unlikeable construction workers find themselves unexpectedly terrorised by one of their own bulldozers. Most of the film follows the machine picking them off one-by-one until they really begin to get it together and fight back.
It’s absolutely as silly as it sounds. What sets it apart from disappointing modern killer-object movies (like Rubber) is that they play it absolutely dead straight. There isn’t even a hint of smug, self-aware laughter here. They must have been sniggering on set but none of it carries into the film. If only more silly horror would take itself so seriously. Great fun.
Phew. All done. Let’s go and watch Beetle Juice now?
Leeds International Film Festival
This week sees the return of the UK’s biggest film festival outside of London! Hurrah! I’ve enjoyed lots of pretty great films at LIFF over the last couple of years (and have regularly promised far more reviews than I’ve actually written), so I’m looking forward to some more.
This year I’m lucky enough to be doing some work there - which sadly means I won’t get to see half as many films as in previous years (booo!). So I’m going to preview a few I’m looking forward to (and might actually get to see) here. Over the next couple of weeks I also plan on watching a handful of the festival films I can get my hands on and putting them up here. Obviously these will mostly be the older one - I’m not likely to find a DVD copy of Russian zombie flick Meteletsa, which is getting it’s world premiere here in Leeds - but there should be a few interesting things to watch. My very own festival outside the festival.
In terms of things to look forward to, though, I’m spoilt for choice. The most alluring horror treat, to my mind, is the sinister looking Mexican flick, Here Comes The Devil (Ahi va el diablo), which swept the horror awards at the last Fantastic Fest. I might actually get to see this one and am already pretty excited. There’s a decent spread of homegrown horror too: Heretic and Before Dawn both look particularly exciting. The latter is a straight-faced zombie movie - something all too-rare since Shaun of the Dead. Whether either of them can possibly match last-year’s glorious bloodbath of nastiness, Inbred, remains to be seen…
In terms of classics, there’s Django, The Shining, King Kong vs. Godzilla AND Return of the Living Dead. All on a big screen! Coo! Sadly, I think I’ll miss all of them. I might get to see Matango: Fungus of Terror though, which should probably make up for it somewhat.
Actual film reviews coming soon. Expect Belgian wheelchair-bound comedies and Canadian SciFi oddities amongst other things.
More Bond: Double bill DaF & L&LD
Diamonds Are Forever
After the disappointment of On Her Majesty’s…, I expect everyone was as glad as me to see Sean Connery resuming Bond duties, taking the role back from Lazenby for one last Bond film. I had hazy memories of Diamonds Are Forever being - as well as one of the better titled Bonds - one that I’d particularly enjoyed. Sadly, it seems I was getting my Bond films confused: DaF is a pretty dull outing, really.
I’ll give the creators some credit: the henchmen are pretty creepy. Mr Kidd and Mr. Wint march around killing off a variety of implausibly trusting truck drivers and smugglers. It’s more than can be said for Blofeld, though, who makes a fairly pathetic villain here. There’s none of the mastermind threat that he had in earlier films: it seems that in each appearance he moves another step towards Dr Evil…
Most of all it isn’t that DaF is bad in any real sense (at least no more bad than other Bonds) but that it’s not a lot of fun. Bond just isn’t serious or important enough to get away with being boring. Even the quiet bits are supposed to be fun. Lurching between explosions, fights, car-chases, innuendo-laden chitchat and sex scenes Bond films are supposed to rattle along at a pretty relentless pace. Sadly DaF is just a little too slow. The climactic show-down just sees Bond gently bashing Blofeld’s submarine against a wall… Even Lazenby had a helicopter-attack-on-mountain-fortress payoff! This one’s just too tame. And not even Shirley Bassey can rescue it from that.
**Live and Let Die **
**L&LD can be accused of many things but it’s certainly not boring. It’s almost as if, face with reinventing Bond in a Roger Moore shape, the producers just decided to throw all sorts of fun at the film and see what stuck. **
It obviously cashes in heavily on the then-popular blaxploitation trend (just two years after Shaft!). Too those unfamiliar with those films it might seem more racist than er… anything else: Bond has left genealogists in stuffy British boardrooms behind and is now traipsing through Harlem (and sticking out like a sore thumb). For a large part of the film it does seem worryingly like every single Black character might well be a baddie, which does get a little awkward. Eventually the goodie-baddie balance is restored somewhat so it’s definitely not racist, no, not at all, never. Hmm…
Either way, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. They just ramped everything up a bit. We have poisonous snakes, revolving walls, super-gadgets, speedboat chases, comic characters. This is perhaps the first Bond film that feels really self-referential - it verges on the edge of pastiche at times - but for the most part it carries it well, staying just the right side of the line.
The ‘comic’ sheriff was a mistake though: a Southern States, gum-chewing, noisy, moron character played for laughs, it’s hard not to wince at each appearence he makes. Mercifully, his role is only brief, and it is intercut with the pretty-awesome speedboat chase. The producers made no such mistake with the villains though: claw-handed henchman Tee-Hee, snake-wielding face-painted Baron Samedi and the mastermind-villain-who-relies-on-Tarot-cards Kananga make a pretty formidable bad-guy line-up. Even if they do repeatedly fall for the classic mistake of explaining their entire plan first and then leaving Bond to die and looking away as he escapes…. But we can’t all be perfect.
L&LD ushers in the Moore era which, if I remember rightly, brings with it a fair number of pretty awful films but, in itself, is a pretty mad and fun Bond movie.