Australian
Why You Should Watch The Tunnel
A week and a bit ago, The Tunnel, an indie Australian horror film was released for free online. The creators have taken a daring approach to film distribution, attempting to cover the $135,000 production cost of their film by selling individual frames on their website, releasing a deluxe DVD and organising a couple screenings. A lot has been said already about this side of the project so… let’s ignore it all together and focus on the actual film.
The Tunnel is a pretty damn decent ‘found-footage’ style movie. As such, comparisons to other similarly styled/gimmicky (delete-as-per-your-taste) are absolutely inevitable. Amongst such competition, by my reckoning, The Tunnel mounts a pretty strong defence and, whilst it’s by no means the best around, it certainly holds its own. And kicks Paranormal Activity all over the park (although, in truth, that isn’t exactly hard…)
The unique selling point in this case is the presentation of the story as a documentary, with talking-heads style interviews with several of the lead characters involved in the story. This, as should be immediately obvious, has a fairly massive downside… You. Know. Who. Survives. I’m not giving anything away here at all (I do seriously hope lots of people will watch this) but, given that we expect people to die in horror films (that’s what happens!), the fact that the film makers show us two of the four lead characters talking to the camera from the start leaves the audience to draw some fairly easy conclusions!
Minor documentary-gripe aside, they do succeed in setting up a genuinely intriguing story. With contemporary fears over water-shortages, the New South Wales government have come up with a new plan to use the miles of abandoned train tunnels that run underneath the city for water storage. For various reasons, this leads to our starring group of intrepid (and possibly implausibly stupid…) band of journalists to go exploring in the dark. Sadly, they’ve told no-one they were going (they clearly haven’t seen 127 Hours). And they’re staggeringly under-prepared and under-equipped. Even Theseus took a thread with him when he went into the labyrinth!
Needless to say, all sorts of tragedy, violence and scary noises ensues.
Again, I don’t want to go into too much detail about what actually occurs. The camera wiggles, night-vision comes and goes, screams and cries echo through the tunnels. It’s stylishly and competently put together and puts their sub-Sydney environment to good use. The only criticism I can really level at the film, however, is that with such an interesting background story created for the film, much of the detail and interest gets forgotten about from around halfway through. They’re not the only ones who do it - District 9 forgets entirely about its mockumentary format from about 30 minutes in - but it did leave me wanting a little bit more from the story. I’m not the kind of viewer who likes to be spoon-fed an easy solution, but having interested me in the story, to forget about it was a bit of a let down. Perhaps, like the creators of [REC], they intend to reveal a lot more of the story, the causes, etc. in a future instalment. Perhaps they don’t.
Either way, The Tunnel is a well-made, decently paced and enjoyable film. It’s interesting, genuinely creepy in places and leaves you wanting more (or though not in an entirely positive way). Oh, and did anyone mention that it’s free?
Who cares what I think? Head over to VODO and grab your free copy
or go and buy the DVD.
Dead End Drive In
I’ve had this film hanging around for ages now and just hadn’t quite got round to watching it. In that time, I’d forgotten what little I knew about it and, in my head, it had become just some run of the mill slasher set in a drive-in cinema. I was wrong.
This is an Australian film from the 80s (and it really is very 80s…) that play on/cashes in on the popularity of Mad Max. Taking a similar kind of post-apocalyptic society as it’s base, this plays as a kind of Mad Max flavoured meeting of Escape from NY and The Cars That Ate Paris (If you haven’t seen either of those, go and do so. Now).
The premise is fairly simple. America’s collapsed, the world’s in trouble, there’re no jobs in Australia, thugs (‘cowboys’) in modified cars terrorise the streets by night, the police deal brutally with anyone they catch. So far, so good.
Playing cricket in the Cinema-prison
A news report, right at the start, makes a big deal of the government’s success in reducing unemployment. We think nothing of it, until shortly later when we discover how this is being achieved; the police are locking all the unemployed into out-of-town drive-in cinemas. And keeping them there.
The odd thing is that most of the unemployed really don’t mind. Once imprisoned, they are fed, they needn’t work, they can watch films. In many ways they live a very free life… inside the electrified fences of their cinema-prison. Not so for ‘Crabs’ however; besides sporting one of the worst nicknames in cinema history, Crabs is keen to escape and this film is his story. And it’s a fun story; there’s sex, there’s fighting, there’s car chases, there’s even a pretty good 80s soundtrack. Whilst you could never claim this to be an intellectual heavyweight of a film (although there are some not-so-subtle observations of racism in Australian society), it’s certainly a lot of fun.
Decidedly implausible, really quite silly, heaps of fun. Strongly recommended.
