Month: July 2023

SMILE. (2022) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

SMILE. (2022) WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY PARKER FINN. BASED ON HIS SHORT FILM FROM 2020, ‘LAURA HASN’T SLEPT.’

STARRING SOSIE BACON, KYLE GALLNER AND CAITLIN STASEY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

If someone smiles at you in a nice normal way, it can make you feel good. It can even make your day. But an evil grinning smile can scare the living daylights out of you. If I was ever visited by an entity, God forbid, I’d prefer it to be wearing a standard scowly demonic expression than a creepy smile. A creepy smile can really put the willies up you.

SMILE, the big horror hit from last Halloween, is full of creepy smiles. I knew just by looking at the poster of the evil smiling girl that it was going to scare me because I react to evil smiles in a very primal kind of way, like most of us would probably do. And, in fact, it did scare the Christ out of me and put me in mind of the only other modern horror film I’ve seen that scares me this much… IT FOLLOWS, which is like SMILE with sex thrown in, haha.

SMILE features actor Kevin Bacon’s daughter Sosie in the lead role. She plays Dr. Rose Cotter, a therapist on the psychiatric ward of an American hospital. Her first patient of the film is a young woman called Laura Weaver, who’s played by Caitlin Stasey, the actress who portrays Laura in the short horror film that inspired this hit, LAURA HASN’T SLEPT. If you purchased the DVD of SMILE, it should have the terrific short film on there as an extra feature.

Laura is distraught. Just recently, she’s witnessed her art history professor committing suicide in front of her. Well…! That’d be disturbing in any language. The horror of it doesn’t end there, however.

Since the suicide, an entity only Laura can see has been following her around, telling her she’s going to die. It can change shape and take the form of someone she knows, a terrifying thought, but, whichever one appears, they’ll all be smiling eerily… How messed-up is that?

What Laura does next, and in front of her shrink to boot, ensures that the horrible curse is passed onto an unwilling Rose, who will spend the rest of the movie trying to escape it.

Here, the movie is similar to both IT FOLLOWS and THE RING, as they each feature curses that can be gotten rid of if you can only find someone to pass them on to. It’s very unfortunate for the poor sod who gets lumbered with the curse, but it’s every man for him or herself when it comes to evil curses.

Rose becomes more and more frightened as she learns that, as long as this entity is lurking about, she can’t trust anyone she knows. It could take the form of her sister, Holly, her own therapist, Dr. Madeline Northcott, her complete non-ENTITY of a boyfriend, Trevor (you see what I did there?), who might as well not be in the film at all, her boss at the hospital, Dr. Desai, or even any one of her psychiatric patients. She doesn’t know where to turn for comfort or advice.

Her therapist, Dr. Northcott, thinks that the key to the haunting of Rose lies buried in long-past trauma. When we discover- through disturbing flashbacks- what has happened to poor Rose in her childhood, it seems to make a kind of grisly sense that Rose should be targeted by this particular hideous evil entity.

She still wants rid of it, though, so that’s the next step- facing up to this uppity entity and kicking it into touch once and for all. The final scenes are pretty scary, as the villains make their faces known and Rose can barely distinguish what’s real from what’s diabolically fake.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t see this film on the big screen last year; it might actually have been too much for me, lol. The ending also puts me in mind of the grotesque denoument scenes of acclaimed horror flick, AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION (1982). This is one of the scariest movies of all time for me, this and THE CHANGELING (1980).

You could also include THE FLY, a petrifying body horror from 1986, amongst the movies with quite possibly enough bodily gore and violence in them to match up to SMILE. It’s a good scary story, well told visually, and they’re talking about a sequel as well.

That’s good news for people like me who love to see horror films in which something truly blood-curdling is hoofing it towards an unwitting human being, smartish-like. It’s nice to see a successful, full-length movie being made out of a short film, as well.

There’s great source material in some of the short films being made today, so let’s keep mining that valuable vein of gold. And let’s hope they don’t take too long to pull any sequels together. My patience only stretches so far, and ditto my widely smiling mouth…

CALIBRE. (2018) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

CALIBRE. (2018) WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MATT PALMER.

STARRING JACK LOWDEN, MARTIN MCCANN, TONY CURRAN, KATE BRACKEN AND KITTY LOVETT.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This horror film is currently on Netflix and I loved it. It feels a bit like THE RITUAL initially, one of my favourite modern horror films along with MIDSOMMAR and IT FOLLOWS. It uses one of my most beloved tropes: a couple of guys head off into the ‘wilds’ of somewhere to do a thing, and the trip turns into the nightmare of all time, from which none- or only one- will escape. Usually the nice guy.

In THE RITUAL, four lads jet from England to the wilds of Sweden (except that it was the wilds of Romania that actually showed up on our screens- no, it wasn’t a mistake, they did it on purpose, lol!) in honour of a mate of theirs who’s passed away.

THE RITUAL is a folk horror film, and the things that happen to these lads in Sweden (or Romania, if you prefer!) would make you want to never leave home again. Ditto MIDSOMMAR, actually. Both films are terrific adverts for Staying Home Forever and Never Leaving the House. Now we can add CALIBRE to this particular melting pot.

Two lads, friends since boarding school but not, like, proper toffs, decide to drive up to the wilds of Scotland (I’m fairly sure that this is the real Scottish wilds and not the wilds of, say, Outer Borneo) for a hunting expedition. Marcus, an Edinburgh businessman and a gun nut, is the driving force behind the expedition. There’s always one, isn’t there?

He’s what you might call a flash bastard. He’s single, and, even if he were married, he’d still be living as if he were a bachelor. He likes fast cars, fast women and frequent snorts of cocaine to keep himself enervated.

He lives life at top speed, and never stops to smell the roses. Flash git, but soulless. And don’t try to tie him down, ladies. Unless it’s with black silk stockings and you’ve got a rose between your teeth…

Vaughan (pronounced Vawn), the bezzie mate, is sort of the foil to Marcus’s alpha male. He’s just found out his wife is pregnant with their first bambino and I reckon he’d be just as happy staying home with her with his feet up in front of the fire watching EMMERDALE. But Marcus wants to go shooting innocent animals, the ignorant pig, and Vaughan is too weak to do other than go along with his pal’s suggestion.

Anyway, they’ve booked in at a gorgeously picturesque inn and, on their first night in the wilds of Scotland, Marcus shags a local girl and gives her cocaine to boot, despite having been warned off her by one of the strangely aggressive local men. They don’t seem inbred or incestuous or anything, like in WRONG TURN or THE HILLS HAVE EYES, but they’re a tight-knit, suspicious and wary group just the same.

The next morning, a hungover Vaughan and Scott, who’ve been drinking the lochs dry since they arrived, head off into the magnificent forests to do the thing they’ve come up here for: shooting an innocent animal, the bastards. I’m sorry, but when you see the soft, gentle head and bright eyes of the deer they’re ‘stalking,’ you’ll hopefully see why I was so vehement just there.

 Vaughan doesn’t want to shoot anything, but he’s too chicken to stand up to his pal. He lifts the rifle being offered to him by Marcus… and his life is basically fucked from that moment on, his and Marcus’s… Guns and cocaine don’t mix, by the way. I can’t believe they didn’t know that, the dopes.

Logan McKay, played by Tony Curran, is the leader of the small community where the city lads have ended up. He’s tough and brimming over with righteous anger over the way their wee village needs investors and some sort of a stimulation package by the government to, well, erm, stimulate things and make ‘em grow (snigger), but nothing ever happens. Well, just look how far they’re situated from London Town, the centre of British politics. No wonder nothing ever happens for them. London mightn’t even know they exist, no offence intended.

Logan’s relatives and friends are hot-headed, impulsive thugs of the ‘act first, think later’ variety compared to Logan. Logan is a logician par excellence compared to these boyos, and these boyos are baying for Marcus and Vaughan’s blood. Can Logan persuade his itchy-trigger-fingered little army of goons that there is more than one way to skin a cat, or is it Goodnight, Vienna for our two city lads?

You’ll have to watch the movie to find out, people, but you should watch it anyway as it’s a terrific, fast-moving horror-thriller that never really leaves you hanging, scratching your head and saying, wtf? It delivers. And there’s at least one thing in there you almost certainly won’t have seen before.

Check out the DELIVERANCE-style ending as well, and admire some of the most beautiful footage of the Scottish countryside by night that you’ll probably ever see. It’s on Netflix, lads. You know what to do…

SILENT HOUSE. (2011) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

SILENT HOUSE. (2011) DIRECTED BY CHRIS KENTIS AND LAURA LAU. SCREENPLAY BY LAURA LAU. STARRING ELIZABETH OLSEN, ADAM TRESE AND ERIC SHEFFER STEVENS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Daddy? Daddy?’

I liked this one, I really did. It’s an American independent psychological horror film based on the Uruguayan movie of the same name, LA CASA MUDA from 2010. The Uruguayan film was based in turn on what was supposed to have been real-life events in South America in the ‘40s but no evidence could ever be found to prove it.

I love this modern-day version. Elizabeth Olsen is the youngest sister of acting twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and she seems to have plenty of acting chops to fall back on, anyway. She’s phenomenal at displaying terror, just phenomenal.

She plays a young girl called Sarah, who is helping her father John and his brother Peter to renovate her family’s run-down derelict summer-house in the remote countryside so that they can sell it.

The house is in a right state. God knows how long it is since anyone stayed there. There’s no electricity, so the trio have to use candles and lamps to light their way in the decidedly eerie, mould-filled old house.  

Peter, who is not on the best terms currently with his brother John, drives away into town to fetch more tools and an electrician, leaving Sarah alone in the house with her father. That’s when the fun really starts…

Sarah and John become separated as they trawl through the upstairs, and, when a frightened Sarah eventually catches up with him, she discovers to her horror that someone has bludgeoned the poor bloke over the head and left him for dead on the floor in one of the rooms.

Here begin Sarah’s desperate attempts to escape the darkened house which has become something of a deadly enemy in the time since Peter left it, and her attempts also to identify and get away from the Stalking Man with the balaclava-covered head, whom she has already managed to confuse with her beloved old man. Daddy? Terrifying Intruder? Well, I’m glad that’s settled, anyway.

The tension is ramped up time after time as the Stalking Man and poor wee Sarah come into very close proximity with each other and Sarah has to crawl through holes and climb over barriers just to stay one step ahead of him. Who is he, and what the fuck does he want with Sarah and her family?

I mean, her father and uncle are surly, argumentative chaps but no-one would want to kill them, surely? And what are these Polaroid photographs that keep turning up round the eerie, sinister empty house, and why do John and Peter not want her to see them? Are you starting to guess, dear reader, the mystery behind this ramshackle Victorian house in the back of beyond? There are different kinds of silence, after all…

Perhaps if I mention that the film fits neatly beside HAUTE TENSION (2005) and THE UNINVITED (2009) as examples of a certain mental condition known as ‘disassociative identity disorder,’ you’ll go, ah, I get it, and add SILENT HOUSE to your to-watch list. Or you might just want to pelt me with rotten tomatoes (geddit?) because of the giant spoiler I just dropped…

By the way, the film claims to be done in one continuous take like Alfred Hitchcock’s ROPE from 1948, but this isn’t entirely true, although it looks true. The film was made in 12-15 minute takes and then spliced together later. It’s not really noticeable, though, and is, in fact, a very good attempt.

My grown-up kids watched this movie with me and they both said it was lame, pants, derivative, crap, etc., but don’t worry because they have no taste. I loved it and it scared the bejesus out of me, so there.

And it was made even more scary for me by the fact that, the night I watched it, I had to sleep with my bedroom door wide open because we’d been painting in there during the day and the kids didn’t want to risk me dying of paint fumes and asphyxiation.

That’s right, folks, they’ll laugh at my film preferences, the disrespectful pair, but they don’t want me to actually die, lol. Oh no. They need me to keep this show on the road…

I can tell you, though, that that night, every shadow was a possible predator hulking behind an armchair and every creak in this old house a Stalking Man creeping his way step by step to my bedroom to throttle me in my sleep.

Crikey, I’ve just scared myself all over again. Watch SILENT HOUSE and you too can have a fear-filled night of jumping out of your skin every time a bird farts on the tree outside your window. You’re welcome.

THE BLOODY JUDGE. (1970) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE BLOODY JUDGE. (1970) DIRECTED AND CO-WRITTEN BY JESUS FRANCO.

PRODUCED BY HARRY ALAN TOWERS.

MUSIC BY BRUCE NICOLAI.

STARRING CHRISTOPHER LEE, LEO GENN, MARIA ROHM, MILO QUESADA AND HOWARD VERNON.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I loved this robust seventeenth century romp, despite its being a tiny bit of a mess. It’s not really sure whether it’s a war film, a biopic of Judge Jeffries, an erotic nudie film, a film about a witch-finder or a film about the Inquisition.

Instead, it ends up being a mish-mash of all of these things, with the flavour of five different countries to boot, thanks to the tendency of the producer, Harry Alan Towers, to involve a load of different countries in the money-gathering stage of production, thus making this movie an Anglo-American-German-Spanish-French-Italian co-production. There’s a mouthful for you. It might explain, however, why the spoken dialogue in the film switched three times to angry-sounding German without warning…!

The magnificent Christopher Lee, renowned Hammer Horror actor most commonly identified with the role of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is the main character here, the titular ‘Bloody Judge.’

He’s only about forty-eight here and looks ridiculously handsome and stern, playing that cold, austere disciplinarian and authority figure he’s portrayed so well and so often during his long and prolific career.

He’s based on the real-life Lord Chief Justice of the seventeenth century, during that period of English history when fear stalked that green and pleasant land and saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could have you up in front of a judge charged with nearly the worst crime of all, treason. Sounds kind of like another bad, more modern, period in history, doesn’t it?

In 1685, Judge Jeffries is sent by London to the West Country, to deal with the soldiers and civilians who aided, abetted and participated in Monmouth’s Rebellion against King James the Second. As always, the sadistic Jeffries (Christopher Lee) is only too happy to help.

He convicts huge numbers of men and women of treason and sentences them to death first by hanging, then they must be revived so they can be drawn and quartered, all the while feeling every modicum of pain. How fiendishly cruel and ghoulish!

The Judge, characterised by his unreasonableness, his total lack of empathy and compassion, his sense of humour bypass and devilish sexual urges, is also busy ‘smelling out witches,’ a dangerous thing indeed if you happen to be a young attractive local woman, with long, free-flowing hair, an ample bosom spilling out over the top of a flouncy, low-cut peasant blouse and a vocabulary designed to utter only two phrases in all:

Woman when being tortured: ‘Stop, please!’

Woman when being raped: ‘Oh, no, please, no!’

Yes, the women in the film are only there to be thoroughly ‘gone over’ for signs of witchcraft by Jack Ketch, the vile executioner, in his horrible underground torture chamber. Women are stripped and subjected to the whip, the rack, branding with a hot iron, the pliers- for extracting teeth- and wholly non-consensual sexual activities.

Ketch, a dead ringer for the sinister Boris Karloff in TOWER OF LONDON (1939), a film in which Basil Rathbone sports a most unflattering hairstyle, watches with his tongue hanging out as Mary Gray, the lead female and a prisoner, kneels naked and licks the bare, whipped body of another beautiful woman who’s suspended from a low ceiling and barely conscious.

In another scene, the Bloody Judge himself seduces-slash-ravages the frightened Mary Gray, who wants it really, as I’m sure you agree… We hear Christopher Lee’s deep, sexy infinitely cultivated voice murmuring sweet nothings over Mary’s naked body while a stunt hand fondles her nudieness, so it’s a bit of a swizz really, like the time I thought it was Chris’s bare behind I was seeing in the 1976 film, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, but it was only his stunt double’s…!

Leo Genn of QUO VADIS fame is excellent as the Earl of Wessex, father to Mary’s lover, Harry. There’s a great musical score by Bruno Nicolai, who in his lifetime worked with Ennio Morricone. The ending is quite fitting too, but I won’t spoil it for you, though naturally I’m dying to, haha.

There’s some gorgeous scenery of countryside in the film, known in the USA as NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTER, though I don’t know why, as it doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. I’m not sure in which country the countryside footage was shot; I’m not even sure if it’s English or European.

The film has, of course, been compared to THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) and Michael Armstrong’s movie, MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970), but all three films have their merits, in my humble opinion, and I love all three of ‘em.Watch them all back-to-back if you can; make an evening of it! And if you like torture chambers and seeing innocent people in terrible agony at the whim of another, well, you’re in for a delicious treat…   

THE WONDER. (2022) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE WONDER. (2022) BASED ON THE 2016 NOVEL OF THE SAME NAME BY EMMA DONOGHUE.

DIRECTED BY SEBASTIAN LELIO.

STARRING FLORENCE PUGH, TOM BURKE, KILA LORD CASSIDY AND CIARAN HINDS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘A mother’s kiss is sacred.’

I’m beginning to be quite the fan-girl of Florence Pugh, having adored her in both the gruesome MIDSOMMAR and the dreamily disturbing fillum, THE FALLING. THE WONDER is pretty damned disturbing too, as well as being a gripping and compelling watch.

Florence plays a nurse (not Florence Nightingale, though it’s a good guess), an English one called Elizabeth ‘Lib’ Wright who has nursed in the Crimean War, which took place in Europe between 1853 and 1856. Russia fought an amalgam of countries including England and the then Ottoman Empire. Russia didn’t win, put it like that!

Anyway, this was a pretty bloody war, so Nurse Lib would have assisted at things like the amputation of limbs when the only anaesthetic was laudanum, and the patching up of the most grotesque head and body wounds.

It would have been a bit like Scarlett o’Hara nursing at the hospital in Atlanta during the Civil War in GONE WITH THE WIND, but presumably Nurse Lib doesn’t run away from her patients in disgust just because they’re a little bit dirty and smell a tad yucky, lol.

Now it’s 1862, and the widowed Nurse Lib, who has also by now lost a child as well and is still grieving and self-medicating with the aforementioned laudanum, is called over to a rural part of Ireland to closely watch what was then referred to as a ‘fasting girl.’

There have been a few of these in history, girls (why only girls, why never boys?) who have seemingly gone without food for a long period of time. This is often supposed to have had religious connotations and the girls could be revered as direct servants of God, when they weren’t being exposed as fakes, that is.

I personally wouldn’t have put myself forward as one of these ‘holy miracles,’ especially in the times of witchcraft and the Witchfinder General, just in case my actions were misconstrued and things went the other way. Anybody got a light…?

The ’fasting girl’ is called Anna O’Donnell. She’s about eleven and her family, a mother, a father, an older sister called Niamh who, frankly, is surplus to requirements (well, she does so little, they could have saved themselves her salary!), and a deceased son about whom there seems to be some mystery. Ooooh-er…!

The O’Donnell family are dirt-poor. This is hardly surprising. It’s 1862 and only a decade since the Great Famine (1845-1952) ended, the most traumatic, disturbing and far-reaching event to ever darken the pages of Irish history.

The potato crop failed in successive years, and, as the poor Irish Catholics (eighty percent of the population at the time) were dependent on d’auld shpuds, they had nothing else to really replace them with. A million people died of starvation, a horrible sentence to have to write.

Another million emigrated, mainly to America, but loads of these last died on the coffin ships that carried them across the Atlantic. Thousands queued to get into the workhouses, a fate almost worse than death, a sure sign of how bad things were. The workhouses had to close their doors in the end and turn people away. It must have been horrendous.

The other twenty percent of the population of the day, by the way, was made up of the English and the rich posh Anglo-Irish. That’s right. England owned Ireland at that time, and Queen Victoria and her minions didn’t exactly fall over themselves trying to help.

Sorry if that doesn’t promote good inter-country relations, but that’s the way it happened, seemingly. I have a lot of very dear English friends and I hope that they won’t mind me saying what’s true. Obviously, I’m simplifying things a good bit here because I’m writing a movie review and not a history book, but you can read up on it yourself if you like.

Any-hoo, Nurse Lib has been hired by a local committee of bigwigs- all male, of course, doctors, lawyers, Ciaran Hinds as the priest, generally posh rich blokes, etc.- to watch the child like a hawk and make sure she’s not getting any grub sneaked into her from somewhere and really is subsisting on fresh air, as is being claimed. The girl herself, Anna, says that she’s living on ‘manna from heaven.’

Okily-dokily. Nurse Lib, despite outright hostility from the girl’s parents, the mum in particular, is on the case. Is someone feeding our Anna on the sly? Or is she really a miracle child, really a ‘wonder’ like some people say she is?

I love that the child’s screen mother is actually her real mother, from real life, Elaine Cassidy, who played Felicia alongside the late great Bob Hoskins in the screen adaptation of William Trevor’s novel, FELICIA’S JOURNEY. That’s another great film, by the way.

Tom Burke is excellent and dishy as Lib’s love interest, the posh journalist from the DAILY TELEGRAPH who’s been ordered to write a story on the ‘fasting girl.’ He thinks it’s a hoax. He also carries great guilt with him because his family died of starvation in the Great Famine while he was away at Snob School. Sorry, I mean boarding school.

When they realised that no help was coming, they barricaded themselves inside their home so that they could die unobserved and with dignity. How chilling is this? I remember reading something similar in a Holocaust memoir once.

A Jewish man begged for money from one of his fellow men, one of the Jewish officials in charge of the ghetto where the man and his family had been incarcerated by the Nazis.

‘The money’s not for food,’ he explained earnestly to the Judenrat member. ‘I know nothing can prevent us all from starving to death now. It’s for rent, so that we at least have somewhere private to die…’

I think I’ll leave it there.