LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. (2023) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. (2023) BASED ON THE NOVEL OF THE SAME NAME BY RUMAAN ALUM.

DIRECTED/SCREENPLAY BY SAM ESMAIL.

MUSIC BY MAX QUAYLE.

DISTRIBUTED BY NETFLIX.

STARRING JULIA ROBERTS, ETHAN HAWKE, KEVIN BACON, MAHERSHALA ALI AND MYHA’LA.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘I FUCKING HATE PEOPLE.’

This is one of my favourite ever Netflix films. I’ve watched it three or four times already and will definitely watch it again. It’s an American apocalyptic psychological thriller film part-produced by Higher Ground Productions, the company founded by the Obamas.

Julia Roberts is phenomenal in it. She’s been my favourite mainstream actress since the early ‘Nineties when I first saw her in SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY with Patrick Bergin, and I still love her today.

This movie is something she can really get her teeth into as well, as opposed to the type of character she plays in frothy, bubbly romcom films like PRETTY WOMAN and RUNAWAY BRIDE, proving that she has great acting chops as well as her trademark good looks which are ageing beautifully. Her hair and legs and face are all still as lovely as ever, and she hasn’t gone down the plastic surgery route either which bodes well for them.

She plays Amanda Sandford in LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. One weekend, she and her husband Clay and their children Archie and Rose leave New York for a break in a magnificent summer home rental with a swimming pool, access to a beach and a nearby small town, plenty of local wildlife (namely deer) and just a general feeling of being somewhere picturesque where you’re getting-away-from-it-all.

My favourite scene in the whole movie is what happens with the gigantic oil tanker when they go to the beach. I love big spooky ships anyway, and this scene is fantastic. It’s the first thing to suggest to the viewer that something’s not quite right.

By the time we notice that the local wildlife are behaving strangely and that the owners of the rental house, the elegant George Scott and his mouthy daughter Ruth, have returned in the middle of the night pleading a ‘black-out’ as their reason for so doing, we’re pretty much convinced that something sinister is afoot.

The house Wi-Fi is not working so no-one can use their phones or computers. Also, Rose Sandford cannot watch the last ever episode of FRIENDS, which is super-important to her. Most frightening of all, the TV is displaying a warning from the EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM. That only happens when the end of the world is imminent…

Planes are dropping out of the sky, the very thing people were worried about back in 1999. Remember Y2K, or the Millenium Bug? Self-driving cars are crashing into each other and blocking up the freeway, so the Sandfords can’t leave the area and go home, much to their frustration.

Ear-splitting high-frequency noises make Archie’s teeth fall out in a gruesomely grotesque scene that you won’t forget in a hurry. The words ‘hackers,’ ‘cyber-attack’ and ‘coup d’etat’ get bandied about…

Amanda, who definitely wears the trousers in her marriage, doesn’t trust the newcomers George and Ruth at first, but the more that bad things happen, the more she realises that George is likely to be of much more use to them in an apocalyptic-style crisis than her husband Clay, a self-admitted ‘useless man.’ She and George even have a strong sexual attraction to each other, but they’d feel guilty about their respective spouses if they acted on it. Awww.

A very trim and fit-looking Kevin Bacon of FOOTLOOSE fame plays Danny, George’s belligerent, gun-toting survivalist neighbour. He’s been expecting this kind of scenario, or something like it, for a long time now and he’s ready for anything.

With a houseful of food supplies and medicines, will he give George and Clay the antibiotics they need for the now gummy Archie? Who does Danny think is responsible for the chaos and confusion that’s going on…? He’s got some theories if y’all wanna hear ’em…

Rose goes missing as well towards the end, which prompts Amanda and Ruth to go looking for her in the deer-filled forest. They find more than just deer and so does Ruth…

The score contributes hugely to the jittery, unsettled and suspense-filled feel to the film, and so do the unusual upside-downy sideways-y camera angles. This is now one of my Top Ten End-of-the-World-slash-disaster-slash-alien invasion-slash-survival films, on a list (in no particular order) that includes the following:

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW- 2004.

2012- 2009.

RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR- 2006.

CONTAGION- 2011.

CONTAINMENT- 2015.

INDEPENDENCE DAY- 1996.

WAR OF THE WORLDS- 2005.

SIGNS- 2002.

ALIVE- 1993.

THE IMPOSSIBLE- 2012.

The list would also include a load of old black-and-white B-movies like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), etc. They’d be in a category of their own because there are so many of them.

Why am I so fascinated by films like this? The sheer scale of some of the catastrophes is what draws me to disaster films, in the same way probably that a lot of us love watching monster movies like JAWS, KING KONG, GODZILLA, JURASSIC PARK/WORLD, etc. Also, I think we like to watch this stuff happening to other people in a voyeuristic kind of way while hoping against hope that it never happens to us…!

Anyway, do try to watch LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND if you can. It’s still on Netflix and it’d be one hell of a way to celebrate this May Bank Holiday.

QUICKSAND. (2023) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

QUICKSAND. (2023) DIRECTED BY ANDRES BELTRAN. WRITTEN BY MATT PITTS.
STARRING CAROLINA GAITAN, ALLAN HAWCO AND SEBASTIAN ENSLAVA.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This won’t be a long review because this survival horror-thriller film is one in which only a few things happen. We have a married American couple who are separating, called Sofia and Josh. Sofia seems to be the driving force behind the separation.

Certainly, she’s the most dominant person in the marriage. Josh is a bit wimpy and not good at standing up for himself, though I imagine it’d be pretty hard to stand up to a Gorgon like Sofia. She’s all like, bitch bitch bitch, all the livelong day. You’d swear no-one else ever had problems.

Anyway, Sofia used to be a doctor before she/they had kids, and, in the movie, her friend Marcus asks her to come to Colombia to deliver a presentation at a medical conference in.

Sofia is from Columbia, like Gloria in MODERN FAMILY, so she’s thrilled at the chance to re-visit her homeland. Remember when Gloria says: ‘I’m from Columbia; I know what a fake crime scene looks like!’ Lol.

Sofia is delighted to get this possible way back into the career she loved so much before she was knocked up and her dreams lay in tatters around her, ahem. She travels from America to Columbia- Bogota, to be precise- with her dopey husband Josh. The kids are staying home for this one.

They’re staying in a nice hotel in Bogota with Marcus, who doesn’t know that the couple are separating. How does he miss it? The way Sofia is freezing Josh out of it would be obvious to the Man in the Moon. She seems to loathe and detest him, and acts as if his very touch, his proximity, is distasteful to her. They’re certainly not about to have any hotel sex, that’s for sure.

Instead, the mad pair of them decide to go hiking in the Bogota wilderness, ignoring all the warnings about this self-same wilderness being a dangerous place to get lost in.

Sofia in essence replies, ‘Feck off! I’m Colombian, I’ll be fine, I know this place!’ Next thing you know, she’s up to her neck in quicksand. Josh sees her predicament and jumps in to save her. If only he’d read the pamphlet on quicksand, ‘That’s not how it works, asshole!’

Well, that’s basically it. If you like movies in which two heads just keep talking back and forth to each other the whole time, have I got a treat for you! The two peeps basically have no choice but to talk to each other while the quicksand has them in its grip.

They even start discussing their marital difficulties while they’re there. Well, they might as well, there’s nothing else for them to do. Until the hissing begins and something long and slithery begins to wind its insidious way to the trapped pair…

I like the snake, but he’s not in it for long enough for the film to qualify as a creature feature. Pity, that. The snake is the one character I’d have liked to see more of, and I think the treatment he receives in the movie is shoddy, I say, damned shoddy.

That’s literally all there is to say about QUICKSAND, both the film AND the icky substance that sucks you down into it the more you struggle. It’s the first movie I’ve seen where quicksand is the main villain, and not just a little sidekick who nearly swallows two black slaves and a ‘hundred-dollar handcart’ in BLAZING SADDLES (1974)…!

I liked the film, but it gets real old real quick, so it might be just a one-time watch. Make up your own mind, though. QUICKSAND is currently streaming on Shudder. I used to love Shudder, but we’ve had so many darn technical problems with it (films not loading, etc.) that we’ve had to unsubscribe from it. Yes, I’m full of the joys today, friends. Enjoy the film, and take it handy.

(PS, Wow, the review above contains exactly 666 words, which means, and I’ve worked this out in minute detail with my charts and crystal ball, that the Anti-Christ will be born to a woman with letters of the alphabet in her name who currently lives somewhere on one of the continents of the world with a partner of a certain age and sex and a pet with four furry legs.

The devil child will be born either in the day or night of a month with four weeks in it, in a year containing no more than twelve months. It will be of one sex or the other, it will have four working limbs and a head and require oxygen, nutrition and H2O to exist. It will pass through the ages of childhood, the teen-age years, adulthood, middle age and old age.

It will speak and read words in the language of his or her family, it will walk on its legs or travel by car, bus, train, boat or aeroplane to the places where his or her presence is required, and it will work for an employer in a place of employment where he or she will exchange labour for pay in the form of a currency. It will spend its leisure time in pursuit of a typical or atypical activity and will marry and mate with a person of similar or opposing gender.

That’s about as specific as I can be for now, but I reckon that that’s more than enough info on the little devil to help us identify him or her when the time comes, I’ll keep ye posted!)