OLD. (2021) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

OLD. (2021) DIRECTED, WRITTEN AND CO-PRODUCED BY M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN.
BASED ON THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, SANDCASTLE, BY PIERRE OSCAR LEVY AND FREDERIK PEETERS.
STARRING VICKY KRIEPS, GAEL GARCIA BERNAL, RUFUS SEWELL, ABBEY LEE, KEN LEUNG, NIKKI AMUKA-BIRD AND AARON PIERRE.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a strange one. I got super-excited when I saw the cover on the DVD box, which featured an anonymous someone with half normal body parts and half sort of skeletonized limbs, to indicate a process of extreme ageing, hence the title.

I was also excited by the fact that the director, M. Night Shyamalan, is famed for the plot twists in his movies, for example, as in THE VILLAGE (2004), and I was hugely looking forward to the twist in this one. I kind of guessed it halfway through, though, with not a little help from the director himself, which was surprising.

Then the film started ending, and I kept waiting for the final plot twist that would justify my supreme faith in the director. Sadly, that didn’t come and I was left feeling a bit flat, but OLD is still a really entertaining and enjoyable- if confusing- horror film, even if M. Night Shyamalan himself denies that he’s a ‘horror’ film-maker.

Horror is the destination, he says, whereas he prefers his characters to come through the experience and out the other side, as it were. Yes, I did watch the thirty-minute extra feature, lol. It shows him saying the above thing about his not being a horror director, and then everything else is about how much he loves his three beautiful, talented daughters, at least two of whom worked on the film with him, one directing and one writing and performing the theme song. Fair enough, guy loves his family. I was glad the extra feature wasn’t any longer, though, as there’s only so much of that kind of thing you can stomach.

The plot sees three families coming to a fabulous island for a vacation, and then being offered the chance by the ‘resort manager’ to take a ‘day trip’ to a supposedly gorgeous stretch of private beach which they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. I’ve put in the quotation marks because nothing here is ‘as it seems,’ heh-heh-heh.

M. Night Shyamalan himself plays the tour bus driver who drives the group of ten people to this peach of a beach, and then drives off again after leaving them an unusually large amount of food. The beach sure is isolated. They reach it by walking through some eerie, lonely caves, then, once they’re ensconced on said beach, it very much looks like they won’t be able to leave it again…

Not only this, but they very quickly discover that the beach has an horrific secret that will mess not only with their minds but also with their physical bodies. You might be able to guess what happens from the title, but I won’t beat you over the head with it. It reminded me a lot of Stephen King’s excellent novella-turned-film, THINNER. As a body horror- even if ‘Night,’ as everyone calls him, doesn’t like to call it horror!- the film is pretty damn chilling and effective.

Particularly striking bits, for me, included Prisca Cappa’s stomach tumour, Kara’s ‘baby,’ a child born to another child, and what happens to the stunning blonde Mrs. Paranoid English Surgeon when her calcium deficiency gets terrifyingly out of hand. That poor, poor woman. I also really liked her husband, Mr. Paranoid English Surgeon, played by Rufus Sewell, having his mental breakdown on the same beach that will claim the lives of most of them before the story ends.

Ah, come on, guys. How is that a spoiler? What kind of an enchanted beach would it be that didn’t kill anyone, ever? Some magic beach that’d be. Cool your jets, lol, and enjoy the movie. It’s a weird one, but still well worth at least one watch. And don’t, whatever you do, call it a ‘horror’ to your mates, because, well, you know. ‘Night’ doesn’t dig it…  

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

THE THING. (1982) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

JOHN CARPENTER’S ‘THE THING.’ (1982) DIRECTED BY JOHN CARPENTER. BASED ON THE NOVELLA ‘WHO GOES THERE?’ BY JOHN W. CAMPBELL JR.
SCREENPLAY BY BILL LANCASTER. MUSIC BY JOHN CARPENTER AND ENNIO MORRICONE. SPECIAL EFFECTS BY ROB BOTTIN.
STARRING KURT RUSSELL, KEITH DAVID, PETER MALONEY AND A. WILFORD BRIMLEY.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Three things to note about supernatural body horror film THE THING: 1. There’s an awful lot of fire in it. 2. There aren’t any women in it, ergo no love story either, the only thing the film is missing. 3. Kurt Russell has the most beautiful eyes. Gorgeous lips too, but, my word, those eyes are to die for…!

It’s shocking nowadays to read over the bad reviews this film initially garnered on its release, and then to compare them with the rave reviews it’s received retrospectively and continues to receive to this day.

Either those early critics really, really got it wrong or it was simply a case, as some people think, of THE THING’s having just found it too hard to compete with two other films that were released at the same time.

Namely, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, which of course presents an altogether different, more positive view of alien visitors from Outer Space, and Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER. 1982 was clearly a good year for science fiction movies.

Suffice it to say here that this film is widely regarded nowadays as one of the best horror movies ever made and John Carpenter, its creator, one of the best horror movie directors. Did I mention that I saw him perform his movie soundtracks live in Dublin’s Vicar Street one Halloween Week a few years ago? I didn’t? Well, gather round, friends, and I shall tell you a wondrous tale…!

Haha, I’m only joking. I tell that story enough every year. Today we’ll just talk about THE THING. So, um, well, here’s the thing, geddit? See what I did there? It’s the story of a highly malevolent, parasitic alien life form that somehow finds its way onto an American scientific research station in Antarctica, after thousands of years of being buried nice and cosy-like in the ice.

That’s a hell of a story, isn’t it? Something similar happens in the marvellous horror movie, HORROR EXPRESS, starring Hammer royalty Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and also TV detective Kojak, aka actor Telly Savalas. Who loves ya, baby?

Anyway, once the lads at the research station encounter THE THING for the first time (in their dog pound as it’s initially taken the form of a cute cuddly bow-bow), they still don’t even grasp the enormity of the situation they’re in. This is only the beginning of the horror for the men, whose lives on the station are probably isolated and tough enough as it is.

All there is to do on the station is drink whiskey, smoke weed, watch videotapes of old TV shows, argue with each other, and, erm, presumably masturbate to old memories and any porno mags they’ve been able to lug up there. Do they ever do any, um, scientific research, which after all is why they’re there? Do you know, I’ve never seen it happen…?

THE THING has the power to take on any life-form it chooses, but only if there’s already an existing life-form for it to take the shape and form of, if you get me. It sneakily decides to take on the appearance of various scientists at the station, and the only way for the other brainiacs to tell the difference is by doing a blood test, which isn’t always convenient:

‘Um, excuse me, Mr. Thing, would you mind awfully just taking a seat here and giving me your arm? It’s only a little prick, you’ll hardly feel it, and you can TOTALLY go back to killing us all afterwards, I promise! We even have lollipops here for anyone who gives blood. Hey, how about those Mets, huh…?’

Kurt Russell, deeply attractive in a full beard and with his thermal long johns on under his outer clothing, is the main character, R.J. MacReady, and the scientist who’s the most proactive in trying to track down and destroy THE THING. He’s (Mac) ready for anything, see? His answer to everything is literally fire. It’s hilarious.

Every time he spots anything that remotely resembles THE THING, he turns a flame-thrower on it and no exceptions. If he’s not careful, he’ll forget himself and end up scratching his arse with that flame-thrower or trying to turn on the TV with it. It reminds me of an episode of THE SIMPSONS where they’re trying to figure out something, I forget what, and Marge ends up saying ‘No fires!’ to all of Homer’s pyromaniacal suggestions.

The feeling of suspicion and paranoia that builds up in the station as the men all view each other now as potential enemies is so strong, it’s almost palpable. Everyone’s all, like, let’s just sit here, real nice and quiet-like, where we can all keep an eye on each other, real friendly-like. No-one trusts anyone else any more and, when men’s tempers are frayed in such an isolated and claustrophobic situation, things can be triggered almost accidentally, bad things.

Again, it’s like that episode of THE SIMPSONS in which Bart Simpson, Milhouse Van Houten and Martin Prince each have shares in a rare comic-book, the first RADIOACTIVE MAN comic or something, but they quickly grow to distrust each other, each thinking that the other is planning to commandeer the comic for himself.

There are very few situations in life that can’t in some way be compared to an episode of THE SIMPSONS, as I’m forever telling my kids. There’s also the episode in which Mr. Burns and Homer are trapped together in a mountain cabin during an avalanche of snow, and they begin to mistrust each other pretty damn fast there too.

The special effects in THE THING are amazingly good, stomach-turning and extremely gory. They’re so good it’s actually incredible to think that they were created a whopping thirty-nine years ago and yet they’ve never been bettered since. Please don’t argue with me about this. I am a woman. I am programmed to win every argument, without exception, and I fight dirty, too, and I’ll resort to tears if I have to, lol.

Although there are some excellent horror film franchises on the go today (INSIDIOUS, THE CONJURING, SINISTER, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, to name but a few), no-one’s ever really managed to scale the dizzying heights that John Carpenter and Rob Bottin achieved together all those years ago. Maybe no-one ever will. And Rob Bottin, clearly some kind of genius, was only in his early twenties when he worked on this movie. To have this calibre of work/film on your CV at that tender age is nothing short of fantastic.

I read online that the film is screened every winter, along with THE SHINING, for the lads at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. That’s funny and kinda sweet but it’s also a bit like showing ALIVE as the in-flight movie on an aeroplane or a virus outbreak film in the hospital waiting-room to people experiencing, well, um, a viral outbreak. Funny but inadvisable, maybe even a little tactless. Still, it’s only a movie. Isn’t it…?

I’m off now to make a nice cup of tea to settle my stomach after all those gory special effects.  I only wish there were some way to do it where I didn’t have to get up from my chair, wash a cup, get the teabags, boil the kettle… Wait a minute. What would Kurt Russell do? I know. Where’s my flamethrower…?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

INSIDE. (2007) A GORY FRENCH EXTREMITY HORROR FILM REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

INSIDE. (2007) A FILM BY JULIEN MAURY AND ALEXANDRE BUSTILLO. STARRING BEATRICE DALLE AND ALYSSON PARADIS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Ralph: Do you like French cinema at all, Ted?

Ted: I wouldn’t know about that now, surr.

Ted and Ralph, The Fast Show.

This is a very pointy, stabby film in the genre known as ‘French extremity.’ Well, it’s both these things all right, French and extreme, and I don’t mind telling you right away that it’s much too extreme for me. It’s nothing but stabbing and blood, blood, blood. I don’t mind a bit of blood but this film is all blood. And stabbing. With big sharp scissors mostly, but also with anything that you can make a pointy shiv out of and stab with.

‘Extreme’ in this case just seems to mean lashings, and I do mean lashings, of body horror, gore, blood and, occasionally, guts. It’s the most blood-soaked film I think I’ve ever watched, and I once watched a film on giving birth in my pre-natal classes. Put me right off giving birth, it did, but by that stage it was too late to reverse the process that was already well under way in my uterus.

I like a nice psychological or supernatural horror, for example, where a family moves into a lovely new house and then they find out they’re sharing it with the Amityville Horror. Stuff like that, or where a woman is pregnant but then she discovers that she was unknowingly raped by Satan on a night out where she can’t remember a smidgeon of what happened, and the baby she’s carrying is actually slated to be the next Anti-Christ, stuff like that. That’s what I like.

Some of my favourite horror films, like BURNT OFFERINGS or THE CHANGELING, both about haunted houses, don’t have any blood in them at all and no-one gets stabbed. That’s what I prefer. I think what happened with INSIDE is that the film-makers decided that they were going to make the film as ‘extreme’ as they could to garner good reviews and plenty of attention, but the only way they could think to do that was to put a ton of blood and gore in it. Gore to me equals bore.

This home invasion film actually did get a load of positive reviews, probably from people who thought, oh wow, there’s so much blood and stabbing in this film that it must be great! Hmmm. I’m not saying the film isn’t well-written and executed (no pun intended), in fact it’s extremely well-scripted and acted, but I still didn’t like it because of all the gratuitous stabby, shooty killings.

Here’s the plot, anyway. A sulky, mopey French photographer woman called Sarah is due to give birth and, on Christmas Eve of all nights, her home is invaded by a mysterious madwoman about whom we know nothing, except that she’s beautiful in an odd, off-kilter way, she’s come impractically dressed for stabbing in an over-long black, trippy-uppy dress and her weapon of choice is a big scary pair of scissors.

She’s come, not so much for Sarah, but for the package Sarah is due to deliver any time now… the baby. The home becomes a place of terror (and the film’s title takes on a sinister double meaning) as this un-named madwoman rampages through the house trying to catch a petrified Sarah who, mopey or not, is not about to give up her bambino without one hell of a fight. That’s the maternal instinct right there, fighting for survival.

The cops come (all big, burly and extremely attractive), and a random criminal called Abdul, who all have to be dealt with by the mysterious crazy lady. The bodies pile up and the blood flows freely as Sarah’s baby, of whom we’re given distressing little 3-D snapshots from time to time, comes ever closer to being born.

Sarah, incidentally, if you like a little bit of showbiz gossip, is played by the younger sister of Vanessa Paradis, the French actress and one-time child pop star (Remember Joe Le Taxi?) who has two children by her ex-partner Johnny Depp. These are all very, very good-looking people we’re talking about here. Showbiz good-looking, I mean, not just regular good-looking. We peasants are not fit to grace their radars, even as temporary blips. Remember that, peasants. Lol. 

It’s a really good plot, the plot of INSIDE, well acted and everything, but the amount of gore in the film means that it’s just not for me, not my cup of tea. Each to their own, though. Someone else might love it, depending on their tolerance for blood and stabbings. Check it out, anyway, see what you think. Me, personally, I won’t be going anywhere near this one again. Did I mention it has way too much blood…?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor