ALISON’S BIRTHDAY. (1981) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

ALISON’S BIRTHDAY. (1981) AN AUSTRALIAN FOLK HORROR FILM WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY IAN COUGHLAN. PRODUCED BY DAVID HANNAY.
STARRING JOANNE SAMUEL, LOU BROWN, BUNNEY BROOKE, JOHN BLUTHAL, VINCENT BALL AND BRIAN WENZEL.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I watched this Australian folk horror film on Shudder at the weekend for the first time and I really liked it, although it wasn’t too difficult to work out the plot, based on the information that we’re given in the first scenes when the titular Alison and her school mates ‘mess about’ on a Ouija board after school.

In the first place, you do not ‘mess about’ on Ouija boards; they are much too dangerous for that and should be taken seriously. Secondly, if we’ve learned anything from every horror movie that ever featured a Ouija board as its means of communicating with the ‘other side,’ it’s that when you open that door to the other dimension for someone to step through, it may not always be your sweet old deceased granny or your childhood pet who does so. It could be a raging demon or a malevolent spirit who’s thrilled with the chance to be back in the world again.

In Alison’s case, she gets a deadly warning from her dead father; her parents died in a car accident when she was a child. She’s been brought up by her Aunt Jennifer and Uncle Dean. The message involves a certain birthday, and, as I said, a deadly warning concerning same. The Ouija board session has serious enough consequences for Alison to never fully be able to put the warning to the back of her mind…

Jump forward nearly three years later, and Alison and her boyfriend Pete are motoring to Aunt Jenny and Uncle Dean’s house in the country for Alison’s nineteenth birthday celebrations. Birthday, you say? But wasn’t there something about a birthday, and a warning, or something…? You’re right. There was…

Auntie and Uncle are a bit dismayed to see that Alison and Pete are practically joined at the hip. It seems that whatever they have planned for Alison, they’ve reckoned without an ultra-protective boyfriend who genuinely only has Alison’s best interests at heart.

How to get rid of him without arousing Alison’s suspicions? How to do the thing they’ve lured Alison here for without arousing his…? They seem like a resourceful couple, dearest Auntie and Uncle. (They remind me of Roz and Brother in the brilliant 1976 supernatural horror film, BURNT OFFERINGS). I’m sure they’ll rig up something…

Two horror movie tropes of great interest here; firstly, the shocking presence of a one-hundred-and-three-year-old woman in a bedroom at the top of the house, whom Alison’s Auntie and Uncle have the cheek to tell her is a granny of hers she’s just forgotten. You don’t just forget you have a living granny. The nerve…

Secondly, there’s a wild, overblown space beyond the end of Auntie and Uncle’s back garden filled with old standing stones that you immediately understand will figure in whatever ghoulish fate Alison’s relatives have in store for her.

Standing stones rock, if you’ll excuse the pun, associated as they are with ancient runes and ancient rites and other ancient things that may or may not begin with ‘r.’ Watch NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957) for a truly cracking example of same.

Australia is such a mystical, mysterious country, isn’t it? It has its indigenous ghosts and spirits and mythical creatures, and so much open, untamed space that you could well imagine strange, wild things happening there.

The dreamy, atmospheric PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975) is a fantastic example of Australian mystery/horror cinema, but even modern Aussie horror films like WOLF CREEK (2005) and WOLF CREEK (2013), both starring John Jarratt who, coincidentally, was also in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, also compellingly feature treacherous Australian landscapes, and not always treacherous for their wild animals and legendary ghosts, either. Sometimes, it’s the people you have to look out for, eh, Mick…?

WALKABOUT (1971), starring Jenny Agutter of THE RAILWAY CHILDREN fame, is another film which, while more survival and adventure than horror, showcases the wild barrenness and dangerous beauty of the magnificent, but unforgiving to the uninitiated, Australian Outback.

Even A CRY IN THE DARK (1988), probably better known as ‘The Dingo took my Baby’ film, features the massive primeval sandstone formation known as Ayers Rock, a place where you could well imagine bad things might happen…

I was pleased to see Brian Wenzel from A COUNTRY PRACTICE, the popular Australian soap opera, turn up at Alison’s house as a middle-aged copper. Who did he play in A COUNTRY PRACTICE…? Oh, a middle-aged copper, Sgt. Frank Gilroy.

He was married to Shirley and his daughter Vicki was a vet, remember? I loved A COUNTRY PRACTICE, which ran from 1981 to 1993. It’d still be on today if it hadn’t been elbowed out by NEIGHBOURS, grumble grumble.

Anyway, ALISON’S BIRTHDAY is interesting straightaway for being both Australian and cast in the folk horror mould. The opening scene, with the schoolgirls and the Ouija board, is not quite as good as the opening five minutes of THE APPOINTMENT (1981), but it’s still pretty good.

THE APPOINTMENT, by the way, is a British supernatural horror film starring Edward THE EQUALISER Woodward, who also appeared as the ill-fated Sergeant Neil Howie in the Mammy and Daddy of all the folk horror films, THE WICKER MAN (1973).

Other English folk horror films of note include THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968), starring Vincent Price, and BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971), which is the film to watch if you’ve ever sat down and actively thought, Eeeeeeh, I wonder what Frank Spencer’s missus Betty would be like if she were in a folk horror film, attending an orgy as a dead sexy imp of Satan’s…? This fillum answers that question.

I think I’ve imparted enough of my wisdomness to you lot for today, lol. I’d best be off now, anyway. It’s time to keep my appointment with the Six o’Clock News and a baked potato…

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 new book, THIRTEEN STOPS EARLIER, is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://amzn.to/3ulKWkv
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Stops-Later-Book-ebook/dp/B091J75WNB/

 
 

THE FALLING. (2014) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE FALLING. (2014) WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CAROL MORLEY. PRODUCED BY LUC ROEG AND CAIRO CANNON. DISTRIBUTED BY METRODOME UK.

STARRING MAXINE PEAKE, MAISIE WILLIAMS, FLORENCE PUGH, JOE COLE, MONICA DOLAN AND GRETA SCAACHI.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a strange, but strangely compelling, mystery drama film. You can’t really call it a horror film, as it doesn’t have all that much horror in it, but at first or second glance you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a folk horror movie, as it definitely contains elements of same. Confused? You said it, lol. Let’s have a look at the plot…

We’re in a posh girls’ day school in England in 1969, where the beautiful Abbie, played by Florence MIDSOMMAR Pugh in her rather impressive acting debut, is best friends with Lydia, who’s not quite such a raving beauty.

The blonde Abbie is at the age where she’s starting to explore her sexuality, so she has sex with Lydia’s brother Kenneth (never Ken!) to try to dislodge a pregnancy that’s been implanted in her womb by another boy. Lydia is, understandably, jealous of her friend’s popularity with the lads. She needn’t worry. Kenneth Never Ken is as happy to have sex with his sister as he is to copulate with Abbie…

We never once see Abbie’s parents, and I can’t help thinking that if they’d been a little more present in their daughter’s life, she might never have gotten into quite such a pickle. As it is, the kids in this film seem to be able to come and go as they please without any kind of parental interference whatsoever, except for rare interventions by Lydia’s mum, Eileen.

Eileen is an interesting character. Played by Maxine Peake, who portrayed Myra Hindley in the absolutely superb television drama about the Moors Murders, SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, Eileen is an agoraphobic single parent who runs a hairdressing business from home.

Her husband is out of the picture and her children, Lydia and Kenneth Never Ken, seem to mostly do what they like. Lydia in particular gives her poor mum a ton of verbal abuse, especially about her agoraphobia, but Eileen has her own perfectly sensible reasons for not wanting to leave the house…

Anyway, after Abbie has sex with Kenneth, she starts having strange fainting fits. Soon, Lydia and the other teenaged girls at the school are all having these fits of fainting, in which they all swoon elegantly and artistically to the floor without ever hurting themselves or braining themselves off table corners and things like that.

It’s like a choreographed ballet of fainting, an orgy of delicate swooning that drives the headmistress Miss Alvaro and her second-in-command, Miss Mantel played by Greta Scaachi, batty with anger and exasperation. They become especially irked when the school has to be shut down after a mass fainting fit during a special assembly.

Neither the head nor Miss Mantel are prepared to believe any explanation for the fainting fits other than, one, the girls are faking it for the laugh, or, two, the girls are being unduly influenced by Lydia, Abbie’s best friend and sidekick. Lydia is acting out for reasons she’s unsure of, but a good therapist, and I don’t mean the snobby toff attached to the hospital, could probably help her to work it out.

Instead of feeling compassionate towards the greatly disturbed Lydia or trying to help her, however, Miss Alvaro decides to expel the unfortunate teenager. It’s then up to the psychiatrist treating the remaining girls to decipher whether their fainting fits are caused by a surfeit of female hormones or hormone imbalance coupled with menstruation and the onset of sexuality, or whether a thing called ‘mass hysteria’ could possibly be at work here, and the girls are picking up the ‘infection’ or the ‘bug’ from each other.

It could also be a sort of mass demonic possession, couldn’t it? The teenage girl is more likely to be susceptible to this type of thing than any other age group, due to hormones and changes in their bodies and maybe even a general propensity for drama and such. That’s just one theory, anyway.

The director here is clearly channelling PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, the floatiest, dreamiest mystery film about missing schoolgirls ever to hit the big screen. The school in THE FALLING has a lake and the most dazzling scenery, forestry, little hidden wooded paths and other natural charms on its very doorstep, giving rise to the notion that here be folk horror, and the girlies read poetry by choice, listen to music and draw and paint to their little hearts’ content. All the subjects guaranteed to arouse romance, glamour, sex and romantic longing in young girls.

If something floaty, dreamy and utterly mysterious doesn’t happen to the girls in this film, then I don’t know who it would happen to. Teenage girls are always doing something weird, whether it’s going for a Picnic at Hanging Rock and getting lost in the Rock or mass-fainting in a delightfully artistic pile of arms and legs and long, long swathes of hair in The Falling. Personally, I wouldn’t mind getting lost in the Rock myself, as long as that Rock was the former wrestler and now actor, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, but that’s another matter…

Guys probably won’t dig this flick, what with its being artsy and slow-moving and quiet and such-like. But women will like it, and fans of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK will like it, so it will have its fans.

The Rock, good old Dwayne Johnson himself, probably won’t like it because it’s a movie where no-one really punches anyone or throws someone out of a speeding car whilst punching them in double time, but don’t you worry your head about that. There are plenty of other films out there for the Rock to enjoy. He’s gonna be all right…  

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 new book, THIRTEEN STOPS EARLIER, is out now from Poolbeg Books:

https://amzn.to/3ulKWkv

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

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

WOLF CREEK 2. (2013) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

WOLF CREEK 2. (2013) DIRECTED AND CO-WRITTEN BY GREG MCCLEAN. STARRING JOHN JARRATT.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I know that this film probably comes under the heading of torture porn, ie, a sub-genre of horror film that goes out of its way to show the viewers sickeningly graphic portrayals of gore and bloody violence against the human person, but I still love it.

And I find John Jarratt’s Mick Taylor an oddly compelling and sexually attractive serial killer, although that probably says more about me and my warped personality than anything else, lol. But lets’s have a closer look at him, anyway.

When he was a callow youth of twenty-three, John Jarratt played a fairly sizeable role as Albert Crundall in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, one of the best Australian horror movies ever made. He did it very well, as it happens.

Now, a mature, grizzly-looking John Jarratt plays Mick Taylor, a serial killer probably unequalled anywhere in film or literature in his zest for killing and the hatred against virtually all of society/humanity he harbours in his hairy breast, snigger.

He’s Australian, right, and an extreme example of the original Alpha male. Hunting, tracking, stalking, shooting, gutting, skinning, slicing, chopping, boiling, even sexually violating; is there anything he hasn’t done to the animal- or human- carcass? Mick’s done it all.

He loves the chase almost as much as the kill, and he’s usually pretty confident that he’ll bag his prey. He knows his territory, the deserted outbacks and lonely highways of Australia, like the back of his huge leathery hand, after all.

Dressed in his trademark lumberjack shirt, jeans, boots and a wide-brimmed hat to keep the hot Aussie sun off his widdle noggin, he trawls these largely empty roads looking for unsuspecting tourists and backpackers to lure back to his torture chamber of a home. And, once he gets you there, you’re better off dead…

Waking up in Mick’s torture chamber is the one thing you don’t want to do. And yet, it’s exactly what happens in WOLF CREEK 2 to poor Paul Hammersmith, an English tourist (played by an Australian actor) who unintentionally ‘deprives’ Mick of a beautiful German female captive whom he accidentally lets get away from him.

Mick is hopping mad. He can get months and months of fun and amusement out of a female prisoner, and this jumped-up little ‘pommie cunt’ has done him out of a guaranteed good time.

So, Mick’s determined to pay Paul back, and this is why Paul is cable-tied to the torture chair in Mick’s gracious establishment with Mick sitting opposite him, regarding him quizzically as if wondering which power tool to use on him first.

The astonishing level of knowledge possessed by Mick in regard to Australian culture and history is really quite shocking to witness. After all, he doesn’t strike one as a guy who did well in school and then went voluntarily on to further education.

Yet, the questions he sets Paul, who’s answering them in exchange for his life (and fingers!) here, are extremely in-depth and intelligent. Mick is proud to be an Australian, and he loves his country.

But there’s genuine love of country, and then there’s National Socialism, lol. Mick Taylor, possibly the world’s biggest xenophobe, is an equal opportunities racist. He hates everyone with the same level of contempt and disgust.

Every nationality, from the Germans to the English, is just another bunch of ‘foreign cunts’ to Mick Taylor. He refers to them as a plague of vermin, coming to ‘his’ country to f**k it up and destroy it. And we all know what you do with plagues, right? You wipe ’em out…

Paul’s ‘English wit’ and his pretty passable attempts to get Mick to join him in some buddy-buddy drinking songs is highly amusing to Mick, not unlike the way that King Kong is amused by Naomi Watts’s juggling tricks and acrobatics in the Jack Black/Peter Jackson version of KING KONG. (Both captives here are rather cleverly trying to use psychology to lull their captors into a false sense of security, but will it work?)

Unlike King Kong, however, Mick Taylor does still intend to kill poor unfortunate Paul Hammersmith. He simply doesn’t mind having a bit of craic and bonhomie with him first, a bit of man-banter. After all, the existence he leads is a pretty lonely one.

But Paul has at least some gumption, some balls; maybe he doesn’t want to be killed. Maybe, unlike the terrified females Mick is more used to, he intends to fight for his life, so that one day he can go back to England, as presumably he intends to do, and resume his job and/or his studies there. But, of course, Mick won’t go down without a fight, and Mick Taylor fights dirty…

I think this film is actually better than the 2005 original. The first film is excellent, and it’s fine that it’s just the relatively straightforward story of three young tourists who fall afoul of Mick on their wee driving holiday. It’s the perfect, easy-does-it introduction to the franchise. But WOLF CREEK 2 is so much more complex.

We get to see a whole lot more of Mick’s hate-filled, xenophobic personality, and the plot has a load of very satisfying twists and turns. I love the bit about the crooked, corrupt cops who try to give Mick a speeding ticket when he wasn’t even speeding (I don’t give much for their chances of survival, do you?), and the horror of the subterranean caves shows us that Mick’s evil has even more layers to it than we previously imagined. Roll on WOLF CREEK 3. Some of us need to know where our next Mick-Fix is coming from…

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

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