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!)  

FALL. (2022) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

FALL. (2022) DIRECTED, CO-WRITTEN AND CO-PRODUCED BY SCOTT MANN.

STARRING GRACE CAROLINE CURREY, VIRGINIA GARDNER, MASON GOODING AND JEFFREY DEAN MORGAN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I absolutely love survival horror films like this one. FALL is very similar to one whose name I can’t remember, featuring a cable car stuck up in the mountains after the booking office has closed and the staff have all gone home for the weekend, maybe even the long weekend. And you know the way that the kids in horror films often do the stupidest things, the exact things that will guarantee them both disaster and a short life?

The kids in the cable car movie (it’s on the tip of my tongue; was it called DROP? SNOW? CABLE CAR? MOUNTAIN? FREEZE? ROCK? SWING? CREAK? THREE THICK EEJITS STUCK IN A ROCKING CABLE CAR HALFWAY UP A FUCKIN’ MOUNTAIN AFTER HOURS?) can’t have known that their cable car would turn out to be faulty, so I suppose you can’t really call them stupid, but the two lasses in FALL do the stupidest thing ever while in their right minds, so they deserve every Darwin Award ever awarded to stupid people who improve the human gene pool by killing themselves in ever more idiotic ways. It’s a bit like the rubbish kerbing itself, if you get me.

FALL adheres strictly to a formula, but it’s a formula that still really works. Put your protagonists in a dangerous situation, then just keep turning the screw on the little blighters till they figure a way out for themselves. THE POOL and CRAWL and 47 METERS DOWN all come to mind as examples of fairly recent survival horror films that stick to the formula, but really work well as well.

American gals Becky and Hunter decide to climb a 2,000 ft high tower in the desert so that they can take photos at the top for Hunter’s YouTube channel, for which she carries out dangerous ‘challenges.’

Well, people will always like and subscribe to watch other idiots killing themselves, we know that. They’ll film you while you’re dying, too, but don’t expect them to call 911 because they’re busy trying to film something, goddammit…!

Anyway, Becky doesn’t want to climb the stupid tower. She’d rather stay home and booze it up and mourn the loss of her hubby, Dan, who died this time last year in, yes, you guessed it, a climbing accident also involving Becky and Hunter. (Dan is played by Mason Gooding, the son of Cuba Gooding, Jr.)

Becky doesn’t want to climb stairs, never mind a stupid rickety old tower in the desert, but Hunter, hungry for Likes & Subscribes, manages to persuade her that, if she doesn’t, she’ll be giving in to fear and fear will dominate her for the rest of her life.

Is that what you want, Becky? For fear to be the boss of you your whole freakin’ life? Do you want to be enjoying a quiet evening in and suddenly fear calls round and ruins everything by insisting you cook for him (yep, fear’s a guy!) and give him the best seat on the couch so he can watch his Netflix series, which, by the way, has one-hundred-and-twenty episodes in it and he’s only watched about four to date? Get a grip, Becky!

About thirty-five minutes in to the film, the shit hits the fan. The girls, Wonderbras firmly in place because ‘tits get clicks,’ suddenly find themselves stuck up the tower and in the worst peril of their stupid lives, and all to get clicks and views for ‘Danger D,’ as Hunter calls herself online.

Putting your own and a friend’s life in jeopardy for your viewers’ pleasure and enjoyment is almost criminally wrong. What sort of desperate character does that? Is someone officially looking into it? Seriously…

I’m not really going to give away any more, but the tension is terrific and the girls’ predicament just keeps getting grimmer and grimmer, as the buzzards circle ominously and the gals can’t get a signal for their phones. Well, it can’t be because they’re not up bleedin’ high enough!

There’s the usual trope of a confession needing to be made by one of the parties stuck up 2,000 feet in the ear, and the other party needs to hear it, regardless of what a dodgy and dangerous situation they find themselves in.

One of the girls is estranged from one parent as well, and would really appreciate said parent reading her mind and coming to her rescue right about now. Oh, wouldn’t that be luverly…?

The two female leads are excellent in their roles, although I found it strange that neither of them seemed to be suffering from vertigo and there were virtually no shots of the ground coming sickeningly up to meet them like in Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO. They were standing around as bold as brass, not even holding onto the pole thing and looking down in gut-wrenching terror.

There’s a pretty good plot twist that I did not see coming, and an ever-so-slightly disappointing ending. It’s just a tad confusing, that’s all. Hopefully it won’t ruin your enjoyment of an otherwise cracking little survival horror film. And remember, it’s a survival film, isn’t it, so someone has to, right…?