Evil Dead Rise

 Year:  2023

Director:  Lee Cronin

Screenplay:  Lee Cronin, based on characters created by Sam Raimi

Starring:  Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher

Running Time:  97 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Guitar technician Beth (Sullivan) goes to visit her sister Ellie (Sutherland), who is a single mother to teenagers Bridget (Echols) and Danny (Davies), and pre-teen Kassie (Fisher).  Following a minor earthquake, a hole opens up in the ground of the underground parking garage of Ellie's condemned apartment building.  Curious, Danny investigates and discovers an abandoned subterranean bank vault in which he finds three phonograph records from 1923 and a strange old book.  When Danny plays the phonograph records he discovers that they have been made by a strange priest, who has discovered one of  three surviving volumes of the Naturom Demonto, a book bound in human flesh and inked in blood, which has the power to resurrect evil demonic forces.  The priest thoughtfully recites these spells on the records, and the family soon find themselves assaulted by terrifying supernatural forces.

This is the fifth film in the Evil Dead franchise.  While Sam Raimi's original The Evil Dead (1981) was a fully fledged horror film, the sequel Evil Dead II (1987) was more of a comedy film influenced by Raimi's enthusiasm for the Three Stooges, and the third film in the series, Army of Darkness (1992), was pretty much a full on fantasy comedy with lead character Ash (Bruce Campbell) transported to the Middle Ages. In 2013 director Fede Álvarez released Evil Dead, a reboot of the series which returned it to its gruesome, horror original.  Evil Dead Rise continues this approach by being a full on horror film.  The blood doesn't so much flow here, as gush, pour, rain and flood.  It opens with a prologue, set in the familiar Evil Dead territory of a bucolic woodland, however the bulk of the film is set a day earlier in an unnamed rain soaked city.  The grim setting of a condemned, decaying, sparsely occupied apartment building works for the material.  It also takes it's time to set up the characters, particularly the tension between Ellie, a financially struggling tattoo artist, due to be evicted in a month, raising three children on her own, and her sister Beth, a freewheeling guitar technician, who is seen as the "cool aunt" by her nieces and nephews, but is frequently dismissed as a "groupie", a description which she angrily rejects.  It is Ellie who becomes possessed by the demonic forces, forcing Beth, who has just discovered that she is pregnant, to step into the maternal role and protect the children.  While there are some nods to the earlier Evil Dead films, this is a stand alone film, and can be watched even if you've ever seen any of the other films.  The performances are good, and the horror, when it comes in, is unrelenting.  It is graphically violent, in the best Grand Guignol tradition of splatter films, and will surely be a late night favourite for horror fans.

     Mother isn't quite herself today:  Alyssa Sutherland in Evil Dead Rise

Searching

Year:  2018

Director:  Aneesh Chaganty

Screenplay:  Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian

Starring:  John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, Sara Sohn, Joseph Lee, Steven Michael Eich

Genre:  Thriller

Running Time:  102 minutes

San Jose, California:  David Kim (Cho) desperately searches for his missing 16 year old daughter, Margot (La).

There is very little that you can say about the plot of this film without giving away one of its many twists.  The storyline is, in many ways, a traditional mystery thriller in which a widowed father desperately searches for his missing daughter, following clues, chasing down red herrings, and investigating suspects. However, what is innovative here is that the whole film takes place on computer screens.  David conducts his investigation mostly from his own home, searching through his daughter's social media feeds, Skypeing and WhatsApping potential witnesses and suspects, and finding clues through CCTV footage that he has been sent by the detective investigating the case (Debra Messing).  The film opens with a moving sequence of the family in happier times before David's wife and Margot's mother's death by cancer, depicted through the family's various screens, setting up family accounts on their new computer, videos of birthdays and holidays, online posts and calendar appointments.  Although the film was released two years before Covid, in a way it feels more pertinent in a covid and post-Covid world, now that we are living our lives more online than ever.  John Cho gives a strong performance as the tormented father, who for most of the film is sitting looking directly at the camera (his various screens).  The film mixes traditional detective story elements with modern technology, and at times the many twists and turns of the narrative strain credulity, but it is involving throughout, and the style manages to be more than just a gimmick.  The computer screen subgenre of found footage film is a difficult one to make work, partly because they look dated very quickly, due to how quickly computer technology moves forward.  Searching, however, is well worth the time.  

John Cho in Searching
  

Cold Light of Day

 Year:  1989

Director:  Fhiona Louise

Screenplay:  Fhiona Louise

Starring:  Bob Flag, Martin Byrne-Quinn, Geoffrey Greenhill, Mark Hawkins, Andrew Edmands, Claire King

Running Time:  81 minutes

Genre:  drama, true crime, horror

In a police interview room, unassuming middle-aged civil servant Jordan Marsh (Flag) is interrogated about a series of murders, which are depicted through a series of flashbacks.

True crime is a perennially popular genre in all kinds of media.  This film is based on the true story of serial killer Dennis Nilsen.  Sometimes dubbed "The British Jeffrey Dahmer", Nilsen murdered at least twelve young men and boys between December 1978 and January 1983.  His crimes were discovered in February 1983 when some human remains were found to be blocking drains in the building where Nilsen lived in an attic flat.  While this is not as good as the three part miniseries Des (2020) which starred David Tennant as Nilsen, this low-budget, low key drama is fairly effective in its own right.  Here Dennis Nilsen is called Jordan March and played by Bob Flag, who is probably best known as the face of Big Brother in 1984 (1984).  Saddled with a terrible wig, Flag gives a striking performance as the repellant Marsh, alternately arrogant, petulantly angry or cringing under his increasingly aggressive police interrogation.  Marsh however does have some moments of kindness, when he helps an elderly downstairs neighbour.  Written and directed by Fhiona Louise, who at the time was a 21 year old drama student, the film suffers from a very low budget, it's technically very crude, the performances are variable, sometimes the sound is hard to hear particularly under the loud soundtrack of pulsating breathing and tolling bells.  There are several flashbacks to Marsh's rural childhood and the death of his beloved grandfather (where his mother tells him that his grandfather is "just sleeping").  Even though it is short, the film seems to move at a snail's pace, and everything is bleak, depressing and grimy - which may be the best approach for a film about a serial killer.  There is stuff to admire here, but very little to really like.  

Bob Flag in Cold Light of Day

 

Dracula

 Year:  1974

Director:  Dan Curtis

Screenplay:  Richard Matheson, from the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker

Starring:  Jack Palance, Simon Ward, Nigel Davenport, Pamela Brown, Fiona Lewis, Penelope Horner

Running Time:  100 minutes

Genre:  Horror

1897:  Solicitor Jonathan Harker (Murray Brown) is in Transylvania to visit mysterious nobleman Count Dracula (Palance), who plans to buy property in England.  However, Harker finds out too late, what his host's true motivations are.  In England, Arthur Holmwood (Ward) discovers that his fiancé Lucy (Lewis) is Dracula's latest victim, and it is up to him and Professor Van Helsing (Davenport) to stop the vampire for good.

The good count himself may not have proved to be immortal, but Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel has proved to be well nigh un-killable, with numerous adaptations in almost all forms of media.  Every Dracula fan has their favourite, and while this made-for-TV movie may not be one of the best, it is still a solid adaptation.  Producer and director Dan Curtis was familiar with horror having created the frankly bizarre supernatural daily soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-1971), as well as the TV movie The Night Stalker (1972) which was also scripted by Richard Matheson, and other adaptations of horror classics such as The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde (1968) which also starred Jack Palance.  As scripted by horror writer Richard Matheson, this adaptation of Dracula remains faithful to Stoker's novel, albeit streamlining it a lot and cutting many supporting characters, including Dracula's bug-eating servant  Renfield.  Jack Palance, who was best known for playing heavies in gangster films and Westerns, may seem a strange choice for Dracula, but he does well, giving Dracula a Byronic menace, as well as a physicality often absent in other versions of the character.  The other performances are solid, and the film benefits from being filmed largely in England and Yugoslavia, despite being made for American TV.  While the film has its slow points, and there are times when the fairly low budget is obvious, it is a pretty impressive piece of work, and well worth checking out for horror fans.  The film's on-screen title is Bram Stoker's Dracula but, when Francis Ford Coppola was preparing his own film, also titled Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), he bought the rights to the title in order to avoid comparisons, and the 1974 film is listed as either Dracula or Dan Curtis' Dracula.  There are a couple of other points of similarity between this and the 1992 film, in both Dracula is explicitly referred to as the historical Vlad Dracula (aka Vlad the Impaler) and in both versions Dracula hunts down the reincarnation of his lost love (Lucy in this film and Mina in the 1992 film).     

Jack Palance is Dracula

The Long Good Friday

 Year:  1980

Director:  John Mackenzie

Screenplay:  Barrie Keeffe

Starring:  Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren

Running Time:  114 minutes

Genre:  Thriller

Harry Shand (Hoskins) is a powerful, ruthless gangster, who has plans to go legitimate with a scheme to redevelop the London Docklands with the aid of mafia investors from New York.  However, on the day of the mafiosi fly into London, Harry's empire is threatened by a series of bombings, and the stabbing of one of his closest associates.  Tasking his mistress, Victoria (Mirren) with handling the negotiations, Harry sets out on a violent quest to put a stop to the attacks.

This is one of the great, underrated classics of British gangster films.  The film mixes themes of political and police corruption, and the IRA, as well as an optimism about Britain becoming a European powerhouse, which in these days rings bitterly hollow.  Bob Hoskins had made a name as the star of the 1979 TV series Pennies from Heaven, but this was his first major film role.  He gives a fantastic performance as the brutal Harry Shand, mixing affability with menace, presenting himself as a legitimate, reasonable businessman but turning on friend or foe alike with brutal ferocity when crossed.  Helen Mirren is also memorable as the icy, intelligent Victoria, who serves almost as Shand's PA, and the acceptable face of his organisation.  The rest of the cast is full of now familiar faces from British TV and film, including Pierce Brosnan in his film debut as an IRA hitman.  The script is intelligent, with moments of dark humour, and the direction is slick, and the film maintains tension throughout, along with frequent, and often shocking moments of explosive violence.

Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday