Sunday, 9 April 2023

Hell Fest (Gregory Plotkin, 2018)

 On Halloween night, Brooke (Reign Edwards) invites her best friend Natalie (Amy Forsyth) to join her friend group at Hell Fest, a travelling carnival filled with macabre rides and mazes.

Natalie becomes suspicious when a mysterious figure in a mask begins to follow them around the park…



I remember seeing the trailer for this movie when it was on the horizon.


Sadly it did not get a cinema release and by the time it got a physical/streaming release I forgot about it.


Since I have been on a vague journey through slasher movies, it got back on my radar.


What is striking about Hell Fest, particularly in terms of its release environment (2018), is how conventional it is.


It is not trying to satirise the genre ala Scream, nor is it trying to reinvent it.

 

It is a slasher stripped to its essence - the characters are introduced and dropped in the titular location, where they are almost-immediately targeted by a masked killer who stalks them through the camp.


There is something pleasingly lo-fi about the movie, from its lack of excess in terms of the genre’s expectations, and its sense of realism.


There are not that many kills, and they are spread out through the story. 


The characters do not realise something is definitely wrong until the third act, which gives the film a stronger sense of mounting tension.


The death sequences all fall within a certain bandwidth of verisimilitude - in between the chase scene through the various park attractions, we get a tense siege in a toilet stall as our heroine tries to escape the killer.


And when the park becomes alerted to the danger, there is a level of believability to their reaction and mistakes - the killer’s mask makes capture almost impossible.


The final chase is terrific - the survivors try to navigate the ‘hell’ attraction without tripping the motion sensors which activate the various jump scares and alert the killer.


The film also deserves credit for creating a genuinely chilling antagonist.


The mask is a great design - a crude facsimile of a human face with slightly warped symmetry at the centre, giving it an uncanny quality. 


And while his plans are foiled, the film ends with the killer still at large and more mysterious than before. 


The cast are all solid. The script’s exposition is pared to the bone, so a lot of information is conveyed through the group’s dynamic. 


In a great piece of genre casting, Tony Todd plays the host of one of the attractions, and provides all of the park announcements.


The production design of the attractions is evocative, which adds some uniqueness to the set pieces.


It is no masterpiece, but as a ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus’ slasher, Hell Fest gets it done.  





Friday the 13th

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Tuesday, 4 April 2023

The TruBond Show: John Gardner's The Man from Barbarossa

In this season of The James Bond Cocktail Hour podcast, we are covering the six year gap between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye, covering everything James Bond-related, from books to comics to video games, to non-Bond properties which tried to fill the gap.

On the latest episode, we return to the work of Bond continuation author John Gardner, and his take on the end of the Cold War in 1991's The Man from Barbarossa!




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Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode, 1980)

On New Year’s Eve, a class of university students charter a train to party into the new year.


What they do not know is that a killer is on this train, a killer with a grudge…



One of Jamie Lee Curtis’s original slasher appearances (coming out between Prom Night and Halloween II), Terror Train is a weird one.


I have watched it before, and I always remember liking it more on reflection than during it.


The film has a great pedigree.


The film was the directorial debut of editor Roger Spottiswoode.


Spottiswoode started out as an editor, working with Sam Pechinpah. He would go onto a prolific directorial career, with a diverse range of credits. I know him primarily from his work on the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies.


My issue with Tomorrow Never Dies is how it relies on editing and coverage to create a sense of momentum, at the expense of anything else.


Terror Train suffers from a similar choppiness - it always feels like the tension is never allowed to build, because of the emphasis on cutting. It is not that the film needed to be like Halloweeen with extended takes, but it does feel like the filmmakers are not fully embracing the possibilities of the story of the primary location.


The film’s faults are not solely Spottiswoode’s - the film was made on a low budget, and so the crew probably did not have the time. However, it is a similarity I could not overlook.


The film was shot by Stanley Kubrick collaborator John Alcott, who developed a unique strategy of lighting the coaches using existing light sources and lenses he developed for Barry Lyndon.

 

On top of the crew, the cast is a who’s who of future names: Alongside Curtis and character actor Ben Johnson, the cast includes Hart Bochner (Ellis from Die Hard), Denise Matthews aka Vanity, and magician David Copperfield… as a magician.


The story is pretty interesting.

 

Unlike the motiveless evil of Michael Myers, the killer of Terror Train, Kenny Sampson (Derek MacKinnon), is the victim of a cruel prank by his fellow students and is out for revenge.


It is fairly clear Kenny is the killer, which adds a level of suspense to the movie, as we follow him as he switches masks and costumes with his victims during the group’s costume party.


The film’s focus on magic and illusion draws attention to the film’s own artifice, but in a way that also works for its mechanics as a suspense thriller:


The killer can pop out of anywhere - a luggage case, under a seat, outside the carriage.


Everything on this train is mutable and changeable, down to the performance of gender - it turns out Kenny has been hiding in plain sight, disguised as the magician’s assistant. 


Terror Train is not that violent, but it is entertaining.


Alcott’s photography gives the primary setting a chilly sense of naturalism. 


While the script does not give them much to work with, the cast are solid - Curtis and Johnson are good, while Bochner is deliciously sleazy as the asshole of the group.


As the mysterious magician who provides the party’s main entertainment, Copperfield’s deadpan energy provides an eerie presence to the film, one that works as a misdirect.


The film is never as good as its constituent parts, but Terror Train is a solid programmer slasher movie with some unique selling points.



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The Fallout (Megan Park, 2021)

Following a school shooting, teenager Vada (Jenna Ortega) struggles to deal with the event.


Isolating from her family, she finds herself drawn to fellow survivor Mia (Maddie Ziegler), and anything that can help her evade her pain.


As time goes on, her tactics of distraction escalate…



I watched The Fallout without any prompting from real events. I had written bits and pieces of this review over a couple of months. I am always a little weary to toss out something if it is not in my wheelhouse.


I do not review a lot of dramas, or movies directly about social issues - I prefer more oblique takes (through a genre framework), or something more idiosyncratic.


Watching The Fallout was actually part of my homework for another review I am still working on, about the mockumentary The Dirties, which is a different take on school shootings. 


Of the movies I watched around that piece, The Fallout stood out - in its sense of focus, on how this event affected a specific individual, and its empathy for this person, and the way it ripples out to affect those around them. 


I had not heard of it before, and I was shocked it had come out so recently. Sadly, it remains relevant, particularly for an American viewer.


Outside of that context, it still works because it is so specifically focused on one person. 


While the movie is anchored to Vada, the film pays special attention to how the event affects others. As Vada falls into depression, her best friend Nick (Will Ropp) ends up becoming an anti-gun campaigner.


And the film also takes pains to show the differences between the way Vada’s depression impacts her (she masks her feelings around everyone, which means people are not able to read her properly) compared with other survivors (Mia (Maddie Ziegler) hides in her house).


You cannot talk about this movie without talking about Jenna Ortega. 


Ortega has gained a wider profile from her roles on Wednesday and various horror movies last year.


As the protagonist, this movie falls almost entirely on her shoulders. 


Often this is literal - whole scenes are composed of close ups of her reactions, or shots favour her over whoever her scene partner.


Vada is introduced as a confident, smart kid - she is lazy and does not care about appearances; she cares for and supports her sister (talking her through her first period); she is not popular but she has a best friend.


Ortega’s performance is completely in tune with the film around her. Her withdrawn, quiet performance is never one note, and she masks the character’s despair with an animation and superficial excitement that do not feel too forced.


It is a minimalist, naturalistic performance that does not provide overt indicators for the viewer.


While Ortega is great, the other performer who stood out is Lumi Pollack, who plays her younger sister, Amelia.


You can see her distress every time Vada ignores her. She is aware of her sister’s pain, but cannot articulate  what is happening.


It is a subtle, unmannered performance that captures the byzantine dynamic between siblings.


There is not a lot in terms of plot - this is a movie about capturing emotional states. There is change, but it is not an overt arc - the point is that recovering from trauma, and recognising and dealing with your mental health, is not a defined, clear progression. Change is small - if it happens.


While the film’s focus is internal, the film is tightly economic in its storytelling.


The school shooting is kept offscreen. The camera stays with Vada and Maddie in the bathroom stall. The focus is on the girls’ reactions to the sound of gunfire.


When Vada goes back to school, scenes play out as snippets with score: Vada has to walk through a metal detector; she has to watch a presentation on active shooter drills.


The sequence plays out like a memory, as the school’s response to the shooting forces Vada to relive her trauma.


This sequence climaxes at the end of the school day, when a noise triggers’ Vada and she soils herself.


It is not a public embarrassment - at least the film does not show if this incident had an audience - but she runs away and breaks down.


As she explodes, the film cuts to the next scene of the family having dinner.


The film does not end with a resolution of trauma - Vada learns to acknowledge and express it and reconnects with her family. But the film is not pat enough to treat that reconciliation as some kind of cure all, with an ending that shows Vada is still affected by her experience. 


If an ending is a film’s final statement, The Fallout’s ending is probably the most satisfying. It does not try to solve trauma, or America’s obsession with guns. It is just honest about human beings, and how we live with it.


One of the great movies that was lost to streaming in 2021, The Fallout is the kind of small-scale human drama that deserves to be seen.


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