INTERSTELLAR

Cast: Matthew McConnaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie Foy, Wes Bentley, Casey Affleck, Michael Caine, Topher Grace, John Lithgow, Ellen Burstyn and David Gyasi.
Writers: Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan.
Director: Christopher Nolan.

(PLEASE NOTE: Some MINOR SPOILERS re scene detail and broad plot)

Rating: 2/5

Deep into Christopher Nolan’s vast, verbose space opera Interstellar, crewmember Romilly (David Gyasi) sits with his ship captain, the experienced space jockey Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey). The conversation turns to the science of wormholes, those time-and-space defying pathways that are spoken of as fact by scientists in movies. Romilly takes a pencil and a small piece of paper, draws two ‘x’s on either end of the paper and folds the crosses together. He punches the pencil through the point where the ‘x’s meet, and says to Cooper something like, “And that’s how wormholes work.”

It seems a pointless scene that set your critic pondering as to its purpose. Cooper, a seasoned spaceman, would know what a wormhole is, so Romilly need not do this for his benefit or the mission’s. Instead, Romilly could only be speaking to McConaughey in his other key role in the film, that of audience conduit.

At some point in the narrative’s development, someone with clout (besides Nolan, clearly) felt that this B-movie hokum, inflated to a ridiculous degree by chalkboard’s full of formula and endless blatherings about mathematical astrophysics and gravitational singularities, needed to be more clearly explained to us Earth-bound ‘audience’ types. So Romilly’s Space Science 101 scene is inserted, essentially providing Nolin a voice to whisper, “Here’s what I’m talking about, paying public, plain and simple.”

What this minor, throwaway scene achieves, however, is to force the director to break free momentarily from his immense self-indulgence. Interstellar is Nolan pontificating on theories associated with space travel, wrapped in a flimsy story about family values and human one-ness that never really cares whether its audience is emotionally engaged or not. The ‘pencil-and-paper’ scene suggests he would just as soon not have to deal with lesser intellects at all.

The British director has been given free rein after banking billions of dollars with the Dark Knight trilogy and proving an acute storyteller with Inception, The Prestige, Memento and Insomnia. Most young, successful directors channel career momentum into personal, grand-scale projects and, like Nolan, usually reveal themselves to be not quite ready for it and too powerful to be told so. This fall from grace has impacted Coppola with One From The Heart; Spielberg with 1941 (then again, with Empire of The Sun); Cameron with The Abyss. Most recently, Wes Anderson (with The Darjeeling Limited), George Clooney (on Monuments Men) and Jason Reitman (with Labor Day) have had those moments.

The first sign that Nolan may have peaked previously is in his use of such an immense canvas to merely rehash overly familiar motifs. We get more vast landscapes (including, yes, an icy one); the ‘tubular world’ effect that inspired awe in Inception; clunky, black, angular machines designed to reflect real-world tech. And he revisits an increasingly disengaging intellectual preoccupation with the abstract nature of time and physics, used so captivatingly to explore ‘dream time’ in Inception and ‘memory’ in Memento yet ploddingly dull and confusing here. Nolan has more to prove before he can start self-referencing.

In the early passages of the story (scripted by Nolan with regular collaborator, brother Jonathon), references arise that suggest the fun stuff is always just around the corner. Teasing references to poltergeists and aliens; an underground government secret lab, conveniently located only a couple of hours from Coop’s home; giant dust storms that are symptomatic of the collapsing world ecosystem. But once Cooper and his team of astronauts are on mission, the pacing grinds, Nolan settling into 90-odd minutes of mission parameter status updates. Occasional personal interactions in the form of video messages from loved ones back home re-energise both the crew and the audience. (His role as Executive Producer on the Johnny Depp dud, Transcendence, was perhaps an early-warning sign that Nolan was becoming too enamoured with techno babble as reason enough for a film’s existence).

The actors strive to be as big as the director’s vision, each afforded their own quivery lipped, welled-up burst of grand histrionics. McConaughey’s ‘everyman genius’ Cooper is basically the same character played by Mark Wahlberg in Transformers: Age of Extinction, a Red State, good-guy mechanics whiz who has settled into life as a stay-at-home single dad. In an opening scene that hints at the full-blown overstatedness to follow, ‘Coop’ has the smarts to electronically hijack one of those pesky drone thingys and rewire its fancy innards to work his harvesters (machines that, in one inexplicable scene, gather themselves around his home like dogs at dinner time).

Co-star Jessica Chastain delivers her version of a paycheque performance, which is still fine; Hathaway overcomes a sense of miscasting to have some good moments; Wes Bentley and Casey Affleck are underused; a warbling Michael Caine, indecipherable. When an uncredited A-lister turns up to kickstart the third act, Interstellar begins to feel more like those disaster movies that Irwin Allen used to make, bulging with enough star wattage to keep our eyes on the screen and not rolling to the back of our heads.

And then there is that big, beautiful, blank void called ‘Outer Space’ and the challenge to fill it with all the awe and wonder Nolan and his visual effects team can muster. It is what every one will be talking about when the film hits theatres, as it should be; the scenes that look like 2001 A Space Odyssey are as good as anything since 2001 A Space Odyssey. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema integrates his images seamlessly with that of the FX crew, achieving that grainy, wideshot, ultra-realism reminiscent of IMAX documentaries. The images are, as Dave Bowman would say, wonderful, but do not integrate as effectively with the character’s plight as the space-scapes of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity or Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.

After 170 minutes and a final act twist that proves more late-career Shyamalan than peak-form Nolan, one is left wondering whether the experience was worth the commitment. In striving to outdo himself, Nolan has only highlighted his limitations, providing his primed fan base with an empty space vessel that makes a lot of noise.

DECODING ANNIE PARKER

Cast: Samantha Morton, Aaron Paul, Helen Hunt, Corey Stoll, rashida Jones, Alice Eve, Maggie Grace, Ben McKenzie, Richard Schiff, Marley Shelton and Ben McKenzie.
Writers: Steven Bernstein, Adam Bernstein and Michael Moss.
Director: Steven Bernstein.

Rating: 4/5

Although some detractors will single out it’s bare-bones storytelling style as a flaw, there is something ingratiatingly refreshing about the narrative frankness of Decoding Annie Parker. Debutant director Steven Bernstein’s two-tiered heartfelt drama defies its Movie-of-the-Week premise with an integrity all too rare in modern cinema.

Reflecting the decades in which the story unfolds, the assured narrative beats captured by Bernstein recall the thoughtful, expertly rendered, small-scale dramas (such as Resurrection with Ellen Burstyn or Testament with Jane Alexander) that were once produced by studios and shown by major theatrical chains. A journeyman cinematographer who has lensed Alfonso Cuaron’s Like Water for Chocolate, Charlize Theron’s Oscar turn in Monster and Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy, amongst many others, Bernstein refuses to overstate his visuals, instead settling on a matter-of-fact but deeply engaging real-world aesthetic.

Annie Parker (a wonderful Samantha Morton) comes from a family whose women have suffered the horrors of breast cancer for many generations. In gruelling scenes, she fights her own battles against the disease; between bouts, she seeks out reasons why the affliction impacts her bloodline while tending to her free-spirited, man-child husband (Aaron Paul) and the life they have created.

Concurrently, Bernstien tracks the medical team led by Dr Mary-Claire King (Helen Hunt), who is determined to find a link of any kind that will shed light on the moribund, bureaucratic state of cancer study. The film seamlessly shifts between Annie’s struggles and the medico detective work of the research team, coalescing decades of real-life developments into a smooth, compelling retelling of events.  

The director coaxes wonderful support turns out of a cast that goes on forever - Alice Eve, Ben McKenzie, Rashida Jones, Marley Shelton, Maggie Grace, Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, Bob Gunton, the great Corey Stoll – all of whom must have worked below-scale to help get what is clearly a labour of love to the screen. There’s a passion to tell this story with an understated urgency and profound empathy that can be felt in every frame of this terrific film.

For further information on all aspects of breast cancer, follow these links:
Australia: National Breast Cancer Foundation
United States of America: Breast Cancer Research Foundation
United Kingdom: Cancer Research UK
France: International Agency for Research on Cancer

BIG HERO 6

Voice Cast: Scott Adsit, Ryan Potter, Daniel Henney, T.J. Miller, Jamie Chung, Damon Wayans Jr, Genesis Rodriguez, James Cromwell, Alan Tudyk, Maya Rudolph and Stan Lee.
Writers: Robert L Baird, Daniel Gerson, and Jordan Roberts; based n the Marvel comic by Duncan Rouleau and Steven T Seagle.
Directors: Don Hall and Chris Williams.

Rating: 3/5

Wondrous feats of new generation effects technology service some old school tropes in Big Hero 6, the latest exercise in brand expansion from the Disney/Marvel monolith. An all-but-forgotten property from the comic giant’s distant past is resuscitated by Mouse House magicians, who apply dazzling digital wizardry to bolster a narrative that borrows from just about every family hit of the last half decade.

Co-directors Don Hall (Winnie the Pooh, 2011) and Chris Williams (Bolt, 2008) are tasked with creating an Avengers-style super-hero pic within the thematic parameters of the Disney canon. In their favour is raffish boy-whiz protagonist, Hiro (Ryan Potter), a spunky, spiky-haired tween with a head for state-of-the-art robotics and a rebellious attitude that threatens to derail his future. Raised without parents, it becomes the role of his big brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) to guide his sibling’s future, introducing him to ‘The Nerd Room’ – a free-thinking, high-tech workspace where Tadashi creates mechanical wonders alongside lab buddies Go-Go (Jamie Chung), Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr) and Fred (the ubiquitous T.J. Miller).

Tadashi’s special project is a medical droid named Baymax (Scott Adsit), a based-in-fact ‘bot whose joints and limbs are protected by soft-to-the-touch inflatable nylon. Soon, Baymax is in the sole care of Hiro and both are hurtled into a mystery that involves corporate espionage, a hurriedly constructed revenge plot and the mass destruction of a shimmering cityscape (again). Littlies may find a confrontation set in the baddies lair a tad confronting, although parents will appreciate the dexterity and craftsmanship as all creative elements meld into the film’s best sequence.

The action takes place in San Fransokyo, a richly textured, beautifully rendered world that melds the architecture and ambience of the northern Californian city with the neon aesthetic and ancient Asian influence of Japan’s capital (it is never clear whether this is a future world or an alternate reality). Disney Animation, applying in-house technology developed for the project, have created a truly artistic palette of detail and colour that is at times breathtaking to behold.

And yet Big Hero 6 manages to dull its impact by overplaying the influence of superior works. Both visually and narratively, The Incredibles, How To Train Your Dragon, ET The Extra-terrestrial, Iron Man and ParaNorman are invoked; surging microbot weaponry looks to have been derived from the same software used for The Green Lantern or Spiderman 3; as stated, the broad daylight demolition of a metropolis recalls Marvel tentpoles The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy (and seems like overkill in a kids flick). Big Hero 6 has dreams beyond the corporate landscape from which it has emerged, yet remains bound to the template set by its creators.

The ace in the hole is Baymax, who scores big laughs and generates warmth and good will that ultimately proves more crucial to the film than it should have to be. The core relationship between Hiro and his synthetic surrogate guardian pans out warmly and should play well with all audience quadrants, as it was clearly intended. Suffice to say, toy sales will soar over Christmas.

LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY'S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

Featuring: Richard Stanley, Marco Hofscneider, Fairuza Balk, Robert Shaye, Graham ‘Grace’ Walker, Rob Morrow and Edward R Pressman.
Director: David Gregory.

Screening at the 2014 A Night of Horror / Fantastic Planet Film Festival. Session details to be annouced soon. 

Rating: 4.5/5

A riveting, rollicking study of counter-culture creativity clashing with the early days of Hollywood’s corporatization, David Gregory’s Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau transcends the standard ‘making-of’ format and emerges more an ‘undoing-of’ study in psychological torment and film sector hubris.

Gregory’s filmography cites over 100 DVD-extra snapshots of the directorial mind at work, as well as the highly-acclaimed features, Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen: The World of Santa Sangre (2011) and What’s in the Basket (2012), a retrospective study of Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case trilogy. This vast experience has clearly proven to be the perfect training ground, as his latest ranks alongside Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1999) and Lost in La Mancha (2002) as an acutely penetrative account of film artistry in turmoil.

Documentaries that chart the hurdles faced by ambitious film projects have been plentiful of late. Like Frank Pavich’s excellent Jodorowsky’s Dune, Lost Soul… is afforded the good grace and fortune of having a truly eccentric visionary at its core – underground artist/philosopher/academic/author and film director Richard Stanley, a brilliant, enigmatic presence whose plummy accent and intelligent gaze emerge from beneath the broad brim of his trademark Stetson.

Stanley found favour with some of the more adventurous LA executives after his 1990 sci-fi metal-noir oddity Hardware and trippy serial-killer western Dust Devil. He boldly pitched a fresh version of his lifelong obsession– H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau, the nightmarish tale of man’s inner beast becoming externalized. Given a surprising degree of free rein for a newcomer to Hollywood, Stanley’s small, dark vision was soon spiralling out of control, the self-serving influence of boardroom bullies to the harsh physical realities of shooting in the Queensland rainforest proving to be just two of the elements that led to Stanley’s descent into his own heart of darkness.

Present is the undeniably dark pleasure one derives from watching a slow-motion train wreck take shape. Cast (Fairuza Balk, Marco Hofschneider, one-time lead Rob Morrow and several Australian support players) and crew (from LA maven Robert Shaye to legendary Aussie production designer Graham ‘Grace’ Walker) flesh out the reality of events that have long since formed into legend. Thoroughly entertaining are the accounts of Marlon Brando’s grand eccentricity, replacement director John Frankenheimer’s methodical boorishness and Val Kilmer’s utter dick-ishness.

But it is the broader insight that Gregory explores in Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr Moreau that proves most satisfying. Stanley’s planned film was perhaps the last of its kind – a wild, unsafe gamble on a director’s mad, complex, thematically rich studio tent-pole. It shares a pedigree with the likes of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Jeunet’s & Caro’s The City of Lost Children - expensive visions left bloodied by horrible births that clawed their way to cult status. To Hollywood’s great shame, Richard Stanley’s vision of Wells’ hellish utopia never materialized, but its legacy makes for an appropriately insane real-life narrative every bit as brilliantly mad and maddening as the fiction promised to be.

START OPTIONS EXIT

Stars: Ari Neville, Yoav Lester, Tom McCathie, Hannah Greenwood, Rhys Mitchell, Kristen Condon, Michael Fee, Tottie Goldsmith and Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read.
Writers: Yoav lester, Christopher Mitchell and Ari Neville.
Directors: Yoav Lester and Christopher Hf Mitchell.

Screens on Friday, September 12 as the Opening Night Film of the 2014 Melbourne Underground Film Festival.

Rating: 4/5 

A coarse, compelling, comedic odyssey, Start Options Exit takes the menu page cues of an old video game and crafts an existential riff rich in Gen-Y self-centredness and energised aimlessness. Driven by a frantic narrative brimming with bad decisions, foul language and failed conquests, co-directors Yoav Lester and Christopher Hf Mitchell’s debut feature is a both a work synonymous with the energy of great underground cinema and a slyly intellectual exercise that deserves to play beyond niche festival placements (of which there will be many).

A heightened, fantastical tone is set by the introduction of the lead characters within a pixelated reality; they are the central figures in a side-scrolling platformer being played by two pre-teens, left to their own devices in a suburban basement. In human form, the game figures become Neville (co-scripter Ari Neville) and Yolis (multi-hyphenate Lester), two like-minded mates with pretensions to alpha-male status but who we meet fuelling their false machismo by harassing a video store clerk (Michael Fee) and crudely propositioning a pretty patron.

So begins the pair’s late night meander through an urban landscape of hipsters, booze, drugs and thugs. Between bouts of loud street philosophizing on all that influences their existence (mostly girls, movies and drugs), the pair interact with different denizens of the night, all of whom have their own vivid personalities. Key amongst them is Tom McCathie’s ‘The Vagrant’, his strong spirituality and positive energy proving a potent challenge to the boys’ angry self-righteousness, and Hannah Greenwood as Chloe, Yolis' recent ex.

In addition to the vid-game graphics and VHS library, references that place the action pre-2000 include the lads carnal yearning for Christina Ricci’s ‘Wednesday Addams’ character, singer Tom Petty (the great singer reduced to crude punchline) and the use of Yazoo’s classic Only You to mesmerising effect. Also suggesting a period long since past is the casting of such time-specific identities as Tottie Goldsmith, terrific as a sexed-up matriarchal presence called ‘The Oracle’; late criminal anti-hero Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, as a quick-witted disposal store clerk; and, in the only sniff of stunt-casting, porn star Ron Jeremy as a relationship therapist. 

The production earns its Opening Night status at the 2014 Melbourne Underground Film Festival on several fronts, not least being its portrayal of two misogynistic, manipulative, opportunistic lead characters most would cross the street to avoid. In their world, rape at knifepoint reunites you with your loved one. Death is, literally, a distraction; a moment representing some other reality that passes as soon as the next meagre goal presents itself.

But Lester and Mitchell have a deeper purpose for Neville and Yolis than to merely paint them as some kind of R-rated ‘Bill & Ted’ comedy team. The filmmakers are determined to explore the consequences of lives lived from a purely egocentric perspective, forging an existence devoid of maturity, responsibility and consequence. Admirably, the production does not impose any type of life lesson upon its protagonists; as the title indicates, existence is a beginning, a series of choices and an inevitable finality. In the absence of empathy or compassion, the path from birth to death is a meaningless, nihilistic journey; Start Options Exit also makes it a funny, thrilling, confounding one.

THE GREEN INFERNO

Stars: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Magda Apanowicz, Daryl Sabara, Ignacia Allamand, Nicholas Martinez, Sky Ferreira and Antonieta Pari.
Writers: Eli Roth and Nicolas Lopez.
Director: Eli Roth.

Rating: 1.5/5

The grand-scale cannibal epic that sly marketeers have been hinting at is nowhere to be found in Eli Roth’s low-rent, low-IQ disappointment, The Green Inferno. Touted as a loving homage to Italian grindhouse hero Ruggerio Deodata’s 1980 cult shocker Cannibal Holocaust, Roth’s limp, one-note adventure plays more like a half-baked piss-take than the work of someone with any knowledge of, let alone respect for, the anthropophagus genre.

Providing the film’s only inherent worth is Lorenza Izzo as Justine, a restless freshman sharing a dorm room with her gormless bff, Kaycee (Sky Ferreira). Disgusted by a classroom presentation on female genital mutilation (surely a course requirement, though everyone acts like the images were just sprung on them), Justine is in the frame of mind to be convinced by smitten, schlubby do-gooder Jonah (Aaron Burns) to attend a campus activist group session led by the charismatic douche-bag, Alejandro (Ariel Levy).

A bat of his eyelids later and Justine is bound for South America, part of a naïve but energised group of protesters determined to highlight the region’s deforestation. A dozen nobodies padlocked to trucks and trees to spread the word about the already well-documented practices of indigenous habitat destruction seems a tad pointless, so some techno-babble about uploading the real-time confrontation for the whole world to see is inserted. In what proves to be just one of the film’s shortcomings, The Green Inferno is peopled almost entirely by imbeciles, burdened with execrable dialogue. These twenty-somethings are smart enough to be accepted into college but too dumb to research their logging industry targets before jetting off into the Amazonian jungles. “You mean, they’ll have guns?” says one wide-eyed moron, just before they board a boat to head upstream.

Long overdue action in the form of a well-staged plane crash finally spins the film on the narrative axis the target audience has been waiting for– the bloody deaths of non-essential support players and the insertion of our protagonists into unfriendly jungle. Thankfully, Roth finds some mojo and moves his players swiftly; in a whirlwind sequencing of post-crash carnage and poison darts, Justine and her surviving activists (which now include ‘Spy Kids’ alumni Daryl Sabara and pretty blonde screamer Kirby Bliss Blanton) are soon in the clutches of a red-skinned native tribe and the festivities begin.

Gorehounds will be happy that the film finally gets down to some bloodletting; by the half way mark, tongues, eyes, limbs and torsos have featured. Those new to either cannibal film lore or Roth’s gleeful depiction of acts of dismemberment will squirm, but the tone of The Green Inferno doesn’t allow for any sort of serious investment on the audiences’ part. Just as no character earns our empathy, nor do any of the acts of cannibalism prove truly shocking. It is one of several misjudgements on the productions part that creates such a chasm between it and Deodata’s film; the Italian’s camera cast an almost objective eye over the horrors, while Roth’s all but screams “Wow, look what I’m doing!”

Devolving into pointless padding (Justine’s plunge into the Amazon is entirely unwarranted) and episodic fight-or-flight diversions, The Green Inferno’s most diabolical liability is tone. Is Roth’s work a satire on spoilt rich kids and the privilege they blindly yield? Why are there passages of wacky black comedy in my cannibal movie (the ‘bag of pot’ sequence is plain stupid; it’s ‘overseas’, remember, so we gotta get a diarrhoea joke in there…)? There is meant to be humour in the notion that the traditional tribal practices the protesters are trying to save proves to be their undoing, right? So why is it barely referenced? And does the tribe (whose ‘remote outpost’ looks like a quiet corner of Central Park) exist only to prepare and eat human flesh? Little else seems to be going on for the whole time the captives are there.

Of greater interest than anything in the film would be to consider The Green Inferno as part of Roth’s broader filmography. To date, his films present the ‘uncivilised world’ as a dangerous threat to those who are privileged, collegiate, good time go-getters. His heroes aren’t always the brightest of bulbs, but they are America’s future; so far, they have been threatened by the swampy backwaters of their own homeland (Cabin Fever), the horrors of Eastern Europe (the Hostel films) and, in his latest work, the ‘savages’ of South America. In each case, powerful forces not aligned to the vision of the upwardly mobile represent pure evil (here, personified by the majestically demonic Antonieta Pari as ‘The Elder’); myopic villains driven to exploit those that represent the best the US can and will offer. There is a forceful horror at work in The Green Inferno, but perhaps it is not the flesh-eaters of the rainforest.

KITE

Stars: India Eisley, Samuel L Jackson, Callan McAuliffe, Zane Meas, Carl Beukes, Lionel Newton and Deon Lotz.
Writer: Brian Cox; based upon the film by Yasuomi Umetsu.
Director: Ralph Ziman.

Rating: 2.5/5

Dabbling in the same fetish-feminism and coldly-served revenge fantasies that made Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch such a wildly divisive work, artist and occasional director Ralph Ziman brings an appropriately seedy but miserably downbeat aesthetic to this long-in-development adaptation of Yasuomi Umetsu’s R-rated anime.

The blood-soaked, soft-core original drew conservative ire and censorship board wrath for its depiction of schoolgirl skin-flick anti-heroine, Sawa. In Brian Cox’s script, the random fornication so prevalent in the cartoon is gone, replaced by a greater focus on Sawa’s troubled psyche and fitful recollection of her past (the skimpy costuming, of course, remains). Fuelled by an addiction to the street drug Amp and hell bent upon avenging the slaying of her crusader cop dad, she delves deep into the sordid world of child prostitution where she ekes out and exterminates any evildoer that crosses her.

Live-action reimagining of the original’s key visual cues and memorable moments will register with the fan base. Relevance is attempted by positing the action in a post-GFC dystopia, riddled with the kind of social decay that budget restraints demand is conveyed by lots of peeling paint and smoke machines. The expansion of the plot from 50 minutes to a laborious 90 yields no discernible thematic gain; additional elements such as parkour street gang rivalries and Sawa’s softening when faced with an orphaned teen bolster the running time but not audience involvement.

Ziman’s flesh-and-blood embodiment of Sawa is American actress India Eisley, registering strongly when called upon to humanize the cold-blooded assassin but unable to cut it when the going gets physical; best amongst the cast is Australian Callan McAuliffe as Sawa’s street-urchin guardian, Oburi. Prime villainy is provided in the form of ‘The Emir’, played in a brief, charismatic turn by local character actor Zane Meas, and his OTT pommie offsider, Vic (some ol’ school scenery-chewing by Carl Beukes); all other bad guy parts are of the ‘arms folded and wait to die horribly’ variety. Gorehounds will find some glee in an opening sequence that features an exploding head seen through a gaping hole in one baddie’s hand and a henchman’s death by dum-dum dildo.

The property fell into Ziman’s hands when Snakes on a Plane director David R Ellis passed away unexpectedly during pre-production. Cast as the Sawa’s protector and loner cop Karl, a clearly disinterested Samuel L Jackson was locked in and hung around when the shoot went ahead, but there is a tangible sense that not everybody was particularly enthused about continuing. Shot in South Africa, the narrative occasionally recalls Luc Besson’s Leon and Tarantino’s Kill Bill double feature, but ultimately feels more akin to such weekly rental VHS staples as Avenging Angel and I Spit on Your Grave than anything worthwhile in its own right.

HOUSEBOUND

Stars: Morgana O’Reilly, Rima Te Wiata, Glen-Paul Waru, Cameron Rhodes, Millen Baird, Ross Harper and Wallis Chapman.
Writer/Director: Gerard Johnstone

Screens as the Opening Night film of the 2014 Sydney Underground Film Festival on Thursday, September 4.

Rating: 4/5

That moment of indescribable horror when you realise that your only option in life is to move back in with your parents proves a grand premise for Gerard Johnstone’s debut outing, Housebound. Exhibiting a bold visual style and a natural flair for funny, character-driven dialogue, the New Zealander has delivered a giggly, gory romp that both honours and enhances his native film industry’s love of the macabre. In tandem with Taiki Waititi’s vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows, 2014 has proven to be a banner year for the New Zealand sector and its grasp of what constitutes marketable, fresh content (take note, Screen Australia).  

Miserably failing as a petty criminal, angry young woman Kylie (a terrific Morgana O’Reilly) is ‘sentenced’ to eight months in an ankle bracelet under the care of her upright and old-fashioned mum, Miriam (comic great Rima Te Wiata). The dark and dusty family home, its countryside setting ensuring Kylie has nowhere to run, seems cursed by unexplainable phenomena stemming from its past as a refuge for wayward teens. When things start to go bump in the night, Kylie reluctantly teams with self-proclaimed ‘ghostbuster’ Amos (Glen-Paul Waru) to unravel decades of small-town secrets and lies.

Years as one of the creative forces on the hit Kiwi sitcom The Jaquie Brown Diaries has served Johnstone’s comedy timing well; he establishes key characters with a swift, confident series of broad brush strokes that are funny and insightful. Less assured is the film’s central second act, when an extended sequence between Amos and a creepy neighbour provides little pay-off and Rima Te Wiata’s comic presence as Miriam disappears for far too long.

All shortcomings are forgiven when the frantic third act kicks into gear, with every energetic blast of increasingly off-kilter exposition scaling giddy heights in gleeful terror and icky comedy. The nerve-shredding creepiness of the first act is largely jettisoned by the film’s denouement, which utilises some well-timed tech wizardry to transport the audiences into every nook and cranny of the grand mansion. The frantic final moments also serve to cover up some gaping holes in logic and realism (the interior of the home starts to take on Tardis-like qualities, for example), but Johnstone has earned so much audience goodwill that such concerns barely register.

Comparisons to countryman Peter Jackson’s early works Bad Taste and Braindead are inevitable, given the high-energy inventiveness and consummate technical skill displayed by the first-timers. But Johnstone’s film is a far more polished undertaking, which also benefits from not relying upon the kind of one-joke local flavour that proved the undoing of Jonathan King’s Black Sheep. More accurate comparisons include such off-shore efforts as Steve Miner’s 1986 cult item House (the artwork for Housebound’s one-sheet echoes that film’s poster font), Tony Williams 1982 gothic-horror Ozploitation favourite, Next of Kin, and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Addams Family films.

WETLANDS

Stars: Carla Juri, Christopher Letkowski, Marlen Kruse, Meret Becker, Axel Milberg and Edgar Selge.
Writers: Claus Falkenberg, David Wnendt and Sabine Pochhammer; based on the novel by Charlotte Roche.
Director: David Wnendt

Rating: 4/5

John Hughes meets John Waters in David Wnendt’s sick, stylish adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s corporeal coming-of-age novel, Wetlands. From the star-making central turn by Carla Juri to its stomach-turning portrayal of all that our bodies have to offer, this dizzying, delightful and thoroughly disgusting romp amps up the novel’s rebellious angst and paints those YA years as ones of ‘personal discovery’, in every sense of the term.

Wetlands is not the first film to explore those first sticky fumblings of teenage sexuality, but few have set the stage with a CGI-animated sequence that takes the audience inside a mystical world created by wiping one’s bare nether regions on a public toilet seat. It is an act that stems from defiance, of course; Helen (Juri) is a child of divorce, raised by an unstable mother (Meret Becker) with germaphobic leanings and a distracted father (Axel Milberg) of retarded emotional development.

Helen is hitting her strides as a late teen sexual being and loving every minute of it. She explores herself with all types of fruit and vegetables (ginger is a definite no); randomly indulges in oral sex with strangers, both giving and receiving; enjoys an ambiguously flirty relationship with her bff, Corinna (Marlen Kruse); and, finds fascination in the fluids and feelings that passion produces.

Things go horribly wrong for both Helen and the audience when she nicks her rectum while shaving, resulting in an anal fissure that puts her in hospital. This allows her time to dream of bringing her parents back together, enjoy a blossoming romance with a young nurse (Christoph Letkowski) and ponder a moment from her childhood that she has blocked out over time.

Having explored the heightened, hormone-filled existence of young women from a racially-charged social perspective in 2011’s Combat Girls, Wnendt undertakes a more personal but no less confronting journey in Wetlands. The casting of his extraordinary lead actor aside, the director’s most important contribution is the tone he achieves; lightly comical yet tinged deeply affecting humanism, he is able to portray some truly grotesque acts yet filters them through the playful, inquisitive focus of his protagonist. The boundaries will be pushed too far for some (the ‘pizza’ sequence; the near-fatal lengths to which Helen goes to stay in hospital), but the bravado and sweetness that Carla Juri brings to the role infuses the entire film; evoking the charisma and vulnerability of Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts in their heyday, she is an A-list star of the future.

Ultimately a winning mix of the traditional ‘teen tribulations’ pic and the edgy, fearless mindset of underground cinema (one wag at the screening attended by SCREEN-SPACE called it, “Sixteen Candles meets Trainspotting”), Wnendt’s Wetland is an altogether more buoyant romp than Roche’s book ever was. Key elements of the bestseller have been pared back on-screen (the complexities of Helen’s relationship with the African man who shaves her; the symbolism of her obsession with avocado seeds), allowing the film to construct both a very real central figure and a vivid cinematic heroine for her generation.

Wetlands will screen as the Closing Night film at the 2014 Sydney Underground Film Festival. Full details at the event website here.

ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS

Featuring: Michael Dudikoff, Lucinda Dickey, Richard Chamberlain, Catherine Mary Stewart, Cassandra Petersen, Robert Forster, Bo Derek, Alex Winter, Sybil Danning, Tobe Hooper, Adolfo Quinones (aka, Shabba-Doo), Sam Firstenberg and Gary Goddard.
Writer/director: Mark Hartley.

Screening at Melbourne International Film Festival on Saturday August 2 and Tuesday August 12. 

Rating: 4/5

Having chronicled Australia’s unhinged exploitation era in 2008’s Not Quite Hollywood and exposed the madness that was The Philippines film sector with 2010’s Machete Maidens Unleashed!, documentarian Mark Hartley now casts his highly-informed fanboy eye over Israeli-born cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and their renegade 80s operation, Cannon Films, for his latest, long-in-gestation work, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.

Hartley’s films play like wildly enthusiastic thesis submissions from the ultimate student of exploitation cinema. Suitably, the Australian director’s latest reveals a rich vein of excess and chutzpah that paints a picture of old-school operators steeped in shameless B-movie showmanship. More importantly, he also captures two individuals whose love for the cinema of old Hollywood fuelled their ruthless business acumen and boisterous egotism (perhaps explaining the presence of alpha-male moneymen James Packer and Brett Ratner, both on board as producers).

Golan and Globus emerged from an Israeli production community with a great deal of commercial credibility; their 1978 lowbrow teen romp, Lemon Popsicle, had become a domestic blockbuster and the pair became flush with cash. The more senior Golan had stars in his eyes and set about acquiring floundering outfit The Cannon Group, with an eye towards conquering the US marketplace and taking the world by storm.

Hartley’s parade of willing actors, executives and colleagues represents a major coup for the production (the likely contributing factor for the very long period between its inception and MIFF 2014 premiere). Each recall the heady days of Cannon Films ascendency, reminiscing with a mix of face-palming disbelief and warm-hearted sentiment, accompanied by a myriad of clips. Generation X-ers who spent weekends paying overpriced rental rates to watch Cannon ‘stars’ such as Lucinda Dickey, Michael Dudikoff and Catherine Mary Stewart will inevitably feel the glow of sentimental warmth upon seeing their aging heroes; serious film buffs will warm more to the likes of Franco Zeffirelli and Barbet Schroeder, who contributed some of Cannon’s more credentialed works (1986’s Otello and 1987’s Barfly, respectively).

Befitting a glimpse inside the ruthless world of B-movie maneuverings, there is some snark dished out to celebs who refused to be involved (in particular, a brash, young starlet named Sharon Stone) and on those who good-naturedly appeared on camera (Death Wish series director, the late Michael Winner, who acknowledges his occasionally prickly take on creative control). Largely anti-hagiographic, Hartley also rakes his subjects over the coals; in one hilarious montage, they are labelled all manner of insulting terms (both Golan and Globus refused to appear in the film, instead authorising their own bio doco, The Go-Go Boys).   

The film often focuses on Menahem Golan’s superb up-selling of dubious elements (the sad rehashing of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish franchise; the infamous Superman IV debacle; the pointless insertion of T&A) and the subsequent box-office fortunes. This approach largely sidelines the role that the VHS boom played in the company’s bottom line. Presumably, the global impact of the home video craze is a subject best saved for its own doco, but Hartley’s decision to focus on anecdotal making-of memories and “What was I thinking?” mock-remorse robs his film of some important contextual information.

Nevertheless, Electric Boogaloo (after Cannon’s famously misguided 1984 break-dancing sequel, although for no discernible reason) is an undeniably fun, insider look at the business of show. Mark Hartley’s factual films are a passionate collector’s take on the obsessive drive to be creative; whether it be low-budget Oz-ploitation practitioners, the insane fearlessness of Pinoy production methods or the battering-ram ambition of two Israeli showmen, the Australian director understands their motivation and affords them the respect and affection they deserve…and then some.  

(Note: The version reviewed was awaiting some final post-production elements. Due consideration has been given to its incomplete status).