THE REQUIN

Stars: Alicia Silverstone, James Tupper, Deirdre O’Connell, Jennifer Mudge, Kha Mai and Danny Chung.
Writer/Director: Le-Van Kiet

Rating: ★ ★ ½

If you’re a stickler for detail (for the sake of this logically care-free film, I hope you’re not), the title should read ‘Le Requin’ - the full French pronunciation of ‘The Shark’. But why give an American film a French title? Or half-a-French title, for that matter? And why call it The Requin or Le Requin or The Shark at all…and then not shark-up for over an hour?

Which is not to imply that married couple Jaelyn (Alicia Silverstone) and Kyle (James Tupper) spend the first 60-odd minutes just being touristy (although they do that, too); they are recovering from their own watery tragedy, having lost a child during a home birth. Jaelyn has serious PTSD, especially on or near water, leading Kyle at one point to surmise that their seaside, tropical island suite was maybe not the best idea for a getaway-from-it-all destination.

It is off-season, which means monsoons, and soon their floating villa is ripped from its moorings and cast out to sea. While the dread of deep-sea predation is always present (unlike any form of rescue craft), it is the elements that pose the greatest threat. Jaelyn and Kyle go through the various stages of existential turmoil one would experience on a raft that was once your bedroom floor - panic, mostly, some bleeding, then accidentally setting fire to your bedroom-raft.

Tupper does all he needs to do on-screen as the wounded husband, but it is 90s it-girl Silverstone who leaves nothing on the acting table as Jaelyn. In partnership with her unmistakable stunt stand-in, she gets to go head-to-snout with sharks of various sizes in water depths prone to change mid-shot. Silverstone brings physicality and a great set of lungs to the more brutal moments, while capturing the grief and sadness of Jaelyn’s emotional ruin in small but effective scenes. It’s good seeing her back in a lead role, even if she gives more than the material deserves.

The alpha predator at the centre of the action is Carcharodon carcharias, or The Great White Shark. They don’t typically live in the tropical waters off the Vietnamese coast (tiger sharks and various breeds of reef sharks populate these regions), but we’ll let that slide. Spielberg did such a job on the shark’s image back in ‘75, flashing a close-up of that black eye (”like a doll’s eye”) is still the perfect cinematic shorthand for terror. The film does little else to earn it’s own sense of dread (unlike 2003’s Open Water or 2010’s The Reef) or provide the creature with some dimensionality (like 2016’s The Shallows), but as the latest sharksploitation riff, it works well enough.          

The Requin is Vietnamese director Le Van-Kiet dipping his toe (no pun intended) into the Hollywood industrial complex, after making a big splash (meant that one) with his 2019 festival hit, Furie, which was a great film. Aside from a few stock footage inserts of Hanoi streets and underwater wonderlands, his drama is staged in the tank space and against the green-screens of Universal Studios in Orlando. The ‘uncanny valley’ downside of CGI used to create that with which we are familiar takes a chunk out of key moments of suspense - the shark footage waivers from fleetingly convincing to…less so - but by minute 80, Kiet knows that his audience is in for les penny, in for les pound.

EXORCISM AT 60,000 FEET

Stars: Robert Miano, Bai Ling, Bill Moseley, Lance Henriksen, Kevin J. O’Connor, Robert Rhine, Kyle Jones, Silvia Spross, Kelli Maroney, Matthew Moy and Adrienne Barbeau.
Writers: Robert Rhine and Daniel Benton.
Director: Chad Ferrin.

Rating: ★ ★

The premise of Exorcism at 60,000 Feet reads like the opening to an inappropriate gag your drunk uncle barks out at Thanksgiving dinner. “Did you hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the dwarf on a flight to VietNam…,” it begins and, before any of your relatives can wrestle the sad, sick family jester to the ground, he screams and spits his way through a waffling, weird, wildly offensive mess of a joke.

In genre-speak, Exorcism at 60,000 Feet is that most dangerous meld of film types - the horror-comedy, which implies a measured balance of chills and giggles. Director Chad Ferrin, who impressed a few years back with the bloody urban thriller Parasites, doesn’t nail either horror or comedy with any degree of inspiration or skill. With co-writers Robert Rhine and Daniel Benton having to share some of the blame, Ferrin pitches for Airplane-meets-The Exorcist, but crash lands well short of the destination.

Like a lot of good comedies, Exorcism at 60,000 Feet opens on the mass murder of a family. Robert Miano plays hardened padre Father Romero, who arrives too late to save the deceased but just in time to identify the evil entity as ‘Garvin’, the resurrected spirit of his army buddy from ‘Nam. For some reason, he needs to return Garvin to VietNam, booking passage on the ‘hilariously’ titled Viet Kong Airways, the offensive moniker only made worse by its anachronism - will the target audience of first-time pot-smokers even know what is being referenced?

On board, the spirit of Garvin (played in terrible make-up by B-movie icon, Bill Mosely) is possessing the passengers, each one a grossly painted caricature of such wannabe comic stereotypes as the roided-up bodybuilder (Luca Pennazzato); the middle Eastern ‘potential terrorist’ (Gino Salvano); the peace-seeking Buddhist (Craig Ng); the anytime/anywhere sexpot (Stefanie Peti); the other anytime/anywhere sexpot (Jin N. Tonic, who shows some comedy chops); and, the Soprano-esque goombah (Johnny Williams). Most unforgivably tasteless is the ‘Mommy with toddler’ passengers, featuring Kelli Maroney (cult favourite from 1984’s Night of the Comet) as the mature-age woman who breastfeeds her obnoxious son Dukie, played by little person actor, Sammy the Dwarf.

Romero teams with orthodox rabbi Larry Feldman (co-scripter Rhine) and the flight crew, Amanda (Bai Ling, playing to the back row) and Thang (an occasionally funny Matthew Moy), to battle the demon, which manifests as a cheap-as-chips ‘green mist’. Garvin’s victims suffer ugly fates to remind the audience this is a ‘horror film’ - clean-cut Brad (Kyle Jones) meets a grisly end while ‘mile high’ clubbing; phone-obsessed millennial Ms Tang (Jolie Chi) must deal with an unwanted demon-pregnancy; and so on. Ferrin earns points for securing the likes of Lance Henriksen (as Captain Houdee...geddit?) and Adrienne Barbeau (pictured, above) for day-shoots, but their involvement is wasted on parts that prove just what good sports they are willing to be to pay some bills. 

The influence of the Zucker-Abrahams 1980 classic is everywhere, most notably in composer Richard Band’s shameless rip-off of Elmer Bernstein’s classic score, but there’s none of the comic pacing or inspired performances that made Airplane so memorable (or The Naked Gun series, which Ferrin also apes). Instead, the humour is of the ‘punch down’ variety - easy, ugly potshots based on race, gender or religion - placing Exorcism at 60,000 Feet dangerously close to the shock comedy stylings of a film like Uwe Boll’s Postal (2007).

That said, praise is certainly due cinematographer Christian Janss, who skilfully mimics the frantic camera moves George Miller employed in his Twilight Zone The Movie episode, ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’, and the effects team working under Joe Castro and Maricela Lazcano, who give exteriors shots of the plane careening through an otherworldly night sky legitimate authenticity. 

THE WAVE (BOLGEN)

Stars: Kristoffer Joner, Ane Dahl Torp, Jonas Hoff Oftebro, Edith Haagenrud-Sande, Fridtjov Såheim, Laila Goody, Artheur Berning, Herman Bernhoft, Eili Harboe and Silje Breivik.
Writers: John Kåre Raake and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg.
Director: Roar Uthaug.

Rating: 3.5/5

International cinema indulges in some old-school Hollywood B-movie thrills with the Norwegian disaster-pic, The Wave. Set against the majestic, UNESCO-protected Geirangerfjord in the Sunnmøre district, director Roar Uthaug slow burns a melodramatic set-up before delivering a spectacular water-wall that more than earns its titular status; the few minutes of screen time afforded the flawlessly realised wave prove every bit as terrifying as the current high-water marks in cinematic tidal surges, seen in J.A. Bayonas’ The Impossible and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter.

Unlike those films, Uthaug (currently preparing the Tomb Raider reboot with Alicia Vikander) and writers John Kåre Raake and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg don’t draw upon the recent past, instead speculating what may lie ahead for Norway’s south-west region. The steep inclines of Åkerneset Mountain are eroding and pose a real-life threat to the villages of Geiranger and Hellesylt; should the sheer cliff face peel away and plunge into the fjord, a tsunami would all but consume the foreshores. The ten-minute warning period in which the population must evacuate is depicted with chilling realism.

The vast scale of the impending cataclysm is provided a personal perspective in the form of geologist and family man Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) and children, teenage son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) and blonde moppet Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande). Kristian is farewelling his role at the earthquake monitoring station; having cut cake with his co-workers, he is all but aboard the Stavanger Ferry and bound for a new, non-fjord life only for his scientific instinct kicks in.

Much of the film’s first half is Eco-Disaster Epic 101. The stern boss, Arvid (Fridtjov Såheim) takes a lot of convincing that the warning signs he has been trained to spot are any warning at all; the family is separated by coincidence; support players pop in and out, uttering just enough dialogue so that we recognise their faces when their inevitable fates are played out. Kristian is a new millennium, ‘every man’ hero; the script deftly defines him as a self-deprecating 40 year-old who doesn’t know what a plumbers wrench is. Past generations would have demanded the casting of square-jawed types, like Paul Newman (see: James Goldstone’s 1980 volcano-themed When Time Ran Out…) or Sylvester Stallone (see: Rob Cohen’s 1996 NYC Tunnel collapse drama, Daylight).

But Uthaug explores a deeper, stronger degree of human drama post-wave. It is to the production’s credit that the human toll of the tsunami is portrayed with as convincing realism as the wave itself; given the modern audience’s familiarity with such horrors, it would have been unwise not to. While searching for his wife and son, Kristian faces the unthinkable when he must walk a corpse-strewn bus; Idun is called upon to commit the unthinkable when a panicky survivor threatens to kill Sondre. The post-event landscape is also afforded a richer, nightmarishly cinematic quality, highlighting the surreal shift in reality such an occurrence leaves behind. The sequence in which Kristian slowly rows a fire-lit waterway littered with the dead reminds us that The Wave may be cut from B-movie cheesecloth, but a fresh, frank perspective is still capable of enlivening old cinematic tropes.