Author: Hellings On Film - the published reviews & interviews

A compilation of my previously film & TV reviews and interviews

Jonah Lives

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“Jonah Lives”

Review

By David Paul Hellings.

CONTAINS SPOILERS.

“A story of revenge from beyond the grave, centering on a group of teenagers who unknowingly supply the catalyst for the murdered Jonah’s return from the grave” in Writer/Director/Editor/Sound Editor/Producer Luis Carvalho’s debut feature.

According to the publicity, “Luis Carvalho was a boy with a dream. As a teenager, his ambition was to become a filmmaker, but life got in the way when he started a family and worked to support them. His goal was put on the back burner but never abandoned. Finally, after several false starts over some 30 years, his dream has been realized with “Jonah Lives”, on which he serves as director, writer, producer and editor”. During those thirty years, buying and reading a copy of “Screenplay” by Syd Field would have been a sound and wise investment, as would sharing the roles of production. Too many hyphens really do spoil the broth.

Made in 2012 and now seeing the public light of day, “Jonah Lives” is an example of the two choices facing a first time director: create something original and run the risk that it doesn’t get an audience and/or sell, or: make something that is a mess of every horror film you like, mix them together and hope it works. Carvalho sadly opted for the second choice, funded it seems by friends and family, none of whom clearly read the script objectively before filming, but most of whom ended up acting in or helping with the shoot.

“Jonah Lives” is a good example of a film in which the director/writer needed to take on board or ask for the opinion of other more objective friends or even, shock horror and perish the thought, actual professionals. It also shows why being too close to the material creates a clear lack of objectivity, especially in post-production.

Cliché ridden with shots and scenes stolen from better films, including “The Shining”, most of “The Evil Dead”, “Nightmare on Elm Street”, “The Beyond” and any other Fulci, “Jonah Lives” has no idea of pacing or building the tension, allowing repetition to kill the momentum or any attempt at suspense. Characters that we don’t know or care about spout bland and continually repetitive dialogue, including countless “Oh, my God!” exclamations. Somebody really needed to say to the director cut the script or at least have a decent script editor go through it before shooting.

The younger cast tries their best as the group of friends who summon the dead “Jonah” (a mute Freddy Kruger lookalike who has a backstory that’s never built upon) via the age-old Ouija board in the basement (because using a Ouija board always has positive results, right?) Cue Jason rising from the grave (nicely done), who arrives to terrorize the friends (who oddly never seem like they’re actually friends).

Meanwhile there are awful performances by the older “actors” at the swingers party in the adjoining house – were they relatives/investors/both? – Either way they come across as amateurish or having wandered in from a failed David Lynch casting session. If Jonah should have killed anybody, it was them.

“Jonah Lives” is at least well shot and nicely scored (even if the soundtrack sounds like a low rate Simon Boswell or The Goblins).

Lucio Fulci was a director who figured “to hell with logic” in his storytelling, but at least gave the audience gore beyond belief, something Carvalho tries to resort to in the last twenty minutes, but with missed opportunities, it seems like far too little, far too late (at 93 minutes, it still feels at least 20 minutes too long, or 93 depending on how cynical you are).

Overall, you just think, “get on with it”. Films like “Cabin Fever” and the superior “Dead Snow” or “Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil” showed that the best way to approach this corner of the genre now is to laugh at it. Sadly any laughs here were unintentional and through gritted teeth at a film that may have impressed friends and relatives, but committed the worst crime a filmmaker can: a boring film with no sense of plot logic. Why is the only character not to take part in the séance the first to die? To subvert audience expectation? If so, there’s a smart way to do it and this isn’t it. Why is one character suddenly seemingly in league with Jonah? Why is Jonah suddenly taking a bite when he was never set up as a zombie? There’s something called a through line, but in 30 years of dreaming, the director didn’t figure to look into that.

The script is a mess. A mixture of everything but the kitchen sink with no sense of real continuity, only emphasizing how bad the dialogue is. The second act meanders and there’s a sense that the director took on too much, either for control reasons because this was a pet project, or because he just wasn’t prepared to listen to any constructive objective feedback.

“Jonah Lives” is a disappointment, if well intentioned. Carvalho, if he gets another shot, needs to work with a decent scriptwriter and get somebody else to edit the finished result. His passion then may pay off.

One character asks: “My God, what have we done?” Made a bad film?

This review originally appeared on Haddonfield Horror:

http://www.haddonfieldhorror.com/2015/04/movie-review-jonah-lives.html#more

Ten

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“Ten”

Review by David Paul Hellings.

Official Synopsis:

“Ten women find themselves in a vacant mansion on Spektor Island in December, 1972. Each believes she’s traveled to the house on business, but they all agree that something seems strange. For one thing, the entire house is full of pictures and statues of pigs. The women all come from drastically different walks of life. None of them would have chosen to spend the night together in such an eerie place, but the last ferry for the mainland has just left, and a terrible storm is rolling in. Trying to make the best of an unpleasant situation, they raid the mansion’s wine cellar and throw a party. As the night creeps on, however, it becomes clear that someone–or something–has lied to get them in the house. It’s not long before someone mentions that Spektor Island is supposed to be haunted. Of course, no one in the house believes in ghosts. At least, not until the first murder. What do an actress, a religious zealot, a renegade, a coed, a model, a singer, a medium, a real-estate investor, a historian, and a doctor have in common? None of them is who they seem. Yet, the fate of the entire world may rest in their hands”.

Directed by Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein.

Written by Michael J. Epstein, Sarah Wait Zaranek, Jade Sylvain and Sophia Cacciola.

REVIEW:

CONTAINS POSSIBLE SPOILERS.

The surreal opening and trippy, cool cartoon credits (nicely done) of “Ten” promise much, even if the credit feel and music scream Rodriguez/Tarantino in grindhouse mode. It’s an interesting start. After that, it’s downhill all the way.

The characters are designed to be quirky, speaking dialogue that wants to be cool and out there, delivered as though we’re in a giallo version of Scooby Doo, but this quickly comes across as a gimmick rather than something that serves the story, becoming almost dialogue from a stage play rather than a film. The overall feel is of a theatrical piece, which is a pity as Catherine Capozzi’s cinematography is first rate; but the content needed tightening, reaction shots seeming like a rough cut at times with characters in frame, pausing before responding, as though they’re waiting for the director’s cue to speak, or though the editor didn’t get around to trimming the scene down and thus slowing the pace and effecting what we’re watching to the point we wish they’d hurry up a little. If you want to know how to shoot a lot of people around a table, check out the diner scene in “Reservoir Dogs” or even “Django Unchained”.

There’s an ongoing pig motif, at the start, in the credits, the doorbell. It means something, but we’re not sure what. It lasts throughout the film and ultimately means nothing at all. Stylistically, there are nice ideas. The pseudo Godard/”Weekend” 360 degree camera move becoming blurrier as the characters get drunker is a sweet touch. The all-female cast work hard, even if they often come across as inexperienced drama students getting their first shot in a friend’s film.

The music video backgrounds of the directors comes through, too much at times, with style triumphing over content, and too many nods to “Amer” (which, in itself, was a nod to giallo, but had a reason to its style). This a collection of characters without depth who talk and talk in dialogue that wants to be cool and clever and informed, but comes across as contrived in a wannabe hipster-chic kind of way. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to care for characters that we have no kind of empathy with. Who are these people? Have we ever met anybody like this outside of a pretentious art gallery opening? No. There are four writers credited, but it seems unlikely they were ever in the same room when they came up with any kind of script. “Ten” wants to be witty, but proves how difficult comedic moments are to do right.

The characters speak basically with the voice of one of the writers, who knows which one, delivering lines that might work at a chic party or an absurdist play, but who talks like this? It tries to be clever, but just isn’t as clever as it thinks it is. As one character gets artistically and comically (sic) knocked off, it’s simply one less annoying character to try and fit into the frame. Rather than care, we’re just glad that another pretentious cartoon is out of the picture.

“Ten” at times looks like it had a reasonable budget, so why not hire a professional writer, or at least listen to them if they did? Why do filmmakers think they can avoid a solid script? Try building a house without some kind of blueprint. “The Three Little Pigs” (a pig story that actually has a point and gets referenced very briefly if badly here) showed what happens to two of the pigs that didn’t have much of a plan. At least they had a smarter relative that knew to build his house on solid foundations and the actual house of bricks. At least the Big, Bad Wolf was a villain that had a motivation: eat the pigs. Simple. Not profound, but understandable. It had a beginning, a middle and an end.

“Ten” wants to be a cult film. Cult films don’t get made, they happen by accident because nobody saw them at the cinema, then they pick up a following after the event. “Ten” wants to be art house. It wants to say something. It’s neither horrific nor funny, which leaves nothing at all.

“Ten” is one of those films that thinks it’s being witty, intellectual and knowing, where the filmmakers think they’re smarter than the audience. That’s a problem if you don’t understand the basic structure of filmmaking and how characters work. These people are there invited for no seeming reason to an expensive mansion with little, plastic pigs in so many shots, as though this is a clever motif. It’s not. It’s an empty elongated music video punctured by stagey dialogue in which characters say a lot, but in reality are saying absolutely nothing at all. It’s a film that says “if you don’t get what we’re trying to say, it’s because you’re not cool enough, or avant garde enough, or smart enough, or you just don’t get ART!”. “Ten” is an art foundation school project made for an audience of two: the directors. Which is fine, if you have only want to patronise your audience. “Ten” may have worked as the short it originally was, but it sure doesn’t work as a feature. By the end, you wonder if it would have worked better with songs, in a “Rocky Horror Picture Show” kind of way. Maybe not. It starts off trying to be clever, then gives up, drifting into a juvenile reveal that wasn’t worth waiting for.

“We’re all stuck in pens”, says one character. Was that the point of the film? To make that wannabe-deep saying? “We’ll swallow anything we can get our hands on”, she says. If so, the message and the rest of the imposed cod-philosophy goes out of the window in favour of a sub Scooby Doo land of spies and microfilm minus the fun, plot, story, or interest. Good luck if an audience swallows any of this poorly written, badly acted work.

There was a little seen British horror-comedy called “Funny Man”. The filmmakers described the optimum viewing experience as “going to the pub with your mates, getting blind drunk, buying a curry on the way home, then sitting with it in front of the TV, eating and drinking more as you watch the film”. They were right. That was the best way to watch “Funny Man”. There’s an optimum viewing scenario for “Ten”. It would be good to know what it is.

Disappointing. On a positive note, it only runs 83 minutes.

This review originally appeared on Haddonfield Horror:

http://www.haddonfieldhorror.com/2015/04/movie-review-ten_22.html#more

Sorrow

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“Sorrow” review

by

David Paul Hellings

“Sorrow”. A film by Millie Loredo. Screenplay, Story, Produced, Co-cinematographery, and Directed by Millie Loredo.

CONTAINS SPOILERS:

There’s an old and true saying: “The audience doesn’t care what went on behind the scenes, they judge you by what’s on the screen”. Another good one is: “When a film works, the director gets all the credit. When it doesn’t, the director takes all the blame”. Nowhere is either saying truer than in “Sorrow”.

The director’s credit appears twice in the opening titles, plus the ‘a film by’ credit, which is absurd to the point of egotism when the director lists themself three times. Stanislavski famously said: “love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art”. I get it that directors think a low budget feature is a calling card to bigger things, but the calling card doesn’t need to be repeated again and again before the film truly begins. It’s not all about you and if you think it is, that’s a problem, but not the last in this low budget attempt at mixing serial killer horror with a women’s drama.

The acting is poor, at times laughably so. Sure, for a dime you won’t get an Oscar winner, but you can get professional performances, unless they weren’t being directed? Melissa Mars completely fails to convince as the cop (who gets introduced and then promptly disappears for the next hour of the film, which might actually be a blessing in disguise considering how miscast she is – at least try and look like you know how to hold a gun); whilst Vanessa Vasquez is slightly more credible as the kidnap victim of the serial killers, but only just, with everybody struggling with generic dialogue that is forced and even the best actors would have fought to make it sound decent or interesting. Jodie Foster set the bar high for playing these kind of characters and few have even come close since. Nobody is in the same city, let alone ball park, in “Sorrow”.

Then we enter “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” riff, even down to the victim being in the fridge, although she seems pretty much completely unharmed considering having being hit by a baseball bat at full pelt in the back of the head: even some blood after the event from the wound would have shown some effort (“Torch Song Trilogy” had a scene in which Matthew Broderick gets the same, but understandably is killed outright, thus proving that reality in film is a necessity at times like that, something “Sorrow” doesn’t even bother with, much its detriment).

Plot logic goes out of the window as the victim’s mother tracks her down supposedly after she’s been missing for 24 hours. In a desert? So easily? Good luck with that. “The Hills Have Eyes” kind of put that theory to bed. This script is why buying a screenwriting book (a criticism I seem to be making increasingly towards first time feature directors, especially the wannabe multi-hyphenates) is the best investment they’ll ever make. How many ‘girl escapes from house and then gets caught and taken back inside’ do we really need to see?

Antagonists are only interesting if they’re original and something we haven’t seen before. Hannibal Lecter spawned a whole host of copy cats, as did every other decent serial killer film (rewatch “Silence of the Lambs” or early Argento and see how good they still are. The killer has a reason, however twisted their logic). Here they’re just acting ‘crazy’ or ‘nasty’ or whatever, whereas crazy people try to act sane. It’s lazy, generic ‘writing’ of the worst kind. In “Sorrow” these aren’t characters, they’re cardboard cut-outs. Women are picked up and killed with abandon, poorly developed characters we’re supposed to care for simply because they’re women? I don’t think so. Check out “Monster” and see a character that we actually have some kind of sympathy with, even if we don’t agree with her actions, because she’s developed and we understand her backstory and motivation.

When Vasquez and Mars finally meet, we get the reveal that Vasquez is “specialised in forensic psychology” and licensed with handguns. This we get with twenty minutes to go? Come on! Where was the set up to this? Suddenly she’s an expert in determining the mindset of serial killers and has compiled a report on her findings? Not that it was used in the previous hour of the film. Welcome to the world of the absurd. It’s a make-it-up-as-we-go-along method of storytelling and shows again that too many directors think they can write, a world where police characters talk about ‘standard procedure’ then take the victim to some kind of warehouse that’s supposed to be an interrogation room, but is clearly just an available location (think about how clinical the bright, white, prison cell is in “Manhunter” and how it creates a sterilised locale in which the character exists, focusing us on the performance, rather than using some cliche dark place). Low budget is no excuse for low effort. Act 3 is supposed to be the final lengths of the race, hurtling towards the finishing line, but we get more talk, talk, as though we’re back in a TV drama. Expositional dialogue is used to explain the victim’s backstory, then the old cliche of the Police Chief being the bad guy with his cap gun (Audio FX, people, they’re free and add to atmosphere) and the victim has really been investigating it all along. It’s all so dull beyond belief. The Chief reveals his entire history as an old fashioned James Bond villain reveals his master plan. ‘Show don’t tell’ is the way it should always be, but that would be too smart, I guess? It all gets wrapped up with a happy ending, but by this point, does anybody actually still care?

When TV shows such as “Hannibal” and “The Following” have high gore content for serial killer subject matter, it’s pretty much inexcusable for a horror film to have very little. “Sorrow” seems to aim for a PG-13 and succeeds. If you’re making a horror film, spend money on FX as the lack of blood is frustrating, cutting to black before every hit says no budget and robs the audience of crucial visuals (or is it being ‘left to our imagination’, that classic cop out). The film is too much talk, trying at times to be some post-feminist drama about relationships and offering platitudes that wouldn’t sound out of place in a fortune cookie. I expected the old chestnut “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” line to arrive on cue, as though this all elevates the horror genre to some new, deeper level. It doesn’t. It’s ponderous and boring to watch.

There are many talented women directors out there, coming up with interesting and fresh ideas. This isn’t one of those cases. The only sorrow I felt was having to watch such generic, badly written, cheaply made nonsense. A genuine waste of time.

This review originally appeared on Haddonfield Horror:

http://www.haddonfieldhorror.com/2015/04/movie-review-sorrow.html#more

NB: All of my reviews are simply my opinion. The day that this review was first published on Haddonfield Horror, one of the production team for “Sorrow” tweeted me to say how disrespectful I’d been to the film. I replied that if they’d made a better film I’d have more respect. A few hours later they deleted their tweet, but they did later demand that the review link to IMDB be removed, which it was by Haddonfield Horror. If it was the only bad review on IMDB, Amazon, and other outlets for review, I could have thought that maybe I was alone in viewing “Sorrow” in negative terms, but it wasn’t and neither was I. It’s a bad film. The fact that they refuse to take on board anybody’s negative review shows that they’ve learned nothing at all from the many mistakes they made making “Sorrow”. It is, quite simply, one of the worst films I’ve seen in a long time.