Three Films Make A Post: In 1987, Oakland was hella freaky.

Freaky Tales (2024): I’m not sure where I caught the case of optimism, but I expected an anthology movie with this particular title to contain tales somewhat freakier than the one about the punks who are attacked by Nazis, decide to fight back the next time, and then fight back the next time, or the one about two young women who are invited to a rap battle, take part in the rap battle, and win the rap battle. This is more Tales of the Bleeding Obvious material.

Apparently, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are big fans of classic exploitation movies, but their modern version of them is bland, antiseptic, and just too nice to truly get the spirit. That the blood and gore is all CGI is absolutely telling in this regard. Doing a proper left-wing style exploitation movie seems like a fine goal to me, but this surely isn’t it.

Clown in a Cornfield (2025): As far as modern retro-slasher comedies go, Eli Craig’s Clown is a perfectly decent time – it’s certainly well-made, has a couple of jokes that actually hit, and a fine final girl in Katie Douglas. It’s also less sadistically minded than rather a lot of modern slashers at the moment, and doesn’t feature endless, boring, torture sequences; it falls in the opposite direction a little, so the violence is a bit too weightless and too cartoonish to ever produce much suspense, proving that you really can’t satisfy me in this regard.

But really, it’s the kind of perfectly decent film, most probably made by perfectly decent filmmakers there’s very little to say about.

Eclipse (1977): This film about a very awkward Christmas dinner with the alcoholic wife of a deceased twin and his neurotic brother, close after the accidental (or was it?) death, was only rediscovered thanks to the efforts of its male lead Tom Conti.

It’s an interesting film, building a mood of tension out of occasional flashbacks, awkward and tense social interaction and a pretty fantastic synth score.

In its general tone the film is a sibling to some of the weirder and more abstract regional films from the US (this is a Scottish film), particularly in its insistence on getting by on a mood of tension and dread alone – there are no revelations coming you didn’t expect, and there’s a slightness to these particular sets of neuroses that sometimes gets in the film’s way.

But unlike the other two films in this entry made fifty years later, Eclipse really strains for something unique, and gains a certain power from it even if it doesn’t quite succeed.

Three Films Make A Post: Beneath the city streets lie government secrets. File #7 is missing… Pray they don't find it.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (1993) aka Waga jinsei saiaku no toki: This first movie in Kaizo Hayashi’s Maiku Hama trilogy is a very film school film nerd type of project. It is full of allusions to and plays with tropes and approaches from other movies – mostly from noir, the hard-boiled school and the nouvelle vague.

As it often happens with this approach, the film appears stuffed full of things, or really, overstuffed, leaving little room for a personality that isn’t made exclusively made from other movies. As it also often happens, many of the scenes here are fantastic when looked at on their own, they just don’t add up to much of a whole.

Where You’re Meant to Be (2016): Paul Fegan’s documentary concerns the attempt of Arab Strap’s voice Aidan Moffat of doing a small town tour with his versions of traditional Scottish ballad and folk material. An early encounter with very traditional Scottish ballad singer Sheila Stewart – her rules of folk singing are so purist, most other folk singers wouldn’t cut it – sees her criticizing the project rather vigorously. Her criticism clearly hurts and rankles Moffat in ways he never quite expresses on camera. An off-camera monologue ruminates about Moffat’s doubts, while the film follows him through backrooms, rehearsals and meetings with various somewhat ballad connected people.

This is more an interesting documentary than a successful one, mostly because it seems to be quite able to find out what it actually is about. It attempts to use the Stewart/Moffat divide as a narrative frame, but there’s really not enough substance to it to carry the whole film. Other encounters feel rather random and not always terribly interesting, something that isn’t helped by Moffat’s tendency to throw himself into the pose of a smirking ironicist, which in my experience only is a way to get people to talk when they’re drunk and don’t notice their interlocutor thinks he’s above them. In any case, it’s not a pose I find terribly interesting to watch.

Hidden City (1987): A young woman (Cassie Stuart) drags an at first unwilling statistician (Charles Dance) into the search for a classified film that leads into the lower echelons of espionage, bad commercial art, and all the interesting things barely buried under London’s surface, secrets the people meant to keep them secret have mostly forgotten themselves.

In mood and style Stephen Poliakoff’s movie fluctuates between comedy, a light and very British 80s version of the 70s US conspiracy thriller, and a psychogeographical essay turned movie. This is very much a film about a boring life getting in touch with the weird undercurrents that have always run just a tiny bit below the surface and starting to get in tune with them, shifting his view of the world; the thriller elements are really only there to hang this shift in personal perspective on.

Three Films Make A Post: She should be dead, now she wishes she was…

Urban Ghost Story (1998): I’ve seen Geneviève Jolliffe’s British low budget piece of kitchen sink horror taking place in Scottish housing estate mentioned as a hidden gem from time to time, particular in the last couple of years. I don’t see it, though. That’s mostly because the film’s attempt to pair the typical poverty tourism of British kitchen sink drama (if you want believable portrayals of poor people in their actual emotional complexity, look in a different genre) with a very low key poltergeist style haunting is always rubbing against how melodramatic the film’s plot actually is, leading to a piece that doesn’t have the tone it seems to believe it has. There are also a lot of the more embarrassing hallmarks of cheesy 90s direction on offer: particularly Jolliffe’s love for “emotional slow motion” often borders on self-parody, as does the perfectly stupid happy end following an absurdly melodramatic climax.

Hell’s Trap aka Trampa Infernal (1989): Pedro Galindo III’s Mexican slasher Hell’s Trap, that imagines a Rambo-style vet (with a surprisingly effective mask) as a slasher, while also trying to cash in on the paintball fad, does not have any such crises of identity. This is a piece of prime Mexican late 80s cheese, and it knows it. Characters are dumb and pretty – also pretty unlikable – the kills are sometimes surprisingly effective, and the series of bad jokes, broad characterisation and murder moves sprightly enough. Plus, how many other slashers do you know whose killers use a claw glove “inspired” by Freddy Krueger as well as an assault rifle?

The Whispering aka 속닥속닥 Sodak Sodak (2018): On the cusp of college, a group of teens stumble upon a cursed amusement park. Murderous ghosts hunt them down one by one.

The resulting film really is as generic as that makes it sound. If you’ve seen any other movie that sounds a little like this one, you’ve basically seen this one as well, sometimes done better, sometimes somewhat worse, I expect. From time to time, the film manages to achieve a comparatively effective set piece, but those moments are neither frequent nor creepy enough to make this memorable.

It’s not a terrible film – there are perfectly okay basic filmmaking chops on display, and the actors do what they can with the little they are given – but it’s so aggressively mediocre I rather wish it were.

Lord of Tears (2013)

When Scottish teacher James Findlay’s (Euan Douglas) estranged mother (Nancy Joy Page) dies, she leaves him her first communication for decades. She writes him that she doesn’t want him to ever return to his childhood home because it was there where he had some kind of break-down as a child, and it is because of this break-down their estrangement happened.

Not surprisingly, this kind of ambiguous message only makes James curious about the parts of his own past he doesn’t remember, not to speak of finding the reasons for his breakdown; he also has dreams that might be fragments of memories, or something calling to him. So James decides to move into the huge, beautiful and creepy house in the highlands for a while, to jumpstart his memory, explain the things about himself he doesn’t understand, and perhaps come to terms with his broken down relationship to his parents.

Once he’s at the house, James’s dreams become stronger, stranger, and more disturbing, and what’s worse, the borders between dreams and reality begin to shift, until James can’t quite be sure anymore about what’s real and what’s not. Still, he keeps on investigating the house. James’s only help is the eccentric American Evie (Lexy Hulme) who is living in the refurbished barn. The very lonely man falls for Evie very quickly, leaving him with reasons to stay at the house even once his dreams – visions? – and parts of his reality become dominated by something that looks like an owl-headed man with peculiarly long arms, something that clearly doesn’t have anything good for James in mind.

Lawrie Brewster’s Scottish indie horror film Lord of Tears is really quite the thing, mixing elements of Celtic and biblical myth, folkloric horror (the urban legends/creepypasta this might be influenced by are folklore too), cosmic horror, and psychological horror into something very much its own, and doing so with style, imagination and vision.

From time to time, but only very seldom, you can see the film straining against what must have been a miniscule budget. Two or three dialogue scenes – particularly those between James and his best friend Allen (Jamie Gordon Scott) – are a bit awkward in direction and acting (despite the acting quality in general being quite high), the ghost make-up isn’t very convincing, and the film’s final twist just doesn’t work at all, but these things, even the botched ending, don’t really matter compared to the very many things Brewster – as well as Sarah Daly’s script – does right.

As everyone who knows me knows, I’m a sucker for new imaginary mythologies, and I generally find the films using them much more interesting than those recycling ye old vampire and zombie stuff (unless those films make these classics/clichés truly their own, which does happen) and the same old rules. Lord of Tears’s mythology is particularly fine, lovingly fitted in the cracks between real world myths, just detailed enough to make it feel believable yet not so much it loses the frisson of the weird and the virtues of ambiguity.

This kind of horror is often not the sort that makes much use of gore and instead puts all its efforts into creating mood, the feeling of dread, and dream-like ambiguity, and the film at hand is no exception to this. Brewster makes spectacular use of his locations, doing that nearly proverbial thing where landscape turns into one of the most important characters of a film. The bleak beauty of the Scottish highlands and the incredible building that is supposed to be James’s childhood home establish the protagonists’ experiences as taking place at the border of reality and dream.

Brewster further emphasises this mood of the unreal with some rather spectacular editing of a kind you seldom see in indie horror at all, with a use of montage that often borders on the avantgarde. This way, the audience can be sure about the reality of anything that happens as little as James can, a – it turns out – rather disquieting state of mind. Obviously, Lord of Tears is a film utterly unafraid of making mental states visible by breaking the sense of realism cinema is often so careful to build, even risking losing its audience by going into directions that only later in the film will turn out to be meaningful and important for the film instead of the whimsical indulgences they at first appear to be. This sort of thing is difficult to do well, yet Lord of Tears does it in more ways than one and with a fearlessness I found particularly impressing. Under normal circumstances, you just don’t do a scene like Lexy’s dance in a horror film, yet Lord of Tears does, making a frightening scene much later that much more effective and meaningful. Which is, of course, another quite remarkable thing – that the film’s weirdness does at all times connect very directly with the story it tells and the characters living through it, beyond the vague connections of mood many of my beloved continental horror films from the 70s settled for.

Lord of Tears really is a lovely film all around, and while it’s not perfect, I think everyone with a heart for everything capital-w weird, or horror films going their own, very individual, ways, should see it.

Three Films Make A Post: 7 Directors. 7 Tales of Terror. 0 Working Cell Phones.

Scare Package (2019): In part, my dislike for this 7-segment omnibus movie is not the film’s fault. I’m not the biggest fan of meta comedies at the best of times, so the film’s meta tendencies would not have been ideal for me at the best of times. However, my problem with this particular film isn’t that the humour is meta, but that it is that lazy kind of meta that does little else than point at a trope, go “har-har, look at that trope!” and then not actually does anything of interest with that discovery, certainly nothing that will provide you with any kind of insight into the whys and wherefores of a trope, leaving it at the pointing out of that fascinating fact that a trope indeed does exist, and it will now subvert it by, um, pointing at it. Also, aren’t jokes supposed to be funny?

The Deeper You Dig (2019): Now, this sort of thing on the other hand warms the cockles of my stony heart, what with it being made by a mother-father-daughter trio (Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams) from the Catskills making their very own indie horror film together. It’s a tale of guilt and revenge from the grave with a big element of the surreal and the Weird, creating just the right mood of strangeness out of snow and found locations. It ends on a wonderfully macabre note, with a perfectly fucked-up happy end much superior to your usual horror bullshit happy ending.

It’s indie horror, so you’ll have to live with pacing that’s sometimes just a bit slow (ending scenes is always a bit of a problem in this area of the art), and some strained acting in the minor roles, but the rest of this is so creative and convincing, these really are only minor flaws.

Filth (2013): And then there’s this pretty insane and messed up bit of very Scottish crime filmmaking based on a novel by Irvine Welsh. The film does a lot of what one is tempted to call stunt filmmaking with an unreliable narrator perfectly played by James McAvoy in one of his best performances, incessant breaking of the Fourth Wall, and scenes that may or may not be dream sequences, but does it so well this feels like the most sensible way to tell this particular tale, perhaps the only way to understand the broken mind of its protagonist.


For the film also manages something very difficult extremely well: showing us a terrible human being doing terrible things, but also showing us his pain and suffering as a fellow human being, his suffering from mental illness, causing compassion for a man without ever wanting to use our empathy to excuse him.

In short: Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)

It’s Christmas time in the sleepy Scottish town of Little Haven. Now nearing the finish line of her highschool life, our titular heroine (Ella Hunt) is planning on taking an off-year before going to university. That plan is somewhat inspiring the ire of her working class dad (Mark Benton) – who clearly fears she’s pissing away her chance for a future that doesn’t see her having to do stuff like janitorial service at the school her children go to as he does – as well as puppy-eyed sadness in her best friend John (Malcolm Cumming). And yes, Virginia, of course John’s secretly in love with her. There’s also some business about Anna having an actual crush, a total arsehole called Nick (Ben Wiggins), and various friends and hangers-on.

All of this is going to stay as important as very obvious character relations can stay when the worst sort of Christmas trouble in form of the zombie apocalypse arises. You know the drill with that one. On the plus side, Anna’s really rather good at killing zombies once she gets going.

This little bit of plot already makes it clear that director John McPhail really attempts to go all in with the genre mash-up here, mixing teen comedy, somewhat gory zombie horror comedy, and a tiny smidgen of romantic comedy (minus all of the tropes of that genre that are actually satisfying, as it will turn out), mostly using the genres in their most clichéd forms.

Because that’s apparently not enough genres, the film’s also a musical, featuring a bunch of tunes that are catchy but also not terribly good in other regards, and choreography that mostly gets by on a bunch of young, clearly talented, actors really going on a charm offensive, which is what keeps much of the film lively and comparatively fun to watch. Alas, this does not change the fact that most of the songs are in the style of second string contemporary broadway tunes. Personally, I tend to find even the first string of this type of music with its love for the technical and the slick pretty much the opposite of most of what I appreciate in music, so this isn’t exactly making me happy. Your mileage may obviously vary here.

Tonally, the film suffers from having a few too many genres to work through, ending up disappointing genre expectations for every single genre it belongs to in turn, something even a truly clever script could not necessarily avoid in a case at this; the workmanlike one with its series of clichés and tropes Anna has certainly can’t.


All of this does make Anna and the Apocalypse sound like a worse experience than sitting through it actually is, though, for while things don’t hang together terribly well here, and the film avoids to do anything actually interesting with it genre mash-up, it does have the already mentioned charm of the cast, as well as a lot of the kind of energy I can’t help but read as a desperate wish to entertain. And even though the film certainly entertains far below its possibilities, who am I to deny it a wish this appropriate to the season?

Calibre (2018)

Because his fiancée's new pregnancy signals something like the beginning of responsible grown-up life, and realistically for quite a few years less time for swanning off with his friends, to him, Vaughn (Jack Lowden) is going on a weekend trip into the Scottish Highlands with his best friend Marcus (Martin McCann). It’s going to be a hunting trip, no less. Vaughn does not actually have much interest in shooting helpless animals but Marcus insists, and it’s pretty clear the latter man has been the dominant partner in their friendship since they met at boarding school, a place where you’d expect Marcus with his clear rich boy entitlement to have felt rather at home, and Vaughn not so much.

After a night of drinking and flirting with the female populace of the village they have booked rooms for the weekend in, or a bit more than just flirting in Marcus’s case, off to the hunt they go. From now on, things will go very badly indeed, for Vaughn accidentally shoots and kills a little boy. The following confrontation with the child’s desperate father ends up with Marcus killing him, too, in what he clearly honestly believes was the bodily defence of his friend. To the audience, the situation is rather more ambiguous; it’s a clear possibility that Vaughn had managed to talk the man down already when his friend shoots.

In any case, from here on out, Marcus takes control of the situation, with little resistance from the just as shell-shocked Vaughn, and the two start on a series of increasingly horrible, and just plain wrong decisions, starting with the idea of burying the bodies and (badly) pretending nothing happened.

Matt Palmer’s Made for Netflix thriller is a rather wonderful example of intelligent filmmaking, based on a script – also by the director – that particularly impressed me with its measuredness, its ability to escalate a situation yet to find the point to stop before things, characters and situations become too over the top.

So Marcus is certainly a bit of an entitled prick – certainly someone I’d dislike heartily in real life - and Vaughn a bit of a wet blanket, but both are so in believable measures, keeping their friendship a concrete thing between two believable and concrete men instead of an abstract or a cliché only there to drive a movie. And the villagers, as country people in horror films and thrillers are wont to, certainly have their own ways of going about things, but again, the film finds exactly the right spot just before they turn into crazy backwoods folk and portrays their actions as consequence of the things they go through.

In fact, one of the film’s subtle arguments seems to be that part of the situation evolves like it does exactly because our protagonists view these people – even an obvious man of distinction like Logan McClay (Tony Curran, as off-handedly wonderful as usual) – as villagers, these curious humans city people meet when they are on vacation, not quite like us, and therefor not quite evoking the kind of empathy and respect they might afford those they meet in their daily lives. That’s not to say there isn’t resentment coming from the other side, too, though it mostly is the sort of resentment provoked by random outsiders just trampling through your life without even seeming to notice when they do harm.

This kind of thoughtfulness, the willingness to let things and people be complicated runs through every aspect of Calibre’s script. However, it also manages to be just a wonderfully effective genre film, if you like your thrillers quietly tense and subtly tight, that is, for while there is indeed something of a violent climax, much of the immense tension of the film is based on careful observation and consideration of people and situations and seldom built on obvious set pieces. That’s not a criticism, of course, it’s a sign of subtlety, and while I do love loud and visually stylized thrillers, subtlety is not a bad thing, especially if it’s realized so well.
It’s also remarkable how little interest Palmer shows in twists, something that now seems to be a mandatory element of most thriller and horror films, often to their detriment; instead of twists, Calibre has actual organic plot developments, the feeling of a noose pulling tighter, and things deteriorating. I rather prefer that.


I haven’t really said much about the film’s technical aspects. That’s not because they are not worth mentioning, but because Palmer’s direction is so self-assured and at the same time so disinterested in pointing at itself, that the film’s highly effective framing of scenes, the pointed editing, and the often beautiful camera work of DP Márk Györi, as well as the through the bank excellent acting, just become part of the gestalt of Calibre.

Three Films Make A Post: When She Sings Nobody Can Touch Her!

The H-Man aka Bijo to ekitai ningen (1958): This might be my least favourite among the respectable percentage of films by the great Ishiro Honda for Toho I have seen. It’s not so much that the film treats much of its monster movie element as something to be hidden behind the ninety percent of it which are a crime movie that bugs me. The problem is that said crime movie is such a tepid one, without a compelling mystery or captivating characters. What we get is a bunch of smug know-it-all cops, some very polite yakuza, and a scientist and a fainting-prone nightclub singer who are trying to convince said cops there’s something more interesting going on than a very boring criminal investigation. This goes on for about an hour or so and includes of course the obligatory crap nightclub sequences all mediocre crime movies are bound by law to possess. Now, from time to time, Honda seems to remember his talents, and there’s a scene of human interaction that hints at more interesting things going on behind the flat surfaces of the characters, or a horror sequence pops in that’s actually as effective as one expects of the director. Mostly, though, this is a bit of a slog with only minor pay-off once the crime elements finally take a back seat.

Tank 432 aka Belly of the Bulldog (2015): Going from tepid to really just bad, there’s this thing directed by Nick Gillespie. A bunch of soldiers or something (do you smell a plot twist?) and their two captives manage to trap themselves in an armoured vehicle. Hilarity, that is to say, lots of dollar store surrealism, bad madness and awkward attempts at building suspense ensue; decent actors are wasted; then a plot twist that explains everything – or as a matter of fact nothing at all – happens, the end. There is, indeed, a difference between a film being confusing and it being confused. This one strictly comes down on the latter line, leaving sense behind for what goes by hallucinatory filmmaking only when you have a pretty stunted imagination. The ending is deeply dissatisfying (and honestly explains nothing at all about the random nonsense the film has inflicted on its audience before), but then, so is the rest of the movie, with nothing in it ever feeling like it has made the step from a vague idea to an actual film.

The Dark Mile (2017): Much less underwhelming than the other two films today is Gary Love’s British/Scottish film about a lesbian couple (Rebecca Calder and Deirdre Mullins) going on a riverboat vacation in the Highlands in an attempt to heal the wounds of something the film won’t explain too quickly. As it happens, the locals on the river are of the country hick type, starting with behaviour between deeply unpleasant and downright horrible to easily end up on criminal. Why, some of them might even be cultists!


This isn’t a film that’s exactly a thrill a minute, but rather one that carefully and slowly builds up its characters and their past, and just as carefully ratchets up the tension, making good use of the atmosphere the Scottish landscapes and a talented DP provide, as well as of a convincing cast. Once the more typical elements of this sub-genre really kick in, the film manages to stay tense and interesting despite not exactly being original in its basic plot or the way it develops. There’s a pleasure in an old story told anew, particularly since Love varies the old story with his obvious care for his characters and many scenes that evoke a nice, creepy sense of a place where not too many horror films take place.

Past Misdeeds: The Dead Outside (2009)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

It's six months after the outbreak of the viral apocalypse (again). This time, a neurological virus in combination with a badly working vaccine (although I'm not sure the film really means "vaccine" and not just "specialized medication") has caused large parts of humanity to become dangerously deranged. Virus victims develop symptoms of schizophrenia which get worse until the only thing they seem to feel is anger. Still, these virus victims stay very much human, most of them are even still able to ramble angrily, so calling them zombies wouldn't feel proper.

Daniel (Alton Milne), who has lost (how and why will be sort of explained in flashbacks and visions) his family, drives through the Scottish countryside looking for a safe place to stay. His car runs out of gas, but fortunately there's a farmhouse close by for him to seek shelter in. At first, the place seems to be deserted, but the next day Daniel meets April (Sandra Louise Douglas), an armed, emotionally devastated teenager, whose grandparents were the owners of the farm. Initially, April doesn't want Daniel staying there, is even close to shooting him, but something changes her mind.

In the following weeks, the girl and the man grow closer, although both need some time to get over the distrust one develops when everyone else is mad and one can't even be all that sure about one's own state of mind. Daniel and April aren't really willing or able to disclose much about their pasts or their feelings to each other. He thinks she might be immune against the virus, while she panics at the mere thought of getting close to any of the remaining medical facilities. Still, there is trust growing between them.

Things get difficult again when another sane survivor, Kate (Sharon Osdin) arrives one day. Her presence disturbs the brittle, unspoken pact between April and Daniel, and catastrophe already waits around the corner.

It seems as if the British isles are the place to look when it comes to ultra-low budget outbreak films. Although this Scottish production isn't as excellent as Colin, my favourite example of the type, it is still a much better film than a lot of its peers are.

It is also a film many viewers won't like for its very slow pace, the conscious lack of clarity in its storytelling and its rather wonderful disinterest in gore. These things aren't caused by any lack of care in The Dead Outside's director Kerry Anne Mullaney, though, they are very much part of the film's design. The film's slowness fits a film about an end of the world that isn't flashy or explosive, but that instead has come slowly and creeping (the same way as the virus works).

The lack of clarity is a necessary part of a film which lets us see through the eyes of characters who aren't at all sure about their own sanity, and who can't and don't want to remember everything they have done too clearly. Mullaney bases some effective moments of dread on the lack of certainty about what's real and what's not her characters live in. I found the way Daniel's dead family and very real danger mingle much more effective than the typical goresplosion.

This is not to say that the film doesn't contain any action at all. There are two (probably budget-stretching) action set-pieces - of course without explosions - that impress through clever editing and the ability to build up a feel of claustrophobia in open, but dark, spaces.

Mullaney is obviously more interested in her characters than in the action or plot. This is not the sort of film that believes in expository dialogue (although there is one large expository monologue late in the film); much is insinuated and hinted at, probably in the hope for an audience willing and able to put a little work into understanding what is going on with the characters. One of the points the film is trying to make seems to be that there really is no clear difference between the state we call "sanity" and "madness". I don't think that's a point it could make by being clear and obvious about everything.

I thought that the actors were really selling their roles quite well. Sure, the acting is a bit strained in a "look! I'm acting!" way from time to time, but more often than not Douglas and Milne project a mix of normalcy and brittleness that is absolutely right for the direction the film is going in. Sometimes, acting that doesn't read as ultra-professional is of help to let the characters on screen seem like everyday people.

I had some problems with the film's visual side. While there are some impressive shots of the farmhouse and the creepy landscape around it (you know I'm a sucker for nature in its less sweet and mellow variations), the film suffers a little from desaturation syndrome. Of course, muted grey and brown colours help emphasize the desolation of the situation, but there's a lot to be said for using other parts of the colour spectrum too, if only to contrast them with all that grey.

Probably even more problematic is Mullaney's decision to shoot about eighty percent of the film with the camera tilted at an angle, as if everything took place on a ship close to sinking. Creepy angles might be a well established way to build mood, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The last point is certainly reached when I find myself tilting my head to the side while watching a movie.

Still, I found these to be minor problems that The Dead Outside more than made up for. I am an easy mark for the film's charms, seeing who much I despise exposition and clarity in movies, and how much I like the ambiguous and the slow, but even people who aren't me could be able to find something quite irresistible in the film's rhythm, in the way it feels like it was made by someone with very personal ideas of what could be interesting about a viral apocalypse.

On WTF: The Dead Outside (2009)

From time to time, the (zombie or not) outbreak movie is still able to deliver things of interest.

In case of The Dead Outside, I had even lower expectations than usual in the genre, because ultra-low budget outbreak films are often a chore to get through. I'm happy to say I was wrong. Why and about what will be explained in my review on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Tags: scottish movies,kerry anne mullaney,horror,reviews,sandra louise douglas,alton milne,zombies,other places

A short review of Doomsday (2008)

AWESOME!!

Technorati-Tags: scottish movies,post-apocalypse,reviews,action,neil marshall,rhona mitra