The Quiet Place (2018)

There's a lot of buzz about The Quiet Place being the best horror film of the year (we're only into April, so that might be a bit premature). Fortunately, I hadn't heard much of this before I saw it, which meant I saw it with no expectations. In fact I nearly didn't watch it at all, as I was feeling lazy and didn't know if I wanted to bother.

Ninety minutes later and I was practically bouncing out of the cinema wanting to tell everyone how much I enjoyed the film.

For those who who can't stand the gore that has proliferated through much of modern horror, The Quiet Place will come as something of a relief. It isn't entirely blood free, and there's at least one wince-making moment (that's telegraphed so far in advance that I was fully prepared to be looking away when it happened - so I don't actually know what was shown on screen at that point), but for the most part it's about the tension and the fear, not voyeuristic depictions of bodily harm.

It's also notable that for all the tension and the scares, it's a movie that doesn't leave you walking away feeling battered senseless. There's a careful management between tension, action and the slower moments (I would have written quieter moments, but in the context of the film, that wouldn't make sense). It feels like a roller coaster horror film lensed through an Indie film-making sensibility.

The story plays on primal fears - be quiet or the monsters will get you. It appeals to childhood fears, inhabiting the same landscape as the Grimm Fairy Tales, but it's also very much an adult tale about protecting your family.

Like last year's Get Out, The Quiet Place should do a lot to redeem the image of horror as a respectable genre. In fact, I can see future generations of filmmakers being inspired by this - although hopefully they'll take away the right lessons from it.

Perhaps I'm over-selling it, but I genuinely loved this film. For a relatively novice director, John Krasinski has crafted something very special, which should do wonders for his directing career, if he ever gives it a chance amid all the acting gigs.

Happy Death Day (2017)

Something strange happened while I was watching this film.

Happy Death Day has been described as Groundhog Day meets Scream. It's the story of a college student who keeps relieving the day that she is murdered with the reset occurring at the point of death.

As the film was most of the way through the second iteration of the day, the picture cut out for a few seconds. When it cam back again, we were watching the moments leading up to the main character's death again. Only she had gone out of her way to avoid the events of that particular death, so how did we get back here in those few missing seconds?

The scene continues to play out exactly as it has before: she died, woke up, and then ran through the events of the previous day, being the only person who knew that the day was repeating. Except she only had the memory of the first day, not the second. This wasn't a continuation of the film - it was the film ten minutes ago.

Was I experiencing my own death-induced timeloop? If so, I only had ten minutes to solve my own murder.

Or I could wait and hope that the film didn't repeat again.

Fortunately, it appears that it was only a temporary technical malfunction, and aside from having to watch ten minutes of the film twice over, I haven't experienced any further repeating time.

Anyway, the film was good fun. It won't necessarily appeal to the hardcore horror fans - it's more comedy-thriller than slasher movie - but for anyone who isn't tired of films about time loops with a bit of stalkery murder thrown in for good measure, it's a decent watch.

The Dark Tower / It

I've read the first four books in The Dark Tower sequence (still haven't managed to get around to the remaining four), so I had a fair expectation of what a faithful adaptation should look like.

Fortunately, going into the cinema to see The Dark Tower, I had been forewarned, both by the filmmakers and the scathing reviews that this would not be a translation of any of the books as such.

I had also been warned not to expect anything other than a stinking pile of manure from the film. Judging by the tone of some of the reviews, this was one of the worst films of the year.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover that it wasn't one of the worst. It was completely ... mediocre.

There's something of an 80s vibe to the story - teenager discovering an Otherland, half the action being back in the real world (presumably to save on the production budget (which reminded me quite a bit of the Dolph Lundgren Masters of the Universe movie)). If that was the intent of the filmmakers, then tonally they were reasonably successful.

The problem is that it doesn't stand out in any way. It feels more like a TV pilot in terms of scale. The set pieces are unremarkable, the special effects nothing that the SyFy Channel doesn't put out on a weekly basis.

And as an adaptation of Stephen King's work, it completely fails to replicate any of the atmosphere of his writing.

On the other hand, there is IT (capitalised for the sake of clarity).

IT has a definite 80s vibe, considering that's the era in which it is being set. Minus the swearing, violence, horror and sexual abuse themes, it doesn't feel a million miles away something that would have fallen into genre of kids on bikes with an  'Executive Producer Steven Spielberg' seal of approval.

It's definitely not for the squeamish. It's also not for people who can't watch scenes of unpleasant things happening to children - and it's shockingly unpleasant in some cases.

It ranks up with the best of the films made from his work, and unlike something like The Shining, which regardless of its status of movie masterpiece (although I'm not a fan), isn't really true to King's storytelling, it feels faithful in content and tone.

The changes that have been made to the story (yes, that scene), and the structure make it work better on the big screen than a rabid adherence to the written word would have. Even though it only tells half of the story, it is still a complete entity and it works really, really well.

So in summary: IT - see on the big screen. The Dark Tower - wait for streaming and don't expect much.

The Mummy (2017)

I've seen The Mummy twice now. Both times courtesy of my unlimited Curzon membership, so don't think I thought it was good enough to warrant paying for it twice.

Somewhere in The Mummy is a decent-enough film, but it looks like a film with a classic case of executive interference. Given that this is supposed to be the first film in a shared universe, it's understandable why the studio might be a bit nervous - but that nervousness could potentially lead to their universe being prematurely mummified and then buried somewhere in what used to be Ancient Mesopotamia.

The opening scene is a prime example. Russell Crowe provides what should be an unnecessary narration over events in Ancient Egypt. Most of what he tells the audience is revealed later in the film anyway - and the rest of it could have played out with a couple more minutes worth of ancient Egypt and maybe a bit of subtitled dialogue to give a little more context of what was going on in the scene. Given the experience of the writers attached to the film, I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't how it was originally intended to play.

There are also numerous cases of over-explanation - lines of dialogue that go against the natural rhythm of the speech and which often seem at odds with the quality of the rest of the dialogue in the scenes. What should be snappy banter becomes weighed down with unnecessary lines.

Then there's Jekyll. And here come some (minor) spoilers - so you might want to give this paragraph a wide berth. It shouldn't come to much of a surprise to most people that he has a monstrous alter ego. That's made fairly evident from Cruise's character's first introduction to the good doctor. What is completely unnecessary is the full-on transformation we get later on in the film. The scene serves a small purpose in distracting some of the characters from other events occurring at the same time, but mostly it feels out of place - assuming Crowe's Jekyll lingers on for a few more movies, there has to be a better picture for him to pop his Eddie. But again, this smacks of someone losing their nerve over including Jekyll and not having him turn into Hyde.

Direction and/or editing feel a bit all over the place. Action scenes are competently handled, but there are a few what should have been jump scares that completely fail (there is one that worked, but it was the exception). There are also a number of moments that I'm sure had the writers rubbing their hands with glee as they thought of the dread that the scene would evoke. Except the director bottled it every single time.

There's a lot more that's wrong with the film, but I don't think it's quite the desiccated corpse that some reviewers might think it is. Ultimately though, I think what's most appealing about it are the glimpses beneath the bandages of the film that it could have been rather than the misshapen version that we were ultimately given.