The Harsh Light of Day Review

If you’re making a movie should have at least one of the following: a) a decent script or b) decent actors. If you’ve got both, you’re laughing, if you’ve only got one of those two things, then if it’s good enough, it can make up for the failings of the other. If you have neither a well written script nor actors that can’t act, you’re in trouble.

Unfortunately, The Harsh Light of Day falls into this latter category. The film is a low-budget horror in which a writer is brutally attacked in his own home by video camera-wielding masked thugs. His wife is killed and he is left paralysed. A deal with a mysterious stranger, however, offers him the chance for revenge.

Another rule for filmmaking that I’m making up and applying to this film right now is that if you’re going to tackle a well-trodden genre, you should have at least have something interesting and/or vaguely original to show us. The Harsh Light of Day flagrantly disregards this long-standing rule I’ve just made up. It’s a film about a certain type of parasitic monster that popular culture has got itself all in a hot sweat about recently. It doesn’t explicitly name this monster, so neither have I, but believe you me, you’ve probably seen at least one film/read one book/watched one TV programme featuring the creature in the last couple of years and if you haven’t, I envy you. The Harsh Light of Day does nothing with this monster that we haven’t already seen seventeen times already.

Dan Richardson and Giles Alderson, who play the film’s lead roles are very wooden and spout some really weakly written lines, penned by director Oliver S Milburn. It may only be seventy-eight minutes long, but it felt like a drag. Clearly the filmmakers were struggling to stretch the plot over that brief a length of time, as there a more than couple of flashback/nightmare montages that add nothing more than a couple of minutes to the film’s duration. They are often laughably bad – at one point, our blurry, shaky camera zooms in dramatically… on a packet of bird feed! Shock, horror!

I believe that there’s always something to like in every film (there just has to be, right?). In The Harsh Light of Day, it’s a brief sequence towards the end seen through the video lens of one of the home invaders. Although the ‘found footage’ thing has been as done to undeath as the film’s monsters, this brief sequence was well constructed and even approached being a bit scary.

Apart from that, there is little to recommend the film. It doesn’t feel good to criticise a debutant director who clearly didn’t have a lot of money to splash around, but hopefully Milburn will return in the future to deliver on the glimmers of promise he shows in The Harsh Light of Day with something better written or with better actors and perhaps something original to say.

Cannibal Review

And the winner of the Jack Kirby Award for Utter Cinematic Masturbation 2011 goes to…Benjamin Viré’s Cannibal! Benjamin, get up here and tell us how you did it!

The plot of Cannibal is as follows: Max (Nicolas Gob) is a weirdo living by himself in the woods. Every day, he practices his golf swing. One day, a stray ball lands near the body of a woman (Helena Coppejans) lying prone and apparently dead in the woods. As opposed to calling the police or ambulance like a regular Joe, Max decides to scoop her up and take her home. Turns out, the woman isn’t dead. Instead she regains consciousness and begins flirting with Max. She claims to have no name so Max calls her Bianca. Bianca sneaks off and kills folks by eating bits of them. Max decides to cover for her. SHE IS A CANNIBAL. BAD DUDES are looking for Bianca. Drama ensues. A climax develops. The viewer awakes from their slumber intermittently.

If you read my reviews regularly, you may have correctly come to the conclusion that I don’t mind art-house cinema. I like it when filmmakers decide to do things a little differently, to mix things up, to try something new without the backing of Hollywood. Hell, I’ll even watch a film where they’re speaking some weird-ass, non-English language and you have to read the words at the bottom of the screen. Cannibal does try to do things differently. It fancies itself as an intellectual horror-film. It thinks because it does a lot of scenes in blurry slow-motion, or because it includes a crudely written monologue about the psychology behind cannibalism or because it RANDOMLY GOES INTO BLACK AND WHITE FOR NO GOOD REASON in the final act, that it’s some sort of clever film.

It is not.

Cannibal is a compendium of incoherent scenes, loosely related to each other. The action of the picture is often so blurrily represented, it’s genuinely guesswork to say what is happening. The characters are both annoying and under-developed, making it a total impossibility to give an actual shit what happens to them.

Plus points? Well, Cannibal has few well composed shots and in the brighter daylight scenes, there’s a kind of super-contrasted look to the film that looks like an old photograph from the 70s, which is nice, but other than that, the film is complete pony, a massive exercise in style over substance – though in reality displaying very little of either. Avoid at all costs.

Phobia Review

Phobia is a compendium of four short horror films – in the style of the classic US horror movies such as Tales From The Crypt, Twilight Zone: The Movie and Creepshow – from a selection of Thai directors.

The first, ‘Happiness’, directed by Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, focuses exclusively on a lone occupant of a single room, a young woman incarcerated in her apartment due to a broken leg suffered in a car accident. She is bored and lonely until she starts receiving text messages from an unknown stranger. Thongkongtoon’s ponderous and quasi-poetic direction adeptly transforms familiar surroundings into first unsettling and then frightening environments. This dialogue-free short is the most subtle of the quartet and a strong opening salvo.

Paween Purikitpanya’s ‘Tit for Tat’ follows, in which a group of bullies are expelled when they are caught consorting with Mary Jane by one of their wimpier schoolmates. They exact their revenge and their victim returns in kind, aided by black magic, with very gory results. In stark contrast to ‘Happiness’, the direction is much more fluid, visuals flash across the screen in a near-subliminal manner and the camera is in a constant state of movement, making for an exhilarating rollercoaster of a film. Unfortunately, the short is badly let down by some incredibly ropey CGI towards its conclusion which undoes a lot of the work it had previously done to draw the viewer into its reality. Its final shock still manages to deliver though.

Probably the best of the bunch is Banjong Pisanthanakun’s ‘In the Middle’. Four teenage lads embark on a Deliverance-style rafting and camping trek through the jungle and scare each other with ghost stories, until an accident throws them into the middle of one. The film is a very tongue in cheek skewering of film buffs and throws in plenty of references to the twisty-turny narratives of the films it is spoofing/paying tribute to. In an amusing nod, one of the characters wears this very spoilery t-shirt. The film also manages to be chilling as well as witty and boasts a very likable cast.

The final part of the set is Parkpoom Wongpoom’s ‘Last Flight’, which while visually and thematically strong, is nixed somewhat by its too ridiculous for its own good plot. An air hostess tends to a princess on a special flight. They get off to a rather bad start as the royal is all too aware that the stewardess is fooling around with her partner. Events conspire and the princess dies while on her trip and the air hostess is once again entrusted to take care of the royal as her body is flown back home. Spooky goings-on occur, but are they real or just part of the hostess’ guilty conscience? The special effects are very good and actors do rather well with flawed material but the incredibly heightened reality serves to undermine any potential frights. The film is also guilty of perpetuating some uncomfortably misogynist views which bristled with my sensibilities.

All in all, however, Phobia is a strong package and a good showcase of Thai directorial talent. An ideal Friday night in DVD, you can order it now at Amazon.

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/05/14/dvd-review-phobia/