Change Your Image
cc_vivalavida
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014)
Sparse chills and a limp third act
The sequel to 2012's breakout horror hit The Woman in Black takes place forty years later in the heart of the blitz. A group of children are evacuated to the derelict Eel Marsh House in order to escape the escalating war, under the watchful eye of strict Mrs Hogg (Helen McCrory) and her student Eve (Phoebe Fox), when things (inevitably) begin to go 'bump' in the night, and one child in particular is drawn further and further into the shadows.
Having rather enjoyed the original despite a rather mixed critical response, I was struggling to think how much further the Woman in Black story could be taken, and so apparently were the film-makers. The plot and the reasons for bringing the titular ghoul back to the big screen are either incomprehensibly told or forgotten in amongst everything else going on, and it isn't long before the well-trodden ground of the day=good, night=bad cycle begins to play out.
Fox and McCrory do their best with roles that more or less come down to wandering about in dark rooms looking worried, and Jeremy Irvine (who appears to be rapidly transforming into Jack O'Connell) is fairly enjoyable as a charming but secretive pilot stationed at a nearby airfield. The child actors, particularly Oaklee Pendergast as Edward – the child who falls under the dark spell of the house – appear fairly capable, but for the most part are denigrated to background props or plot points.
While there is an interesting psychological horror movie to be made about terrified children torn from their families and thrust into what turns out to be greater danger than the infinite fall of bombs, but this is not it. Hammer, steadfast staple of the horror genre, has fallen prey to the cattle prod symptoms of modern horror, with merely one or two good frights built up around genuine suspense thrown in at random. Even the climactic final act feels limp and unwanted, appearing to build up speed before coming to a dead stop. The melancholy atmosphere and unrelenting paranoia of the first film have all but fled.
Angel of Death (a title that is really never explained) is not without some chills: the jet black cinematography and the likable cast of characters do very little to stave off the plodding plot, unintelligible motivations and drought of decent scares. Poor show, Hammer.
The Other Woman (2014)
Hollywood 1, Bechdel 0
My experience of watching The Other Woman can best be equated to being presented with a large iced cake, only to take a forkful and realise that beneath a miniscule layer of icing there lies nothing but impacted excrement. The film comes courtesy of director Nick Cassavetes (whose previous crime against celluloid was 2004's The Notebook) and is intended as a story of female empowerment as one woman (Cameron Diaz) who, upon discovering that her boyfriend is married, teams up with the wife (Leslie Mann) and another secret lover (Kate Upton) to take revenge.
The biggest of many, many problems with the film is that it pretends to be a story of female empowerment: I'm not sure if I missed a meeting, but since when has swooning over every male character, getting drunk and being sick into handbags been the mainstay of strong female characters? There is also a horrific display of double standards: could you imagine a film where a group of men get their own back on a cheating woman by suggesting that they kick her in between the legs or supply her with hormone pills designed for pre-op trans-sexuals? The initial promise portrayed by the film's poster (a knuckleduster sporting a wedding ring in place of a spike) is scuppered within the first five minutes.
The three leads actresses are incessantly annoying, Diaz sporting a possibly plastic-enhanced smile all the way through, Leslie Mann apparently under the belief that any line of dialogue can be made funnier simply by shouting it, and Kate Upton is there purely for set dressing. The second Nikolaj Coaster-Waldau (playing the cheating husband) walks into frame, the women (even the ones he has cheated on and lied to) can't help but fall instantly in love with him. Nicki Minaj is cast as an assistant to Diaz' lawyer character (no, I'm not making that up), and spends her scenes plastered in grotesque layers of make-up and doing her best to shove her bottom at the camera.
As if that last piece of casting wasn't enough, the entire film seems to be populated by the interior decoration of Maxim magazine, everyone looking perfectly tanned with perfect hair and nails and sporting snow-white teeth. None of the events or the dialogue bears anything even resembling real life, at best looking slightly tacky and at worst giving characters lines like 'you need to cry on the inside, like winners do'. I guess that makes me the biggest winner in the entire universe, because I left the cinema positively bursting with internal tears.
At best, one could say that the film is coherently put together
and that's it. There is nothing else in this vacuous, grotesque, star-studded pile of crap to redeem it, and the fact that it has just taken around $25 million in America is a depressing reminder of the state of modern cinema. At least Devil's Due had the decency to make me feel so ill that I could have prematurely left the cinema with my integrity intact, but The Other Woman kept me pinned, mentally kicking and screaming for the entirety of its' unbearable 110 minutes.
The Quiet Ones (2014)
Fresh, interesting British Horror
The Quiet Ones is a new British horror movie from the makers of The Woman in Black. Produced by the classic crafters of horror, Hammer Productions, the film follows an Oxford professor (Jared Harris), his tutees and a student cameraman (Sam Claflin) as they attempt to both prove and document the theory that supernatural powers are simply a manifestation of psychological trauma. They begin studying a young girl who believes she is possessed by an evil entity, and a strange relationship begins to develop between her and cameraman Brian as the professor's attempts to create a poltergeist take their toll.
In an era where endless Paranormal Activity sequels, squeezing every buck out of the found-footage genre and reliance purely on cattle-prod jump scares, it's refreshing to see a horror film that seems to have been made by people who understand how suspense works. In the same way that Woman in Black tricked you into thinking that it's going to be a run-of-the-mill horror flick set in a creaky old house but did something interesting, The Quiet Ones uses the 'house in the middle of nowhere' setting in a way that doesn't just turn the lights off and throw furniture around when things go wrong.
While rare (but noticeable), there are still uses of very loud noises out of absolutely nowhere to accentuate the scares, but asides from that, they are achieved through realistic and unobtrusive special effects, a sparing but effective use of a rumbling, mechanical musical score (there is something to be said for music that can make a scene of occult research feel intense) and an unflinching refusal by the camera to shy away from the horror. The camera-work is an interesting mix of live-action and old celluloid stock filmed from the perspective of the cameraman as he observes the increasing number of bizarre and terrifying events unfolding before the investigators.
As far as performances go, Jared Harris is well cast as the physics professor slowly declining into madness in a knowing manner very reminiscent of classic Hammer-horror and Sam Claflin builds a lot on his brief performance in Catching Fire, creating a very believable character struggling with his own beliefs as the absolute horror of the experiment becomes increasingly harder to deal with. Olivia Cooke is also very good as Jane, the tortured subject of the experiment, taking a very over-used character (the silent, unblinking possessed girl) and doing something interesting with it, alternating between an almost comatose recluse and a young woman dealing with adolescence and emerging emotions.
The running time of just less than 100 minutes means that some of the character development feels a little rushed, but it means that the film has adequate time to set up scares, deliver on the suspense, and create an intriguing story without feeling repetitive. Taking unexpected turns, featuring good performances and inciting real fear in the audience, The Quiet Ones is a very welcome breath of fresh air in mainstream horror movies, proving once again that constant scenes of exorcisms and annoying families with camcorders have become tired old tropes and that the best thing to do is wipe that all away and focus on believable characters and more interesting methods to create a genuinely tense atmosphere.