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thesubstream's rating
Lodging itself eventually in the creepy-people-doing-creepy-things tradition of religious/occult horror films like The Wicker Man and Rosemary's Baby, director Ben Wheatley's hit-man horror flick Kill List comes on, initially, like a bad-boy bit of British Social realism.
It's rough around the edges, shaggy and idiosyncratically edited, with dialogue so unpolished and authentic-seeming that it's occasionally hard to decipher. It's filled with a handful of legitimately great performances by actors allowed to work improvisationally, seemingly, lending the first half of the film an incredibly charming unpredictability, a low-key volatility that had me bouncing back and forth between moments of disturbing darkness and happy familial pleasantries. Then it gets really crazy.
Jay and Gal are ex-army, estranged friends and partners in crime. Eight months after a disastrous (and mysterious) gig in Kiev, Jay's home life is disintegrating, and after a raucous dinner party with his ex-partner and his creepy new girlfriend he agrees to get back in the saddle and take a job. They're given a list - three targets - and soon they're settling back into a charmingly macabre groove, carousing "salesmen" on the road from town to town and target to target. But after an inadvertent discovery during a routine bit of hit-man work derails their plans, the pair realize they may be part of something much bigger - and much darker - than a back-room murder-for-hire.
Kill List a stunning piece of very smart genre filmmaking. Wheatley not-so-gently inserts chunks of spooky, disturbing horror into what's already a charmingly dark kitchen sink drama. It's this transition - that either a social realist framework can be twisted into a framework supporting high horror or that a horror film can work filled with improvisational dialogue and broody bits of working-class British anxiety - that makes the film such an immense, jarring pleasure.
Will it work for horror fans used to slick, post-'80s supernatural spookery? Will Ken Loach fans do with a little blood and forest horror? Who knows. For fans of both, it's a stunning - literally - hybrid, something completely unexpected, a real discovery. Kill List is a brilliant idea, brilliantly well executed.
It's rough around the edges, shaggy and idiosyncratically edited, with dialogue so unpolished and authentic-seeming that it's occasionally hard to decipher. It's filled with a handful of legitimately great performances by actors allowed to work improvisationally, seemingly, lending the first half of the film an incredibly charming unpredictability, a low-key volatility that had me bouncing back and forth between moments of disturbing darkness and happy familial pleasantries. Then it gets really crazy.
Jay and Gal are ex-army, estranged friends and partners in crime. Eight months after a disastrous (and mysterious) gig in Kiev, Jay's home life is disintegrating, and after a raucous dinner party with his ex-partner and his creepy new girlfriend he agrees to get back in the saddle and take a job. They're given a list - three targets - and soon they're settling back into a charmingly macabre groove, carousing "salesmen" on the road from town to town and target to target. But after an inadvertent discovery during a routine bit of hit-man work derails their plans, the pair realize they may be part of something much bigger - and much darker - than a back-room murder-for-hire.
Kill List a stunning piece of very smart genre filmmaking. Wheatley not-so-gently inserts chunks of spooky, disturbing horror into what's already a charmingly dark kitchen sink drama. It's this transition - that either a social realist framework can be twisted into a framework supporting high horror or that a horror film can work filled with improvisational dialogue and broody bits of working-class British anxiety - that makes the film such an immense, jarring pleasure.
Will it work for horror fans used to slick, post-'80s supernatural spookery? Will Ken Loach fans do with a little blood and forest horror? Who knows. For fans of both, it's a stunning - literally - hybrid, something completely unexpected, a real discovery. Kill List is a brilliant idea, brilliantly well executed.
Director Eduardo Sánchez begins his newest spooky feature Lovely Molly with a deliberate shout out the the film that brung him here, The Blair Witch Project (co-directed with Daniel Myrick). A crying woman confesses into a videocamera, capturing herself in a moment of distress and hoping to leave a clue to be discovered after she inevitably succumbs to an off-screen terror. Sánchez hasn't returned exactly to his old stomping ground of first-person documentary horror - Lovely Molly is for the most part a spooky old fashioned psyche-out horror film - but it's a nice touch in a film filled with them.
Molly and new husband Tim (Gretchen Lodge and Johnny Lewis) are ripped from sleep in their new inherited home by a squalling alarm. Someone has opened their back door and is thumping around in the kitchen, but police find nothing out of the ordinary and chalk it up to the wind despite Tim's insistence that he locked the door.
He's a truck driver, and is away from home for stretches of time in which Molly is left alone to deal with a growing malignancy, a presence in the house that manifests itself as sung voices, crying children, clomping horse hooves and slamming doors. Molly's afraid to reach out to her sister or husband for help, fearing that they'll assume she's lapsed back into substance abuse. She instead begins to videotape her encounters, and it's this footage, as well as taped footage of someone stalking neighbours and visiting an odd underground shrine of some sort, that forms the frightening backbone of the film.
As Sánchez himself claimed in a post-screening q&a, the film is as much an "indie relationship" film and "actor's piece" as horror film. The entire weight of the film is on newcomer Lodge's back and she pulls the whole thing off dazzlingly well, transforming from a slight, trembling girl into a stalking, haunted and threatening woman crawling through an empty house. It's a performance good enough, combined with Sánchez's legitimate gift for crafting arresting moments of weird, totemic and animalistic horror, to transcend the film's kind of tired "is it a ghost or a hallucination" set-up, and take the whole thing into straight-up spooky, straight-up original territory.
Molly and new husband Tim (Gretchen Lodge and Johnny Lewis) are ripped from sleep in their new inherited home by a squalling alarm. Someone has opened their back door and is thumping around in the kitchen, but police find nothing out of the ordinary and chalk it up to the wind despite Tim's insistence that he locked the door.
He's a truck driver, and is away from home for stretches of time in which Molly is left alone to deal with a growing malignancy, a presence in the house that manifests itself as sung voices, crying children, clomping horse hooves and slamming doors. Molly's afraid to reach out to her sister or husband for help, fearing that they'll assume she's lapsed back into substance abuse. She instead begins to videotape her encounters, and it's this footage, as well as taped footage of someone stalking neighbours and visiting an odd underground shrine of some sort, that forms the frightening backbone of the film.
As Sánchez himself claimed in a post-screening q&a, the film is as much an "indie relationship" film and "actor's piece" as horror film. The entire weight of the film is on newcomer Lodge's back and she pulls the whole thing off dazzlingly well, transforming from a slight, trembling girl into a stalking, haunted and threatening woman crawling through an empty house. It's a performance good enough, combined with Sánchez's legitimate gift for crafting arresting moments of weird, totemic and animalistic horror, to transcend the film's kind of tired "is it a ghost or a hallucination" set-up, and take the whole thing into straight-up spooky, straight-up original territory.
Cameron Diaz does what she can with what little she's given to work with in James Mangold's brainless, hyperactive and utterly rote spy-romance-thriller Knight and Day. Paired with the increasingly wooden, increasingly off-putting Tom Cruise as half of a pair of mis-matched adventurers on the run with a valuable MacGuffin fighting off arms dealers and CIA agents alike, she seems to be the only one in the flick that's got a half-inch worth of ambition.
Diaz is asked to play one of those uniquely stupid Hollywood-committee takes on a modernized cute-woman-in-peril-who-learns-to-handle-her-own-uzis, a tough-talking Bostonian who raised her younger sister and is totally girly, and cute, and goofy, and likes boys, but wears boots (!!) and fixes up muscle cars (!!). Cruise plays agent Roy Miller, the agent gone rogue who swoops into her life and together, they have a series of absolutely predictable kung-fu & fireball escapades across a series of scenic European rooftops.
Knight and Day attempts to enliven its muddled, characterless story by kicking things off with the zenithal version of one of the tiredest Hollywood tropes - characters "meeting cute" - and it succeeds well enough in its early stages, where Diaz is allowed to stretch her cute-chops talking to herself in an airplane bathroom while Cruise's Miller wreaks havoc outside.
It's all downhill from there, though, as Cruise robotically manufactures a performance that at best is reminiscent of the cocky, aggressive charm he could exude in decades past. The film trades in its early attempts at characterization for repeated slapstick gags and hard to follow plot twists, all of which it then tries to paper over with breathless action and hokey romance.
To be fair, the film doesn't shoot very high. It wears its low-brow goofiness right there on its sleeve, and it mostly achieves its goal of being a light-hearted, dumb as a rock summer action movie, which is more entirely than can be said for, say, Ashton Kutchers' repellent Killers. See it in a good mood with low expectations and you might be well enough convinced that it's light rather than stupid, fun rather than ridiculous, charming and cute rather than manufactured and plastic. That last part is probably a stretch though. 4/10
Diaz is asked to play one of those uniquely stupid Hollywood-committee takes on a modernized cute-woman-in-peril-who-learns-to-handle-her-own-uzis, a tough-talking Bostonian who raised her younger sister and is totally girly, and cute, and goofy, and likes boys, but wears boots (!!) and fixes up muscle cars (!!). Cruise plays agent Roy Miller, the agent gone rogue who swoops into her life and together, they have a series of absolutely predictable kung-fu & fireball escapades across a series of scenic European rooftops.
Knight and Day attempts to enliven its muddled, characterless story by kicking things off with the zenithal version of one of the tiredest Hollywood tropes - characters "meeting cute" - and it succeeds well enough in its early stages, where Diaz is allowed to stretch her cute-chops talking to herself in an airplane bathroom while Cruise's Miller wreaks havoc outside.
It's all downhill from there, though, as Cruise robotically manufactures a performance that at best is reminiscent of the cocky, aggressive charm he could exude in decades past. The film trades in its early attempts at characterization for repeated slapstick gags and hard to follow plot twists, all of which it then tries to paper over with breathless action and hokey romance.
To be fair, the film doesn't shoot very high. It wears its low-brow goofiness right there on its sleeve, and it mostly achieves its goal of being a light-hearted, dumb as a rock summer action movie, which is more entirely than can be said for, say, Ashton Kutchers' repellent Killers. See it in a good mood with low expectations and you might be well enough convinced that it's light rather than stupid, fun rather than ridiculous, charming and cute rather than manufactured and plastic. That last part is probably a stretch though. 4/10