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Reviews
Stath Lets Flats (2018)
Best UK comedy since Peep Show
A heartwarming comedy that manages to be funny and retain some bite, Stath comfortably straddles several comedy genres. At times a family comedy, others an immigrant one, and then in parts a workplace comedy, going at it expecting purely one of these has clearly caused other reviewers here some trouble.
Each character is fairly monstrous in their own way, yet somehow for the most part remain likeable, quite a feat of writing. They have all been written with care and rarely drift into full caricature, and most importantly the writing never feels mean-spirited, a welcome change from the trend of the past few years of UK comedy. Take Sophie - a simple-minded character it would be easy to.write as a one-note punchline, as some shows do, but there is none of that here. It helps that her actor and Stath's are real-life siblings, because you can see the genuine love they have for one another come through on screen.
Series 3 was a peak, and felt like a potential finale - Demetriou has openly stated they will at least be taking a break for now and the wedding scene (with the most incredible Rihanna cover in television history) would be as good a place as any to wind things up. I hope not, though, there are definitely legs to this and it might be nice to see the characters finally back in Cyprus, especially Vasos and Stephen.
Red Room (2019)
By the numbers and just plain nasty
There's budget, as in doing a lot with no money and making a virtue of that, and then there's budget as in reaching high and failing thanks to an obvious lack of cash. With more resources, this could have been a serviceable, if lazy 'Hostel' rip-off. As it is, it's at times hilariously poor and otherwise downright dull.
The first thing that really alerts you to the level we're at here is the accent work from the main henchman - a couple of minutes in and were treated to a full Dick van Dyke number from John Dallesandro. I'm not sure why the (Irish) director decided this criminal family absolutely had to be British, but checking the actor's agent page he does have Cockney *and* "Victorian English" listed, whatever the latter might mean, so he's obviously confident in his own abilities. Perhaps there's a decent actor hiding behind these tortured vowels but it's impossible to tell from this performance.
The budget issues show with the sets. We're shown several of the audience members for these darkweb torture shows, supposedly millionaires, none of whom live in anything more impressive than a suburban townhouse. Look out for some more fun accent work from these guys, though - you can pass time waiting for the plot to advance by guessing where they're supposed to be from.
Most of the acting is fine, nothing spectacular but given what they're working with, it's hard to be overly critical. The negatives are mostly directorial or writing decisions, from odd scripting (perhaps there was something behind the decision to have the leader of the brutal murder gang call his father Daddy, I couldn't work it out though) to plot devices that seem to be thrown in to fix plot holes, each one making several more in the process. We see police involvement once, hinting at some larger conspiracy behind this horror, but that angle gets forgotten just as quickly in favour of pointless flashbacks to the abductee's night out. The police are paid off to not investigate missing women, but governments, banks and press don't bother looking into it? The technical processes involved in the broadcasts are managed by an abductee, who apparently can't access the wider web to get help because they've "limited what he can access" - they have the know-how to outfox him on that, but not actually manage the broadcast system themselves? There's a lot more but you get the idea.
In the end, the film nearly allows itself to become truly sickening - which wouldn't have particularly improved it but would at least have made it notable - but shies away from that in an apparent, incredibly presumptuous preparation for a sequel. Four years on and I think we're safe, but there is absolutely nothing to recommend this dire shock by numbers. Torture porn is a fairly dismal genre but the better examples at least try to provoke something beyond revulsion - admittedly, it's almost always an exploitation of the fear of the other, from 'Cannibal Holocaust' to the Hostel series, but this doesn't even seem interested in playing on the fear of walking home alone, or the attitudes of the rich to the lives of the poor - watching 'Red Room' and reflecting on this is a bit like watching a team you have no feelings about miss an open goal in a game you're not invested in. If you really need to see another scene in which women are tortured to death, have at it, but there are films that do that and also retain a coherent plot, so you'd have a better time watching one of those instead.
Eden Lodge (2015)
A Pastiche
Spoilers because honestly, knowing what happens in this film won't make the experience any worse for you.
This is a slog. According to this page it's 80 minutes long, but feels like a full two hours with the various subplots involving various cliched horror characters. The suspect countryside folk, the jovial Australian, the warring couple and the creepy definitely-did-it-oh-wait-no-he-didn't guy.
I only watched this, as most people did I'm sure, because the title, branding and style tricked me into thinking it had anything to do with the older, but far better 'Eden Lake'. I guess the shameless gambit by whoever made the decision to veer towards copyright infringement, only to wink at the audience in the final act by ripping off 'Psycho', paid off. And about that - who rips off 'Psycho'? How stupid do you have to be to think inverting the plot of the most famous, genre-defining horror movie of all time is a good idea? Not nodding to it, not borrowing some of the tropes as many other films have done, inevitably, because of the importance of the Hitchcock movie, but just doing the exact same plot but reversing the key roles? Probably as stupid as you would have to be to give your British low-budget horror a near-identical name to one of the best British low-budget horrors of the past generation.
I'm angry at this film because its elements are perfectly fine for a b-movie distraction. It's badly put together in a way that makes it less than clear who the killer actually is, and shifts your attention away so fast from murders of people you've barely got to know that it's a struggle to care, even at a point where infanticide is invoked, but neither of these things is unique in this genre. If it decided which film it wanted to wholesale rip off, and dropped the weird side story of the mindless, half-written sex interest character, it could have been a tight if uninspired thriller. As it is, all it's really possible to recommend about it is that it reminds you 'Eden Lake' exists, which luckily was also on the same streaming service I watched this half-realised idea.