Reviews

This is a contemplative documentary about the life's work of Alan Goble, a film fan from early childhood who achieved the impossible in adulthood: cataloguing every film ever made.

He did this first on paper, and then tape, and then CD-ROM and finally the internet, adapting his project to each emerging technology as the decades marched on. You are reading this review on a site which itself stands on the shoulders of Alan Goble.

The film is partly a record of how this mammoth task was achieved, and partly a study of the personality behind it. It's impossible to watch this film without thinking of everyone you know, and the traces that each of their loves will leave behind them.

This movie tries to do everything it can to make the audience want to switch off in the first part. It presents you with a terrible, manipulative person who'd be a danger to anybody getting close to him, and then puts him on a collision course with someone you instinctively want to protect from him.

You're just going to have to trust me that there's more that needs to unfold. Beautiful things are going to happen. It's messy and trashy, and it needs to be. You'll even end up feeling a little bit bad for having those protective feelings at first, which is going to feel unthinkable when you're in the early stages of the story. Learning what Patty wants and seeing her find it is an absolute joy.

It's a great film with some surprisingly subtle things to say about freedom and what it means to invent yourself.

I have completely rewritten what was a largely positive review after 3 episodes. I don't think I've ever seen such wild oscillations of quality in a TV show: minute-to-minute swings up and down. It's like watching the shadows on the wall of a fight between a good writer and the terrible one.

The quality is more consistent towards the front of Season 1, and hits a low point in Episode 5 from which the series never really recovers. The faults become glaring when the series stops looking at the 50s era and stares too long at the 21st century period. Until then, the shifts in attention provide a regular refreshment of the atmosphere. You already know it in those earlier, better episodes but when the show stops focussing on Mari Yamamoto it becomes impossible to ignore: her performance carries this project, and the writers only have anything of interest to say about her role in the 50s. When the spotlight moves away from that, the weaknesses of everything else are on full display. The signs at the end of Season 1 are that "Monarch: LOTM" is done with discussing the past and will now be entirely in the present day, and that doesn't bode well for the show's future.

So it's a weird show. I continue to watch because I love giant monsters, and the series provides just enough flashes of quality to keep me engaged but I can pretend they're not testing my patience.

It's a shame this didn't turn out better, because the movie is trying to be different than the usual horror. It's just not very good at being different. It's really well shot, and there are some key moments that are really good and would have been memorable moments in a better film.

The film falls down most heavily on narrative. Early on, you will start to wonder if this movie was adapted from a comic or something, since the silly dialogue has that overwrought feeling: self-serious but daft. Once you've been introduced to the collective noun usage of "rotten", the film slowly drips more jargon and symbolism until it starts to fill in the history of its world. You can tell that they decided against putting this exposition upfront because they thought it was be more sophisticated to have the characters reveal it at the gradual pace with which you might mention past events in normal conversation, but you can't wring sophistication from a story like this. Everyone is apparently aware of the enormous supernatural threat, but it hasn't changed the world one bit.

The other giant failing is those very people. With the exception of two women who try to warn idiots not to do the idiotic things that everybody knows not to do, everybody is incredibly stupid. The film's protagonist, Pedro, is hands-down the stupidest character ever to appear in a horror film. I don't care who just popped into your head in a challenge to me saying that; there is no halfwit teenager in the crudest slasher who even comes close to the stupidity of Pedro. It is impossible to care about him because he is so detestably dim. Evil does not need to conquer a world that contains Pedro, for it is already lost.

This is a frustrating film. It shows so much potential and throws it away.

If you watch a lot of movies influenced by the stories of William Hope Hodgson, H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, you might rate this a point or two higher because on some weird level you enjoy having your hopes dashed. For anyone else, this score might even be too generous.

It's a real shame, because the early setup of the film is great. It makes you think you're actually going to get a good Lovecraft-esque film (there's the ol' masochism again!). The opening titles are stylish. The actor who plays Connie has immediate charisma (sadly, she is underused). There's an intriguing early discovery which legitimately leads on to the next stage of the story. Sure, it's a tiny bit shaky, a little bit goofy, but that's par for the course in indie movies of the type; overall it looks like it's shaping up to be one of the good ones in the cosmic horror genre. You'll even see an actor who might recognise if you're a glutton for punishment: her from The Strain, yes (along with Connie's actor, the best performances here).

But there's a point where the wobbles suddenly escalate and soon after that the project completely falls on its arse. Any enthusiasm I had for the film ebbed away to nothing. It's as if an evil film crew came through the veil and replaced the original crew, wickedly sabotaging and unpicking all the good work that went before. Even Slash's soundtrack, which is never good, gets noticeably worse throughout.

These weird, gapless phone calls; this plastic artificiality; the completely unnatural emotional reactions: are these evidence that what we're witnessing is mental illness, something supernatural, or "just 80s movie things"? Only at this moment in history could that full range of possibilities exist.

And that gamut is what's going to keep you gripped in the oddest possible way. You can never simply guess or second-guess what's going on, because you always know that in 80s cinema this could be a representation of something more mundane. From that possibility, many more can spring. Your mind becomes a field of spinning plates: perhaps it's a weird mating dance between people who've lost their spark, someone/everyone is a psychopath, someone/everyone has memory loss, the list goes on.

You are absolutely never going to guess the twist, and how you react to that revelation will largely rest on how much you enjoyed the ridiculous build-up. If you allowed the campness to wash over you, the ending will be an absurd delight but if it was trying your patience then the ending is going to make you rage.

There's something particularly adorable about the way this film clearly thinks it's playing a classy two-hander worthy of the stage. I mean, it's not. It's absolutely not. Awww, but bless its heart.

If you like seeing men grab each other by the collars and shout into each other's faces, nose-to-nose, before getting pulled away by a sweaty friend, you're going to love this movie. Evergreen "You got sump'n ta say t'me?"

Be warned, though: the seemingly endless sublimated kissing does eventually give way to an abstract scene inside a spaceship. It's a bizarre intrusion that makes little sense in the context of a film about shouting and inappropriate emotional strategies - hence the docking of 8 stars - but they're soon back to finding each other in forest sheds and struggling with expressions of fondness.

There was great potential in this: a largely one-room piece, where an assessment of a prisoner turns into a court hearing of Humanity versus Hell.

However, it's shaky right from the introduction of the prisoner. Sean Patrick Flanery's attempts to force his face to twitch look exactly that: forced, which immediately began to wobble me out of the movie. It soon becomes clear that he's not a good enough actor to carry this role either, and a gap has opened up. I don't recall seeing him in anything else, and I'm sure he's capable of performing other roles well, but this needed something specific that just isn't in his toolkit.

The demon's definitions of what constitutes a sin of murder are questionable and fall under the category of "Things people assume must be defined as sins in the Bible but aren't" (cf. "Oh, come on, everyone knows it" and "Well, I'm sure I heard it somewhere"). One of them has direct instructions in the Bible stating how to do it and orders of when it must be done. Another alleged analogue to murder is completely undefined biblically, even though there's at least one big Bible story dealing directly with the issue and the Bible still doesn't define it as sin. So, for the antagonist to insist that these things are murder and our whole species knows it... well, we're listening to the writer's opinions at this point. That isn't always a bad thing but here I felt it hurt the integrity of the film since the movie's embodiment of evil really needs to be making a watertight case, especially when it has declared itself to know more about scripture than anybody who has ever lived. I would quite happily waive the fact that the whole "war on Heaven" narrative is not in the Bible either, if the rest was solid on theology.

There are various other things that don't make sense. The demon is supposed to need a certain outcome for which it is impatient, but there is no reason why - as an eternal being - it couldn't simply wait out the next 25 years, or why it couldn't engineer the circumstances it requires via other means (which it has already done for another character in the very first scene of the film). There's another thing regarding a book which I can't go into as it would constitute a spoiler, but you'll know it when you see it and you may well wonder as I did: "Sorry, *what*?"

It's a great setup that does a couple of really interesting things, but ultimately it bounced off me and it's let down by a truly pathetic ending. A better writer could have done much more interesting things with the concept, philosophically.

Mills (Adam Driver) and his family hail from a distant planet, and as anyone who's seen the trailer knows these aliens are exactly like human beings. They use guns, they have joystick-guided spaceships like the ones in our imaginations, and they enjoy walks on the beach in designer knitwear just like us. So, when he crashes on Earth, it's impossible not to think that there must be some reveal coming. What Twilight Zone-esque surprise awaits us about who Mills's people really are? You're going to suspect time travel, or that this planet isn't really Earth, or...

Yeah, don't do that. Of course the story would be more effective and fresh if we were watching familiar dinosaurs through the horrified eyes of truly alien visitors, and the reasons we are not are entirely financial. It would cost more money to make the protagonists non-human aliens, and it would make less money if Adam Driver didn't look like Adam Driver. That's it.

So we have this weird situation where the aliens are, by a trillions-to-one chance, *exactly* like humans whereas the dinosaurs are weirdly inexact. I'm being generous in saying "inexact", when "entirely made-up" is the real point. There are creatures in this where you'll sit bolt upright and think, "Wait... that's not a dinosaur in any sense," and it'll set you off thinking if this is some detour in the story. Again, it is not. You're just being jarred for no reason.

I could love all of this if it was some gloriously silly B-movie. They could take all the liberties they wanted if they had made it fun, but by making something so willfully dour they lost that leeway.

I normally dislike war movies, but this is something quite different. In Below, the war is simply another wall among many - the sea, suspicion, and secrets - trapping the characters in a claustrophobia-inducing struggle to understand and survive their predicament.

It's more accurate to classify it as a classic mystery story which just happens to be set inside of WW2. It's in the tradition of tales such as Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Captain of the Polestar", or perhaps Charles Dickens's "The Signal-Man": stories of hard-working people isolated from help, who experience something so frightening that neither they nor the reader knows for sure what caused it. That's not to say it's a nebulous film: not at all. All questions are answered in satisfying ways, but there's still room for personal interpretation at the end.

It's got to be a mark of a good film if you catch yourself memorising the characters' names so you can tell the FBI later.

I watched this with zero knowledge: hadn't seen a trailer, didn't know what it was about. All I had was a recommendation from someone who wished they'd known as little as possible about it before they had seen it. So that was their gift to me. Thanks, I guess.

You could stop reading now, if you want to be in the same state. I have to keep typing to get to the 600-character minimum.

If you've insisted on reading on, this is the best I can do to talk about it while remaining somewhat vague. There is something endemic which people still want to pretend is a fringe, despite all the evidence that it's the mainstream once again. That mainstream wakes up every day and drips a little more poison, and whether they understand the next stage or not, they love the buzz. But every drip contributes to a rising tide, and a lot of them don't understand how it will eventually sweep them along. Perhaps you know a little more and you know it's happened before, and you know enough detail to know how it happened. This is how it happened. This is how it always happened and always will. We're all at the mercy of them figuring that out before the cheque is cashed.

If you've watched enough horror, you've seen this kind of story a number of times, and many of its features will be familiar. However, other films would have told this story with fewer beats, and it's those extra pieces of attention which set this version apart.

There are some great performances, especially from Ester Expósito as the lead, Lucía, and Inés Fernández as her niece, Alba. The two of them play off each other in a completely believable way, and their relationship is the core this movie needed to support the wilder elements.

I appreciate a slower movie and I tend to value slow, fantastical horror over ones that simply fling blood everywhere. Venus is an unusually well-balanced patchwork of slow-burn horror with occasional sprints into something bloodier: fairytale-esque horror weaving into crime drama.

I used to believe I'd happily watch any old crap if it was connected to the Lovecraft mythos. I don't believe that anymore.

There's this constant sense that you're watching adults perform in a film written and directed by precocious children. Emotional reactions and behaviour are unconvincing, to put it charitably, and you don't have to know the specifics of history to instinctively know that those uniforms, those guns, that ship, Beatrice Barrilà's hair, the Zippo lighter, a grammaphone and the pastiche of 1930s-ish orchestral jazz that's playing on it do not remotely fit together in the same year. Anything is allowed to be here as long as it's vaguely old-timey; why make any more effort than that? And that's before the captain starts Duke-Nukeming quips such as "Eat this!" or the movie's cackling villain tells the captain that his "puny human brain can't concieve" of how good and fun his plan will be, mwa-ha-ha-haaaa. That's not even the only time that character says "puny human". It's so bad.

The only reason those costumes are here - really, the only reason this film exists - is because of season one of The Terror (which, lest we forget, was set in the 1840s). It's painfully obvious. Every diversion the plot tries to make from that can only be made via yet another crudely impersonated drama: Apocalypse Now, Aliens, The Thing. Please don't think, "Hey, I like all of those things!" You won't like this. When you're watching a Deep One wriggle on the spot as if there's a musical number playing, it'll also put you in mind of The Mighty Boosh. It's hard to square the idea that this monster type is your evolutionary superior with the visual appearance of a Halloween house worker.

Cliché-riddled community theatre, and it can't even be bothered to complete its very simple mission by the time the credits roll.