Iron's Film Picks of 2018 Part 2 (#4 - #1)

#4 - Annihilation (*)

I hear you, braying like a pack of well-read mules: "The book is better! The book is better!" Well, usually, but not always. Just you try and claim Mario Puzo's The Godfather book is superior to Francis Ford Coppola's film. I dare you. Another film leagues better than its source book is Annihilation.

Annihilation is a science-horror film directed by Alex Garland, a man who has (someway or another) been involved with several of my favourite films of the last couple of decades (28 Days Later, Dredd, Sunshine, and Ex Machina). In the film's version of events, a mysterious space object crashes into a lighthouse on the United States' southern coast. This results in 'The Shimmer', an anomalous area of eco-madness that's in a worse state than Brendan Fraser's post-The Mummy 3 career. The Shimmer, it seems, is expanding and all attempts to survey it have been met by the snag of the expedition teams dying. Dangerous mutations run rampant, and the laws of physics are in such a disarray one can imagine Stephen Hawking spinning in his grave...if it wasn't for the whole wheelchair thing, anyway.

If you've read Roadside Picnic by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (or seen its film adaptation, Stalker); read H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space; or seen that segment of Creepshow in which Stephen King plays a retarded redneck who succumbs to an alien fungus, then you'll have a good idea idea of how Annihilation plays out. I.e., an out-of-their-depth team of scientists explore a setting that throws a shit-tonne of weird imagery and body horror at them. It's like a visit to my grandparents' house.

In that respect, Annihilation is certainly a beautifully-shot movie - if in a morbid sort of way. It's full of startling pastoral imagery. From the moment the team cross the border into The Shimmer - the electromagnetic border, here represented as the Windows XP media player visualiser - they are thrust into a world reclaimed by nature. The transition is represented by their leaving behind a world of drab universities, laboratories, and houses, entering into a wild collection of lush meadows and forests, and vibrant plantlife. But this isn't Arcadia. It's the playground for the horrible side of Nature responsible for creating moths and AIDs. A nightmarish, self-replicating world of people turning into plants, colourful fungi overrunning everything, and horrifying animal mash-ups (shark-crocodiles, and whatever the hell that bear thing was) lifted straight out of the back of my maths' exercise books.

#3 - Halloween

I'm just going to point out that I liked Halloween 3, which featured the man, myth, and legend that is Tom Atkins. That being said, the franchise's various sequels and remakes are, largely, a disservice to the original Halloween film; adding layer upon layer of convoluted bollocks. Such as serial killer Michael Myers being would-be victim Laurie Strode's brother; or Myers being a thrall to a druid cult known as The Cult of Thorn. But what to do with 40 years of franchise building? Throw it in the fucking garbage like the film's Trump and the other films are international treaties. That's what.

This score with this film, released and set exactly 40 years after the original, is that it retcons proceedings so that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is still alive, and Myers (Nick Castle) has been locked in an asylum for the past four decades. Laurie has been using the time as a recluse, estranged from her daughter, to nurse her PTSD and become a gun-toting triple hard bastard. She's tried to prepare her daughter and granddaughter for the inevitable day Myers returns, but her daughter isn't having it. Jeeze, all I got off my grandma was stale butterscotch candy. Myers escapes, obviously, in no small part due to a couple of absolute tits (calling themselves true-crime podcasters) returning his mask and reminding the sedate killer of his badass murder spree and how cool it'd be to do it again. The killer promptly returns to Haddonfield, gets his mask, his boiler suit, and a large knife, so that he can slay his way through the town again. Fortunately, it's largely Millennial victims this time, which is nice.

What makes this film so great - other than John Carpenter's synth soundtrack, I mean - is that it combines a back to basics approach to the slasher genre, with being a franchise legacy film. Laurie is the action survivor, like Sarah Connor, so she's ready - there's a few nice twists on scenes from the original here, which are recreated almost shot for shot. Perhaps the great flaw of the movie is that having spent so long keeping Laurie and Myers separate - for the same reasons you'd keep the school shooter away from the unarmed school students - the film struggles to bring them together for the climax. The twist with Myers' psychiatrist Dr. Sartain (the discount Dr. Loomis) just serves to bog the film down and seems like something from a later-numbered Halloween film. 

But as ever, Halloween is at its best when it focuses on Myers, aka The Shape, aka The Boogeyman, as a primal force of evil. Such as when he stands around in the background all threatening, simply staring like the racist head case inside the pub. He has the physical presence that a lot of the other classic slasher villains simply don't have: a silhouette, and a head tilt, director David Gordon Green is able to have Myers scare by having him do very little. Or ambling out of cupboards you just know he's stood in. Or that one fantastic scene in which Myers casually cleans up in a suburban street, in one long take, by going from door to door with the ruthless efficiency of a Jehovah's Witness.

#2 - Apostle

So, if The Endless is a film about two naive brothers who find themselves suckered in by a cult's cosmic ponzi scheme, Apostle is what happens when you try to do the same to a militant grumpy bastard. Apostle is a folk horror movie exclusive to Netflix, and the best way to describe it is if you imagine The Wicker Man, Black Death, and The Raid being placed in a blender. It's part remote island cult movie, part torture porn, and part cynical protagonist knocking ten bells of shit out of the zealots.

There's not a lot of substance here, just style - which is to be expected from director Gareth Evans. Set in 1905, former priest (turned non-believer) Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens) is sent to a remote Welsh to rescue his sister Jennifer from a cult. Posing as a potential convert, Thomas is able to sneak onto the island, which resembles something from Resident Evil 4 by being at least 100 years out of date. Thomas is able to get in with the leadership - led by Malcolm (Michael Sheen) - easily by exploiting the island community's problems. Inevitably, things go sideways. The affable leader is replaced by a real hard-ass and the medieval torture devices come out.

As mentioned, there's not a lot of substance to Apostle. Sure, it probably thinks it's fairly clever - in the same way that Rik from The Young Ones thought he was The People's Poet. Given the cult's dark secret, there's a loose parable about nature. There's also commentary on faith and its fragility, as Thomas struggles to believe after he was tortured for his Christian beliefs during the Boxer Rebellion. But really, we're here for the brutal torture scenes and violent fights.

Like the films from which it draws inspiration, Apostle favours the steady slow-burn of crafting an oppressive isolating atmosphere. It certainly looks the part, with gloomy medieval buildings, occult imagery, bitter scenery, as well as weirder environments such as tunnels of putrid blood, forests of rotten vegetation, and a rather Lovecraftian shed that features an old god bathed in blood and consumed by plants. It seems that the cult have broken the natural order by chaining up a nature spirit and gorging it on blood. Now, corruption seeps throughout the island. Didn't the hippies teach us anything?

#1 - A Quiet Place

Do you remember The Happening? That film in which the trees were killing everyone for...reasons, and much of the ‘horror’ was Mark Wahlberg's confused face watching trees swaying in the wind? Yeah, it was pretty embarrassing. But it sort of started its own genre; one in which the primary defence against eldritch forces is ‘nothingness'. In The Happening, the defence was don't move. In A Quiet Place, it's don't make a noise. Then, more recently, in Netflix's Bird Box, the only way to survive is not to look, as though you've just accidentally entered the girls' locker room.

It's a gimmick, obviously, but one which I feel will become increasingly prevalent in the wake of Bird Box's 45 million watches and A Quiet Place's critical success. A Quiet Place is, of course, the superior film, incorporating its central conceit into the film making process itself; resulting in a film that understands subtly in visual storytelling and sound design. 

In the not-too-distant future, mankind has been pushed to the brink by a race of horrifying creatures who, whilst blind, are apex predators using sound to hunt their victims. These things are more sensitive to sound than your mum whenever you tried to sneakily play video games after lights out. As such the only way for humanity to survive, is for them to live in near-complete silence. Our protagonists, a family of four (plus baby (plus dead kid from the cold opening)), live in a jury-rigged, sound-proofed rural home, communicate through sign language, and do their chores manually - use leaves as plates, walk barefoot on a trail of sand. They even have a sound-proofed coffin-like structure for their fucking baby.

With the sound the characters make being muted, emphasis is instead placed on background noise. The comforting rustle of cornfields, the roaring of rushing rivers, or the ambient music (including one particularly tender moment when the husband (John Krasinski) and wife (Emily Blunt) dance together, listening to music on an mp3 player). There's also a focus on visual acting - facial expressions and gestures - like in those boring old movies granddad watches. It shows a well crafted movie, one that downplays a particular aspect to make for a more intimate experience. And for that reason alone, A Quiet Place drags its bloated carcass of horror movie cliches and shit plotting into a list of best movies of 2018.

Because, oh boy, I do have my grievances. Firstly, I don't buy the twist of the creatures being crippled by radio signals - on a planet absolutely swimming in radio signals. That'd be like making a film about a host of aliens who have a weakness for water, coming to conquer a planet that's mostly water. Oh, right. The monsters also have ill-defined powers. So, I get that they're sensitive to sound, but it seems impossibly so for the survivors to have any real chance. You couldn't even fart in this set-up. And, she's pregnant - really? The dad must be a goddamn wizard at tantric fucking

Secondly, there's no real end game. The characters have it pretty easy, so you know that you're just wasting time waiting for someone to fuck it all up. Since there's little else in the way of noise, you can practically hear the stupidity of the characters. Oh, let's live in a creaky old farm house. A mattress-covered hole is just as good as a steel bunker, right? And I know, why don't we (the dad and the boy) leave the heavily pregnant mother alone with the fucking deaf girl, whilst we take our only gun and go out hunting. Wouldn't that be a good idea? Darwin says yes, yes it would.

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