Black Static #74 (March-April 2020), page 15
The story continues in One Missed Call 2 (2005) directed by Renpei Tsukamoto, in which journalist Takako (Asaka Seto) investigates when the curse starts up again. This film follows the same gambit as Ring 2 by having its original film’s heroine go missing. More followed in One Missed Call: Final, in which a bullied girl reactivates the curse on her classmates. Like the first, both are entertaining if a little overlong, and in the wake of other J-horror just a little familiar. The franchise led to a television series and a US remake of the first film in 2008.
The trilogy is released on two discs with One Missed Call on the first and the sequels on the second. Extras: One Missed Call: commentary by Tom Mes; archival interviews with Takashi Miike and cast members; premiere footage; ‘Live or Die’ television special; ‘A Day with the Mizunuma Family’ featurette; alternate ending. One Missed Call 2/One Missed Call: Final: making-ofs for both; short film Gomu directed by Renpei Tsukamoto; One Missed Call 2 deleted scenes, One Missed Call 2 music video; behind-the-scenes for One Missed Call: Final; short film The Love Story; location tour; trailers and TV spots. The first pressing contains a booklet with writing on the films by Anton Bitel.
DANIEL ISN’T REAL (Arrow Blu-ray, 10 February, 15) doesn’t give much away in its title. College student Luke (Miles Robbins), troubled after witnessing a mass shooting in his childhood, reconnects with his younger self’s imaginary friend, now grown up to the same age as him (Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold and Maria Shriver), a recipe for trouble. We’re in Jekyll and Hyde territory with a side order of Fight Club, but it benefits from smart casting (Sasha Lane, discovered by Andrea Arnold in American Honey, gives what could have been a standard-issue quirky-girlfriend role some odd angles, and it’s good to see Mary Stuart Masterson again, as Luke’s mother) and director Adam Egypt Mortimer (whose first feature was Some Kind of Hate) is someone to look out for. Extras: commentary by Adam Egypt Mortimer; video essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas; deleted scenes; alternate ending; interview with Mortimer; Frightfest introduction; Q&A and interview; trailer; stills galleries. The first pressing includes a booklet with an essay by Katie Rife.
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DEADLY MANOR (aka Savage Lust, Arrow Blu-ray, 17 February, 18), made in 1990, was the final film from Spanish director José Ramón Larraz, who appeared in these pages with the BFI’s release of the Cannes-premiered, once-lost Symptoms (reviewed in issue #52). That film was a low-keyed British production. Deadly Manor is set in the USA, though former Doctor Who companion William Russell turns up in the second half. The film is a latter-day entry of the slasher boom of the previous decade, though it’s a long build-up before that happens, and the 18 certificate is more for a prolonged sex scene than anything else. A group of teenagers spend the night in a deserted mansion, but soon realise they’re not alone. Pretty standard stuff, but Larraz’s many cultists will want it. Extras: commentary by Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan; interviews with actress Jennifer Delora and producer Brian Smedley-Aston; archive interview with José Larraz; Savage Lust VHS trailer; image gallery; BD-ROM content: script and shooting schedule. The first pressing includes a booklet with an essay by John Martin.
More Larraz, or Joseph Braunstein, which is the name he is credited as in EDGE OF THE AXE (Al filo del hacha, Arrow Blu-ray, 27 January, 15). This was made in 1988, a Spanish/US coproduction, shot largely in Big Bear Lake, California, with a majority-American cast. Some of the interiors were shot in Madrid, and the opening murder in the car wash is a mixture of both, with the joins not obvious. This is another slasher movie, rather less graphic than some (hence the 15 certificate it has now). Who is the madman with an axe, whose victims are mostly women? And what, or who, links the victims? Lillian (Christina Marie Lane), home from college, wonders this. She strikes up a friendship with Gerald (Barton Faulks) over a love of the latest technology, including very early computer networking, with green monitor screens that will be nostalgic to those of a certain age. Soon Lillian finds herself in danger. Watchable, in a mode that by the time it was made had become very familiar. Larraz, for his part, considered it his worst film. The film is presented on this disc in both English- and Spanish-language versions. Extras: commentaries by Barton Faulks and by The Hysteria Continues; interviews with Faulks and make-up artist Colin Arthur; image gallery. The first pressing includes a booklet with an essay by Amanda Reyes.
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BLACK ANGEL (Arrow Blu-ray, 27 January, PG) is a film noir, made in 1946. Singer Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) is murdered, but who killed her? Suspicion falls on Kirk Bennett (John Phillips), the last man seen with her. He is caught, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. His wife Catherine (June Vincent) and Mavis’s alcoholic ex-husband Marty Blair (Dan Duryea) try to prove his innocence before it’s too late. There’s a sinister turn by Peter Lorre as a nightclub owner, and a twist in the tail. At just over 80 minutes, Black Angel is economical to the fault. It was the final film of Roy William Neill, a prolific director of the studio era, beginning in the silent era in the teens. He could and did work in many genres, including the 1943 horror film Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and eleven of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films. He died the same year Black Angel was made, of a heart attack, aged fifty-nine. Extras: commentary by Alan K. Rode; appreciation by Neil Sinyard; trailer; image gallery. The first pressing contains a booklet with an essay by Philip Kemp.
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HÔTEL DU NORD (Arrow Academy, 10 February, PG), from 1938, is a little too early to be called noir. Instead Marcel Carné’s film shares the romantic fatalism of several other French films of the period, including Carné’s own Le quai de brumes (from the same year) and Le jour se lève (the following year). Renée (Annabella) and Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) are young lovers on the run, intending to fulfil a suicide pact in the Parisian hotel of the title. He shoots her but can’t bring himself to go through with his own death. He escapes with the aid of criminal Edmond (Louis Jouvet) and his mistress Raymonde (Arletty, impressively bitchy, and showing her range as she would be best known as Garance in Carné’s later Les enfants du Paradis). But Renée is not dead, and when she recovers she works at the hotel as a maid, only for Pierre to see her when he returns to Paris. The studio-set recreation of Paris adds plenty of atmosphere to a film worthy of comparison with its director’s more famous ones before and since. Extras: introduction by Paul Ryan; archive interview by Marcel Carné; image gallery; trailer.
A SERIAL KILLER’S GUIDE TO LIFE (Arrow VoD, 13 January, 15) is a debut feature shot in and around Brighton, directed by Staten Cousins Roe and co-written by him and co-star Poppy Roe. It’s an entertaining black comedy, slickly done on a small budget, in which Lou (Katie Brayben) finds a life coach in Val (Roe), who is, she soon discovers, a serial killer. They go on the road together.
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SONS OF DENMARK (Danmarks sønner, Eureka/Montage Pictures dual-format, 17 February, 15) is a thriller set five years from now. After his girlfriend dies in a terrorist bombing in Copenhagen, Zakaria (Mohammed Ismail Mohammed) is radicalised and joins an underground organisation, where he meets Ali (Zaki Youssef). Meanwhile, far-right populist leader Martin Nordahl (Rasmus Bjerg) is gathering momentum and is on his way to gaining power. Sons of Denmark, written and directed by Ulaa Salim, has an odd structure, with one protagonist giving way to another partway through, but it’s a taut story of divided loyalties and a theme which is certainly timely. Extra: trailer; booklet with essay by Jason Wood and an interview with Ulaa Salim.
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In HARPOON (Arrow Blu-ray, 27 January, 18), three friends, Richard (Christopher Gray), his girlfriend Sasha (Emily Tyra) and their friend Jonah (Munro Chambers), who Richard suspects is cheating on him with Sasha, go out to sea in a boat called The Naughty Buoy (a pun which doesn’t work in American English as they pronounce it “boo-ee”). But following an argument – in which the harpoon of the title – gets some use, the engine stalls and they are left in the ocean with nothing to eat or drink. It’s an ironic, blackly comic three-hander, made more so by the presence of a narrator (Brett Gilman). Extras: commentary by Rob Grant and producers Michael Peterson and Kurtis David Harder; “psychedelic commentary” by Grant; making-of; deleted scenes and B-roll footage with commentary by Grant; Frightfest interviews with Grant; Frightfest introduction and Q&A; trailer. The first pressing includes a booklet with an essay by Amy Simmons.
From on the water to under it. 47 Meters Down (US spelling) was a British/American coproduction shot in the Dominican Republic, by British director Johannes Roberts. It was what used to be called a high concept: two good-looking young women in swimwear, underwater, menaced by sharks. What’s not to like? Well, quite a bit actually. I didn’t say much more than that when I reviewed it in issue #62. It wasn’t a good film, but it made money, so here we are with 47 METERS DOWN: UNCAGED (Altitude DVD, 3 February, 15). It’s not a sequel as such, but a rehash with four young women instead of two, unrelated to the first film. It lives down to its predecessor.
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The Gallows came out in 2015, before my time in this column, but it hardly set the world alight. But it now has a sequel. Written and directed by Travis Cluff and Chris Lofting, a Blumhouse production, THE GALLOWS: ACT II (Lionsgate DVD, 6 January, 15) features Auna Rue (Ema Horvath), minor YouTube celebrity and would-be actress, who moves to a prestigious school with a top-flight drama department. Then one of her YouTube subscribers alerts her to a play called The Gallows, which she uses to great effect as a stage monologue. Then strange things start to happen, beginning with objects moving of their own accord behind her when she’s online. This film isn’t very good, though Horvath’s performance belongs in a better movie. Extras: commentary by Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing; making-of; deleted scenes.
TTA Press, Black Static #74 (March-April 2020)
