Wednesday 7 September 2011

It's not the end of the world, it's just the end of the day.

Fright Night/Kill List/Pontypool (2011/2011/2008)
Chosen by me because I like going to the cinema a lot and i asked someone to lend me Pontypool.




Fright Night is a mostly fun but ever, ever so slight fancy. Farrell is pretty good but the film has a distinct lack of ambition not really offering up anything new or interesting (there is one nasty moment involving a rescue attempt that I don't know if was in the original or not - too long since I've seen it, that is an effective shock but never seems to play into anything that happens after).
Tennant is mostly pointless (the early trailers sidelined him completely and it's not hard to see why), a sub par Russel Brand impersonation never really finds the hook it needs to be clever.

Kill List is pretty astonishing. Starting like a dirty kitchen sink drama about a family disintegrating merging with a Lynchian nightmarish left of center universe (where signing a deal in blood seems perfectly acceptable to one of the characters) before finishing up in a particularly British mode of horror film. The cast are superb, the film challenging and horrifying (a bit with a hammer is very hard to take in). Brilliant, interesting stuff.

Pontypool is a fascinating, sometimes frustrating movie. It has a very clever hook and takes a long steady time getting there. Set almost exclusively in one location it is claustrophobic (there are various points where characters see outside but the camera looks at them not from their viewpoint) and haunting, though never particularly scary.

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