Novocaine (2025)

Jack Quaid plays Nate, a man who has a condition that stops him from feeling pain. That may sound all well and good, but Nate can't eat solid foods (in case he bites off the end of his tongue without feeling it), he has to set a timer to remind him to urinate before his bladder potentially explodes, and his home has a lot of extra padding around some of the fixtures and fittings. He tends to err towards caution, although that changes when he enjoys a date with a lovely bank colleague, Sherry (Amber Midthunder). That makes it all the more unfortunate when Sherry is taken hostage the next day by dangerous bank robbers. Determined to hunt them down and save the woman he loves, Nate decides to turn his apparent weakness into a bit of a super-power. 

Co-directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, both having shown a nice and consistent improvement throughout their joint filmography, Novocaine is helped a lot by a smart and fun screenplay from Lars Jacobson (who is finally on the right path to getting us all to forget that he co-wrote the screenplay for Day Of The Dead: Bloodline). Once the main premise is set up, you know that everyone involved is just running from one situation to the next with a focus on lots and lots of pain. And that's exactly what happens, with everything escalating from a slight case of the ouchies to a major bit of "oh my god, that's not going to be fixed any time soon".

Berk, Olsen, and Jacobson pace the whole thing perfectly, and the action is enjoyably scrappy and inventive. Our hero isn't particularly skilled, but he knows that he can take plenty of hits without suffering in the same way as others around him. He's not invulnerable, but it seems that way to some of the people he encounters. The 110-minute runtime fairly flies by once the action begins, and even a couple of extra sequences at the end of the film somehow don't make it feel as if it is outstaying its welcome.

Quaid is a very good choice for the lead role, once again relying on his slight awkwardness and charm ahead of any muscles or fighting capability. His character is driven by new love, and Quaid has experience in playing that kind of guy, even (especially) when he has to start questioning his feelings and motivation. Midthunder is also very good, and makes such a strong impression in her early scenes that you can easily understand why Nate becomes so driven to save her. Jacob Batalon is fun as an online friend who may need to finally meet Nate IRL, Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh are two cops who start to suspect that our hero may be working with the villains, and Ray Nicholson is entertainingly callous and vicious as the nominal head of the criminal gang.

Funny and violent in equal measure, and with just about the right tone maintained throughout, Novocaine manages to feel relatively fresh and unique while reframing the kind of visceral action that we've seen in many different movies over the past few years. It always feels slightly ridiculous, but that helps to take the edge off of some of the more wince-inducing injuries we end up seeing. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants an action thriller with a fun twist on many of the usual tropes. You'll find it a relatively painless viewing experience.

8/10

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Shudder Saturday: The Spine Of Night (2021)

I tried to watch The Spine Of Night before, but things conspired against me. I ended up busier than expected, had to stop the film, and then just never got back to it. I always thought I was missing out, and I figured that the film might be something I would love. A year or so later, I discover that I was completely wrong. The Spine Of Night is a boring waste of a great cast.

Described on IMDb as an "ultra-violent, epic fantasy set in a land of magic" that "follows heroes from different eras and cultures battling against a malevolent force", this is all about a powerful woman (Tzod, voiced by Lucy Lawless) who battles to retain possession of a mystical flower known as the Bloom. It, or something akin to it, has been guarded by others over many years (with one of those guardians voiced by Richard E. Grant), but it has fallen into the hands of a major baddie named Ghal-Sur (Jordan Douglas Smith).

Co-written and co-directed by Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King, this rotoscoped dark fantasy has a number of obvious influences feeding into it, and anyone who enjoys those influences should find something to like here, but they will struggle to maintain that enjoyment as the film makes one mis-step after another. Although the runtime is only 93 minutes, the pacing makes it feel much longer, and makes it feel like quite a slog at times. The characters are hard to care about, the environments shown onscreen feel like disconnected backgrounds, as opposed to a real world, and the central quest never becomes as interesting or involving as it should be.

The animation style also works against it slightly. I appreciate some good rotoscoping, but it works best when it feels like a vital component. This is a choice, and an ill-advised one. There's nothing here that couldn't have been improved by either a different style of animation or, perhaps, a live-action presentation of the unfolding events.

As for the cast, both Lawless and Grant are great picks for their roles, Smith does well as the villain, and there are roles for Patton Oswalt, Joe Manganiello, and Larry Fessenden, as well as quite a few others, but nobody is given good enough material to work with. I don't mind something that mixes in plenty of familiar elements, there's a comfort and fun in enjoying ingredients mixed into a new recipe, but this feels, perhaps as intended, like a tale that was written back in the 1970s and dusted off for modern audiences without any extra re-writing or polishing of the material.

I could recommend you plenty of animated movies to watch ahead of this, from the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres, and some of those show a much better way to make use of rotoscoping. I'm sure The Spine Of Night has some fans, but I'm never going to want to revisit it, and I'll probably forget it exists at all within the next few months.

3/10

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Upgrade (2018)

Written and directed by Leigh Whannell, Upgrade is a sci-fi action movie that also revels in moments of gloriously gory vengeance. While it’s only the second directorial feature from Whannell, he already shows a big step up from his work on Insidious 3 (which was, admittedly, hampered by it feeling very unnecessary and also too tenuously connected to the other movies in that series).

It's the future. A believably near future. Homes are efficiently managed by computers, as are cars, and most people have become very comfortable with giving commands to invisible helpers. Grey (played by Logan Marshall-Green) is not one of those people, despite the fact that his wife (Asha, played by Melanie Vallejo) is. Marshall-Green much prefers to get his hands dirty, such as when he is working on classic cars that need an actual driver to drive them. Despite their opposing views on technology, the husband and wife make a lovely couple, until a car accident leaves them vulnerable to an attack by vicious crooks. With his wife dead and himself rendered quadriplegic, Grey would rather be dead. There is, however, a small gleam of light at the end of the tunnel. A new tech called STEM, a chip that could be planted in just the right place inside his body to help him walk and have a normal life again. But the procedure, and tech, has to be kept a secret. Which becomes more difficult as STEM starts to speak to Grey and reveal that they can work together to find those responsible for the death of his wife. Some extreme violence ensues.

I know the preceding paragraph is quite a lengthy one, and I usually try to make my movie summaries more concise, but it still doesn't cover the other interesting ideas that the film goes into, which is a huge plus. Whannell does very well indeed with the moments of action and violence, but he is savvy to the fact that he can't expect to keep viewers engaged with just those "trailer shots". So you end up getting a film that nicely hops around between the gleefully visceral and the interesting and thought-provoking ideas threaded throughout (okay, they're not the MOST thought-provoking ideas you could have in a film script but they're certainly a welcome addition to something that could have tried to coast along without them).

Marshall-Green is great in the lead role, spending a lot of the first third of the movie in quite a downbeat mood, understandably once he loses his wife and use of his limbs, and then being astounded and torn by the choices that STEM offers him. Vallejo makes a good impression in the small amount of screentime she has, Harrison Gilbertson is decent as the scientist responsible for the device and operation, and Betty Gabriel is your standard, doggedly determined, police officer who wants to help the hero and eventually starts to piece things together ahead of everyone else. Benedict Hardie is an impressively skilled and callous main villain (helped by the fact that he looks and acts like a cross between Robert Knepper and Jackie Earl Haley) but everyone else encountered by Marshall-Green does good work, even if they are there to be gorily despatched en route to the main target.

It's no surprise that this is such a big step up for Whannell as a director, considering the concept and the fact that it's not beholden to any other entries in a series. The big surprise is that it easily ranks alongside a lot of his other scripts, and may even be one of his best. Not that the dialogue is quotable, or even that good at times, but it uses some broad brush strokes to great effect in the way it explores a range of human emotions, vengeance and morality, and that blurring divide that keeps getting thinner and thinner between tech and those who operate it.

There are a lot of clear influences on display throughout - from The Terminator to the films of David Cronenberg - but Upgrade manages to cram them all in while still feeling very much like its own beast. Which may very well be the best skill that Whannell has in his bag of tricks.

8/10

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