Fantasy Island (2020)

Do you think it would be fun if someone decided to make a movie version of The Love Boat, but then decided to take the basic premise and twist it into a slasher movie? I am guessing probably not, at least not if you are familiar with the show, and have a fondness for it. The same goes for Hotel, although that was much more of a soap opera. But the same might go for Fantasy Island, a film based on a brand name that will satisfy neither fans of the TV show nor younger viewers who won't know what they're letting themselves in for.

The plot starts off simply enough, after a prologue scene showing someone being terrorised. A bunch of people arrive at Fantasy Island, where they hope that their fantasies will come true. There's Gwen (Maggie Q), a woman who thinks that her fantasy will allow her to make up for a past mistake, Melanie (Lucy Hale), a woman who wants revenge on a school bully (Sloane, played by Porita Doubleday), Patrick (Austin Stowell), who wants to play soldier, and brothers Brax (Jimmy O. Yang) and J. D. (Ryan Hansen), who just want to party hard. Michael Peña is Mr. Roarke, the head of the island, and the one ensuring that people stay the course as their fantasies play out, even if they turn into something unexpected.

Re-uniting some of the people who gave us the much more enjoyable Truth Or Dare (director Jeff Wadlow, who also helped to write the screenplay with Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach again, and Hale in a central role), Fantasy Island is just about the most ridiculous and pointless mainstream thriller/horror I can think of in recent years. I guess there's a vein of black comedy running through it, which may help viewers who respond to it more, but it certainly wasn't enough to help me find everything more bearable.

The cast are an admirably diverse selection, I guess, but the one thing they have in common is a level of blandness that doesn't help lift the weak material. Maggie Q ends up becoming the foremost character, working things out ahead of others and trying to change the situation for the better, but that doesn't make her any more interesting. Hale is good though, and she's someone I tend to enjoy in the main roles I have seen her in, and Yang and Hansen work well together, bringing more of the fun moments in the first half of the film. Stowell is saddled with an annoying strand that shows him desperate to have a moment of heroism, and Peña speaks in platitudes while smiling enigmatically. Thankfully, Doubleday is another person I just tend to automatically enjoy onscreen, and there are supporting roles for the always-welcome Michael Rooker and Kim Coates.

It just goes to show you that you can pretty much do anything you like with a well-known brand name and nobody will question you if they think enough teens will go to see it. This makes all the wrong choices, from the lack of characters you want to root for to the downright stupid final act, but thinks all will be forgiven when it moves along slickly enough while occasionally winking at those who remember the TV show. All is not forgiven. And my fantasy has now changed from me being locked in a room with Scarlett Johansson and twelve jars of strawberry jam to simply never having to endure a sequel to this.

3/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Prime Time: The Club (1994)

The Club isn't a particularly terrifying, or original, horror film. It's a slick teen movie that peppers the runtime with moments attempting to show interesting character dilemmas and moments showing a grinning villain wisecracking as he dances around those who are in peril. Easy enough to forget, it somehow still has enough charm to make me want to save it from complete obscurity.

It's prom night. One couple (Kyle and Laura) are at a stage in their relationship when it looks like the best thing for them to do is go their separate ways. One couple (Amy and Evan) seem happy enough with one another, but there's a lecherous, and potentially dangerous, counsellor (Mr. Carver) to deal with. And one young man (Darren) is miserable enough to be considering suicide. The clocks stop at midnight, leaving these six characters alone and trying to figure out just what is going on, with a young man named John Rotman on hand to further mess with their minds.

Although director Brenton Spencer has a large body of TV work in his filmography, The Club is a rare non-TV feature for him, and the same goes for writer Robert C. Cooper (billed here without the middle initial). Perhaps that explains why this sometimes has a made-for-TV feel, but I can see it being potentially problematic when it came to raising the money for a horror film that wasn't part of a franchise heading downhill at this point. There are still genre gems to be found from this time but they're few and far between, with mainstream American horror feeling quite stagnant in the '90s, before the shot in the arm that came from Scream and the second shot that came from the success of The Blair Witch Project at the end of the decade.

The cast are a mixed bag. Rino Romano and Andrea Roth are a bit too bland as Evan and Amy, whereas Zack Ward and Kelli Taylor do better with their more troubled characters. Matthew Ferguson is okay in the role of Darren, although he's pretty much sidelined for most of the movie, with the exception of his one main scene, and the ever-enjoyable Kim Coates is as . . . enjoyable as ever in the role of Mr. Carver. J. H. Wyman (billed as Joel Wyner) is surprisingly good fun in the role of Rotman, although he only really comes into his own during the third act, when the script really lets him cut loose and become amusingly impish in almost every scene.

Although it takes a bit of time to get going, perhaps a bit too long for this kind of easy entertainment, The Club picks up enough after the opening third to at least keep viewers entertained until it's time for a few decent set-pieces. That's when you get some good practical effects and some fun confrontations that serve as practice runs for the real battles of wills to come during the grand finale.

Unlikely to make any top lists (unless it's something entitled "fairly enjoyable horror movies you may not have seen and could live without but just give them 90 minutes of your life anyway"), The Club is a decent little time-waster for the undemanding. It's no classic, and relatively bloodless, but it does exactly what it sets out to do.

6/10

You can watch the movie here.
Americans can watch it here.

Dead By Dawn 2018: Innocent Blood (1992)

A horror comedy about a vampire from the director of An American Werewolf In London? It's fair to say that I had some pretty high expectations when I first watched Innocent Blood. Those expectations weren't met, and I didn't ever revisit the film over the next couple of decades. I'm not sure whether that is a good or bad thing, because this long overdue rewatch has made me realise that there's a lot here to enjoy.

Anne Parillaud plays a vampire named Marie who heads out into the night to feed. She feels like Italian, leading to her feeding on one of the many mobsters who populate the city. Once done with her meal, Marie usually takes care of the body to stop anyone returning as a vampire, but she is interrupted when she starts to feed on a boss man named Sallie (Robert Loggia). That leads to Sal rising up again, hungry and out of sorts, which leads to bewilderment from his crew and problems for an undercover cop named Joe (Anthony LaPaglia).

Written by Michael Wolk, Innocent Blood is a fun vampire movie that uses the supermatural powers associated with the beasts to play around with the buddy cop film template and provide some fun set-pieces. There's a decent amount of bloody moments, and the script has a lot of fun lines as the vampire threat and mobster activity builds.

John Landis directs competently enough, working within his means to deliver a vision that requres some enjoyable practical effects and stunt work to fully show the deveoping situation. There are some surprisingly solid action beats, some playing around with vampire tropes, the usual selection of cameos,and one main sequence in which Frank Oz plays a coroner bemused by the liveliness of the corpse wheeled in for him is a highlight.

Cast-wise, Parillaud is decent enough in the main role. She doesn't always convince when in full vamp-predator mode, but does much better in the scenes that have her fooling people with her attempts to look innocent. LaPaglia is also decent, stuck with the more straightfoward role - the cop on the case who is seeing things that nobody else will believe. But it's the cast of criminals that make the film more fun than it otherwise would be. Loggia is a blast as the powerful criminal who starts to realise just how much more power he has gained, Don Rickles is wonderful as his legal counsel, Chazz Palminteri has a small role (but is always good to see), and Tony Sirico, Kim Coates, and some other familiar faces are a lot of fun as they watch Loggia evolving. Angela Bassett and Luis Guzman also appear in small roles, both on the side of the police.

Despite some issues, such as a few dated effects and the pacing issues, Innocent Blood is a fun time. The biggest thing working against it when it was released back in 1992 was that it wasn't another An American Werewolf In London. But what is?

7/10

This LOOKS like a decent disc for those wanting the film, but maybe another release could be on the horizon?

Goon: Last Of The Enforcers (2017)

I liked Goon. It was a sweet film that happened to also feature a lot of bone-crunching violence, and it featured a superb central performance from Seann William Scott. Goon: Last Of The Enforcers is, although some (many?) may disagree, a superior sequel.

It's been a while since we last saw Doug Glatt (Scott). He's grown older but not that much wiser, although now nice and settled at home with Eva (Alison Pill), still putting up with the drunken antics of his friend Pat (Jay Baruchel), and still taking a hell of a beating out on the ice, when he needs to. Things come to a head when he is set upon by a vicious player named Anders Cain (Wyatt Russell), leading him to try and leave hockey behind for the sake of his health and Eva's peace of mind.

As well as returning to the role of Pat, Baruchel also co-wrote the script with Jesse Chabot. Obviously wanting to heap a bit more onto his plate, Baruchel has decided to make this his feature directorial debut, which makes sense considering how well he seems to know the characters and small world created in the first film. He certainly does a better job behind the camera than he does in front of it. It's been a while since I watched the first film but I can't recall his character being quite so idiotic, although I could be wrong.

Scott continues to make the most of the opportunity that this lead role affords him. He's dim, but not a complete idiot, and he does get a chance to grow somewhat. Russell is a great addition to the roster of characters, showing almost a mirror universe version of Doug. He's a man who wants to spill blood and break bones, his passion is for the fight ahead of the game or the team, and he's genuinely confused when others don't seem to approach the sport with the same attitude. Liev Schreiber returns, as Ross Rhea, and once again proves to be an excellent illustration of what Doug may potentially have lying ahead of him. Pill does well with her relatively thankless role (as ultimately understanding as she is, I am sure some will view her as just the moaning wife), and Kim Coates and Callum Keith Rennie stand out as two men who want to run the ice hockey team two very different ways.

Although it runs through just as many sports movie cliches as the first film, Goon: Last Of The Enforcers at least uses a new bag of old tricks (if that makes sense). There are a couple of mis-steps - with the main ones being the waste of Baruchel in the actual acting department, and the equal waste of Elisha Cuthbert in a small role - but those aren't significant enough to stop this from being a perfect follow-up to a film that I never would have considered in need of a sequel.

8/10

Pick it up on DVD for a bargain price here.
Or, in America, get it the bluray here.

Silent Hill (2006)

I'm not a big gamer. I've never been that talented when it came to playing videogames so I never threw myself into them as some of my friends did. In fact, playing FIFA was just like reliving a miserable childhood at high school in which I was always picked last for the football team, because of my innate inability to actually play all that well. But there were some games that managed to get me hooked. Games like Destruction Derby and Gran Turismo on the Playstation. Games like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider. And, yes, even Silent Hill, which was a nerve-jangling blend of images culled from the nightmares of the most fevered brain. A number of videogames from that generation have been made into movies, with varying degrees of success. I never thought that Silent Hill would lend itself particularly well to the medium of film, but I was happily proven wrong when I saw the final result.

The film begins with two parents (Sean Bean and Radha Mitchell) worried about their adopted young daughter (Jodelle Ferland). She's prone to sleepwalking and has been muttering about a place called Silent Hill. At her wit's end, the mother takes off with her daughter to visit Silent Hill and find out just where their little girl came from. As she approaches the town she is a suspicious police officer (Laurie Holden) attempts to stop her, which leads to a bit of a driving malfunction. Moments later, the mother is looking for her daughter in Silent Hill, the police officer is pursuing the mother and the father is setting off to find his family, having not been informed of the plan. It's not long until the sirens wail in Silent Hill and The Darkness descends.

Written by Roger Avary, with some creative input from director Christophe Gans and Nicolas Boukhrief, Silent Hill may not be the most densely plotted horror movie ever, but that's not a problem when the visuals and atmosphere are so impressive. Everything is in line with the game, or at least my memories of the game, and there are plenty of nice touches here and there for fans to spot and enjoy (the radio crackling static when danger is nearby being one of the most obvious).

The cast is solid for a film of this type. Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean are pretty bland in their roles, as is Laurie Holden, but Jodelle Ferland outshines her adult co-stars, and support from Deborah Kara Unger, Kim Coates and Alice Krige helps a lot. Krige, especially, revels in a role that feels as if it was written with her in mind. And then there are the many physical performers who managed to bring alive the stranger inhabitants of Silent Hill, the creatures and humanoids who can raise goosebumps just in the way they move around. Fans of cenobites will love the bizarre and horrifying menagerie of monsters on display here.

With a decent backstory teased out en route to a grand finale, Silent Hill manages to be more than just a bunch of impressive visuals (unlike the sequel, THAT review is coming soon). It's respectful to the games that it sprang from, and it's also respectful to horror fans in the way that it keeps creating the chills while also never skimping on some great, gory moments.

I understand people being hesitant to check out any movie based on a videogame - we've all been burned at least one time too many - but this is one well worth checking out.

7/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Silent-Hill-Blu-ray-Radha-Mitchell/dp/B001E8V6GE/ref=sr_1_3?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1382909454&sr=1-3&keywords=silent+hill

The Amityville Curse (1989)

The Amityville house doesn't quite look the same as it did before in this fifth entry in the franchise that should never have limped beyond three (despite how I disliked it, I will accept that the third movie attempts to place itself in line with the other movies).

A bunch of people move into the house and start renovating it but it's not long before things start going bump in the night. And the day. People take far too long to see sense and get out of the house, the scares aren't all that scary (though one dream sequence about a third or halfway into the movie is actually pretty damn good) and the house itself has no character. And the fact that it's not even the same house ruins things almost as much as the evil taking over a household lamp.

The cast are all, in general, pretty poor actors playing pretty unlikeable characters. Kim Coates does well, and it's a shame to see that this is on his CV, and Cassandra Gava isn't too bad but David Stein is awful and only Dawna Wightman, as Debbie, is worse than him. She gives a performance that should easily have won her a roll in Troll 2. Anthony Dean Rubes is just there, he does nothing of note, while Helen Hughes goes way over the top with a character who is at least supposed to be way over the top.

Written by a number of people, and based loosely on the book by Hans Holzer, the script veers from the ploddingly dull to the outright laughable. Director Tom Berry seems happy with it, however, as he does nothing to cover up the weakest element of the movie and adds some more failings to the mix, especially his knack for dragging scenes out and making every potential scare just another extra moment of boredom.

One to avoid.

3/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Amityville-Curse-DVD-Giron/dp/B000066CSC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346708892&sr=8-1