Unhuman (2022)

A strangely light piece of work from Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, certainly in comparison to the movies that made their name, Unhuman also shows why they should maybe stick to the nastier and more intense horror movies that they seem to enjoy. Because this isn't good. And it isn't good in a way that becomes more and more infuriating as you think on it more.

The plot is fairly simple. A typical assortment of teens are on a school trip when something goes wrong. The bus they are on is attacked, leaving them in a state of panic as they all try to avoid becoming a snack for some things that definitely walk and act like flesh-eating zombies. They're unable to stay fully focused on the main problem, however, as typical cliques and resentments continue to affect the group dynamic.

I'm not sure where to begin with this one. Maybe you should all check out the trailer and see if you think you might enjoy it. Be warned though, the trailer does what trailers are supposed to do. It sells you on something that isn't really there. All I wanted was a simple tale of ill-prepared teens fighting against zombies while being unable to stop fighting one another, and what I got was much worse. There's something else going on here, you see, something that might have been a bit more thought out and planned than most of the teenagers realise.

The cast generally do okay. Brianne Tju is Ever, a decent female lead, and her onscreen BFF is played by Ali Gallo, who has a nice presence. Drew Scheid, Benjamin Wadsworth, Uriah Shelton, and C. J. LeBlanc play the male characters who make the strongest impressions, and they do just fine in their roles, but they feel like they are playing archetypes. That's not necessarily the case, not entirely anyway, but characters aren't really fleshed out to any satisfying degree. I will say the same for the likes of Lo Graham, Blake Burt,Tyler Galpin, other teens filling out the cast who don't get much to do. At least Peter Giles does his bit to help entertain, playing a teacher who seems amusingly carefree about his role.

What this film needed to do, funnily enough, was dive right into the main influences it wanted to play around with. Dunstan and Melton only really make things clear, and forehead-smackingly obvious, in the final scenes, which may make many groan, as I did, rather than appreciate the attempted reworking of familiar ingredients. Because the central idea is all this has going for it. The comedy doesn't work, there's a lack of decent gore, and nobody even has the balls to settle for a selection of needle drop soundtrack moments and some affectionate overuse of montage (which would have absolutely worked, considering the movies being referenced).

Unhuman? More like unamusing, unentertaining, and unworthy of your time.

3/10

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Netflix And Chill: 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

I like sharks. They terrify me, and I want to look away, but I also have great respect for them as predators who are very close to the top of the food chain in their main environment. I used to read up on them, and various aquatic creatures, when I was a kid with the time to spend on special projects and absorbing factoids like some info-hungry sponge.

I cannot remember all of those facts here and now, and I won't use Google to make myself seem smarter, but I do remember that a) a shark can sense one drop of blood in a large body of water from quite some distance, and b) they can also sense the small electric fields given off by animals. They're pretty canny when it comes to finding "food".

So the fact that 47 Meters Down: Uncaged wants you to believe that a bunch of panicking teens could stay still, whimpering, while trying to avoid a large, blind shark is just one of the many preposterous elements that made it impossible to ever take seriously. I'll try to mention some other ridiculous highlights below.

Scheduled to go off on a boat ride, Mia (Sophie Nèlisse) and her stepsister, Sasha (Corinne Foxx) are instead persuaded to go off with Sasha's friends, Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Stallone), to dive and explore an underwater city. It's an area that is being explored by Mia's father (played by John Corbett) and his team, although they will be at a different part of the site while the girls sneak in to have their underwater fun. And eventually they are all surprised by the giant, blind, shark. The appearance of the beast is so surprising that one of the young, thin, teenage girls pushes back in the water so far that she hits a stone pillar . . . so hard that it is knocked over, blocking the way that they entered the sunken city. Because that is entirely plausible.

I like director Johannes Roberts. He has spent the past couple of decades working with various budgets and resources to supply a mixed bag of genre thrills. Highlights include the superb, and too rarely mentioned by horror fans, F AKA The Expelled, the film preceding this one, and The Strangers: Prey At Night. But I'll even stand by some of his films that could be viewed as lesser efforts. The Other Side Of The Door at least tried a couple of different things among the more familiar beats, and Storage 24 simply aims to be an entertaining, low-budget, British sci-fi horror. He even manages a couple of good moments here, one or two set-pieces that still entertain in between the stupidity, and the final sequence is just the right kind of silly to prove a satisfying conclusion.

It's as a writer that he seems to have slipped most, once again working with Ernest Riera on this. You can either go for gritty realism and tension or complete absurdity, but trying to land between the two rarely works. Most people will start wondering how they are supposed to take this film when the girls all put on scuba masks, nothing covering their ears, and then are all able to talk clearly to one another once underwater. Maybe the masks were designed to work in the same was as bone-conducting headphones, I cannot swear that there aren't any out there that don't work in that way, but it just didn't seem at all likely. Then the blind shark appears. Then you get that pillar knocked over. And things just keep getting sillier and sillier, for the most part. It would be more endearing if you didn't suspect that there could have been the chance here for another properly good underwater horror from Roberts.

The main actresses don't do a bad job. They are all required to swim around and look frightened, and they do that well enough. There's the strained relationship between the stepsisters, you get the one person delivering all of the information to the group (and viewers), and there's a great moment that has the classic freak out by someone who then tries something incredibly selfish. Make the rest of the plotting more believable and the cast would come out of it all a lot better. Corbett also does a decent job, and also provides some info at just the right time.

It's laughable in what it wants you to believe, a film that assumes everyone will be able to switch their brains off for the duration, and tests that notion to the limits, but if you CAN at least switch your brain off for some of the runtime then you also get some decent death scenes, and some crude jump scares that will provide a distraction for 90 minutes.

4/10

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