Salem's Lot (2024)

It's been 20 years since the last adaptation of Salem's Lot so I guess there's a chance that many people exploring the horror genre nowadays will be less familiar with the tale, first presented in a Stephen King novel that remains one of his best, before being turned into a traumatic TV movie directed by Tobe Hooper. There have also been other sojourns into, or near, the town, with A Return To Salem's Lot in the mid-1980s, and King himself expanding on the tale in separate short stories and as part of the threads winding through The Dark Tower book series. So I don't think it should ever be classed as something that cannot be revisited/reworked.

Lewis Pullman is our Ben Mears this time around, a writer who returns to the small town that he lived in for a time as a child. The town, and particularly one large house, has a certain pull to it. Ben forms a connection with Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh) while he is back in town, and befriends a schoolteacher named Matt Burke (Bill Camp). It doesn't take long for these three to notice that something strange is happening around them, with town residents disappearing or acting very odd, as a powerful vampire decides to make Jerusalem's Lot the base for his attempt to turn the USA into his own little Fangtasia.

The second film directed by Gary Dauberman, who helped to make the Annabelle series such a success, and also worked on the screenplay for both chapters of It, the biggest problem with Salem's Lot is something I wouldn't normally tend to complain about. It's far too short. Considering both of the main previous attempts to film this story have clocked in at about the 3-hour mark, this solo movie needs far more than the 114-minute runtime it gets. That becomes very obvious when scenes seem to clash against one another, allowing no time for the proper development of the bigger picture of a town being infected and turned into a ghost town (but, obviously, the ghosts are all vampires).

There are good moments here, all of the actual vampire stuff is well-handled (it's often spooky and inventive, if never actually scary), and the way in which certain scenes are reworked is often surprisingly successful, especially in the change of setting for the big final battle. It's just a shame that the pacing never feels right for most of the runtime, with the exception of a few set-pieces in the second half that you just know the rest of the movie was planned around.

Pullman is decent in the lead role, although he doesn't shine as brightly as some other potential choices (Ben Mears has never been the most memorable King character though, despite the greatness of the story). Leigh is better, with the advantage of being able to comment on a town that she's lived in all her life. Both Bill Camp and Alfre Woodard (playing Dr. Cody) are excellent, feeling quite appropriately like more experienced peers helping the younger leads to deal with a very odd situation, and there are also enjoyable performances from John Benjamin Hickey (as Father Callahan), William Sadler (Sheriff Parker Gillespie), Pilou Asbæk (as Mr. Straker), and Spencer Treat Clark (superbly unnerving as the grave-digger, Mike Ryerson). The other person to mention is Jordan Preston Carter, playing young Mark Petrie with an expected mix of wisdom, anger, and terror. Carter is very good in the role, although a couple of the best moments involving his character are slightly mis-handled, again all to do with the pacing.

Maybe we'll see the full version of this one day, and I don't doubt that there was a lot of extra work done in the editing room here. It's almost like watching a series on a streaming service and accidentally hitting the "play next episode" option twice, leaving you with a gap that you piece together as the ongoing narrative continues. There's still enough to enjoy here, and it's certainly not as bad as many other remakes I could mention. The visuals and atmosphere both have moments of brilliance, but it's clear from the opening credits and very first scenes that this is a film with much more just beyond the edges of the screen that horror fans would love to see.

6/10

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Netflix And Chill: Hidden Strike (2023)

What a combination we have here. The director of Need For Speed and the writer of Grace Of Monaco, working together to deliver an action comedy that pairs Jackie Chan with John Cena. What could possibly go wrong?

If you're assuming that my opening paragraph is dripping with sarcasm then you'd be right. Not that I want you to think that Hidden Strike is a complete waste of time. It's just that, knowing the people behind the camera, I can see why it feels like such an odd feature.

If I summarised the plot of Hidden Strike then I suspect it would make the whole thing sound either too complicated or too dull. Basically, John Cena plays someone who ends up working alongside Jackie Chan to take on an oil-thieving villain (Pilou Asbæk) in the desert environments of Iraq. Obvioiusly, Cena and Chan don't immediately trust one another, but their friendship grows as they work together against increasingly growing odds of mission success.

The second half of Hidden Strike is quite good. There are some enjoyable fights, although nothing comes close to the prime Jackie Chan work of yesteryear, and occasional moments in which the leads work well together. You have to get through the first half though, and that's a bit of a slog. There's a big action set-piece that takes place in an artificially-created sandstorm that isn't as thrilling or impressive as it should be, and the script isn't witty enough to help viewers warm naturally to Cena's character from the beginning. The lack of wit, or lack of great wit, remains a problem throughout the whole film, but it's easier to overlook when Cena and Chan are complementing one another in the busier fight sequences of the second half.

Aside from our leads, Asbæk is good value as the baddie. That's a relief, especially with nobody else making much of an impression. Chunrui Ma and Wenli Jiang are the two main females, both there to serve a script that wastes their presence, and everyone else is onscreen to be a generic fighter or placed in jeopardy. Okay, you get one other "boss level" opponent, but that is it.

Arash Amel's script seems to think that viewers will want time spent alongside Cena trying to be funny (emphasis on the word "trying" there). This isn't the right approach, but nobody figured out how to improve the material. Scott Waugh's direction is competent enough, even when making use of some wildly varying CGI, but nobody here is at their best.

Fans of Jackie Chan will already have a dozen films they know they can rewatch ahead of this, but it's worth noting that this IS a film boosted by his presence. He may not get to deliver the kind of hijinks he used to, due to a flat script, as well as his advanced age (the man is one year away from turning 70), but he is still an undeniable star when given even the briefest opportunity to shine. It's because of Chan that I didn't hate this, but almost everything else here ensured that I didn't love it either.

5/10

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Prime Time: Samaritan (2022)

There was a time when a city had a hero, Samaritan, but those times are gone. Samaritan and his brother, a nemesis named . . . Nemesis, disappeared after a lengthy battle. Both were presumed dead. But young Sam Cleary (Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton) thinks at least one of them survived, and he thinks it is an old man who lives in the building just across from him. As that old man, Joe, is played by Sylvester Stallone, he might be right. Will Samaritan return, and will he deal with the new threat (Cyrus, played by Pilou Asbæk) that the city is facing?

I could have worked a bit more on that summary, but that would require more effort than the writer of the film put into the plotting. I have enjoyed some previous work from Bragi F. Schut (mainly the Escape Room movie), but this is bad. And it’s bad from start to finish, despite having a few scenes between young Sam and old Joe that show promise.

Director Julius Avery entertained me with the excellent Overlord a few years ago so I know that he can so great work. He can keep viewers grounded, in terms of geography and timing. You wouldn’t know that from this film. Scenes go by that could be indicating minutes, hours, or days, and the locations could be almost next door to one another or in opposite sides of the country (the only exceptions being Sam’s apartment and Joe’s apartment). And my summary of the film? It is depicted in animated form at the very start of the movie. 

A couple of things work, mainly the cast and a few decent fight scenes, but this is a superhero movie that thinks it is slyly subverting the superhero movie, and it really isn’t. If you haven’t spotted the third act moment being set up from the very opening moments then I don’t know what to tell you, but I saw it coming a mile away. The fact that the film allows it to play out as if it is a major bombshell ends up undermining it, and undermining the whole film. It doesn’t help that it is followed by a flashback with some of the worst de-aging FX work I have seen in a mainstream film.

Stallone is as good as you would expect in the role, his performance helped by the fact that he is an elderly man who could still beat up most of us with one hand tied behind his back. Walton is fine, even if he is credited with the middle name ‘Wanna’, but his character is sorely underwritten, and surprisingly hard to root for at times. Dascha Polanco is perfectly fine, playing the mother of Walton’s character, and various minor goodies and baddies are suitably portrayed by Moises Arias, Jared Odrick, Sophia Tatum, Abraham Clinkscales, and Shameik Moore. Asbæk is the highlight, however, and he manages to lift the movie slightly with every one of his scenes, seeming to revel in the experience of playing the kind of charismatic and deadly villain you could slot into pretty much every action thriller from the 1980s onwards.

There are one or two ideas here that make the appeal of the movie obvious, with everyone involve probably thinking they would get to have their cake and eat it, starring in a superhero movie that tried to be a step removed from other superhero movies. Sadly, those ideas are either under-developed or worthless, especially when couched in a feature that is so flat and consistently lazy. There’s not one aspect that deserves extra praise, from the score to the wardrobe, from production design to the effects, and I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. Just watch Mystery Men instead. Or Super. Or Defendor. Or one of many other movies that twists some of the superhero movie tropes.

3/10

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Overlord (2018)

If there's one thing we all know by now it's that Nazis would have made an army of zombie soldiers if they could have. The only thing worse than a Nazi is a zombie Nazi, and they have appeared in popular entertainment quite often over the past couple of decades. They appear here, but the plot chooses to focus on the very real horrors of war, first and foremost, with the standard genre thrills mixed in slowly but surely until brought to the surface for the third act.

Starting with a group of soldiers being airdropped into Germany, Overlord is a tense and visceral experience from the opening scenes. The skies are shredded with anti-aircraft gunfire, meaning that many of the young men are killed before they even get a chance to jump out of their craft. The ones that land are immediately in great danger, and it never gets easier. But the mission is a vital one, destroying a radio tower that has been causing all kinds of problems, to put it mildly. The soldiers find someone willing to help hide them, a young French woman named Chloe, they start to figure out how best to complete their mission, but it all becomes even more complicated when they discover bodies being experimented on and a serum that seems capable of creating mutated super-soldiers.

Written by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith, it's intriguing to see that this was developed from a story idea from the former, who has a background in more varied dramatic works. Smith seems to be the horror guy, of the two, but both have worked well together in balancing the wartime tension with the pulpy entertainment aspects.

Director Julius Avery, working on what is only his second feature, does a great job with the material. It's often dark, and the action is frantic at times, but you never lose sight of the identity and location of the various characters, and the set-pieces are perfectly paced. Special effects are great throughout, impressively bizarre and bloody, but the focus stays on the main characters, even while horrific oddities start to multiply around them.

The cast are another big plus. Jovan Adepo and Wyatt Russell are the two main soldiers, with Russell being the one who ends up in charge after so many deaths in the first act, and both of them do excellent work (I'm not familiar with Adepo but have already come to expect excellence every time I see Russell onscreen). Mathilde Ollivier is equally good as Chloe, a determined survivor with loved ones to look after, and the main villain of the piece is played with relish by Pilou Asbæk. Other characters are portrayed by John Magaro, Iain De Caestecker, Jacob Anderson, Gianny Taufer (a standout as the younger brother of Chloe), and Dominic Applewhite.

There may be a little too much familiarity here, which might explain why there were so many mixed/lukewarm reviews when this was released in cinemas, but Overlord takes the elements that we've all seen elsewhere and blends them into a fantastic piece of genre entertainment, with impressive visuals and a score by Jed Kurzel that's also worth mentioning (I know, I know, I always forget to mention scores, and I constantly apologise for it).

8/10

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