Prime Time: Whistle (2025)

There are many fine examples of whistling throughout the horror genre. Okay, there's one, but it's one that casts a mighty shadow. That one is the great M. R. James tale, adapted a number of times (most notably with Michael Hordern in the lead role). And now we have Whistle, a film based around an Aztec death whistle. It causes very bad things to happen to anyone who hears it being blown. You would think that the easiest thing to do would be to just not blow it, but then we'd have no movie.

Written by Owen Egerton and directed by Corin Hardy, two people who should already be known to horror fans, this is a teen horror movie interested in doing nothing more than being a teen horror movie. It's not very good, but it at least clears the low bar that it sets for itself.

A group of students end up in possession with a skull-shaped whistle. They soon find out that anyone who hears it ends up dying, but not in a normal way. They are actually visited by an apparition of their future selves, and die in the way they were due to die in the future. And so begins a race against time, the teens eventually realising what is happening and then trying to figure out if there's a way to stop it.

The screenplay is the problem here. Egerton has a fun idea, but doesn't do enough to make the most of it. This should have been full of impressive set-pieces, blood and gore thrown around in lieu of any proper scares, but it's a disappointingly bloodless affair, for the most part. The one major highlight just serves to remind viewers of how weak the rest of the film is. It doesn't help that none of the characters are very interesting, not even the leads (played by Dafne Keen and Sophie Nélisse), and also doesn't help that the cast give such flat performances.

Neither Keen nor Nélisse manage to feel like the best casting choices here, but the same can be said of almost everyone in the cast, from Sky Yang and Jhaleil Swaby to Ali Skovbye and Percy Hynes White. Even the "star cameo" from Nick Frost feels like a role that could have had someone better there (perhaps someone with more of a presence in the horror genre).

I am happy to enjoy some dumb fun, not every film needs to be layered and deep. I expected to be an easy mark for Whistle. It's a shame that it couldn't do better when it comes to the simple pleasures I was hoping for. Considering how forgiving I often am, or am often accused of being, the fact that I can't even bring myself to rate this as anything more than average should serve as a warning to those who are a bit more discerning with their viewing choices. It should still just about work for those wanting a slick and mindless distraction for 100 minutes though. 

5/10

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Noirvember: The Kid Detective (2020)

Being a kid detective is a very good thing. Or so it seems. Getting to help the local community, being underestimated by many people dealing with you, and acting wise beyond your years in a way that many view as endearing. It all becomes a bit more difficult to deal with when you're no longer a kid though, particularly when you stay in the same job, carrying around the weight of your childhood success.

Adam Brody stars here as Abe Applebaum, the kid detective who is now an adult in an apparent state of arrested development. He hasn't let go of his past, and hasn't moved beyond what many expected to just be a phase. He doesn't see why he should change though, considering his gift for detection. But his latest case, a young woman named Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) asking him to find out who murdered her boyfriend, turns into an opportunity to completely re-evaluate his past, and perhaps even allow himself to move on to the next chapter in his life.

A great mix of comedy and drama, and with a proper and well-constructed mystery at the heart of it, The Kid Detective is an excellent character study that benefits from Brody being such a great fit in the lead role. Writer-director Evan Morgan nails the tone throughout, jumping deftly between effective little gags and scenes that show the pain of someone feeling more adrift in the turbulent sea of life, and his script is full of an obvious affection for the tropes being used/subverted.

Brody carries the film on his shoulders, but does so in a way that emphasises how slim those shoulders are. He's been playing variations on this kind of role for much of his career, someone a bit emotionally-stunted and selfish, but this gives him a number of layers to work through as the plot unfolds. Nélisse is very good as the young woman who doesn't realise that the mystery she needs solving may lead to something even darker and more dangerous, and Sarah Sutherland is a lot of fun as the sullen Lucy, a woman who has somehow found herself as trapped in her role as secretary to the kid detective as he is trapped by his own history. Wendy Crewson and Jonathan Whittaker are bemused parents who expected their son to have moved on from this "phase" long before now, Peter MacNeill is the local school Principal, and Dallas Edwards plays a boy named Calvin who may be the key to unlocking the case.

Much darker than expected, but all presented in a way that stops that darkness from weighing it down too much and making it unbearable to watch, The Kid Detective is a surprisingly brilliant mix of the old and the new, making use of a fun core idea to springboard into muddy waters familiar to anyone who has watched their fare share of neo-noirs. Every individual aspect is handled with care, especially the set-ups and payoffs to gags that are used throughout to maintain the well-balanced tone throughout, and the end result is a gem of a film that should develop a strong cult following as more people discover it and recommend it to like-minded film fans.

8/10

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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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