WRONG TURN

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

What, again? Incredibly, having wrung every last dollar out of a franchise which ended after the sixth entry was withdrawn over lawsuits and therefore quite clearly wasn't worth milking any further, the Wrong Turn concept has moved to another studio and started again. In brief, the six Wrong Turns were agreeably nasty, agreeably nasty and funny, meh, actually not too bad, very poor and spectacularly sleazy. Now there's a new one and it's very much more of the same: a few surprises, some graphic grue, but there's also an attempt (by the original's writer) to give some depth to the backwoods psychos while ladling out the nastiness at the same time.

Otherwise, it is the usual crew of idiotic hunks and spunky nubiles getting lost in the woods while hiking the Appalachian Trail: despite all the warnings the kids merrily wander off the trail and end up triggering booby traps and being dragged off by masked psychos. This time, rather than a mere trio of homicidal freaks, there's a whole community called The Federation, who've been living by their own rules and laws since 1859, and from whom the  local townsfolk maintain a discreet distance. But the teens have broken the Federation's laws and are sentenced to death, or worse... Meanwhile, the father of one of the girls (Matthew Modine) is driving out to the rescue but getting dissuaded at every turn...

Wrong Turn 2020 is actually the best since Joe Lynch's 2007 Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. It pulls a few interesting twists, such as the most achingly liberal of the group realising that the Federation exactly represents the rural socialist community project of his urban dreams, and it does a neat reversal with the most notable of the town rednecks. Against that, it is too long (a woodland slasher really doesn't need to be 110 minutes) and at least one of the heroes is a thundering bellend of the highest order so it's hard to feel too bad when he's brutally offed. In the end, it's not bad at all: perfectly alright for a Friday night rental though it would benefit from a substantial edit. Whether this incarnation will last for six movies or not, we'll just have to see.

***

PARADISE Z

CONTAINS PHWOOOAR AND SPOILERS

Yet another low-budget zombie flick and as unremarkable as a thousand others. This is only vaguely notable as the latest from Wych Kaosayananda, the director of the weirdly titled blam-blam knockabout (on which he styled himself as Kaos for no immediately obvious reason) Ballistic: Ecks Vs Sever. It's also one of the smallest-scale zombie movies imaginable: just three speaking roles (and a couple of brief one-line bit parts), one location, and hardly anything happening for the first half hour with the zombs' incursion into the titular Paradise being very low-key and measured.

Because what Paradise Z actually is is the very softest of softcore skin movies, in which two attractive young women hole up in an abandoned resort hotel in Thailand during a zombie epidemic that oh so very gradually drifts towards them. They lounge around in bikinis, they dip in the pool, they take showers, they make love, they lounge around again. Which is all very pretty, but there are anything up to a dozen websites catering for that purpose that don't have any kind of plot or narrative to get in the way of the extended norkage. But the idyll can't last forever and gradually the undead break in, forcing the girls to fight or flight...

It's not very good, but it is only 80 minutes long and fairly painless. It's not atrocious enough to have you writing angry letters to the distributors (in this case it's streaming off Prime), but it's hardly worth the effort involved in clicking Add To Wishlist. If you're in a very, very tolerant mood it'll pass the time, but only just.

**

ARMY OF THE DEAD

VIVA LAS SPOILERAS!

Back in 2004, Zack Snyder did the unthinkable: firstly he remade George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead, the greatest zombie movie of all time and a longstanding personal favourite, and secondly he made a decent fist of it. It's not as good as the original, sure, but as a straight-up nasty zombie movie that stuck with its 18 certificate and didn't wimp out for the teen market, it was good blood-drenched fun. Now Snyder has returned to the undead for the epic Army Of The Dead and frankly he can make as many of these as he likes because he's much more suited to zombies than superheroes.

Don't misunderstand: this isn't a masterpiece. It absolutely doesn't need to be a hundred and forty eight minutes long and could do with a serious trim. It doesn't have the heart or emotional punch of Train To Busan, which achieved so much more in half an hour less, and it doesn't give you much in the way of characters to care about. After a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, military badass-turned-burger flipper Dave Bautista is hired to assemble a team to break through the city's quarantine walls to remove millions from a casino vault. But there's more to the zombies than just the shambling undead and they'll need more than mere firepower to get through before the US military drop a nuclear bomb on it all...

Why the nuclear strike? Because it's the only way to be sure. What's really surprising about Army Of The Dead is that the chief reference point isn't a zombie movie anyway, but James Cameron's Aliens. Lines of dialogue like "you don't see them f***ing each other over" are too close to be coincidental, Garret Dillahunt's clearly treacherous "security man" is Carter Burke in all but name, and there's a climactic moment on a rooftop that's way over the line of respectful homage and actually detracted from the intended effect because of the obviousness of the moment. And it's a pity because there's a lot to admire in it and a lot to enjoy. This is a zombie movie that includes both varieties of cinema zombies: the slow shufflers and the fast leapers. It portrays some of them as thinking, communicating, planning, leading. It even posits the idea of zombie animals as well as humans, a curious omission from the bulk of zombie cinema thus far (although it's not massively surprising that there does exist a film called Zombie Shark).

If all you want is a bog-standard, 100% generic Las Vegas cheapo zombie movie, there's always the thunderously unremarkable Steve Niles' Remains. But Army Of The Dead is leagues ahead of that. Much of the film is a lot of fun, impressively mounted on a huge scale with a lot of CG and action sequences, even though many of them are an extended series of balletic slo-mo bullets to the undead heads. Characters are delineated enough that you could probably lose a goodly chunk of the early setup sequences, and there are agreeably grisly fates for some of the less sympathetic (and in one case downright despicable) members of the crew. On the other hand Tom Holkenborg's score adds absolutely nothing - the most memorable soundtrack cue is a Richard Cheese version of Viva Las Vegas over the opening credit sequence, and relistening to some of Holkenborg's music through YouTube was turned off pretty quickly - and the CGI does reach overload level on more than one occasion.

I've never been much of a fan of Zack Snyder's films. I liked Dawn Of The Dead and 300 but his superhero movies were terrible, and I've no interest in the Snyder Cut of a film that (whilst acknowledging the personal tragedy that led him to drop out) wasn't much good in the first place and which he's now extended to four hours, drained all the colour out and reconfigured to 4:3 to better fit a screen shape that hardly any of us are ever going to see it in. It's pretty empty, sure, but it's not as creepily sexualised as the even emptier Sucker Punch and it's not as tiresomely glum as Man Of Steel or Dawn Of Justice. But I enjoyed it a lot, I had a lot more fun with it than I was expecting and I wouldn't even be averse to watching it again. (Plus, there's always the hope that if Zack Snyder can confound expectations after a recent string of uninteresting films and come up with something better, maybe other similarly overblown but hollow directors like McG and Michael Bay can as well....?)

****

SCATHING

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND WHATEVER

More cheap slasher junk. There's not much you need to know about Scathing except that it's nasty, it's stupid, it makes not a shred of sense, it has a twist ending that also makes not a shred of sense, it's indifferently done and your life will not be even imperceptibly enriched by seeing it.

The basic thrust is that a young woman sneaks out late at night to be with her thicko boyfriend who, rather than take her to a club, a cinema or a restaurant like normal people would do, takes her to the back yard of an abandoned house, where they wander round for a bit looking in the barns. But in the morning the car won't start and when their friends arrive to help them, a masked maniac looms out of the barns and kills them, leaving the first couple apparently trapped in their car for three straight days without food, water or toilet facilities...Told in flashback during a police interview, it pulls a ludicrous twist in its last act by suggesting that everything up to that point had been complete manure and that our apparent heroine was actually the killer, despite the fact that two of the victims were big hunky blokes and she's one of those skinny petite types. (Also, if this is a police interview, why is she telling them her dream sequences?)

With its poor acting, gibberish plot and occasional bits of torture and gore (and strong hints of cannibalism), it does have the feel of backyard slasher junk of decades past, to the extent that it  might even bring back a little twinge of nostalgia for the video nasty era. Forty years ago this would definitely have been seized and would thus have earned itself a measure of must-see attention it simply doesn't warrant. These days it doesn't even have that. The more I think about it (which is not a good idea) the more I realise that even the blood and screaming was insufficient reward for stodging through the rest of it. It's worse than I remember, and I only saw it on Saturday.

*

BUNDY AND THE GREEN RIVER KILLER

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND IT'S THAT MAN AGAIN

You might have seen an announcement recently that a new film about Ted Bundy, the serial murderer, rapist and all-round turd whom society has managed perfectly well without since they executed him, is in the works, and the general response to his news has not been entirely enthusiastic. Stop glorifying him: do we need yet another exhaustive analysis of the man who bludgeoned and butchered so many women that no-one even knows for sure how many there were or where the bodies are? Has Bundy not had enough moments in the sun yet? If "cancel culture" is an actual thing, how come it's used against people who tweeted about Donald Trump or Israel but it's not used against people who raped and murdered scores of women? And if you have to make Ted Bundy movies (which you absolutely don't), at least stop casting chiselled, good-looking hunky guys to play him.

I've (clearly) never had much truck with True Crime movies: especially the American obsession with actual serial killers like Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, whoever the Hillside Strangler was. Fictional ones, sure: bring it on, pass the popcorn. But real human beings suffered and died at these scumbags' hands and that's an uncomfortable source of entertainment - and let's face it, that's what these films are. This one centres on the Green River Killer, an individual who was new to me but who turns out to be of the same rancid ilk, and is slightly unusual in that it's a British film, specifically Welsh (though the exteriors were shot in the US). Depressingly, it's punishingly shoddy in all departments and borderline unwatchably poor throughout.

Uninspired by a true story, Bundy And The Green River Killer supposedly details the hunt for yet another serial killer after four bodies turn up in a small Washington town. Bundy himself is already on Death Row, for the Chi Omega murders (which we absolutely didn't need to see cheaply re-enacted at the start), and is consulted, Lecter-like, by an FBI profiler and the Green River lead investigator after the bodies keep turning up and they still have no leads. One of his ideas does lead to a possible suspect but there isn't enough evidence and he's soon free to kill again and again and again.... for twenty years in total while they wait for the necessary advances in DNA technology.

To be honest it's perhaps a mercy that we don't see more than one of his victims, the others left unnamed and unseen in a story that has no interest in them, partly because it would be tediously sadistic and partly because such moments would clash with the bland and frankly boring remainder of the film. The dialogue is tiresome, the performances are uninteresting, the look of the film is flat and cold and the music score (from a pre-composed library) does nothing to underline the alleged drama or the alleged characters. When the lead detective's wife complains that the 20 years he's spent working the case have wrecked his life, it would have been nice if there'd been scenes backing that up. It would also have been nice if they'd at least tried to age the characters through the decades beyond one laughable suggestion of greying hair, when all the film's time periods appear to have been shot in a fortnight. For a movie about a man who killed up to seventy people, it has no sense of pace, no sense of urgency, not the slightest sense of horror.

Auteur Andrew Jones has a lot of movies on his CV, churning out four or five titles a year like he's Jess Franco or something. They include the weak killer doll movie Robert (and three sequels, none of which are troubling my rental queue) and scripts for remakes of Night Of The Living Dead and Silent Night, Bloody Night (the latter of which is as ball-achingly substandard as this is), as well as horrors inspired by Jonestown and Charles Manson. There's nothing in there so far to suggest a horror icon in the making, and after this fifth-rate excuse for a soul-crushing bore I'm not going to dig any further.

*

MORTAL KOMBAT

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND OUCH

I've never been much of a video game player. I managed to make it through several demo levels of Doom, Heretic and Carmageddon with the cheat codes enabled (for me it's the equivalent of watching a foreign film with the subtitles on) and I used to enjoy aimlessly messing about in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City causing assorted vehicular destruction and randomly running over old ladies on the beach. But I'm not a gamer or a gamehead and I never put 50p in a martial arts arcade machine because I was only going to lose very quickly.

This is the third cinematic incarnation of the Mortal Kombat game to hit UK multiplex screens, and it's certainly the best so far, albeit against very weak competition. Neither the Paul WS Anderson film from 1995 nor the John R Leonetti "sequel" (Annihilation) two years later have been up for a rewatch in the last two decades as I didn't think they were more than passable. Every so often there's a massive fighting tournament between the evil Outworld and our own mortal Earthrealm; Outworld have won the last nine of these interdimensional thudathons and if they win this next one then they'll take over the Earth forever. (Whose rules are these?) Only a pitiful quartet of untrained humans can stop them, if they can discover their secret superpowers in time; meanwhile the Outworld team have decided to cheat by wiping out Earth's contenders before the tournament even starts...

The first thing to say about this new Mortal Kombat is that it's really violent and graphically gory in a way that had me wondering how the hell it went through the BBFC with a mere 15 certificate. Even acknowledging that it's all fantasy violence that can't be imitated or emulated by impressionable teenaged idiots without MMA training, it's surprising how much they've got away with. Today's splatter fans don't know they're born. In a highlight scene which in the 1980s would have been hacked out entirely and the remnants given an 18, a woman's head is  bloodily bisected by a buzzsaw hat. Don't even ask; suffice to say that not all the granted superpowers are cool and one poor sod missed out on laser eyes and lightning bolts and ended up with a magic hat.

This does all sound like absolute kobblers. But it's very colourful and mostly moves so quickly that you don't really notice either the extensive running time (110 minutes) or that it doesn't make a whole load of sense. There's plenty of bone-crunching combat scenes, CGI monsters, a pleasingly diverse assortment of characters showing that women can fight just as hard and as brutally as the men, and even double amputees with robot arms can take down demented extradimensional demons. It's not magnificent enough to suggest a renaissance in videogame adaptations, but as a simple minded action movie in which people lamp each other Mortal Kombat 2021 is more than enough fun. Babbling nonsense, but I rather enjoyed it as a violent, empty spectacle. These days, I'll settle for that.

***