ALIEN: ROMULUS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Hurrah! The Alien series gets back on track and back to its roots with this terrific SF horror. Whilst I absolutely loved Prometheus and kind of enjoyed Alien: Covenant enough (and rewatching them this last week generally confirmed both responses), it's nice to get away from the creatures' backstory as favoured by Ridley Scott and throw the saga back to a bunch of variously sympathetic types picked off by the supremely scary monsters as in the first four films. Alien: Romulus is littered with callbacks to those films - some subtle, some not so - and while much of it works magnificently, there's more than one colossal legacy callback which feel distracting and entirely unnecessary. The signs are promising right from the start - the film immediately looks like it was shot back in the 1980s, you can hear the flutes in Benjamin Wallfisch's score, and even the titles and credits font is identical to that of Alien.

While Prometheus and Covenant (and even the first Alien Vs Predator movie) centred around experts and scientists, Alien: Romulus goes back to the first four instalments, using regular characters who have absolutely no idea what they're suddenly dealing with. Rather than space hauliers or prisoners, they're basically youngsters stuck on a miserable mining colony, with no hope of passage to any other planet where there might actually be sunlight. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her companion Andy (David Jonsson), a damaged synthetic, reluctantly agree to help raid a suddenly discovered spaceship, to steal the cryogenic pods that will enable them to hypersleep long enough to reach another, better world. But, inevitably, the craft is not entirely deserted...

From there on it's ticking most of the expected boxes: armies of facehuggers skittering like spiders, rotating lights and clanking metal corridors (the production design is a glorious recreation of the original Alien look), people trapped in rooms with the monsters, a strong female lead (even standing in a Ripley pose at one point), physical effects rather than digital (the CG is mostly reserved for the exteriors and the planet's rings). Much of this is exciting and enormously enjoyable, spectacularly mounted, solidly put together and well played (David Jonsson's android gets an upgrade halfway through and becomes a completely different character). And, unlike Fede Alvarez' earlier Evil Dead movie, it's actually scary in places.

Skip this paragraph if you don't want the really big spoiler. What lets it down is the use of callbacks, many of which are mere background touches and perfectly good fun, such as another appearance of that drinking-bird toy, or musical nods to the earlier scores (Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner are both included in the end credits). Others are more serious, two in particular. Much has already been said of the other synthetic on board, a CG simulated Ian Holm pasted in a la Rogue One, reprising his sinister android role with several lines of verbatim dialogue. This makes no narrative sense: Rook is not Ash, and is never suggested to be Ash, so given that Ash didn't look like Bishop or Call (or indeed David or Walter), why should Rook look like Ash? And if Rook and Ash were the same android model, then why didn't the original Nostromo crew recognise him/it immediately? Secondly, the iconic Aliens line "Get away from her, you bitch!" is dropped in, but out of context it's just taking a sledgehammer to the fourth wall for no logical reason beyond fan service.

To be honest I could have done with a little less of the council estate swearing and a little more depth to the characters besides Rain and Andy. You could also ask why no-one other than the Double Deckers has noticed this massive spaceship that's suddenly appeared out of nowhere. And perhaps it starts to flag a little in the last stretch with a new creature suddenly introduced, that to be honest the film didn't really need. Or you can put all that aside and just enjoy the movie for what it is: a gory (15-certificate) horror romp with scary monsters big and small, and enough Big Ideas to engage the brain without getting in the way of the thrills. I had a great time watching it and whilst I still do like the previous two films, I'm really happy that the Alien saga has gone back to basics and back to what it does best.

****

IN A VIOLENT NATURE

CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS

Unstoppable masked killer picking off teens? Check. Maniac's origin story told as a cruel and tragic campfire legend? Check. Annoying young victims, at least two of whom frankly deserve it? Check. Local law enforcement powerless to assist? Check. At least one outrageous gore highlight? Check. And yet... not. Because while In A Violent Nature certainly ticks all the boxes on the eighties slasher template, it does them in completely the opposite way. This is the antithesis of the standard woodland slasher, which does the exact opposite of everything that makes a typical teenkill horror movie. This is the anti-Jason, the anti-Cropsy, the anti-Madman Marz.

In content, it is precisely what you remember and love from the Friday The 13th sequels, The Burning, Madman and all those other slight variations on those themes. His wasteland grave disturbed by a bunch of charmless youngsters, the wordless, remorseless bogeyman figure Johnny rises, methodically tracks down the intruders and dispassionately kills them. And that's it. Where this film differs from the Fridays and similar is in its style: shot in 4:3 squarevision, with minimal editing as the camera forever hovers behind Johnny's shoulder as he stalks and slashes, accompanied by the sound of utter silence rather than shrieking violin stabs or low sawtooth synths; the film has no music score. The shouldervision and lack of editing also means it allows us to fully relish the ludicrous overkill of one particularly gruesome death scene, by not cutting discreetly to a blood spurt or something else entirely while the murder continues off-screen.

It's an interesting experiment: to take the standard 80s stabfest and rip out any semblance of artifice or style. But what you end up with is a series of very slow plods through drab fields and woods as you just traipse along behind the monster murderer. We're obviously not getting the killer's POV you'd expect, because he's on screen pretty much the whole time, but we hardly ever get anyone else's perspective either. Only in the final reel, when it looks like the Final Girl might actually be getting away, does our viewpoint tear away from Johnny's shoulder blades.

Is that enough? Personally I'm not sure: this new angle on familiar territory dispenses with a lot of the usual tropes and techniques, but those are the things I liked about those slasher movies - Harry Manfredini's strings, subjective camera, editing to speed the movie along. Not to suggest that The Final Chapter or A New Beginning were particularly involving, but In A Violent Nature absolutely and deliberately isn't.

**

MULHOLLAND DR.

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

In a BBC Culture poll of critics back in 2016, David Lynch's film was voted the greatest film of the 21st century, incredibly beating the likes of Pan's Labyrinth, Zodiac and The Grand Budapest Hotel. (For the record, Jason Statham's Death Race remake didn't even place.) That's the level at which it's revered: it's the most highly rated of Lynch's feature films on the IMDb, a co-winner for Best Director at Cannes, Oscar-nominated for Best Director... Granted that a lot of awards have been won over the years by absolute tat, is it really that much of a masterpiece?

Just as Sunset Boulevard is actually Sunset Blvd., so Mulholland Drive is actually Mulholland Dr., as seen on a road sign under Angelo Badalamenti's sinister, typically Lynchian title music while a black limousine twists through the Hollywood Hills. It's involved in a spectacular accident leaving only one survivor: an amnesiac (Laura Ellen Harring) who takes the name Rita off an old poster for Gilda and holes up in an empty apartment. The new tenant, newly-arrived aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) turns up and the two women try and work out who she really is.... Well, that may be how it starts, but at some point reality breaks down completely, with most of the events of the previous two hours completely abandoned and Watts and Harring playing entirely different people. Or are they? What really happened? How much of it is fantasy, hallucination, dreamscape?

Even the people who love it don't claim to fully understand it (that's one of the reasons they love it) and it's apparently one of those movies you have to rewatch numerous times to get to grips with. I've never been a fan of obscurity for its own sake, and the apparent lack of resolution annoyed me when I first saw the film (in Denver, Colorado) and to be honest it still annoys me. But this is a David Lynch film so there are any number of agreeably weird byways to explore: a pair of creepy mobster types (Dan Hedaya and composer Angelo Badalamenti) apparently under orders from a silent, wheelchair-bound man in an windowless room, a cuckolded film director (Justin Theroux) forced to cast an actress he doesn't want, a psychic who turns up, claims "someone is in trouble" and is never seen again, and more memorably the nightclub in which Rebekah Del Rio performs an a capella version of Roy Orbison's Crying in Spanish. More memorable still is a stunning scene in Winkie's Diner concerning a dream of some unspeakable, primal evil hiding in a back alley behind the building, and it's as unsettling and freaky-creepy as anything.

Any number of those elements may or may not have recurred in the TV series for which this was originally the pilot episode, until ABC turned it down and it mutated into a feature film. That may also be why there's hardly any strong language because of network standards (and presumably it was the extra material that involved the nudity). But these strange characters and odd little moments - including a hilariously botched murder in a private eye's office - are frustratingly never allowed to develop as everything that has apparently been set up is ignored, forgotten or switched around.

For hardcore Lynch fans it's a no-brainer. But personally I'm still not convinced as to either Mulholland Dr.'s cult appeal or its alleged masterpiece stature; I did enjoy it more as a rewatch, and there's enough actual narrative in there to get to grips with (unlike Inland Empire, which I absolutely hated), but it's no Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, for me Lynch's best film by a mile. But's it's ultimately too frustrating and too wilfully obscure, even with a handy explanation in one of the BluRay's extras, and there's not enough reward for working out exactly what the hell is going on.

**

(This is an edited version of a review originally written for FrightFest's Gore In The Store section.)