THE CRITIC

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS AND BIG WORDS

To the cinema once again, dear readers, and the latest motion picture from Mr Anand Tucker, which proves to be a modestly engaging little contrivance which might rank as a perfectly passable period potboiler were it not for the occasional sense that it might be pretending to profundity. One is always grateful for the film industry to step away from the wearyingly familiar from time to time, and amidst the mostly unremarkable summer attractions for the massed audiences, any offering that is not aimed primarily at easily distracted simpletons is to be seized upon immediately.

Jimmy Erskine is The Critic of the title, the Daily Chronicle's longstanding reviewer of the legitimate theatre and columnist of greasepaint gossip. He is, one must acknowledge, not a particularly pleasant fellow: too fond of the alcohol and certain other vices which, let us merely hint, are still against the law in 1934. He is also too cheerfully addicted to the vituperative vitriol of the reviewer's art: regularly denigrating the hapless thespians' nightly efforts with an almost childishly sadistic glee. Faced with the Chronicle's new owner, a man unwilling to subsidise his sybaritic lifestyle, Erskine concocts a fiendish plot against him, with the assistance of an actress whose performances he has viciously abused in print. Inevitably, however, his machinations must fail...

Erskine is a gift of a role for Mr Ian McKellen, an actor always worth watching both for moments of quiet, intimate subtlety or declamatory grandstanding, and here he does get to play to the close camera as well as the gallery. I must confess at this point that I yield to no-one in my ambivalence towards Ms Gemma Arterton, an actress whose work for some unfathomable reason has never particularly appealed to me, be it the schoolyard shenanigans of St Trinians or the cavorting around South America with James Bond (although in all fairness I was a great admirer of Byzantium); but here she does have the difficult task of playing a not-very-good actress, which I should say she accomplishes. She does well to differentiate between the "real" Nina and the "stage" Nina, though on at least one occasion she is aided by the production in which she is appearing being a clearly unspeakable disaster.

Having said all this, at least in its current form (following reshooting that substantially restructured the story) The Critic is a reasonably enjoyable yarn: sombre though not without humour, with excellent attention to period detail, a mixture of the glamorous and the grubby, as well as an insight into the nature and function of the critic (and whether he can create his own drama rather than merely report on others'). It is scarcely one of the greats - for one thing there are a few too many handy connections between the characters - but it is a mostly solid and well mounted melodrama that takes perhaps too much care to never really catch fire. Ultimately, however, it is Mr McKellen's show and, whether he's being mischievous, bitter or conspiratorial, you can not take your eyes off him. One wonders what Jimmy Erskine would think of it: for my mere part, dear readers, I commend it to the house, albeit with reservations, and exit with a flourish, stage left.

***

THE CROW

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

And the big question is.... why? Why bother doing another Crow movie? And. more specifically, why bother doing another Crow movie when you're not going to do anything that remarkable or massively innovative with it? What's the point? Surely there are plenty of other comic book stories - even ones in a similar vein - that haven't been tackled once yet, let alone four times? Ah, who cares, there must still be some money left in this IP, let's drag it out again and flog some more coins out of it.

Beyond a couple of character names and the basic thrust of avian-aided revenge from beyond the grave, this incarnation of The Crow doesn't appear to have much to do with the 1994 version, a film rendered uncomfortable due to the on-set death of Brandon Lee (leading the makers to finish the film with doubles and CGI). Eric (Bill Skarsgard) and his girlfriend Shelly (FKA Twigs) are still murdered, but this time it's because Shelly has an incriminating video of gangster Roeg (Danny Huston); because of Shelly's sins she's doomed to Hell, but Eric can only save her soul if he returns from Purgatory and kills Roeg and his associates...

It's okay. Save for the fact that it's one of those very rare occasions when someone from Blake's Seven turns up (Josette Simon), it's nothing remarkable, it's nothing innovative, it's nothing special. But who goes to the cinema for unremarkable? Yes, it's got enough blood and violence to get an 18 certificate (still a rarity these days): the sequence in which Eric slaughters all of Roeg's goons at an opera house alone would qualify for that. It does also have a soundtrack full of (what to me at least is) absolutely terrible music! The Crow 2024 has no less than forty-sex producers of one stripe or another (co-, executive, line and so on) and one has to wonder what the hell they were doing all day: three minutes each? It just about gets by but it's entirely redundant and is that really enough for fifty million dollars? Personally I don't think so.

**

THE SUBSTANCE

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND YIKES

Yikes. I mean, yikes. If you've been waiting impatiently for a genuinely extreme body horror, something totally unrestrained and boasting a final act that is honestly up there with the last reels of Peter Jackson's Braindead for sheer blood flood, then here it is. The Substance is one of the best full-on horror grossouts in years, possibly decades and, as a longtime genre fan, I obviously loved it. Finally: here's a movie that doesn't hold back, doesn't cut away, doesn't tone it down for the softer sensibilities, and also has so much to say in between the grotesqueries.

It's not about being old (to quote Citizen Kane, "old age is the one disease you don't look forward to being cured of"); it's about looking it. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, 61 and absolutely going for it) is a fading Hollywood star, fired from her regular fitness TV show because she's starting to look her age and Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the crass-to-the-point-of-caricature studio head, wants somebody younger and sexier instead. A young doctor gives her a thumb drive promoting The Substance, an apparently simple set of syringes, chemicals and nutrients which cause her to graphically birth her a younger, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley) - a spectacular scene in a cold, white-tiled bathroom. Calling herself Sue, the "newborn" replaces Elisabeth as the network's fitness star and is an immediate ratings smash. But whilst the procedure comes with very clear rules, she is so enamoured with her new self that, as Sue, she immediately starts breaking them...

The final act of The Substance is an all-stops-out overdose of monster mayhem: a body horror with the grisly flesh-twisting mutations of The Fly, The Thing and Society (along with the prom night spectacle of Carrie) presented with genuinely startling practical and prosthetic effects, now mixed with hilarious yet absurd comedy. Strangely, the closest film it's referring to is actually a comedy, Death Becomes Her (which even starred Mr Demi Moore): the quest for eternal youth and vitality at whatever cost, and the physical horror of when it goes wrong. (There's also an old Stanley Baxter sketch, substituting plastic surgery for body-cloning serums, in which the process goes spectacularly and hilariously awry at the presumed moment of triumph.) And yet it doesn't shy away from moments of actual humanity: after a chance encounter with an old school friend, who says she's still beautiful, Elisabeth is so thoroughly conditioned to the importance of youth that she can't conceive of the idea of just going out for the evening and looking her age. (Specifically this is more relevant for women: men are allowed to look like decrepit physical wrecks with no problems, but woe betide any womrn who shows the slightest signs of not looking like the Prom Queen any more.)

Questions do remain, however, concerning the procedure itself and the "science" behind it. If the mind and consciousness are transferred between the new and old bodies, then why are both Elisabeth and Sue active at the same time in the later stages of the film? And if they're separate people, then where's the benefit for Elisabeth? It's also left unexplained, though it probably doesn't matter, who's marketing this stuff and why, how it's ever supposed to be commercially viable or where it even comes from. And it's odd, though convenient, that Elisabeth doesn't appear to have any friends or family (or even assistants or domestic staff) to visit her in her massive apartment.

I'm delighted that The Substance is actually getting a wide UK cinema release rather than briefly playing a few arthouse screens before dropping onto streaming, though I do wonder how the Friday night popcorn audience will respond to what Coralie Fargeat has achieved. (The running time of 140 minutes might count against it as well.) But for my part, I thought it was terrific. The Substance is superbly made, funny, shocking, and consistently inventive (whether illustrating Elisabeth's decline through the construction and subsequent neglect of her star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, needle-dropping an apposite cue from Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score, or just including queasy closeups of an eye with multiple irises). Do see it.

****

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER

CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS, IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK THAT WAS WRITTEN 127 YEARS AGO OR SEEN ANY OF THE HUNDREDS OF MOVIES BASED ON IT

Finally! This was actually supposed to come out in October 2023, but it's taken this long due to the original distributors being bought by another company and it's taken going on a year to sort out the legalese. And it's generally been worth the wait: a welcome return of full-on period Gothic Horror, and a new yet familiar representation of one of the genre's principal towering figures. What a pity it's taken so long.

If you didn't know already, given the vast number of Dracula adaptations there have been over the years, the Demeter was the ship on which Count Dracula travelled from Bulgaria to England, until it broke up on the rocks near Whitby. The disappearances of the Demeter crew are detailed in the Captain's log, presented as half of one chapter from Bram Stoker's original novel; this fills in all the gaps as to what we all know actually happened on board, as the crew are picked off one by one by a terrifying creature that surely doesn't have anything to do with either the fifty large crates of earth in the hold, or the mysterious, barely alive young woman who has apparently either stowed away in the hold or fallen out of one of the boxes.

One of the best things about The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is that it presents Dracula not as a tortured romantic lead or a suave and charismatic aristocrat, but a twisted, repulsive monster of the Nosferatu ilk. Which is absolutely right: the price for immortality should be a miserable existence spent forever in the shadows and darkness. The only real trouble is that by nature of most vampire tales the bulk of the horror takes place at night and sometimes, with events lit only by moonlight and candles, the film is visually too dark - a technique that's becoming increasingly prevalent for no apparent reason. I would recommend that you pick a cinema where they do actually turn all the house lights off, but unfortunately that's not an option as the film will be heading straight to home viewing platforms with no UK theatrical release. What a shame when terrible films like Tarot and Baghead get the wide exposure they frankly don't deserve, and a nicely crafted, serious horror movie like this one is pretty much thrown away. The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is still definitely worth your time, but do turn the lights out.

****

TRAUMATIKA

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SPOILERS

The trouble with Traumatika isn't that it's a bad film: rather it's two perfectly good films that don't belong together. One is harsh, nasty and deals with very difficult issues and subjects that really need to handled very delicately and sensitively and should come with a battery of trigger warnings; the other is a satirical maniac-chases-women horror comedy that is far lighter and more typically entertaining. There's nothing wrong with either of them, in the way there's nothing wrong with, say, Munich and Carry On Matron: but they absolutely shouldn't be bolted together and the tonal shift is jarring.

Discounting a brief scene in which an unholy artefact is buried in the North African desert in 1910, the bulk of the first half concerns that newly discovered object's new owner, who opens it and becomes possessed by the evil within it, leading him to abuse his own young daughter, Fleeing, she aborts the unwanted pregnancy but is then compelled to abduct young children from the local area and raise them as potential vessels for the demon. All of this is bleak and deeply uncomfortable viewing, and rightly so. But twenty years after she was killed by the sheriff who found the bodies in the basement, her younger sister appears on a tacky true-crime TV show to tell her side of the story, as the evil appears to have returned just in time for Halloween...

And it's that part of the film which is lighter, jokier, and looks and feels like a more traditional horror movie, with satirical observation about crass media sensationalism, creepy trick-or-treat kids, actual gags (the masked maniac suddenly coming back for his hat), and the final sting that suggests It Might Not Be All Over and you should come back next year for Traumatika II. Which, again, is perfectly fine, but the gear change halfway through is too abrupt: incest and dead children don't belong in a multiplex popcorn horror, and Boo! jump scares and familiar genre tropes don't belong in a confrontational drama about rape and abortions. Either segment as its own separate movie would be fine: they're both well made and they're both interesting and absorbing, but the hitching of one to the other weakens both of them and the film as a whole.

**

BOGIEVILLE

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

I don't want to spend too much time on this very low-budget British vampire movie (why should I? They didn't) but I suppose it should be mentioned in passing. A young couple on the run stop off at an abandoned caravan park and find themselves trapped there as caretakers to the resident warring vampires. Fine, except that it's set in Atlanta, Georgia yet is quite clearly and undisguisedly shot in Surrey: Godalming may be in the South but it's not the Deep South. All that has been done to suggest the setting is to have the all-Brit cast speak in American accents and drive a bunch of left-hand drive cars: they haven't even changed the road signs or redressed the obviously British petrol station to reflect US gas prices.

The best thing about Bogieville really is the vampire teeth that most of the cast have to wear; the trouble is they have to speak through them as well and a lot of dialogue is pretty well indecipherable. Some of the effects for the vampires burning in sunlight are perfectly okay, though Near Dark looked a hell of a lot better and that was over thirty years ago. It's fairly bloody, but there's really not enough in the movie to maintain interest.

*