As Above, So Below (2014) - Horror Film Review

First off, yes As Above, So Below belongs to the 'found footage' genre but don't stop reading yet. This much maligned genre has had it tough as it has it's fair share of trash. This isn't even the first film of it's type to be set underground, Australian horror The Tunnel springs to mind, while the ideas of this film also seemed to share a lot with the Russian based After....

Perdita Weeks stars as Scarlett; a British Lara Croft lookalike archaeologist and explorer. Following in her father's footsteps she has been searching for the 'Philosopher's Stone', a gem that is said to grant immortality as well as turn base metal into gold. Her journey brings her to Paris where she believes the gem is hidden in the middle of a series of catacombs that run under the city. Enlisting the help of a group of urban explorers she descends into the dark underground where the terror and madness begins...

Here the found footage aspect makes sense in a way. Scarlett is being filmed for a documentary she is having made about her quest, so her and her fellow explorers have been fitted with needle cameras on their head lamps. As Above, So Below is a very claustrophobic film, the tunnels are very small and confined, the cameras being on the characters heads really makes you feel like there is no room as there is lots of extreme close ups with people and the surrounding area that I found myself wishing desperately to get some air.

This is a scary film, there is a pervasive sense of creeping dread as well as a variety of jump scares. Usually I cannot abide jump scares, here they are well sign posted yet each and every time I nearly fell backwards off my chair due to the totally messed up payoffs. It is not all perfect though, shadowy figures moving around in the back ground are ineffective and not creepy, while mysterious chanting and demonic noises sound like something you would find on a Halloween sound effect tape.

The location of the catacombs is a character in it's own right. There are messages scrawled everywhere, secret tunnels and traps right out of Tomb Raider and a mid film twist that screamed Silent Hill to me and was actually quite clever. I was constantly confused as to what was going on, it remained purposely vague and sometimes this fails. Straight tunnels that nonetheless seem to loop around on themselves, doorways that vanish once walked though, the somehow chilling discovery of a piano inexplicably discovered in the middle of far too narrow corridors; there is a lot of both hit and miss moments exemplified by the discovery of 'the mole'; a friend of the Parisian explorers who went missing years previously and yet pops up fine and well deep underground.

The special effects are sometimes great and sometimes not so much. Trauma on the characters looks fantastic and there are some quite brutal scenes and fun death scenes but then other more dare I say it supernatural elements look a bit cheesy. I think the main problem is that As Above, So Below gets to a point and then just doesn't go any further, the last third was fun to watch in a 'will they survive? won't they?' kind of way, yet the escalation of terror just doesn't ramp up to the levels I was hoping for.

I don't think I am ever going to go underground, certainly not in Paris, so the film was effective in some ways. As Above, So Below can be scary, and is quite messed up in what occurs and the possible unspoken explanation for the events of the film are quite something. Overall there is a lack of cohesion to the whole thing that makes you question if the filmmakers themselves knew what was actually going on.

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Evil Dead II (1987) - Horror Film Review

The last of the Evil Dead films is here to review now, for a long time Evil Dead II was my favourite of the original trilogy but later got overtaken by The Evil Dead's black humour. For the longest time I assumed this was a remake of that first film, it is shockingly only recently I discovered it was not and that the film after the first ten minutes is a continuation of the events of that one.

The only survivor of a night of terror in which he had to kill his demon possessed friends Ash finds himself the new target of the Evil Dead. Dawn brings release from the terror but spending much of it unconscious it is soon night time again when the evil returns in force. Meanwhile the Professor's (whose recordings unleashed the terror) daughter has arrived back in America and is enroute to her family's cabin along with some missing pages of the Necronomicon, and a small group of helpers. Can the Evil Dead actually be stopped?

Evil Dead II loses a lot of the atmosphere that made The Evil Dead such a feat of endurance (well, for me watching it for the first time), it replaces it with slapstick, funny one liners, and even more over the top gore than before, here the blood runs red, green and blue!

Bruce Campbell really brings Ash to life as the self obsessed, arrogant heroic idiot, a joy to witness. Half the film is Campbells gurning face and slapstick fights, two in particular spring to mind; his fight against his girlfriends severed head clamped to his hand, and the iconic cult battle between him and his possessed hand, both of which Campbell does a laugh out loud performance. The other half of the film are the demons and the effects done for these. Somehow the special effects don't seem as good this time around. The stop motion dancing girlfriend scene looks really rough, but this just adds to the charm for a film that does not take itself seriously, the monster transformations again look rough but again just perfectly fit this film.

Evil Dead II works because of the comedy, plain and simple, the best parts of the film revolve around this. The scene that always gets me laughing my head off is when every object in the cabin starts laughing at Ash; books, chairs, a deer head on the wall, even a table lamp, in his madness Ash joins in, such a funny scene that ends Ash's alone chapter and ushers in more characters to be possessed and killed in entertaining ways.

The horror aspects work well when they do appear, the scene where Ash is locked in the cellar is memorable, and the whole end sequence with the cabin under massive attack work well. The Deadites look more like monsters this time around rather than human, changing into hideous forms and being more gooey and icky such as when redneck girl Bobby-Joe accidentally swallows a demon's eyeball! Sam Raimi again does a fantastic job of directing bringing yet more unique and crazy camera angles that have influenced many films since (e.g: Edgar Wright's ones).

My reviews have been lacking lately, I blame a darn sinus infection that is giving my face constant pain, but there you go, my review of one of my favourite films of all time. If you haven't seen the original Evil Dead trilogy then it is something you have to do now!

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Update 29/12/2020: Having got the Blu-ray box set recently I checked this out once again. This is a great horror film with some really iconic moments, it doesn't get old.

Event Horizon (1997) - Horror Film Review

Some reviews write themselves, some have to be pried out my head and vomited onto screen, Starting off on a bum note but this review of Event Horizon has taken me all day to write, it is trash! Alas even I have off days.

Event Horizon is a classic cult British sci-fi thriller released back in 1997. I first become interested in it after learning that the survival horror video game Dead Space was in part influenced by the film. On a side note it is fun to see the mixed relationship Event Horizon and the video game Doom have. Event Horizon uses a Doom sound effect at the film's start while the plot of Doom 3 is very similar to Event Horizon's.

The film takes place in 2047, a search and rescue vessel under the command of Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) is seeking out an experimental ship called the 'Event Horizon' after receiving a distress signal, seven years after it mysteriously vanished on its maiden voyage. Along with the crew of the rescue vessel is Event Horizon's creator Dr William Weir (Sam Neill) who wants to discover just what happened to his ship. After arriving the crew are puzzled to find it completely deserted. While exploring the ship they start to have vivid hallucinations that seem to point to the fact that something terrible has happened on Event Horizon.

Event Horizon takes quite a while to get going, and up until the last quarter is a slow paced affair with lots of long atmospheric creeping about. Until that last part I was beginning to think that the film was not what I had expected, sure I was enjoying it but it was maybe a bit too slow, and a load of the characters in the film are irritatingly stupid, especially a woman nicknamed Mama Bear who follows a hallucination of her son to her doom despite the fact that if she had two brain cells it would be astonishingly apparent that there was no way on God's Universe her child could be on the damned Event Horizon. The other characters vary between annoying, plain and mean but the film still finds room in its limited main cast of seven or eight, to include a token black comic relief guy (he is a welcome relief as much the film is bleak and dark).

It sounds like I didn't enjoy the film, but I did, it doesn't help that I watched it in chunks rather than in one sitting, that always interferes with my enjoyment of films. The director Paul Anderson has stated that a large amount of violence was cut out of the film to get his film rated, as such you would expect it to be quite tame but no; there is plenty of gore with self mutilation, and inventive killings. The film also pays heavy homage to The Shining, almost like a sci-fi remake of that film at times with rivers of blood, possession, and even two creepy blood soaked girls making an appearance.

Starring quite a few famous actors and with a intriguing plot Event Horizon is a great little sci-fi film combining elements from some of the best horrors to make for a thrilling ride.

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