Fanga (2022) - Horror Film Review

Fanga is an Icelandic fairytale horror film that puts its own spin on the well known Beauty and the Beast story. Directed and written by Max Gold, this tells a familiar tale with a slight twist to it, and uses sparse, yet beautiful looking locations to tell that tale. Apologies to the actors here as I'm not entirely sure how to type their names the way some of them should be typed!

With her father close to death, Belle (Andrea Snaedal) seeks the help of the local wise woman (Hana Vagnerová) to assist. The woman tells the girl that the only way to prolong his life is to seek out a magical rose that is said to be guarded by a beast. Belle finds the cave where the flower is kept, and encounters the beast, who turns out to be a man afflicted with a curse (Gudmundur Thorvaldsson). Surprisingly he allows her to take the rose, but upon returning home she is informed by the wise woman that unless she stays by the beast's side her father's condition will once again deteriorate. For the sake of her father, Belle decides to go and live with the beast, and comes to form a friendship with the man, as well as learning that the only way for his curse to be lifted is for him to fall in love.

While just over ninety minutes long, Fanga (translating as Prisoner) managed to be a real slow moving film. It got me thinking that maybe a lazy Sunday wasn't the best time to view it as I legitimately kept falling asleep trying to watch it. This hides its budget by having natural locations for the most part, rather than sets, and by having a very minimal cast. Rather than be an actual beast, the man is normal looking, if deeply troubled. When the urge takes over him however he becomes a mindless killer who feasts on his victims, with it insinuated that the curse means the only way he is able to eat is by consuming the flesh of his victims. There was a decent dynamic between the two main characters, with Belle never seeming to be afraid of the man, and him never really being a threat, only on the rare occasions when he transforms. The make-up effects are subtle, with his transformation being more in the way he acts than in the way he looks.

Most the film takes place in and around the beast's remote cave, surrounded by some beautiful and lonely looking scenery. Not too much happens in a horror sense, this has more of a feel of a fairytale than of a horror, but this has some moments, such as the creepy looking zombie like creature that stands guard at the cave's entrance, a neat scene where the beast's prior victims stand around him as ghosts, and some arthouse style nightmare sequences later on which stitch together a variety of disparate images. The beasts attacks include some decent sound effects, but mainly the attacks are not shown on screen, with the afterwards moments shown more keenly than the actual attacks.

There isn't really more to say about Fanga, a very slow moving story which does put its own unique spin on a classic story. For me, I found it to be a struggle to watch due to how slow and uneventful it all was, despite the competent filmmaking and the great locations used.

SCORE:

Dead Snow 2 (2014) - Comedy Zombie Horror Film Review

Tommy Wirkola's (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) Dead Snow stuck in the mind for a few reasons. The first was that its snowy setting led to plenty of lovely looking moments of the blood contrasted with the white of the snow. The second standout part were the Nazi zombies, there have been enough films like this over the years that the Nazi zombie is a definite subgenre of the zombie genre itself. I haven't seen Dead Snow since 2010 and so after a quick read of the Wikipedia plot guide I headed into this one. Spoilers for the first film will follow.

Despite it being five years in real life terms, within the context of the movie this picks up immediately after the cliffhanger ending of the first. After his friends are slaughtered up in the mountains after inadvertently angering a group of cursed Nazi zombies, Martin (Vegar Hoel - Dead Snow) is the sole survivor, and after returning the gold him and his friends stole thinks the horror is all behind him. However it turns out he accidentally hadn't returned all the gold and the commander of the Nazi force, Herzog (Ørjan Gamst - Dead Snow) attacks him in his car as he makes his escape. Eventually Martin looses him, but passes out and crashes the car. Sometime later he wakes up in hospital where he is told he is under arrest for the murder of his friends, not only that but the doctors mistaking Herzog's severed arm for Martin's missing arm (that he lost in the first film) have attached it to him. As Martin struggles to control his undead and very powerful new appendage, Herzog is suddenly reminded of the last orders he received back when he was alive; to march on the nearby town of Talvik and kill all its inhabitants. Raising a new army of the undead he sets out to do just that.

The body count this time around is a lot higher, the amount of zombies is also a lot higher. That's what sequels often do after all, make everything bigger and more spectacular. You have that here in the form of a tank that the Nazi zombies are using, that and both Martin and Herzog gaining the ability to raise the dead. Leading of course to a big bloody showdown between the two sides. I remember the first film being bloody and here is no different. Poor Martin spends almost the entirety of Dead Snow 2 caked in blood. Civilians are killed all over the place and not just limited to adults. Death here is almost always played for comedic effect, and so dark humour such as some mothers pushing prams getting obliterated by a tank shell, a tank riding over some children playing in a sand pit, and the politically incorrect sight of a wheelchair bound woman's carer running off and leaving her to ineffectively attempt to escape are not as grim as they may sound. The humour goes all over the place being both physical and with the dialogue of the characters. Some of it works, such as the poor zombie man that Martin first resurrects constantly getting damaged (at one point he even puts him under the wheels of his car after it gets stuck in a snow drift in order to get traction). Elsewhere, most notably with some of the dialogue this doesn't fare as well. There are a trio of American characters who are geek caricatures, one whose dialogue mostly revolved around Star Wars lines was a bit grating. I must mention the comedic highlight of the movie, Martin has gone to a World War II museum to get help from the museum clerk when they find out the Nazi zombies are there. In a scene taken straight out of Scooby-Doo, the two decide the best thing they can do is disguise themselves as part the exhibit. This leads to a wonderful scene of the two standing still like statues, the museum clerk for some reason having chosen the awkward pose of crouching down with a shocked expression on his face, while pointing his finger out!

Child Eater (2016) - Horror Film Review

Child Eater is based on the 2012 short horror film of the same name. When I reviewed that a few years back (here) I commented that I hoped the feature length version would improve upon the lore built up in it. Like the original short, this one too is directed and written by Erlingur Thoroddsen, and this one also stars Cait Bliss who reprises her role as the babysitter, Helen.

A quarter of a century before the events of the film there was an old man named Robert Bowery who lived in the woods near a small town. This man had failing eyesight and believed by consuming the eyeballs of children he would be able to get his sight restored. After a little girl manages to escape from him he is finally caught and believed killed. In present day, Helen (Bliss) is asked by her father to babysit a young boy, Lucas (Colin Critchley). The boy complains of a monster hiding in his cupboard, Helen humours him but when she looks there is nothing there. Later that night she hears a strange noise coming from Lucas's room, she goes there to find he has vanished. She decides to head out into the nearby woods to search for him, unaware that Robert Bowery (Jason Martin - Gotham) has returned in a new supernatural form to once again kidnap children...

I assumed a feature length film would find time to build on the lore and the characters that the original short didn't have time to do. However this seemed far more content to stretch that original short into a feature length with minimal added of any consequence. After a tiny sliver of character development the film soon gets to the original place the short started. Nearly the entire movie takes place over the night Lucas vanishes, and from what my memory told me this goes along in a very similar fashion to the original. I found Lucas to be an annoying character, and there was a bit of a throwback in feel to the early 2000's in how he acts. There was a weird stretch of time in the past where it seemed children were being given scripts for adult characters. This led to child characters speaking and acting with a maturity that came across as creepy rather than realistic. Such is the case with Lucas who the film would lead you to believe is a lot more articulate, rational and intelligent than all the adults around him. This just makes for a creepy character, and so I wasn't that fussed what the titular child eater would do to him. There are a bunch of other characters but there is so little development with any of them that I couldn't care less about them. Bliss was fine as the babysitter but I didn't really understand why she felt the need to rescue Lucas after a certain point in the movie.