You can forget your Paranormal Activities and your Cloverfields, for true visceral found footage horror look no further than this terrifying twosome of Spanish language films released over the last couple of years.
The premise is simple enough; the first movie begins with a nice TV journalist conducting an expose of the lives of firefighters as a segment of the program ‘while you are asleep’. She flirts and bonds and then they get a call. The TV crew follows the firemen to an apartment building where the police are struggling to open a door to an old lady’s apartment because the old lady has seemingly gone bonkers. They get the door open and the old lady has indeed lost it, but she seems to have an uncontrollable temper and has gotten a bit bitey (think the infected from 28 days later). The crew manage to fend off the lunatic but find that suddenly the building has been sealed from the outside due to this infection and they can’t get out.
The infection spreads and the TV crew, firemen and remaining tenants of the building have to struggle to stay alive. The whole thing is incredibly intense despite a bit of a sag in the action halfway through. Its really violent and makes you jump right out of your seat but not in a telegraphed way.
The found footage format allows the directors Jaume Balugera and Paco Plaza to move the camera so that the audience has no idea when or where the next shock will come from. This all leads to one of the most unbearably intense finales I’ve ever seen in a horror film. I won’t spoil it but it involves night vision in a dark room with something that looks disturbing as hell.
The sequel picks up the action right where we left off with a SWAT team entering the building to search for survivors along with a priest who knows more than he initially lets on. This allows the camera action some variety in that each of the team has a camera mounted to their helmet. The swat team are attacked by the infected cast of the first movie and the infection spreads some more.
Meanwhile a gang of teenagers, also conveniently with a camera; break into the building through the sewers and get caught up in the slaughter. The increase in firepower allows for far more gory death’s including death by firework which is both hilarious and macabre.
The best thing about the sequel though is how it builds on the revelations in the final act of the first movie and while doing so becomes the best film of its type since, well since The Exorcist really. The ending is a major kicker which should lead further into Rec 3 & 4 which are being filmed as I write this. I for one cannot wait to see how they expand the mythology further still with a wider canvas to play on.
In the recent boom of found footage thrillers, these films are far and away the best. The Rec films are not just the fast moving zombie films they appear to be on the surface. Many people have not seen them due to the fact they are in Spanish and subtitled. Don’t let that put you off. These films are just about the most blood thirsty fun you can have in a room with the lights off.
by Chris Holt
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John Woo is one of the best action directors who ever lived…fact.
His more recent work has overshadowed this simple truth but anyone who has seen the Hong Kong output of the late eighties and early nineties can testify to this. It was perhaps inevitable that Woo would eventually make his way to Hollywood where also inevitably his genius would be diluted and watered down until we got a film like Paycheck.
Now this is going to be controversial to some but I stand by this viewpoint.
John Woo’s best American film isn’t Face/Off or Windtalkers, it’s the first film he made over there, its Hard Target from 1993.
Sam Raimi was the producer responsible for shepherding Woo’s talent stateside and despite limited English and Raimi being on stand by to take over in case things didn’t work out, Woo made Jean Claude Van Damme’s best film and got the best performance out of him prior to JCVD. Despite being heavily censored to get an R Rating in the states, Hard Target feels like the only film Woo made in the studio system which was fully off the leash and crazy with its action scenes.
Face/Off was strangely muted, Broken Arrow was a poor imitation of Speed, Mission Impossible 2 was too in love with producer and star Tom Cruise and Windtalkers didn’t come close to fulfilling its potential. In Hard Target, Van Damme takes a two handguns blazing /split kicking approach to taking out the bad guys, grenades explode and pigeons fly in slo mo. People die violently and in ways that make you fist the air with joy,the lasting effect is a blood pumping adrenaline rush that I revisit time and again.
The story is basically a remake of 1930’s film The Most Dangerous Game, updated to an urban setting in this case New Orleans. Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) baits desperate homeless men (often ex military) with a promise of $10,000 if they can make it from one end of town to the next. Rich men then pay Fouchon for the privilege to hunt these poor men and bring them down like animals. What they don’t count on is that their latest kill, Douglas Binder has a daughter named Natasha (Yancy Butler) and she has come to town looking for him and asking all the questions they don’t want answered. Natasha ends up being saved from some thugs by Chance Boudreaux (Jean Claude Van Damme) a merchant sailor who was raised in the bayou by his uncle and has military training in his past. When her efforts with the police prove fruitless, Natasha hires Boudreaux to help her track down her father. This leads them to the attention of Fouchon and his right hand man Pik (Arnold Vosloo) and they decide that Boudreaux is the ultimate game and will be their last hunt.
A lot of the complaints about John Woo’s US output stem from the fact the films don’t have the heart that his Hong Kong films do. Whilst this is valid in some respects I think the heart on display in the heroic bloodshed subgenre he made his own just would not translate to the west. In The Killer when Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee come face to face, guns drawn for the first time, the soundtrack goes all rom com for a moment and they look at each other with a very wry smile. If this happened when we first meet Christian Slater and John Travolta in Broken Arrow then there would have been mass walk outs. I think its something that was unique to Hong Kong cinema at the time, even much of Jackie Chan’s output around the same period revolved around the value of friendship (albeit slightly less homoerotic) and even today I don’t think western audiences are culturally savvy enough to take it that way without shouting GAY and stomping off.
If you are talking about the action, then Hard Target is definitely on a par with most of his HK work, with the exception of Hard Boiled whose carnage is hard to top. There is some heart in Hard Target for those prepared to look. The film is very much about the plight of the homeless whilst the rich get richer and turn a blind eye. There is even something approaching emotion in Van Damme’s eyes every time one of the good guys buys it. The subject matter is even more relevant today than it was back in 1993 and the fact that post Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans thousands were left homeless and starving while the republican government did nothing, makes the plot feel a lot more poignant.
Jean Claude Van Damme is not an actor, he is a movie star in the way that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not an actor no matter how much he tries. They are both performers who have charisma and presence but lack thespian chops. During the height of his career Van Damme worked with very few actual auteur’s and instead most of his work was directed by journeyman hacks or untested foreign directors.
As John Woo was at that point; an already proven talent he got Van Damme’s best work out of him, using his accent as part of the character and making him look cool as hell. The character of Chance Boudreaux wouldn’t have been out of place in a western (check out the way he sweeps back his coat near the beginning revealing not a gun but his leg which he is about to do some serious kicking with) and there is a look on Van Damme’s face that says he knows he is on to a good thing and he will never look cooler.
The supporting cast all turn in solid performances especially Lance Henrikson as a truly evil man, killing all who get in his way and Arnold Vosloo playing a man who is like the evil opposite of Boudreaux without a moral compass.
Hard Target is a film that did respectable business when it came out in cinemas. It did better on video and was one of the last films during the ‘action hero’ phase of the late eighties and early nineties. It seems to have been forgotten mainly due to the fact that Van Damme became something of a joke due to his personal problems and the end of the above the title beefcake action hero era. For my money, Hard Target is great Saturday night entertainment and a Van Damme good time at the flicks.
by Chris Holt
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Back in the mid seventies, the Vietnam war was still raging on. The hippy movement and feeling of revolution pushed into being by the sixties had given way to Disco, flares and scandal from the likes of the Manson family murders, Watergate and the ill fated free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont which ended in violence. The optimism and free love spirit was dead or dying and many promising young filmmakers fed the last twitches of that corpse into their films. You can see it in films as diverse as Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Even Spielberg’s Jaws (the first summer blockbuster) has a very jaded outlook on the world, portraying a town more concerned with commerce than keeping its beautiful children alive.
It wouldn’t be until Apocalypse Now and the aforementioned Deer Hunter that Hollywood tackled Vietnam and even then it was a sore spot. It wasn’t until 1986 and Oliver Stone’s Platoon that America began to reach a kind of catharsis with the conflict and explored it further through films like Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War and Hamburger Hill. Pre-dating all of these films though and a good three years before the similarly themed First Blood which introduced us to John Rambo was John Flynn’s film Rolling Thunder. A film way ahead of its time.
The film has recently resurfaced thanks to the championing of one Quentin Tarantino and has enjoyed some revival screenings stateside. The original studio behind the movie Twentieth Century Fox was so appalled by the violence in the movie that they sold it off to Grindhouse distribution company American International Pictures. At a test screening for the film the reaction was so negative that some members of the audience got up and tried to physically abuse the studio personnel that were in the theater. Its not coincidence that Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader is credited as one of the writers on the film, it shares a dark cynicism and casual attitude to violence with that classic movie.
The film takes place in 1973, Major Charles Rane (William Devane) returns home after a long period missing as a prisoner of war with his colleague Johnny (Tommy Lee Jones). Both are shell shocked and broken men and the Major finds that much has changed since his leaving years ago. His son is now six years old and his wife has begun a relationship with the local sheriff and moved on with her life. The Major is greeted as a hero and rewarded with several silver dollars collected for him by the people in his hometown. Its clear through a number of scenes that pain is the only thing that Major Rane understands anymore and he talks of getting to like his predicament as a prisoner and his daily routine of torture. One day he arrives home to find his house invaded by low life thugs who are after the silver dollars he was gifted. They threaten and torture him and are amazed to find that Major Rane won’t break even after they put his hand down a garbage disposal. His estranged wife and child return home and are shot and killed. Major Rane wakes up some time later in hospital minus a hand and calmly and calculatedly seeks out those men who wronged him with the help of a local girl Linda (Linda Haynes) who has a crush on the Major and sees him as a way out of her humdrum life. The two of them head to Mexico where the scene is set for a bloody confrontation.
Rolling Thunder has a lot in common with No Country For Old Men, and I’m not just talking about the presence of Tommy Lee Jones either. Both films are cynical about people and their capacity for evil and have a very dark sense of humor. Both films also take place either on the border or just inside Mexico and the United States and feature Vietnam vets as the hero so to speak. The dialogue in Rolling Thunder is minimal and sparse, never wasting words always getting right to the point. A few of the lines said though are great and the performances match. William Devane is a character actor who has never really played a sympathetic role as he does here. He is a guy who is always popping up as a shady government operative or rich scumbag, probably best known now for his work in 24 and Payback.
Devane is awesome in this role and had this film gone on to be big at the time of release he probably would have had a career like Tommy Lee Jones went on to have. Speaking of Jones, he isn’t in this much but boy does he make his scenes count. At the beginning of the film he is all damaged and shy, having to wear his sunglasses not because of the sun but because he can’t stand the crowd looking at him. In the scenes towards the end of the film he looks lost and out of place just like the Major, not sure what to make of his new surroundings in the family home. When the Major enlists his help to go on a raid at a Mexican brothel he suddenly comes alive and cracks a smile for the first time, aware that violence is imminent and its what he knows and does best. The final shootout still stands up to today’s best shoot outs and is reminiscent of The Way Of The Gun, it all happens very quick and very close with many bad guys shot point blank.
Many have criticized Paul Schrader in the past for misogyny against women and that is very much in evidence here as well. The first woman, Rane’s estranged wife is portrayed as something of an airhead who moved on too quickly once her husband disappeared. The character of Linda is someone who throughout the film, men come on to, sometimes aggressively and its not clear whether Rane has any feelings for her at all (Devane gives nothing away) but it seems mostly like he is using her as either bait or a cover for his revenge. As a result you come away feeling slightly sorry for her, seeing a way out and then being used and abused which she sought to escape in the first place.
I can highly recommend Rolling Thunder, it’s a forgotten film and deserves re-appraisal now that the world has caught up to the cynicism on display. John Flynn went on to direct the equally badass but less good Stallone and Steven Seagal vehicles Lock Up and Out For Justice. He died aged 75 in 2007, a shame as watching Rolling Thunder you get the impression that he definitely had more inside him and could have made an out and out classic had the film done better. Rolling Thunder is currently streaming free to Lovefilm subscribers and will be out on blu-ray in September, if you love the seventies as a decade of film then give it a watch.
by Chris Holt
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Got a screener? A cool poster? in production on your own low budget gem? Contact us at thelostmovies@hotmail.co.uk
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