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Movie Review: Titanic II

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Film studio The Asylum has always done its bottom-feeding from the deepest, darkest depths of the movie-world’s Mariana Trench. And while on one level it seems churlish to criticise its output – given its raison d’etre is to churn out wilfully, woefully cheap movies to cynically exploit cinematic and societal trends for a quick buck – that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Or is it? I can never really be sure if I loathe or absolutely bloody love The Asylum’s movies, expertly straddling – as they do – the fault-line between failed cinematic experiment and comedic masterpiece. And Titanic II  (what a title, by the way) is no exception.

The story, for what it’s worth – and by jove it isn’t worth much – concerns the startling discovery that huge chunks of ice are falling into the ocean from the Arctic shelf, causing tsunamis to launch icebergs across the Atlantic (at least there aren’t any Sharknados). This shocking discovery is made by Captain Maine (Bruce Davison, the movie’s only well-known face and talented actor) of the US Coastguard; his assistant, and literally ONE scientist. The sequence where the heroic trio flee to the safety of their helicopter across a perilous icescape as it cracks and tears around them looks like it was rendered on a half-broken Amiga 500 circa 1987, either that or on Babbage’s Difference Engine.

During their escape the poor scientist makes the trio a duo by plummeting to his death down a newly-opened CG chasm, and, honestly, Cliffhanger it ‘aint: it’s more like a death-scene from CITV’s Knightmare. You can almost hear Treaguard remark witheringly: ‘Ooooh, nasty’. It’s absolutely bloody hilarious, as all good deaths shouldn’t be in an ostensibly serious edge-of-your-seat disaster thriller. Now, as something of a handy psycho-barometer: if you find yourself laughing at the deaths in The Poseidon Adventure you’re probably a psychopath; if you don’t find yourself chuckling at the deaths in Titanic II then you’re probably a neolithic caveman who’s never seen a movie before. Even my 7-year-old lost his shit laughing at the incongruity of most of them.

Now, imagine what Titanic 2 would look like in real life: how obscenely grand and lavish its construction, its launch undoubtedly broadcast to the entire globe, and attended by hundreds of thousands of revellers and enthusiasts, including all of the most famous celebrities of the day. Now imagine it on a budget of fifty pence. Can you picture it? Are there about 25 people at the launch, all of whom are dressed like they were on their way to the Spar for a loaf of bread and some Freddos when someone forced them onboard a cruise-ship at gunpoint? Does the air around them ring out with the same identical chorus of royalty-free whooping and cheering sound effects, played endlessly over and over, again and again, like some torture-loop fresh from Guantanamo Bay? Does the ship’s captain look like the result of ordering Tom Green from Wish? And is he clearly wearing a uniform that’s at least 3 sizes too big for him to the point where he’s got a visible wizard’s sleeve? Is there equipment on the bridge next to him that looks like a vending machine that’s had things selotaped over it? My friend, then you’re clearly aboard The Asylum’s cut-price version of Titanic II.

Near the beginning of the movie we’re introduced to Amy Maine, a nurse aboard the doomed cruise-liner, and daughter of the coastguard Captain we met earlier. We’re also introduced to Dick Van Dyke’s actual grandson, Shane van Dyke, who swaggers onto the ship playing Titanic 2’s rich financier, Ian.

We’re supposed to believe old Ian is some sort of irresistible ladies’ man and millionaire playboy, despite the fact that he looks like a minor henchman from an 1980s action movie after a rough divorce, and his line delivery drips with all the charm and dynamism of Jeffrey Dahmer after demolishing an ounce of skunk. Of the four haggard, scantily-clad MILFs that form Van Dyke’s entourage, and hang on him like the reek from a recent fry-up, it later becomes evident that one of them is inexplicably in charge of passenger liaison and disaster control.

“Hey, what will we do if this bad boy starts sinking? Do we have someone in charge of calming people down and getting them to the lifeboats?”

“No, we didn’t officially fill that role, but I’m sure if the worst happens we’ll be able to count on one of the many chicks who fucks the guy who owns the boat. Christ, you worry too much.”

Van Dyke and Amy used to be an item, but as this segment of dialogue makes painfully clear, they were too badly written to survive as a couple:

“Your dad punched me in the mouth.”

“Can you blame him? You were joyriding in his boat at two in the morning.”

“Still a daddy’s girl I see?”

“Look who’s talking.”

The very same Van Dyke is responsible for the movie’s script and direction, so we know that the apple falls very far from the tree in this family – so far from the tree that it was probably launched by a tsunami.

As disaster inevitably strikes, and the ship is subjected to whooshes and impacts and explosions (which is not nearly as exciting on screen as this sentence fragment would suggest) we’re treated to a scream-track of a Faye Wray-style damsel losing her shit in an endless loop of terror, even when all we can see are men. People randomly trip and flail to their feet, because Van Dyke must’ve told them that that’s how people behave in a stampede, even though there are only ever about 5 extras on screen at any one time. I don’t know what the minimum requirement is for a stampede, but it’s probably more than five.

The movie is a beautiful hotch-potch of inanity and hilarity, something that’s especially evident when Amy and van Dyke embark on their perilous below-decks mission to save Amy’s nurse friend who’s been crushed beneath a vending machine, only for her to be killed by a door. There’s a daring dash up a ladder that’s very clearly been filmed at ground-level, with the actors crawling horizontally along the floor like Gollum. There’s the absolute bat-shit insanity of Captain Maine’s survival advice to his daughter, which I paraphrase here: “You won’t survive in a lifeboat. You need to get to the diving facility that’s on that ship for some daft fucking reason, put on some diving equipment and wait inside the sinking ship for the next tsunami and iceberg to hit. That’s the key to living through this!”

Then there’s the diving facility itself, which we know is a diving facility because there’s a paper A4 poster that says ‘TITANIC 2 DIVING FACILITY’ hanging on the wall next to a high-school gym locker.

The movie’s ending is bleaker even than the movie version of Stephen King’s The Mist, but nevertheless had me laughing all the way through the end credits. After dodging certain death with van Dyke, Amy finds herself in a rescue craft with van Dyke, desperately trying to resuscitate him as her father and his assistant look on with cold detachment.

Normally, there’s an unofficial rule of thumb in movies that the longer a character spends trying to bring another, dying character back from the brink, the greater the chance that the dying character is going to survive. Amy spends almost two and a half minutes – not a long time in the grand scheme of things, but a very long time on-screen – pressing down on van Dyke’s chest and giving him mouth-to-mouth, doing the same thing again and again, with no change in direction, urgency, tempo, camera angles or music. She just plods on and on with it for what feels like forever…

And then he dies…

And the end credits roll. And without another word being said, THAT’S THE FUCKING MOVIE.

I really hope they make a Titanic III.

*You can currently stream Titanic II on Amazon Prime*

Run-time: Mercifully short

Movie Review – Greenland

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When I first watched the trailer for Amazon’s new, end-of-the-world disaster-flick Greenland I assumed it was a series, because so much action was crammed into those two electric minutes, spread over such a multitude of locations, that my unconscious brain must have doubted that two hours or less could do it proper justice. Unbeknownst to me, I was right about that.

Gerard Butler is John Garrity, a shit-the-bed husband desperately trying to get back into his wife’s good graces and keep his little, semi-nuclear family together. Unfortunately for him, just when things are looking good, a comet decides to pay a visit to earth. It quickly becomes apparent that the government’s official line about the fragments harmlessly burning up on entry are about as water-tight as the assurances he made to his wife about never cheating on her. In a couple of days’ time mankind faces an extinction-level event, a headline act that will be ably supported by various city-pulverising practice strikes.

John receives a presidential alert on his phone informing him that he, his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and diabetic son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) have been selected for extraction to a place of safety: a skills lottery the aim of which is to ensure that what’s left of mankind has the knowledge and resources to rebuild some semblance of civilisation in the wake of the disaster. As John inexplicably proceeds to enjoy a suburban get-together in the wake of this ominous message, the alert arrives again, this time appearing on his synched TV-screen for all his guests and neighbours to see. None of them have received an alert.

This is a delicious predicament in which to place our heroes. Will their hitherto mild-mannered neighbours run the scale from panicked to hostile to murderous? Will they try to block their escape, steal their place? Will John have to hurt or kill one of his former friends? The conflict is burned through in moments. It’s a pattern that’s repeated throughout the movie. This rise-and-burn of the movie’s plot points simultaneously encapsulates both the best and the worst thing about Greenland: namely that the dizzying array of moral quandaries and perilous scenarios thrown at the audience keep the film zooming along at a fast, furious and exciting pace, but the lack of time in which to explore and unpack the more interesting questions raised by these predicaments leaves the film occasionally feeling shallow. Again, a series format would have allowed for this, but maybe I’m just more of a TV guy.

The connective tissue that speeds these finger-click-fast scenarios along is made up of coincidences, cliché, and plot-holes so big you could steer a comet through them. Some of them you can excuse as being the inevitable consequence of a world held in panic’s grip, as with the couple who – after the Garrity family becomes separated thanks to a rather heartless government policy – steal Allison’s wrist-band and abduct Nathan, thinking they can gain access to an evacuation flight in the Garritys’ stead. Yes, it’s preposterous that the couple would believe their plan had a chance of succeeding, but people in the real world do much more blindingly dumb, desperate and delusional things under much less strenuous and apocalyptic conditions, so the plot-point doesn’t seem all that jarring. Much less forgivable is Allison managing to find Nathan again with relative ease, ditto with family’s separate journeys back to Allison’s father’s house. Everyone John meets in the chaos-stricken city in which he’s trapped is conveniently heading in almost precisely the direction he needs to go.

The family’s ultimate destination is Greenland, the location of the US government’s gargantuan fall-out shelters (I wonder if the denizens of Greenland had any say in the matter). John first learns about the location of these shelters from a kindly young man he shares a truck with on his way north; this man also tells him about alternative means of reaching Greenland by way of a civilian airfield in southern Canada. Greenland, then, is one of those rare movies that gives away the ending in its title. Not quite as egregious an offence as The Sixth Sense being called Bruce Willis is a Ghost, instead lying somewhere in severity between Jaws being called They Eventually Manage to Kill the Shark, and 10 Cloverfield Lane being called John Goodman is Right.

The hardest plot-hole to swallow is that the military, who have been mercilessly enforcing both a strict survivor quota and a screening program to keep out the chronically ill, would welcome a series of civilian flights arriving from Greenland with open arms, and not just instantly shoot them out of the sky.

Egregious implausibilities notwithstanding, listening to your inner-cynic and –critic simply isn’t the way to enjoy this movie.  Who in their right mind would select a disaster movie starring Gerard Butler, and then think to themselves, ‘I’m really looking forward to all of the realism and nuance in this one.’ The movie is a blockbuster, albeit one with a more modest budget than most, and seeks not to tinkle the intellect, but to thrill with spectacle, and entertain with edge-of-the-seat peril, providing just enough emotional heart and human stakes to make you care about the characters. Greenland ,then, meets its aims. Who cares if it’s occasionally schmaltzy or sometimes runs roughshod over reality? The performances are believable, the direction is tight and effective. It makes you feel panic, empathy, dread, hope, horror and happiness, and feel them big, sometimes in one short scene. No blockbuster in recent memory has made me involuntarily verbalise my feelings, in some cases incredibly loudly, quite as much as this one.

It’s also refreshing to find a modern movie that isn’t crushingly nihilistic (beyond the core premise of global annihilation itself, of course); bad people do bad things in times of duress, as do good people, and they certainly do here, but Greenland also showcases its fair share of quietly noble people content to go gently into that good night, because, after all, kindness and self-sacrifice is as much a marker of humanity as savage self-interest.

Though the ending is two-parts bleak to one-part hopeful, at least it doesn’t leave you facing the grim inevitability of a husband and wife having to fuck their own kids and grandkids in order to perpetuate the human race, like some other recent, extinction-themed movies we could mention. Looking at you, The Midnight Sky, you filthy animal.

Greenland is a good film – though I still think it would have made a genuinely great Limited Series. Perhaps it still will one day.

THREE AND A HALF STARS

Horrible Horrors – “Curse of the Scarecrow”

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A vengeful scarecrow returns to life once every twenty years to kill anyone who happens to be in very, very close proximity to it. Never before has a horror movie antagonist been so fucking lazy.

Twenty years ago, June (Kate Lister) witnessed her parents being murdered in their family home. She’s still receiving therapy for it, from Karen (Cassandra French), the most condescending and arsey therapist ever to pick up a notepad and dispense chill pills. Karen’s therapeutic techniques appear to consist of pulling faces at June, implying that she’s a mental case, and drinking all of her wine. Not a bad gig if you can get it.

June no longer believes that a scarecrow killed her parents, reasoning that the trauma of what she witnessed created a false narrative designed to insulate her from the idea that a real, flesh-and-blood person could have done something so heinous. Karen senses that June is almost completely recovered, so comes up with a great idea: “Hey, why don’t you go back to your family home in time for the twentieth anniversary of your parents’ brutal murder? Tell you what, I’ll come with you. Hey, your brother lives there, doesn’t he? … He’ll have wine, right?”

Karen the therapist: the Karen-est of all Karens

That’s not the real dialogue, which is somehow actually worse than anything I could have come up with in jest. This is the sort of movie where everyone talks in exposition.

“Is that the coffee cup that holds enormous emotional resonance for you?”

“Yeah, it’s the cup I was drinking out of when my parents were murdered.”

“Wasn’t that 20 years ago?”

“Yes, to the day.”

“It’s funny I should be bringing all of this up given that we’ve been friends since we were kids.”

“That’s okay, Alice Jones of Number 35 Acacia Avenue, whom I met at the roller-skating rink on a windy Thursday in October when we were both seven.”

The doomed June. Kate Lister is actually a decent actress, doing her best with abysmal material.

The director, Louisa Warren (who also has a starring role as one of June’s friends), doesn’t like to innovate or interrogate a sequence, preferring instead – during indoor scenes, at least – to leave the camera static and cut between whomever is talking. This gives the movie the feel of a corporate training video, which I suppose is horrifying enough in its own right. It’s obvious, though, from the handful of aerial shots peppered throughout the movie that she’s got a mate with a helicopter.

By the time June and co. roll into town, June’s brother is already dead, killed by the scarecrow whose macabre legend with which he was so obsessed. Why he turned his back on the creature long enough for it to kill him when he believed wholeheartedly in its supernatural powers is anyone’s guess, but this decision is just one of many dumb decisions that come to taint the entire movie, decisions made by the characters, the production ‘team’ and the director.

Chanel (Tiffany-Ellen Robinson), a soon-to-be-doomed piece of scarecrow-fodder, chats with the duo of wine-drinking misery-hunters by the side of the road, and warns them not to go back to that farmhouse: June’s farmhouse. On a more affluent production the farmhouse would probably have looked suitably run-down, rustic and terrifying, but here it looks very expensive, with a brightly-lit, tastefully decorated interior. “Ooooh, I wouldn’t go prowling around that modern-looking, very spacious and immaculately kept building in a desirably affluent rural area if I were you! You’re asking for trouble, so you are!” Of course, many horror stories – I’m particularly thinking of MR James’ stories – have successfully subverted the safety of daytime to produce some of the most spine-tingling, sun-lit scares of the genre, but that isn’t the route this movie goes down. It more seems to be a case of, “This is my/my mother’s/my friend’s house. Fuck it, this’ll do.”

It’s here that I start to feel a little guilty for doing a hatchet job on the movie. This is a passion project that’s been conceived, executed and distributed on a tight budget, with only a small team behind and in-front of the camera. Why am I being such a dick about this? Well, there’s a simple answer to that:

I am a dick.

My favourite parts of the movie are, without question, Chanel’s death scene and Karen’s hypno-therapy session. In the former, Chanel is chased across a field by the scarecrow after it kills her boyfriend post-coitus (he was having sex with Chanel, obviously, not being pumped by the scarecrow), when she climbs over a small fence and cuts her knee. She proceeds to rock and writhe on the ground like a landmine victim. As the scarecrow closes in on her she holds a hysterical cry-face for literally twenty-five seconds, during which I laughed like a jolly, bearded lumberjack. Robinson’s performance was so unrestrained it made Moira Rose look like John Wick.

Karen shines again in the hypnosis scene, where she carries the tone of the woman in the TV studio on a treasure-hunt style TV game-show, whose job it is to berate the contestant for being so shite. Again I laughed. A lot. That my favourite parts of this horror movie are the two most unintentionally hilarious probably signals that the project has fallen rather short of its aim. Most of the dialogue in this movie feels ad-libbed – very badly, I may add – and is characterised by the kind of infuriating repetition your parents fall prey to in their twilight years.

And the scarecrow himself? It’s hard to work up a cold sweat of dread about a baddie whose presence is signalled by the sound of a bell on a little girl’s bike. Plus, he’s about as scary as a lumpy, middle-aged man crammed into a bargain-bin scarecrow costume, which is exactly what he is. I again defy you not to laugh when he finishes off a victim by shoving straw into her mouth.

The most terrifying thing about this movie comes in the final few seconds, where things are clearly being set up for a sequel. People of the UK, I implore you: hide, ideally burn, all of the scarecrow costumes. If you have a helicopter, do NOT lend it to the director. Let’s pray this particular cursed scarecrow never makes a comeback. Not in twenty years. Not in a hundred years.

Still, if you’re looking for a few daft laughs as you’re working your way through a batch of herbal, I suppose you could do worse than Sleepers Creepers here.

Year: 2018

Run-time: 84 mins

Studio: Proportion Productions

Director: Louisa Warren

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit: Good Bad Shit (sub-category: Funny Bad Shit)

Horrible Horrors – “Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill”

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Like westerns? Like zombie movies? Like slashers? Well, you’re going to absolutely hate this. Even if you like zombie-western-slashers you’ll probably hate this.

It’s like a succession of shlock-horror vignettes alternating with mini music-videos, with the only real consistency in the movie being the panto-esque acting and excruciating (though occasionally unintentionally hilarious) dialogue.

The movie begins in the desert with a drug dealer being pursued in a low octane car chase by a police woman, who of course breaks off pursuit when the dealer hurls a mound of coke from his car and it bursts all over her windscreen.  A little tip for you killers out there: this also works with murder weapons. Just throw your bloody knife or smoking gun at the pursuing law enforcement vehicle and, BINGO, you’ve got away with it. Most of the movie’s landscapes are bleached, much like the atmospheric Mexican vistas in the movie Traffic, while the movie itself is about as entertaining as being stuck in actual traffic.

The dealer’s car breaks down and he finds himself at Sunset Valley, a mysterious ghost town that, unfortunately for Mr No-Blow Escobar, is filled to the gunnels with zombies, who waste no time in, well, wasting him. Their leader is the vengeful Bloody Bill, a Confederate soldier consumed with eternal wrath following his long-ago execution.

A little later, a mini-bus containing a debate team is hijacked by Earl, the earlier drug dealer’s pissed-off partner. They, too, end up in Sunset Valley, and proceed to be picked off by the undead. Beyond the principals’ broad character types – hick; screaming beauty; bad-ass babe; mouthy smart arse; preachy do-gooder; angry black drug dealer – there isn’t much to commend them as actual people that you might bring yourself to give a single, solitary shit about: Earl, the dealer, shouts about drugs, money and killing people; and the debate team spend a fair amount of time actually debating things, which doesn’t make for a particularly arresting zombie-slasher flick.

‘So you’re saying the beliefs of the world’s three major religions are invalid?’ asks one of the unfortunates, seeming genuinely upset.

‘No, I’m saying they’re unsubstantiated. There’s a difference.’

The writers obviously thought to themselves: ‘Well, we’ve made these guys debate champions. We’d better have them randomly debate things every once in a while.’ I guess we can be thankful that they weren’t written as champion Morris Dancers, although at least that would’ve been funny.

The not-quite-yet-fully-zombified dealer from the start of the movie shows up at one point, screaming at the doomed congregation: ‘Bloody Bill! He’ll find you!’ Of course he’ll find you, I thought to myself. The town’s only got about seven buildings in it. It wouldn’t exactly take a hide-and-seek champion.

It’s clear that the director, Byron Werner, wants to show off the toolkit of techniques he learned in film school – bleaching, colour filters, jerky cuts – without ever marrying them to mood or effect. The zombies appearances are mostly scored to goth rock, which really helps capture that old timey, Civil War feel. I should have felt dread at the zombies’ arrival, not get the sense that my six-year-old son had just accidentally flicked the channel to a 24-hour station specialising in German heavy-metal music. In fairness, Werner shows himself to be a very capable and inventive cinematographer, and adept at crafting effective sequences, he just doesn’t appear to care much about threading it all together to achieve consistency of tone or vision. It wasn’t much of a surprise to discover that Byron Werner has indeed gone on to enjoy a lucrative career directing the music videos of some very well known artists. So, in a way, this movie was his audition reel. And good luck to the guy. He’s obviously got talent.

Not so the editor or the people in charge of continuity. Not only do we see a two-lane track suddenly become a one-track lane during a crucial (almost) collision, but at one point Earl is caught mouthing the line of one of the other characters as they’re speaking it (that’s probably my favourite bit of the movie).

Earl’s death is also my favourite, for reasons both good and bad. Good, because he goes to his reasonably noble death with a face-full of crack daubed on his face like war-paint, and live grenades in his clutches. And bad, because the special effects budget couldn’t supply Earl with a worthy, flashy enough send-off. We should’ve seen a slow-mo blow-out, as a fireball smashed through the building and engulfed the first floor, sending fiery debris and shards of glass shooting after the screaming women. What we saw was, em, sort of close to that: a wee puff of black smoke slowly drifting out of a window, like a freshly-released genie just couldn’t be arsed making a grand entrance.

Bloody Bill himself doesn’t look too bad, as far as straight-to-video villains go. He’s like a low-budget Leatherface, or the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers, but without much of the creepiness, or indeed jeeperiness. I won’t tell you how the film’s lone survivor manages to bring down Bloody Bill. Not because I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s just that I don’t really care enough to tell you.

Some of the gore is commendable, some of the film’s sequences undeniably are well shot, and there are a few unmeant but magical laughs, but even if you’re a connoisseur of shit movies like me you might still want to give this one a miss.

Year: 2004

Run-time: 88 Minutes

Studio: The Asylum

Director: Byron Werner

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit? Bad Bad Shit.

Movie Review – Joker

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Joker is such a gritty and twisted re-imagining of the Batman mythos that the only way Batman could exist in this new world would be as a fascist enforcer in the mould of Judge Dredd, looking to preserve the status quo, and perhaps thump down on the sub-human scum who repaid his father’s benevolence with death and chaos.

Back in the days when Batman first scowled through the comic panes at a generation of youths whose fathers and brothers and uncles and childhood friends were about to go to war, society still clung to its belief in the quintessential goodness of the patrician class and its unassailable right to rule, in all its patriarchal glory.

The masses, particularly the American masses, believed that wealth was an emblem and consequence of hard-work, success and moral probity (many still do). The more money you had, the better you were. These days the left-leaning zeitgeist favours the idea that the ruling elite is inherently corrupt, a view that’s perhaps closer to the truth of human nature than the one that was sold to the war generations.

The fortunes amassed by billionaires like Thomas Wayne are increasingly seen as fortunes stolen from the common man and woman, or at least made upon their breaking and broken backs. The billionaires of the 2000s have been re-framed as walking black holes of greed; sucking out souls, opportunity, money and autonomy from states and whole nations, in the process helping to create the very conditions of inequality, oppression and violence that figures like Batman spend their nights wading through and fighting against.

In this movie, the good guys aren’t necessarily good, and the bad guy’s aren’t necessarily bad. Hence the Joker isn’t some unknowable force of murderous mayhem like Heath Ledger’s, nor a gangster whose evils have been amplified by a vat of toxic ooze like Jack Nicholson’s, but a very real product of his domestic and social environment. This Joker is the most human incarnation of the infamous villain, and all the more terrifying for it.

The intensity of Phoenix’s performance – how he seems to inhabit the very bones of Arthur Fleck; how his face no longer seems his own – makes watching Joker a heavy, visceral, fascinating, and often extremely uncomfortable experience. It’s a staggeringly brilliant evocation of mental illness; a disturbingly detailed and earnest exploration of frailty and rage. Arthur’s trademark laugh, triggered at times of stress and trauma, is chilling to the point of being blood-curdling. Phoenix makes you believe in, and feel for, Arthur Fleck, even when he’s shooting men in the back or bludgeoning the head of a betrayer off a door-jamb. Even at the very apex of his madness, we feel for him.  He’s vulnerable. He’s the underdog. He’s capable of great kindness.

Arthur Fleck’s a good boy. He loves his mother. He loves chat-show host Murray Franklin. He wants to be Murray Franklin; he wants to be respected by him; he wants Murray to be his father. Arthur wants to make people laugh. He wants to be noticed. He wants to be famous. He longs to be a somebody. He wants to be loved.

But piece by piece, slowly but surely, Arthur’s innocence and certainty – his very reality – is stripped from him by the society and institutions around him, as everything and everyone that ever meant anything to him betrays or fails him. Each time a layer of his vulnerable psyche is pulled away it’s replaced by anger and madness until finally, tragically – and, of course, inevitably – all that’s left of Arthur is the raw, open wound of Joker – a name bestowed upon him by his fallen hero, Murray Franklin.

Heath Ledger’s Joker was closer to a trickster God from Norse legend than a living, breathing human being; a creature with no history, or connections: an agent of pure chaos. But his and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker share, if nothing else, a multiplicity of possible origin stories. Where Ledger’s ever-shifting tales about his disfigurement, his very Jokerness, are borne of lies and delusion, Phoenix’s Joker is composed of a roulette wheel of possible root-causes:  who and what made him?

Was it his mad mother? Was it his own sprawling mental illness? Was it ideological cuts in funding to mental welfare organisations? Was it the harsh realities of a life lived in a pervasive, dog-eat-dog capitalist society? Was it rising inequality between the very richest and the very poorest? Was it our narcissistic cult of celebrity? The emotional toll of being rejected and humiliated by two father figures (Wayne and Franklin)? The broth of resentment, cruelty and hatred bubbling away on the streets?

The rioting, discontented masses of Gotham come to revere Fleck/Joker as the emblem of their violent movement – the hero of the underclass – but the movie is careful not to make that same mistake. Even when Fleck/Joker delivers a speech live on camera, admitting to murder and raging at society, moments before executing Murray Franklin (De Niro’s casting as talk-show host Murray Franklin is a nod both to Taxi Driver, with which Joker shares not only De Niro, but much of its tone and aesthetic, and King of Comedy, in which De Niro plays a crazed narcissist and wannabe comic who holds a talk-show host hostage in order to secure his big TV break) he doesn’t exhibit the confident, steely oratory of a rebel-in-chief. His words are the garbled, urgent outpourings of a man whose brain is electric with grief and madness; a man who only moments ago planned to turn the gun on himself instead of on Murray Franklin.

If you aren’t rooting for and empathising with Arthur Fleck in the film’s first half, then you’ve got no heart; but if you’re still rooting and cheering for Fleck once he’s jettisoned the last of his fragility and humanity to fully become Joker, then you’ve probably missed the point somewhere along the line.

‘Joker’ blends past and the present, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, infecting us with the uneasy sense of a world, or worlds, constantly shifting beneath our feet: we’re us, we’re Fleck; it’s Gotham, it’s New York; it’s present-day, it’s the 1970s; people are real, people are illusions; Arthur Fleck is a good boy, Joker is a bad boy. The crowds that tear Gotham’s streets apart are products of the hubris and lies of capitalist demagogues like Trump, but their behaviour more closely allies them with the supporters of people like Trump. A bunch of angry clowns. What is truth, what is lie, who must live, who must die?

As Fleck travels through the flaming streets of Gotham in the back of a squad car, he looks like a man who finally gets the joke. The mayhem outside matches the mayhem inside his head. He doesn’t have to fit in anymore, because the world has changed to fit him. Moments later a stolen ambulance thumps into the squad car. Arthur Fleck is pulled from a glass-fringed aperture in the wreck of that rammed and wrecked squad-car. He’s laid on his back on the bonnet, helpless, bloodied and confused. The figure who soon takes his first steps upon the bonnet of that squad car, to riotous bays and cheers, is Joker. Arthur Fleck is dead, all vestiges of mercy and hesitation gone from his flickering mind. He is reborn. While Arthur might have let a friend who showed him kindness walk away from a blood-bath, Joker has no such instincts, as evidenced by the bloody footprints peppering the floors of Arkham Asylum at the close of the movie.

We begin and end the movie in a psychiatric facility. Given how unreliable the protagonist is – how many times we’re fooled by his false perceptions – how much of what we see in the movie is actually real? Is the Joker real… or is he fake news? Are we nothing more than a symptom of Arthur Fleck’s madness? The observers he’s always craved…

“You get what you fucking deserve…” utters the Joker. It’s a line that’s swiftly adopted by the rioters, becoming their mantra and mission statement. It could also be the movie’s; the nihilistic spine that runs throughout.

Did Arthur Fleck deserve what he got: a childhood of poverty, abuse and madness? Did Murray Franklin get what he deserved? Did the Waynes? Did those guys on the subway? Did Gotham?

Batman will one day be the hero that Gotham deserves, but Joker is the villain that it fucking deserves right now.

And it’s the movie we need.

VERDICT: 5 STARS

Movie Review – Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love

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Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love (2019, Gravitas Pictures)

Released Blu-Ray/VoD: November 12th

Director: Tyler Cole

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love follows Damian Booster (Aaron Burt), a popular LA podcaster and perennial playboy, as he wrestles with his true feelings in the wake of an ultimatum from his non-Bechdel-test-passing girlfriend, Danielle (Emily Pearse): Come meet my mother for brunch in a few days to demonstrate your commitment to commitment, she tells him, or kiss our conjoined, couple-shaped ass goodbye.

One man’s tragedy is another man’s comedy, after all; and one man’s love story is another man’s horror. So why not blend them all together? Damian spends the duration of the movie dealing with a mounting crisis of mind and soul, his fear of falling in love manifesting itself through a succession of scary movie tropes.

Accompanying Damian into this hinterland of horror, hopelessness, har-de-hars and horniness is his visiting friend Alan (David Lengel, who resembles a sort-of elongated David Schwimmer) and a nightmarish assortment of neighbours and nutty, night-time denizens of the town.

First-time film-makers Tyler Cole (the movie’s director and co-producer) and Aaron Burt (the movie’s writer, co-producer and star) also know a little something about suffering for love, having gone through extraordinary struggles to commit their vision to the screen. Between them they’ve sacrificed jobs, homes, savings and sanity. Tyler even sacrificed bodily autonomy by following through on a promise to have his wrist tattooed with the logo of a hire company if they agreed to lend him audio-visual equipment for the movie.

So was the struggle worth it? Will Tyler smile wistfully each time he looks down at his branded wrist, or will he find himself wishing that his inked limb could join the discarded hands of Luke Skywalker and Ash Williams in some fleshy, rotten pile or pit somewhere?

Mercifully, Tyler’s self-vandalism wasn’t in vain. There’s much to enjoy in Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love: it’s fun, inventive, ambitious, creepy, consistently surprising, rarely dull (with the possible exception of a clunky scene in which Damien invites Alan to be a guest on his absolutely abysmal podcast) and occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny. Burt is a down-to-earth lead; a great straight-man who gives generously to his fellow performers, both on the page and on the screen. With his help, and Cole’s, the cast brings a naturalistic, quasi-improvised feel to the movie that really fits its style.

The dialogue can occasionally feel clunky, but when it works, it works brilliantly, especially in those segments when the movie activates the ‘com’ portion of the horr-rom-com triangle. Its greatest assets in the laughter stakes are Nancy (Carly Reeves), a nutty, stream-of-consciousness-spouting wild child from the neighbourhood, and Travis (Darren Keefe Reiher), Aaron’s boozing, belligerent next-door neighbour. Nancy and Travis may be broad characters, bordering on caricature, but they’re so well played, and outrageously funny, that you won’t care a jot.

Burt and Cole have achieved so much in this movie with such limited resources. Visually, some of its finer flourishes wouldn’t look out of place in a low-budget, studio-funded project. Never-the-less, while the film has lofty ambitions, and an undeniably unique and fascinating conceit, it never quite manages to live up to its full potential.

Experimentation with form and content in cinema is to be lauded. Sometimes the weirdest of gambles can push the boundaries of what’s possible, or even re-invent cinema itself. But melding such a disparate trinity of genres into a coherent, meaningful shape is a tall order. Horror and comedy make great bedfellows, as do romance and comedy: it’s the threesome that’s the tricky part.

Ultimately, Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love never quite coalesces into something that fully justifies its Frankensteinian approach to film-making. Instead, we get a very entertaining, mutant mish-mash of The Shining, The Hangover, Swingers and every generic slasher and romance flick of the 80s; well-crafted vignettes that work well in isolation, but rest uneasily when sitting next to each other.

The responsibility for the movie’s structural problems lies more with the composer than the conductor. After all, the success or failure of the movie’s central, genre-busting conceit rests solely upon the shoulders of Damien’s character, and, alas, he hasn’t quite the weight or the heft to carry the burden. He feels more like a cipher than a real guy; a blank-faced agent of plot. As a consequence his breakdown, and subsequent breakthrough, feels hollow and unearned.

It perhaps would’ve served the story better had Damien’s sense of horror been wedded to some disturbing pattern from his or his family’s past, or had sprung from some long-buried guilt or shame. As it stands Damien is nothing more than a mildly narcissistic man-child who’s reluctant to grow up and sheath his shaft, like most of LA’s aspiring entertainers, and, I’d wager, a significant portion of the planet’s male population. His journey, like him, is shallow, whatever he appears to have learned about love by the end of the movie.

Tyler Cole makes up for the short-fall in tone and theme by really throwing himself into his role as director, clearly relishing the opportunity here to flex his creative muscles. He must’ve felt like an actor whose agent had secured him every single role in a movie, the chance to run free and do, and be, everything at once.

As Cole deftly jiggles, juggles and muddles the aesthetics of three distinct genres, it’s hard not to see the finished movie as an extended demo reel for his extensive talents. This could well be Tyler Cole’s ‘Scott Derrickson’ moment (a director whose path led him from Hellraiser: Inferno to Doctor Strange).

Cole’s use of light, and lighting, is particularly strong – bathing the dingy rooms and corridors of Aaron’s apartment complex in the red and blue hues of his shifting moods – as is his understanding of how to build and release tension, all of which serves the eerier moments well. He also knows how to get under your skin with a good jump-scare.

It’s just a pity that the movie makes you feel terror more effectively than it does relief and happiness for the protagonist’s plight.

Who knows? Maybe that’s an apt description for love in the real world, too.

THE VERDICT

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love might not inspire you to tattoo yourself with its logo, but you won’t come away feeling short-changed.

It begs repeating that this is a first-time movie whose creators should be celebrated for their tenacity and dedication; whose vision and ambition should be applauded. Just because I judge it to have failed in some of its loftier aims, doesn’t mean that I consider it a failure. Far from it. It’s raw. Brave. Bold. Original. Haunting in places, hysterical in others.

It’s clear that Burt and Cole are both going places. Don’t be frightened to join them on the first leg of their journey.

You might very well end up falling in love with their work.

Watch the trailer here