Review: Severance

Anybody expecting this year's THE DESCENT will be severely disappointed. A Brit-horror with "The Office"-style humour, it has enough good moments to make it worth one viewing, but enough flaws to keep it down in the basement of the recent flood of Deliverance/TXCM-style torture films. Early signs are encouraging that the film will defy genre expectations (a girl with a spider crawling up her back, there is a great scene with a man-trap) but it ends up playing it safe and sticking with the tried and tested.

Take the "noble" black character: he does nothing of significance in the entire film, but is poertrayed as an all-round good egg until he "bravely" dies defending the white girl. This now-standard horror cliche is not much more than Uncle Tom for the 2000s. Then we have the standard gratuitous american character in order to sell the film to the yanks. Can't have a British film without the token american girl stuck in there. To add insult, she is the one who takes up the standard "kick-ass babe" persona that every horror film is required to have by law. How played out is that role? Sure, THE DESCENT had it too, but at least it mixed it up by having *two* of them, both at each other's throats.

Then there's the hero: a standard "lad" into sex and drugs with a mockney accent, designed as a more blokeish version of Tim from The Office. I can't stand characters like that, or anything that targets that market segment (which is why i don't drink Coke Zero). This guy is also supposed to be comic relief, trouble is nothing he does or says is funny. There is a long, tedious subplot where he gets high on magic mushrooms that is not only completely irrelevant to the plot, it completely lacks any humour.

There's not much of interest after the man-trap sequence: Tim Mcinerny as the cowardly team leader steps on a land mine and what he does is so immediately predictable that you expect the film to pull a swerve, but it doesnt. It plays out exactly as you would expect. There isn't even a twist ending. Finally, the film tries to suggest there is more than meets the eye with its early playing up of connections with the War on Islam, but it turns out to be a complete red herring that goes nowhere. Actually the more i think about the film, the less i like it.
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Review: Sars Wars

Sheer unadulterated genius. SARS WARS is a gut-wrenchingly funny, utterly deranged, deliriously original, absurdist zom-com from Thailand.

A team of thugs kidnap pretty schoolgirl Liu and hold her hostage in an apartment block. Little do they know, a zombie outbreak is taking place in the very same apartment, a giant snake is on the loose, and the government have set a timer to blow up the building to contain the outbreak. Think that sounds crazy? We haven't met the good guys yet: Khun Khrabii, a stoic hero sent to rescue Liu, his master Thep, a balding lecher with a battery-powered light saber, and sexy scientist Dr. Diana, creator of an antiviral shot that has a 25 in 26 chance of accidentally making the patient's head explode. And then there's the bad guys...

Director Taweewat Wantha and his team of writers have crafted something akin to the fevered imagination of Peter Jackson's BRAINDEAD, combined with the wild "mo-lei-tau" surreal/spoof humour of Hong Kong's Stephen Chow. The actual zombie and horror-themed content is surpisingly well realised, with excellent make-up effects, some great CGI sequences, and a real sense of tension; but its in the ridiculous send-ups of everything from Japanimation to John Woo to Star Wars to The Crying Game that the movie really takes off.

Thoroughly self-aware, characters constantly make references to the film's attempts to "make money, not win awards": a little unfair, because there is far more craft and ability on view in this film than in a hundred Hollywood blockbusters put together. Certainly none of the recent crop of zombie films pouring out of Hollywood come close. Even Stephen Chow, the acknowledged king of this style of comedy, should feel threatened: this is a better film than KUNG FU HUSTLE, and is possibly even better than SHAOLIN SOCCER too.

Review: Born To Fight

Where ONG-BAK is a traditional martial arts film that strings a series of muay-thai fights and Jackie Chan-style chase scenes together with a simple plot, BORN TO FIGHT is an action film more akin to DIE HARD. That means plenty of John Woo-esquire gun battles and an incredibly high body count, with a sprinkling of brutal stunts. BORN TO FIGHT is not a sequel to ONG-BAK, its not "the next ONG-BAK", its simply a highly entertaining actioner that will keep fans of this director satisfied until TUM YUM GOONG is released.

The opening sequence, featuring people leaping between 2 moving trucks, is reminiscent of similar classic scenes from POLICE STORY. The story then switches gear, seemingly heading towards simple martial arts film territory (our hero is challenged by a local thug over the affections of a girl) before a hail of gunfire signals a massive change in direction.

The next portion of the film is a relentlessly brutal slaughter-fest, as the evil villains randomly gun down villagers without a second thought, to levels you would never see in a Hollywood film. Hans Gruber has nothing on these guys! Finally, after a few false starts and a rendition of the Thai national anthem, our plucky villagers rise up, although quite how they manage to slaughter so many villains in revenge despite being outnumbered, unarmed, and constantly being killed in the gunfire is never entirely clear.

What is clear is that the ridiculously gimmicky "gymnastics fights" are fun to watch, the ball-kicking guys who fire kettles and things at the heads of their enemies deserve a SHAOLIN SOCCER type film of their own, and there's nothing cuter than seeing a little kick-boxing girl kick the hell out of a baddie.

Our hero has a few moves of his own, but the film's focus is wider than ONG-BAK, concentrating on the efforts of a team rather than a lone individual, nevertheless he is the star of two wonderful gun battles shot in single takes without cuts: forget DOOM's first-person-shooter scene, this is the true visual embodiment of the modern shooter game, a breathtaking yet agonisingly short sequence inspired by similar sequences in John Woo's HARD BOILED and John Carpenter's THEY LIVE.

What BORN TO FIGHT lacks in coherence, it makes up for in energy. This is the modern equivalent of the kind of crazy rule-breaking action films Hong Kong could churn out so successfully in the 1980s. And its the perfect appetiser for TUM YUM GOONG to come.