Review: Fall

How’s this for a (literal) high concept: two young women drive out into the middle of nowhere to climb a two thousand feet tall disused television transmitter tower… and then can’t get back down. Safe to say those with a fear of heights might want to sit this one out.

After seeing her husband fall off a cliff, Becky (Grace Caroline) has spent the last year down the bottom of a bottle – but now her influencer bestie Shiloh (Virginia Gardner) has a great idea for her latest post (no, it's not "show more cleavage", though that does come into it) and she needs a partner who knows her way around insanely tall objects. Becky is skeptical, but also has literally nothing else to do and what better way to get her life back on track than by risking it for online status?

 

They drive out to the desert, they go up, and they don’t come down. For thrill-seeking movie-goers that’s all you really need to know (though here’s a hint at what comes next: vultures). This is relatively restrained as far as having people dangling off various edges goes; director and co-writer Scott Mann knows that when you're this far off the ground doing pretty much anything is extremely risky, and the "less is (usually) more" approach cranks the tension high while keeping things grounded (pun intended).

Much of the high-rise action is filmed from a distance that re-enforces both their isolation and just how little room they have to move; everything else just makes it very clear that it's a very long way down. Do they just sit quietly and wait, or do they have to climb up, down, and all over the tiny platform they're stuck on just to have any hope of staying alive? Let's just say they probably should have brought a bit more rope with them.

 

It’s not all about dangling off a very slender and very rickety tower though, as this also features a fair amount of on-ground backstory that makes this more than just an excuse to give everyone in the cinema a bad case of vertigo - though this is pure nightmare fodder for anyone who's ever been even the slightest bit concerned about falling victim to gravity.

 

Characters are fleshed out in ways that provide (a little) conflict while still keeping them plausible as friends, and as experienced climbers their various approaches to getting down largely make sense - or, to put it another way, they don't ignore the obvious solutions just because the movie needs them stuck, making them the kind of smart characters you want to see survive rather than dimwits you're just waiting to see die.

 

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: The Retaliators

 

Opening with a sequence so generic it seems like it must be a fake-out - and it is, though not in the way you're probably expecting - The Retailators moves from zombie levels of gore to hard-boiled crime and back again with the kind of ease that films with five times its budget can only envy. It's a surprisingly sensitive look at grief and loss; there's also a woodchipper, and we all know what that means. 

Single dad John Bishop (Michael Lombardi, from Rescue Me) is the kind of cool pastor who'd be embarrassing if he wasn't so earnest... and even then he's still pretty embarrassing, especially when he gets pushed around while buying a Christmas tree by Dante from Clerks. Time to give a sermon about forgiveness, which includes the somewhat ominous line "when man's law fails, God's law prevails".

 

Bishop gets the chance to practice what he preaches when his teen daughter Rebecca (Abbey Hafer) bumps into the Scariest Man Alive, aka Ram Kady (Joseph Gatt) at a service station. She's going to a party; he's a bikie gang member just back from a drug deal that involved him beating up and robbing a man in a wheelchair. But it's when the still alive (just) wheelchair man starts bumping in Kady's trunk - and she notices - that her grim fate is sealed.

The arrival of seemingly stalwart cop Jed (Marc Menchaca) puts a twist on Bishop's grief, when he reveals that not only does he share Bishop's pain, but that he's figured out a way to do something about it. Unfortunately, Jed's scheme - which is well-established, long running, and involves a cavern-like basement full of cannibal lunatics - only really works if the target of his vengeance won't be missed. And thanks to screwing up the drug deal, Kady has his brother and a whole lot of bikies out looking for him.

Directors Samuel Gonzalez Jr and Bridget Smith keep a tight grip on material that tonally moves around a lot: this is a film that features both a realistic look at heart-rending anguish and a lot of raving maniacs trapped in a dungeon. But it's this constant switching things up - on top of everything else, both Robert Knepper and Robert John Burke get show-stopping single scenes as seen-it-all bosses (ones a cop, the other's a crim) - that keeps this so engaging.

Much of this works as straightforward drama; this is a solid crime film before it turns into gonzo horror. People have competing agendas that put them in conflict, while their behaviour always makes sense in terms of who they are - nobody goes nuts simply because the plot requires them to (even the murderous Kady has his own logic). But it definitely doesn't hurt that this also racks up an extremely substantial body count in the third act as our youth pastor hero has to go into murder mode to stay alive.

The Retaliators eventually pays off the cheesy yet bloody opening without sacrificing the drama that led it to such a demented point. It's everything you could want in an exploitation flick: it's even set during Christmas so you've got no excuse not to watch it every single year.

 

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Orphan: First Kill

Orphan was one of the more gleefully demented horror films to make it to the big screen earlier this century, piling on a string of out-there-but-almost-logical twists that left audiences staggering out asking each other "what did we just watch?" It's the kind of experience that's almost impossible to replicate - but Orphan: First Kill has a few tricks of its own up its deceptively child-sized sleeve.

With the first film's twist well and truly out of the bag - that the seemingly pre-pubsecent and definitely deadly demon child Leena (Isabelle Fuhrman) is in fact a non-supernatural thirty year-old con artist with a side hustle in murder - this prequel begins with Leena seemingly safely locked away in an Eastern European asylum where everyone is as jumpy as hell and rightly so.

Before long she's escaped in ruthless fashion, and promptly decides it's time to flee the country. Her scheme is simple: adopt the identity of a missing US child and start a new life. Having never seen French doco The Imposter (or for that matter, last year's Titane), the parents of missing Esther, Allan Albright (Rossif Sutherland) and wife Tricia (Julia Styles) fall for her ruse and bring her back home to their mansion and a life of luxury.

It's soon clear that while Allan - who clearly fell apart after his daughter vanished - is uncritically happy to have her back and inspiring his artworks once more, Tricia is a little more skeptical and their louche douchebag son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) seems almost annoyed to have his little sister hanging around. Esther is going to have to pull out all the stops to keep her scam going.

While at first this seems to be a solid but unsurprising retread of the original that's content to hit many of the same beats - especially Esther developing feelings for a man who sees her as a child - events rapidly spiral down a new and almost as deranged path. Sometimes a pint-sized serial killer just can't catch a break.

A solid supporting cast go a long way towards selling this, with Styles especially impressive as a mother firmly committed to keeping her family together. A pacy script doesn't hurt either, juggling suspense (just how long can Esther get away with it?) and slasher scenes for a roller coaster of thrills, kills, and the occasional rat corpse discovered in a smoothie.

But it's Fuhrman - plus a range of child body doubles and a load of other seamless camera trickery - who makes this so much fun. She's totally convincing in the role, presenting Esther as both an instant horror icon and a semi-believable human being forced into a life of crime and murder by a condition nobody around her seems in the slightest bit interested in helping her with.

Then again, most of them end up dead by her hand so it kind of evens out.

- Anthony Morris