Tag: australian cinema

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Royal Hotel (2023)

the royal hotel

Hannah (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are backpacking in Australia. When they run out of money they go to an employment agency that specializes in finding gigs for travellers. They are sent to a remote mining town where they are employed as bartenders at a dirty, rundown pub/hotel.

It is run by a drunken bastard of a man who has clearly seen better days (a glorious Hugo Weaving), and it is patronized by a motley crew of miners who are as rowdy as they are misogynistic. They constantly harass with come-ons and sexist jokes.

Writer/director Kitty Green (along with co-writer Oscar Redding) fills The Royal Hotel with an unending sense of dread. From the moment Hannah and Liv arrive in town there is a feeling that something terrible is going to happen to them.

But this isn’t a movie filled with knife-wilding maniacs or skeezy rapists, or cannibals. It is more realistic than that. The men, for the most part, seem like decent blokes – hard-working, blue-collar, rough-around-the-edges blokes for sure, but not necessarily evil men.

But that’s the thing, that’s the point the film is trying to make. A couple of young women, out-of-towers, like these girls are, will inevitably face a litany of potential dangers in a place like this. And there is no way for them to tell who is essentially harmless, and who might cause them real horror.

Hannah is the one who recognizes the potential danger they face every night, while Liv seems more oblivious. She’s willing to accept the overt sexism as a cultural difference. It is up to Hannah then, to constantly steer Liv away from danger.

One of the locals, Matty (Toby Wallace) takes a shine to Hannah. He seems nice so the girls allow him to take them to a watering hole for a swim. They have a good time and get a little drunk. That night he puts a few moves on Matty. She rebuffs. Gently at first, but he persists. She tells him straight up “no” but he pushes back. Eventually, she has to get tough and yell at him. But at that moment it isn’t clear if he will leave.

Another customer, Dolly (Daniel Henshall) is seen lingering upstairs in the hall near their room. On another night he gets aggressively rude with Matty. But he’s sweet to Liv, especially when she’s drunk. On at least a couple of times, he steers her towards his car when she’s completely loaded.

It is a slow burn of a film. There isn’t a lot of incident. Not a lot happens. For most of the film’s run time, I felt myself waiting for something to happen. Something horrible. That’s not a knock on the film at all, I found it rather exhilarating. So many horror films go running straight to the jump scares and the violence, that it was rather pleasing to watch a film so willing to take its time.

I hesitated to make this my Friday Night Horror film because, well, to be honest, the horror never really comes. It doesn’t end in a bloodbath. Not to spoil things but it does end with a bit of violence, but not in the traditional horror movie sense. There are some tonal shifts moving the film between horror, thriller, and something like a workplace-from-hell drama that the film doesn’t quite pull off. But mostly it really worked for me.

31 Days of Horror: Talk To Me (2022)

talk to me poster

A group of teenagers come across an embalmed hand. When you hold the hand and say “Talk to Me” you will see a spirit. If you then utter “I Let You In” you will be possessed by same spirit. The teenagers use this magic to make viral TikTok videos.

Mia (Sophie Wilde), a 17-year-old who is still grieving over her mother’s death two years prior. She died after taking too many sleeping pills and it is unclear as to whether this was accidental or suicide. Her relationship with her father has become strained so she spends most of her time at her friend Jade’s (Alexandra Jensen) house.

Mia is considered a bit weird by the popular girls and this is starting to strain her relationship with Jade. This is perhaps why Mia eagerly volunteers to use the hand at a party they attend.

There are rules regarding the hand. There are always rules with these things. You cannot be possessed for more than 90 seconds or the spirits they will remain in this world. Naturally, the rule gets broken and things get bad.

Talk to Me was directed by Danny and Michael Phillipou better known as the YouTube channel RackaRacka which is known for its horror/comedy videos. This was their first feature-length film. I haven’t watched any of those YouTube videos but you can see the influence of those types of videos on the film. The camera often moves in big swoops, the editing is quick, and when we peak into the supernatural the look is stylish.

It is a very entertaining film with some good scares and a lot of style. Sophie Wilde is terrific and I hope she has a long, storied career. I’m just not sure there is much to the film beyond its entertainment value. Mia is clearly still deeply wounded by her mother’s death, but the film doesn’t seem to know what to do with that, other than periodically have her mom appear to her as a vision. It has some fun with the idea that these kids are dabbling in the supernatural, taking huge risks with evil all for social media clicks, but again it doesn’t really know what it wants to say about all of that.

Plotwise it is a mix of Flatliners and a Monkey’s Paw story, which is fine in and of itself, I just wish there was something more to it than surface horror.

Mad Max (1979)

mad max poster

I’ve watched the Mad Max series kind of backward. I saw Fury Road (2015) in the theaters, and really quite loved it, while also noting its utter ridiculousness. Then I watched Mad Max 2 (1981) a couple of months ago and followed it up pretty quickly with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Truth is I had always heard that the first Mad Max film wasn’t all that good and that’s why I skipped it. Until now.

The film is quite a bit different than its sequels. Whereas they are set in a post-apocalyptic world in which society has completely broken down, in this one society seems to be mostly intact. For sure some things are broken, but it feels more in line with similar films from the era in which urban crime is high and the police seem helpless to fix it.

Mel Gibson stars as Max Rockatansky, an Australian police officer who is decidedly not the super awesome butt kicker he is in the sequels. Well, sort of not. In a pretty great opening sequence, some crazy bikers are being chased by Max’s fellow officer. They create all sorts of havoc until Max is called in and chases them down. But after that scene we find Max to be a gentle family man with a wife and small child. He takes them to the countryside and they have a nice holiday.

Of course, things eventually turn bad and Max becomes the man we’ve come to know and love in those later films. But it does take a while to get there. I feel like watching this series out of order was actually helpful. Had I watched the first one first I might not have gotten around to watching the sequels. But by watching the original after I had seen all the sequels, the original film now feels like an origin story, a prequel. And as such, while still not as good as any of the sequels, it fills in some character details and lets me know how Max became Mad Max.

There are some pretty spectacular car crashes, made even more incredibly realizing they all had to be done in one take as the tiny budget wouldn’t have allowed for more.

So, yeah, this feels like a warm-up for what is to come. Consider it practice for the terrible beauty of Mad Max 2 and Fury Road. Or look at it like a full-length DVD extra origin story.

Awesome ’80s in April: Dead Calm (1989)

dead calm movie poster

When I was a young teen, probably sometime in the late 1980s my mother’s friend Beverly had a satellite dish and all of the premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. We only had basic cable at the time so I was in awe of all the movies she had access to. She was kind enough to allow me to send her requests of films I was interested in watching and she’d record them for me onto VHS tapes. I used to scour the TV Guide looking for movies for her to record.

When I got older and was living on my own I used to set the VCR to record old movies off of TCM and other cable channels. I had quite a collection of films dubbed off onto VHS tapes.

One film in that collection was Dead Calm. Unlike Firestarter this was a film I didn’t really know much about. Nicole Kidman was not yet a star and I didn’t know who Sam Neill or Billy Zane was. It is an Australian film and I don’t remember how much publicity it received in the USA. But at some point, I must have seen a trailer or read a synopsis and decided it sounded interesting. Thus I recorded it onto VHS tape.

But I never did watch it. It sat in that collection of tapes for years and years. When I’d go looking for something to watch I would see it, think to myself “I should watch that sometime” and then skip right past it. Many years later I got a digital copy of the film and yet I continued to put off watching it. One of the things I’m loving about this Awesome ’80s series is that I’m finally getting around to watching those sorts of films.

I should have watched this one much sooner as it is pretty terrific.

Kidman and Neill play Rae and John Ingram, a married couple who recently lost their only son in a terrible accident. They have taken off in their sailboat to sail the Pacific Ocean and forget about their troubles.

One day they spy a schooner that seems to be in some distress. They hail it to no accord. Before they can make their way over to see what the trouble is they see a man, Hughie (Zane) furiously rowing toward them in a dinghy.

He says that his boat is slowly sinking and that all the other crew is dead of food poisoning. But something seems off about him. When John indicates he’d like to sail over and check out the boat, Hughie becomes very agitated. He generally seems over-excited and behaves somewhat erratically.

When he finally crashes and falls asleep, John takes the dinghy over to the boat to investigate. What he finds is disturbing. But before he can come back to his boat, Hughie has knocked Rae unconscious and taken control of the boat.

The film becomes a tight thriller with Rae trying to escape from Hughie and John trying to survive the sinking boat long enough to be rescued. I loved the gender reversal of that. Typically in movies like this, the woman would be trapped helplessly by the villain and the male hero would rush in to rescue her. But here John must be saved by his wife after she subdues the villain.

Director Phillip Noyce keeps things moving briskly and the tension held tightly. The two boats, thousands of miles from anything but the ocean create a wonderful setting where the characters must survive on their own cunning and wits.

This was Kidman’s breakthrough role and she’s terrific. She gives her character confidence rarely seen from female characters in this type of movie, but she never loses her femininity. Sam Neill is great as well. He spends a great deal of the film alone on that sinking ship and he allows his character the fear that comes from such a situation but also a determination to survive. I’m not a huge Billy Zane fan and he doesn’t quite have enough crazy menace here, but he’s still effective.

I’m surprised this film hasn’t received more love. I’m really glad I finally decided to watch it.