CELLULOID SCREAMS 2017: DAY TWO

Day One of Celluloid Screams brought us a cult, a haunted house and a trio of kick-ass women. What would Day Two have in store? Well, I'm going to tell you. Wouldn't be much of a blog if I didn't...

I REMEMBER YOU

In a remote part of Iceland, an elderly woman is found hanged in a church and the ensuing investigation reveals a possible connection not only to a number of other deaths in the area but to the disappearance of the 7-year-old son of Freyr, the new psychiatrist in town. And is there a further link to events across the bay, where a project to restore a run-down house is beset by supernatural happenings...

Based on Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's novel, I Remember You is certainly a slow-burner but please don't let that put you off. The gradual build-up of tension and the drip-feed of plot developments make this work so brilliantly. The police procedural, missing person drama and ghost story elements mesh perfectly and it's fun to see how the seemingly disparate events of the plot come together in a clever and satisfying way.

Not only is I Remember You confidently made, excellently written and convincingly performed, it also showcases the bleak yet beautiful landscapes of one of my favourite countries. It's also creepy as hell and although there are a couple of effective jump scares along the way it's the sense of disquiet permeating the piece which truly elevates the proceedings. This is a chiller of rare quality which also packs quite the emotional punch.

Easily one of highlights of the festival and I'm looking forward to seeing this again. Check out Yrsa's novels too.

HABIT

Unemployed Michael (Elliot James Langridge) spends most of his time in his flat, at the Job Centre or in the local pub until a chance meeting with free-spirited Lee (Jessica Barden) lands him a job on the door at Cloud 9, a massage parlour in Manchester. One night things turn disturbingly violent and Michael is given a glimpse of a netherworld to which he may be attracted more than he wants to admit...

With such a diverse selection of films at Celluloid there's usually one that, for whatever reason, just doesn't land with me and unfortunately this year it was Habit. I talked to people after the screening who genuinely loved it and to be honest I'm happy when a film polarises opinion. After all, who wants to make something that everyone thinks is just okay?

Have to be honest here, this didn't engage me. I didn't care sufficiently about most of the characters and the gore, although packing in its fair share of entrails and lopped-off parts, is staged in an oddly mannered way. If you're going to show me cannibalism, make it as gross as possible. The 80s output from our Italian friends always made this sort of thing look utterly disgusting so what happened here?

Well, having Roxanne Pallett air kiss the end of a gristly piece of bloodied bone is stylish, don't get me wrong, but that pivotal moment of the film is where I need to be caught off-guard, wondering where the hell things were going to go next, instead of not being sufficiently shocked to be propelled into the second half of the story, where all bets should have been off.

Nonetheless, the final sequence at Cloud 9 is rather effective and suspenseful and although the plot doesn't tie up all of the loose ends it doesn't feel inconclusive in any way. I liked the slightly messy ending, I just wish I'd liked the rest of the movie too but hey, other people at Celluloid loved it and I can totally see why.

Quick mention for Joanne Mitchell (Sheffield horror fest regulars may very well remember her from Before Dawn): she's brilliant and very funny in a supporting role as one of Cloud 9's employees who knows all about the business, even down to etiquette of who makes the next brew in the place.

TRAGEDY GIRLS

Small-town teenagers Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are obsessed with three things: death, their social media presence and the number of hits received by their web show. As their online status threatens to fade, they decide that an inside track on a new wave of killings will blow their popularity through the roof and so they take things into their own hands...

Not only does Tragedy Girls make some amusing and valid points about our relationship with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al, it has a keen eye for the tropes of the slasher/serial killer genre and uses those as the bedrock for a knowing, fun romp which goes about its bloody business with gusto.

Yes, Sadie and McKayla are somewhat annoying and are basically welded to their smartphones but the performances of Hildebrand and Shipp keep their characters interesting to watch even when they're being irritatingly self-absorbed (which is a lot of the time). The supporting players are excellent, notably the ever-reliable Craig Robinson as local firefighting hero Big Al and Josh Hutcherson sending himself up something chronic as cool, ahem, "deep", motorcycle-riding dude Toby.

Tyler MacIntyre's movie is gleefully unpleasant, handling its dark material with a pleasingly light touch. It left me with a smile on my face and a renewed alertness to the potential dangers of gym equipment.

INSIDE NO. 9

For many this was the biggest draw of the festival as Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton introduced three episodes of their anthology series which has recently finished shooting its fourth season. The three episodes chosen for Celluloid Screams were The Harrowing from Season 1, Séance Time from Season 2 and a brand new episode from Season 4 called Tempting Fate (which means the picture above is inaccurate because it's from The Trial Of Elizabeth Gadge but what the hell, I'm still going with it).

For a series which has a natural home on television, these episodes played incredibly well on a big screen in front of a large audience. The Harrowing pulls out all of the Gothic stops, constantly swapping laughs and chills as its tale of the world's creepiest babysitting job unfolds. It also boasts the outstanding double act of Shearsmith and Helen McCrory as strange siblings Hector and Tabitha.

Séance Time may very well be my favourite episode of Inside No. 9 to date so I was really pleased that it was showing here. This tale of a somewhat downmarket prank show is played for chuckles for most of its running time (Alice Lowe, in particular, is a disinterested, downbeat delight) but there's a sinister edge to the proceedings which really comes to the fore as the tone turns on a dime and a supremely unnerving twist is revealed.

And so to the new episode. Tempting Fate follows three council workers assigned to clearing out the property of a recently-deceased lottery winner but a discovery leads to the plot spinning off in all sorts of intriguing directions with all of the threads being tied up in a thoroughly satisfying way. If this is the standard of the new episodes - and I suspect it will be - then Season 4 is going to be a real treat.

DOWNRANGE (CELLULOID SCREAMS SECRET FILM)

Having guessed the Secret Film wrongly yet again - it wasn't Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres, let's just face facts and agree that I will NEVER work out what the Secret Film is - I settled down to watch the latest from Ryuhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train, No One Lives). Well, when I say "settled down" that isn't strictly true because within a few minutes there's flying lead, bloodshed and holes in the head as an unseen sniper tries to pick off a group of people who have stopped on a deserted road to change a tyre on their SUV.

A heady cocktail of dodgy dialogue and ferocious firepower, Downrange makes the most of its simple premise by keeping things moving at a fair old clip and not giving the audience too many opportunities to catch its breath (and hence think about any holes the plot may have). There's a few attempts to give the characters some backstory as they're pinned down by the shooter but most of the flick is concerned with various attempts to escape. Oh, and people getting bits blown off them.

This manages to just about sustain itself over its running time by introducing the potential for further carnage just as the wheels look to be coming off. As for the finale, it's nothing short of crackers as we're introduced to some of the dumbest law enforcement personnel ever to don the badge and provide target practice.

Even so, Downrange works particularly well as a pulpy thriller if you're willing to switch your brain to "off". And I mean totally "off", don't leave it in neutral or it might accidentally slip into gear and then you're suddenly thinking about what could or couldn't happen or why someone's doing something stupid. What this delivers in spades is intense, bloody havoc. If you're expecting depth, well, just don't.

I'm still undecided about the very last moment of the film though. On the one hand, it's a good, gory gag. On the other, it's maybe one excess too far.

SUSPIRIA (40TH ANNIVERSARY RESTORATION)

Ballerina Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) travels to Freiburg to enrol in a prestigious academy but from the moment she arrives the weirdness dial is turned up to the maximum - even the task of getting a taxi from the airport is a disorienting, windswept, rain-drenched ordeal - and a beautifully orchestrated dance with the supernatural ensues.

After seeing this many times (don't ask how many) on VHS and DVD this was the first time I'd experienced Dario Argento's masterpiece on the big screen and it didn't disappoint. The visuals are jaw-dropping, the baroque soundtrack is a real button-pusher (especially when it's belting out like it was here), the murder set-pieces are peerless and there are great performances from a cast whose principals are mostly female.

Jessica Harper is terrific as the lead, playing Suzy as vulnerable without ever making her seem in any way a victim, and the amazing Alida Valli towers over the film as the formidable Miss Tanner. As I mentioned previously it's a feast for the eyes with most of the piazzas, buildings, rooms and corridors filmed to look as if they've fallen straight out of a dream. Or, in Suspiria's case, a prolonged nightmare.

With some of the audience never having seen this before, I wonder how it played to them when today's horror movies are so different from this? I hope they tapped into its genuinely deep-seated scariness and that they enjoyed it as much as I still do. This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest films of all time in any genre and fans of cinema should count this as essential viewing.

CELLULOID SCREAMS 2017: DAY ONE

Sheffield's horror festival returned for its ninth year of madness, mayhem - which actually included the film Mayhem - special guests and karaoke. Day One brought us three very different pieces of work...

THE ENDLESS

If it's Celluloid Screams, where's the Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead film? The opening gala, as it turned out. With their third film, Benson and Moorhead bring us the tale of brothers Justin (Benson) and Aaron (er, Moorhead) who return to the "UFO death cult" they left several years previously.

Whereas most movies of this type would have the cult members behave like nutters within seconds of being introduced and send the plot into a downward spiral of increasing, babble-heavy tedium, The Endless flatly refuses to stick to the template - hell, it refuses to stick to any kind of template whatsoever - leaving the viewer in a situation where they have no clue as to what's coming next and where the danger, if any, is coming from.

The various characters within the cult actually seem pretty reasonable people - or is that just what they're trying to project? Obviously I'm not going to answer that one and I'm also not going to give away any detail of a beautifully executed reveal about two-thirds of the way in that left me grinning like an idiot. All I'll say is that it explains a lot, if you were already waiting for an explanation.

For me, Messrs Benson and Moorhead are three for three. I loved Resolution, I loved Spring and - no real surprises here - I loved The Endless. As the leads in their own film, their performances are excellent, the supporting cast is uniformly great and there's more than enough welcome humour to complement the mind-bending strangeness even when things get "very culty".


BORLEY RECTORY

Ashley Thorpe's labour of love about the "most haunted house in England" is a beguiling mix of live action and animation wrapped up in the stylings of a 1930s chiller. A whistle stop tour of the spooky goings-on over a number of decades weaves a number of real-life characters into the mix, played by such genre luminaries as Reece Shearsmith and Nicholas Vince.

Make no mistake, there's nothing else out there like this and as a technical achievement it's stunningly impressive. However, as a piece of cinema, I ended up liking it very much when I really wanted to love it with all of my heart. Originally intended as short of around 30 minutes in length, this version clocks in at over an hour and in my opinion the optimum running time would have been somewhere between the two. On a few occasions it does wander and some tighter editing wouldn't have gone amiss.

Even so, there's plenty to enjoy and there's no doubting the passion for the project that's evident in every frame of this. It may reach a little too far in trying to cram in as many events as possible but its ambition has to be applauded. Borley Rectory sets out to be different and in the main it succeeds admirably. This has to be worth your time over a trip to the multiplex to see the latest instalment of yet another uninspired, production-line horror franchise.


68 KILL

Chip (Matthew Gray Gubler) is very much in love with Liza (AnnaLynne McCord) and would do anything for her. Which, in this case, means accompanying her on a spot of breaking and entering to bag them $68,000. Of course, things don't go according to plan leaving Chip with a serious case of second thoughts about their relationship. Provided he can actually survive the next couple of days, that is...

So is 68 Kill a movie featuring a clutch of strong, empowered, female characters who don't take shit from anyone or is it ultimately a revenge fantasy about a doormat of a guy who's finally had enough of his domineering girlfriend? Well, I guess you could make an argument for both of those but my view is that it's a shamelessly enjoyable blast of primo grindhouse scuzz which shouldn't be taken too seriously.

And yes, the plot is driven - refreshingly so - by the women of the piece. Alisha Boe is excellent as Violet, who initially appears to be a victim and then turns out to be anything but, the awesome Sheila Vand puts in a memorable turn as murderous super-Goth Monica and the aforementioned McCord is quite brilliant as Liza. Yes, she's clearly a little unhinged but at the same time it's also plain to see exactly why Chip is smitten. Hey, I would probably have been robbing rich guys' houses with her too.*

Written and directed by Cheap Thrills scribe Trent Haaga, this walks a similar line between guffaw-inducing comedy and vomit-inducing violence, only more so. Occasionally, it does threaten to tip over into the realm marked "outright disgusting" especially when Liza's brother - and his revolting hobby - is thrown into the mix but the whole enterprise is so batshit OTT it's more likely you'll be shaking your head and laughing at just how far the plot is willing to go totally off the range than rushing to the nearest bin to be sick in.



*Theoretically speaking, and within the 68 Kill universe that is. I'm not in any way condoning the theft of property from the houses of rich guys. Or any type of thievery from anyone else, for that matter.

THE SNOWMAN

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Chloë Sevigny
Writers: Hossein Amini, Peter Straughan, Søren Sveistrup
Director: Tomas Alfredson

*** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

Boozy Norwegian cop Harry Hole (Fassbender) is spending most of his days investigating the contents of a vodka bottle when the case of a missing woman drags him from the sidelines and back to what he does best - solving really horrible crimes. And this one looks like it's going to be particularly horrible if the instincts of his new colleague Katrine Bratt (Ferguson) turn out to be correct...

After the recent Flatliners, here's another movie which takes an exceptional cast and strands them in a plodding, by-the-numbers thriller which manages neither to excite nor chill. Yes, there are some gory moments and the plot does contain a bunch of ideas which are conceptually unpleasant but it's all delivered in such a perfunctory way that you'll probably be checking your watch long before the killer is revealed.

Fassbender's excellent but his detective is saddled with the type of crime genre baggage we've seen all too often - he's something of a maverick, he can't sleep, he hits the bottle whenever he's got a spare moment, his previous relationships have been disasters but he's still in touch with his most recent ex and her son, and so on, and so on.

Even so, these well-worn character beats could still have been given fresh life through the writing but the script goes through the motions to a frustrating level and even its attempts to wrong-foot its audience are half-hearted at best. To give an example: Ferguson's new addition to the police department is obsessed with the case - hold on, could she be hiding a secret? Hmm. Guess.

Elsewhere, Sevigny - playing twins - is given virtually nothing to do twice and the flick ultimately blots its copybook by casting J.K. Simmons and then reducing his role to what is almost an extended cameo. His character should arguably be casting a huge shadow over the story but considering his potential for being a major suspect in the investigation there are huge chunks of The Snowman where he doesn't even figure in any sort of discussion.

At almost two hours in length, you'd think The Snowman would cram in the twists and turns, rack up the suspects and pile on the bodies. Unfortunately it doesn't do any of those, lumbering along to a ho-hum confrontation between cop and killer which puts those Harry loves in jeopardy. Even the climax is botched, with proceedings apologetically grinding to a halt as the enterprise literally gets itself on to thin ice, having been there figuratively for about ninety minutes previously.

The one thing at which The Snowman did succeed is that it made me want to go to Norway - the scenery's undeniably beautiful. As for everything else, I wasn't quite prepared for just how underwhelming it would be given the talent involved. What could have been an exhilarating Scandi-noir slay ride through the snow ended up as an unrelentingly dull trudge through a slushy mess.

FLATLINERS

Starring: Elliot Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev
Writer: Ben Ripley
Director: Niels Arden Oplev

*** WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

In the wake of a personal tragedy, medical student Courtney (Page) becomes obsessed with what happens after the moment of death to the point that she's more than willing to recreate those conditions by having her heart stopped and then being resuscitated moments later. Courtney quickly finds colleagues who are similarly ready to push the boundaries for the sake of science and career enhancement. What could possibly go wrong?

Rather than being a remake of the 1990 Joel Schumacher flick this sets itself up as a continuation of the story, drafting in Kiefer Sutherland as a senior doc who may or may not be the same guy from the previous movie (it's never made clear, which I actually kind of liked, except... well, I'll get to that later). Continuation or not, it's still a bunch of defibrillator-happy would-be docs who don't think there's much wrong with crossing to and from the other side until the spooky stuff drifts in about halfway through.

Good cast as well. Elliot Page does smart, intense and focused while still being sympathetic, James Norton manages to be likeable as resident booze/drug hound and shagger Jamie and Diego Luna gives good furrowed brow as Ray who rapidly becomes the voice of reason as his mates fall over themselves to be the next one who's temporarily snuffed out. Rounding out the crash cart club is Marlo (Dobrev) who is a driven young woman with a dark secret and Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) who is a, er, driven young woman with a, er, dark secret.

Let's be honest, the performances are not the problem here. This is a prime example of talented actors left high and dry by the material, which starts out mildly intriguing but just ends up being unrelentingly bloody silly. Yes, the first half of the movie was reasonably engaging to me, partly because I was wondering how exactly the new movie would deviate from the old one. Well, not nearly enough as it turns out, which is a shame.

Once the supernatural element kicks in, Flatliners degenerates into a series of tedious jump scares you'll see coming a mile off. You want creeping down dark corridors, pulling back curtains, that sort of thing? There's loads of that. Mind you, at least this doesn't fall back on a scene set in a morgue. No, hold on, it does. And even that isn't nearly as frightening as it should be. Eventually we do get to the payoff after what seems like a couple of weeks but it's just as much of an anti-climax as the one employed by the previous incarnation of this movie.

Also, if Kiefer Sutherland is the same guy as the previous movie, how come he's not as suspicious when things go totally awry about an hour in? His character's thinking appears to be: "Hmm, fatal unexplained accident. A room of students, each of whom seems to be concealing something. Okay, not going to investigate that. After all, it's not like I got up to anything weird when I was a medical student... oh, there was that thing where I got my mates to kill me so I could see the afterlife but hey, no one else is going to try that".

Flatliners plays its frankly ludicrous plot developments with an admirably straight face but in the end it fails to engage as either a drama or a shocker. Aside from a mild surprise 70 minutes in it's thumpingly predictable and rather than building up to a suspense-filled, high-stakes finish it fizzled out, leaving me thinking "Was that it?". And with no last-ditch shock as a twist, unfortunately that was it. As thrillers go, it can't be saved. Call it. Time of death: 2017.

Don't get me started on the unused, high-tech hospital in the basement either.

MOONWALKERS

Starring: Ron Perlman, Rupert Grint, Robert Sheehan
Writer: Dean Craig
Director: Antoine Bardou-Jacquet

CIA agent Kidman (Perlman) is sent on a mission to London to locate Stanley Kubrick and enlist his services to film a fake version of the moon landing in case the actual Apollo 11 mission fails in that purpose. However, the guy who professes to be Kubrick is in fact Leon (Sheehan), permanently stoned flatmate of Jonny (Grint) who's in financial trouble with some bad guys and sees a quick money-making scheme as a way to get them off his back...

Moonwalkers is a reasonably entertaining film but it's certainly not without its problems. Still, let's start with the positives. The leads are very good indeed, make that very, very good in the case of Ron Perlman. His troubled spook provides most of the best moments of the movie as he wades through 60s hippie culture with an amusing weariness. When he's not slapping people around or blowing them away, that is. If Kidman was played by someone other than Perlman I feel the end product would have suffered as a result.

Rupert Grint, as the slightly dodgy band manager-cum-fake-Kubrick-wrangler, is good value as a somewhat reluctant, thoroughly out of his depth wannabe wheeler-dealer and I didn't spend the film thinking of that Weasley kid. Sheehan, as the uber-flaky Leon, gets to play the broadest comedy in the piece and his constant ineptitude under pressure could have become annoying but I was left chuckling a fair amount of the time, especially at his interpretation of Kubrick (not really a spoiler, but it's several miles off).

The period detail is generally spot on too, although there's a point at which you feel the 1960s props are just being shoehorned in to sequences. Occasionally the effect is one of drowning in the decade. Did they have a job lot of these things which they felt they should use? Sometimes less is more. I'm not going to point out that poster of The Who in Jonny's place may actually be from the 70s. Oh, I just did. I may be wrong.

It's an action/comedy, that I can't deny. There are some rather nicely choreographed fights and shootouts and I did laugh at various points along the way. The problem is that the two elements work against each other, so you're presented with scenes bordering on farce sitting alongside flashes of startlingly nasty and gruesome violence. Also, Kidman's suffering from flashbacks about what happened in a previous mission to 'Nam and although his hallucinations of burned villagers are chillingly memorable they belong in a different movie entirely.

Also, I know it's a movie set in the swinging 60s but did we really need a visit to another rambling bohemian pile whether another orgy is taking place and another group of naked women are wandering about? Actually, the visit to the rambling bohemian pile does wring some laughs out of Jonny's choice of director for the fake lunar footage, a guy called Renatus whose only previous celluloid outing - an experimental work which took YEARS to complete - is predictably pretentious but still made me smile.

There's also a whiff of "Lock, Stock..." about this, the plot could easily be described as a "caper" and for me this has exactly the same issue as Guy Ritchie's flick - it can't balance the comedy and drama as effectively as it aims to. It does throw in a couple of disposable gangs (wasting the great James Cosmo in the process, both figuratively and literally) for Jonny to avoid and for Kidman to take on and by the end it may not have quite got to the point where it's thrown in the kitchen sink but it's used most of the other stuff around it.

That's not to say Moonwalkers is a waste of time. Far from it. Perlman is always watchable and if you can laugh at a character discovering that someone has taken a shit on one of their records then you may enjoy this more than I did. The comedy's a little too wacky and the violence a little too unpleasant given the context, but there's just about enough to enjoy on balance and it's an interestingly flawed pic.

THE BELKO EXPERIMENT

Starring: John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona

Writer: James Gunn

Director: Greg McLean

In a high-rise office block just outside Bogotá, Colombia, the employees of the Belko Corporation are about to have a very bad day indeed as an unknown voice suddenly announces over the PA system that they're about to participate in a game which boils down to a drastically simple choice: kill or be killed...

After a breezy introduction which sets up the main characters and the appropriate office politics rather nicely, The Belko Experiment gets down to its blood-soaked business long before it can be project managed out of existence (I can say this, I've been a Project Manager). People lose their heads - literally - when the first target isn't reached, the ante is upped, sides are taken.

At the centre of the mayhem is your average office schmo Mike Milch (Gallagher Jr.), a guy who just wants to get by and please as many people as he can even when there's worker genocide on the menu. His girlfriend Leandra (Arjona) isn't quite as accommodating when faced with the prospect of random, splattery, cranium-exploding death but she's positively tree-hugging compared to colleague Wendell Dukes (John C. McGinley turning the psycho dial up to 11) whose initial, barely concealed sociopathic tendencies give way to hacking people to bits with meat cleavers faster than you can say "That guy's got a meat cleaver".

Running a tight 89 minutes, The Belko Experiment doesn't dally too long with discussions about who has the right to live, who's on the list to die and who has the right to play God in this situation. As with almost all business discussions anywhere ever, any debate is generally curtailed before it gets anywhere, but this time it's by another announcement requesting that more people have to be bumped off. At its core this isn't a film which is going to let itself get bogged down in moralising, it's a stripped-down, gory thrill ride and it delivers some startling, wince-inducing violence at regular intervals (UK readers, there's a very good reason why it's rated 18). Some of this violence involves, yes, office supplies. I'll never look at a sellotape dispenser in quite the same way again.

This is all carried along by a rather impressive cast and, for the more cine literate out there, trades somewhat upon knowledge of the performers' previous roles. For instance, Michael Rooker. Got to be playing a murderous nutjob, right? Well....just watch the movie to find out. Elsewhere, Tony Goldwyn scores as a calm, calculating boss who may just be about to take all of his rational decision-making processes to the Nth degree, Sean Gunn is amusingly annoying as Grade-A stoner Marty and Melonie Diaz fits the "surely they can't kill her, can they?" role of new starter Dany perfectly.

It's not an unfamiliar set-up and the usual questions are there (for instance, will the office nice guy suddenly snap and start killing people?) but this takes an approach which is fresh enough to shake off most of the potential clichés. James Gunn's script - yes, that James Gunn, about to unleash the second Guardians of the Galaxy outing - is brutally efficient, dispensing some killer one-liners as the bodies pile up. The final moments, not to give anything away, are an absolute hoot and a rather fitting way to round things off.

It may not be the most subtle of movies out there right now but if you can hang on to your lunch The Belko Experiment is easily one of the most entertaining and for this horror fan it was something of an unexpected treat. Also, it's nice to see director Greg McLean right back on gloriously gory form after trying, but not quite succeeding, to generate scares from the disappointing possessed rock snorefest The Darkness.

FREE FIRE

Starring: Cillian Murphy, Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer
Writers: Amy Jump, Ben Wheatley
Director: Ben Wheatley

In 1978 Boston, Justine (Larson) is brokering an arms deal which will see Vernon (Copley) and his associates selling a cache of machine guns to a group representing the IRA. Firstly Vern doesn't have the specific type of machine gun which Chris (Murphy) and his colleagues were expecting and then an unexpected conflict between one member of each party turns the situation from bad to much, much worse...

The antithesis of many a choreographed bullet ballet, Free Fire doesn't have people twisting acrobatically through the air, shooting enemies with deadly accuracy. It doesn't have a bunch of characters who shrug off gunshot wounds with a grimace and supernaturally limited physical impairment. No, shots go high and wide on a regular basis and those that do hit their mark cause serious pain for their targets.

As the shootout wears on the cast becomes ever more grimy and soaked in claret, some of them reduced to an agonising crawl as they attempt to reach their goal. Even at this point the protagonists are still cracking wise with each other and the barbed comments fly just as regularly as the slugs.

After the trippy, multi-layered delights of High-Rise some might view this latest from Ben Wheatley as being relatively straightforward and perhaps even a little lightweight. Nonsense. This is both bloody and hilarious, continually reloading with a ready supply of cracking dialogue executed with relish by a cast to die for.

It may be a trifle churlish to single out a performance for special mention as everyone in this is very, very good but for me Sharlto Copley steals the piece as the swaggering, spectacularly gauche Vernon who brings the chuckles and the cringes in equal measure. Sample behaviour from Vern: suggesting that Justine goes to retrieve something mid-firefight because "nobody will shoot the bird". He's amusingly awful throughout.

Let's be honest, there isn't a duff performance here. Hammer is excellent as the unruffled Ord, whether he's trying to reason with the increasingly excitable Vern or stopping to light up a joint in the midst of the chaos. Wheatley regular Michael Smiley is as thoroughly watchable as ever and Brie Larson makes sure that it isn't just left to the blokes to kick arse.

The run of excellent Ben Wheatley/Amy Jump movies continues with the smart, slick, Seventies-set shenanigans of Free Fire. It's brash, breezy (at just 91 minutes) and brilliant. Bravo!