Month: November 2019

Knives Out

Rated: MKnives Out

Written and Directed by: Rian Johnson

Produced by: Ram Bergman, p.g.a., Rian Johnson, p.g.a.

Starring: Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, Noah Segan, Edi Patterson, Riki Lindhome, and Christopher Plummer.

Knives Out is a classic who-done-it that begins with the drama of violins playing as chasing dogs run from the rising gothic structure that houses the Thrombey family.

I love a movie that begins with dogs, this one with a wry hint of humour that continues as private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) investigates the mysterious suicide of famous multi-millionaire author, Harlan Thrombey after celebrating his 85th birthday.

Made like a familiar murder mystery, think, Murder She Wrote (a nod given as the mother of nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) watches transfixed in Spanish) or an adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s novels, there’re the usual suspects, here a family, eldest daughter and self-made, Linda Drysdale, married to Richard Drysdale bearing trust-fund brat who refuses to grow up, Ransom (Chris Evans), along with Walt (Michael Shannon), the son who looks after the publishing business with no real work of his own…  Then there’s widower and daughter-in-law, Joni (Toni Collette) and college-kid, Meg (Katherine Langford), living off hand-outs while hiding their dirty deeds. And let’s not forget grandson Jacob, the politically ambitious kid who spends too much time in the bathroom, probably masturbating to Nazi propaganda.

Then there’s nurse Martha.  She’s the one who always beats Harlan at playing Go.

It’s a different genre from director and writer, Rian Johnson, his previous work, Looper (2012) (if you haven’t watched this action / sci-fi yet, you’re in for a treat) and more recently, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) (one of the best to date, in my opinion) epic journeys that start in one place and finish somewhere completely different.

Instead of a journey, Knives Out is one of those stop situations where the characters are held in one place.  So it’s all about the details of the setting, the entrance of house-keeper, Fran (Edi Patterson – also fantastic in the series, Righteous Gemstones) captured in the angle of a mirror, the trick window, the books and figurines and paintings that catch the eye while looking for clues.  And the dialogue takes the mind in different directions, away from the central investigation as the family discusses racism or not being racist while handing nurse Martha a dirty dish to be put away.

So yes, it’s a murder mystery with clues dropped for the sharp observer as private investigator, Blanc pieces together the real story of the patriarch’s death, but it’s the wry humour and the distraction I enjoyed:

Martha answers her mobile, ‘Hi Walt.’

‘Hi Martha.  It’s Walt.’

‘Hm.’

There’s a stellar cast here, although, I’ve got to say Daniel Craig’s southern drawl as Blanc dragged for me – brat Ransom even highlighting the annoying accent.

I wonder if it’s because I’m so used to Craig as Bond these days, with that British accent?

Evans was the highlight for me.  And Jamie Lee Curtis as the dry eldest, self-important daughter.  And Toni Collette perfected the quiet desperation of the self-help guru relying on hand-outs, hence the quiet desperation.

So, there’s quality here and attention to detail.

Some of the humour missed the mark, see above: the southern drawl.

But overall, Knives Out is good fun.

Mrs Lowry & Son

Rated: PGMrs Lowry & Son

Directed by: Adrian Noble

Written by: Martyn Hesford (based on his play)

Produced by: Debbie Gray

Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Timothy Spall

L S Lowry was a British artist (b. 1887, d. 1976) renowned for painting urban landscapes featuring textile mills, factory chimneys and other scenes from Pendlebury in Lancashire, where he lived and worked for more than 40 years.

The song, Pictures of Matchstick Men, by Status Quo (1968), refers to Lowry’s slightly abstract, impressionistic style of painting. Other than that reference, I wasn’t at all familiar with the artist or his work, so had no idea what ground the movie might cover.

From this perspective, the film engaged me and kept me wondering how it would end, although it was in no hurry to get there.

Rather than being an exploration of their entire lives, the film deals mainly with the years 1934 until 1939, when son Laurence Stephen Lowry (Timothy Spall) is his mother’s sole carer, while also holding down a full-time job as a rent collector, like his father before him, and painting in the attic studio most nights after she has retired to sleep.

The father died earlier and left them in debt, so their existence is restricted, although they can afford an unseen maid to do light cleaning.

Lowry is on the cusp of becoming known as an artist, so perhaps the choice of such a compressed timeframe helps show what he had to overcome in order to become recognised.

I wondered before I saw the film why it was called Mrs Lowry & Son, since the son was the one who became a famous artist. But after several minutes in her company it is clear that, despite being bedridden, the mother (Vanessa Redgrave) is the dominant person in the relationship, while his devotion to her is harder to fathom.

Perhaps by dealing with this small period in time the film depicted the essentials: his mother as the only person he really wanted to connect with, the frustration that she could not see what he could, but that he determined to balance his duty to her and his passion for painting as they were equally important.

According to biographical accounts, Lowry’s mother was controlling, couldn’t abide failure, and disliked living in an industrial, working class suburb, when she had been raised in elegance and luxury.

She considered her son’s choice of painting subjects to be ugly and a constant reminder of how far down they had fallen in society. It’s only when we see these two people in flashbacks, with her an elegant, straight-backed young woman skilfully playing the piano, or him as a young child in a sailor suit entranced to be in her company at the beach, that you can appreciate the dynamics that were established so long ago and are too entrenched now to be changed.

This filmed version of a play is very much stage-bound, and quite often stilted in the way it is photographed and acted.  The only moments of lightness come from Lowry’s walks when he plays innocent games with the local children who delight in his company.

Both actors deliver their lines carefully and a bit woodenly, as though at a formal dinner party.

Not a lot happens for much of the time, just little scenes of him walking around town observing people and buildings, where he gets his inspiration, or at home upstairs in her bedroom, with her holding court from her bed while he balances his dinner on his lap, giving her updates on what is happening outside, or discussing their neighbours. But her constantly critical edicts on his lack of success, his wasted time painting, and her utter lack of appreciation for all his sacrifices to ensure she has a comfortable if slightly shabby home, food, company and safety, make her a very unlikable person.

One reviewer said she was right up there with monster mothers such as Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest or Piper Laurie in Carrie, and she is easily as awful as them, if not worse.

He tries to cheer her up and she says, ‘I haven’t been cheerful since 1898’.

It’s almost as though she enjoys being bitter and grumpy, and by constantly belittling her son ensures he’ll never have the confidence to leave her. This is especially evident when he receives an offer to show some of his work at a London gallery, and she manages to suck all the joy out of this prospect.

Apparently if she is unhappy, he must be so, too.

For a film depicting a struggling artist yearning to be recognised, not a lot of time is spent showing him painting in his attic studio or seeing more than just a few of his paintings from that period. This is frustrating if you want to see what he spends so many of his evenings immersing himself in, after he declares to his mother how his art is an obsession, how he sees beauty all around and must capture it somehow.

There are a few glimpses of his work, including the story behind the portrait of an unusual woman he saw on a bus, or a landscape featuring sailing boats, which turns out to be a treasured memory of a time he and his mother spent together at a beach during his childhood.

This is a very slowly paced film, in no hurry to get anywhere, and not given to deeper explorations of its characters’ motivations.

It will probably appeal more to an older audience accustomed to a slow burn rather than a bright rush. But I was engaged throughout, and inspired enough afterwards to research Lowry’s works, which I found fascinating in their deceptive simplicity.

Lowry once said that he was “a man who paints, nothing more, nothing less”, and this film doesn’t challenge that claim.

Finke: There and Back

Rated: MFinke: There and Back

Directed by: Dylan River

Produced by: Rachel Clements, Isaac Elliot, Meredith Garlick, Trisha Morton-Thomas

Narrated by: Eric Bana

Director of Photography: Clair Mathon

Featuring: Isaac Elliot, Scruff Hamill, David Walsh, Daymon Stokie , Luke Hayes, Toby Price.

‘Fast as all hell, rough as hell and dangerous as all hell.’

If that sounds like your idea of fun, you might want to head up to Alice Springs on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend for the Finke Desert Race.

Each year 15,000 spectators and 500+ riders turn up for the Northern Territory’s biggest annual event.

It’s a two hour dash through the scrub to the Finke Hotel, 230 kilometres through the heart of Australia, and for the riders, ‘It’s like holding onto the edge of a cliff for two hours’.

While the car and bike events each crown a King of the Desert, the dirt bikes are the glamour event. Theirs is the raw confrontation with one of the most challenging off-road events in one of the most remote places in the world.

Part of the allure is that a dark horse can come up from behind and steal the crown.

With race favourite Toby Price forced to compete in the four wheel drive section due to injury, the field for this year is wide open. As Finke is raced on corrected time, and each rider sets off individually, the race leader will not necessarily be the winner.

Behind the scenes there are high stakes for these potential dark horses in their ubiquitous trucker caps, with the film honing in to tell the stories of six competitors from a field of nearly 600.

Yamaha hasn’t taken out the race in 9 years and local boy Daymon Stokie, despite a broken hand, hopes to steal the crown from fellow local and KTM rival David Walsh.

Scruff Hamill has driven up from Sydney to race a 1970s’ bike he’s restored himself, while Isaac Elliot will attempt the race on a bike with special modifications. A decade earlier he fell during the race and, while it rendered him paraplegic, it didn’t dilute the Finke fever running through his veins.

Every year there are gut-wrenching stories. Who will take the crown this year? The desert will decide.

Breathtakingly beautiful, ‘The desert is an all-powerful force that looms over every rider,’ and stunning cinematography, using aerial and ground-level views, even bike-cam, captures the inscrutable beauty of this ancient world, while glimpses of the night sky are awe-inspiring.

As Eric Bana’s voiceover intones, ‘It’s God’s country, it’s like nowhere else’.

With its clouds of dust, drifts of red sand, relentless heat, dangerous curves and infamous whoops (like the corrugations on dirt track, only bigger—much bigger) the Finke is intense.  It is very much a confrontation with human fragility. According to emergency services, just about every bone in the human body has been broken somewhere along the track. As one rider very perceptively commented: ‘The hardest part of the course is the four inches between your ears.’

The Finke has changed since it began with a group of larrikins in the 70s. According to one ex-rider, ‘It’s a bit different now; it’s a bit serious.’ But some things haven’t changed. There are still plenty of ways to put yourself on the ground. Hard. Even if you’re not in the race, you can ride the 44 gallon drum hooked up to bungie ropes. It’s the Finke version of a mechanical bull.

Punch & Judy

Rated: MA 15+Punch and Judy

Directed by: Mirrah Foulkes

Written by: Mirrah Foulkes

Produced by: Michele Bennett, Nash Edgerton, Danny Gabai

Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Damon Herriman, Tom Budge, Benedict Hardie, Lucy Velik, Gillian Jones, Terry Norris, Brenda Palmer.

This strangely beautiful fairytale, horror story, social commentary is not an easy film to classify.

Behind the scenes, the director has breathed life into the puppets, allowing the drama of the Punch and Judy Show to play out beyond its predetermined conclusion.

Traditionally Punch batters a whole cast of characters. Often starting by mistreating his own baby, Punch’s other victims include Judy, a police constable, a skeleton, the devil and even a crocodile—with many of those hapless characters now populating the village of Seaside.

In the version of the show that has survived in England from the 17th century until the present day, Punch and Judy are glove puppets voiced by a single storyteller.

Dubbed the Professor, the puppeteer uses a device called a swazzle for the voice of Punch. Since the swazzle renders Punch almost unintelligible, he mutters away, his frustration and fury building, until he finally vents, paying out on anything in reach with his slapstick.

Even so, the film harks back to the earlier marionette theatre that made its way to England from Italy’s commedia dell’arte. The word slapstick in our modern language actually has its origins in the literal slap stick that Punchinello carried across from Europe, while the expression pleased as punch macabrely  derives from Punch’s glee when he beats another character senseless and then proudly proclaims, ‘That’s the way to do it’.

As, Punch & Judy opens, it’s a moment where life imitates art imitating life. Professor Punch (Damon Herriman) and Judy (Mia Wasikowska) are taking a bow for their newly revived more punchy and more smashy show when the Professor apropos of nothing, casually flings Judy across the stage and into a wall.

In keeping with the English tradition where the crowd sides with Punch, shouting out warnings to him and revealing the hiding places of the other characters, the living puppets of Seaside have descended into a state of mob rule, with those who are weaker or different are scapegoated as witches.

In this world the voice of the accuser holds sway, while the rabble seizes upon the flimsiest of pretexts to displace their own depravity onto the those unable to defend themselves: ‘This one’s chickens all died on the one night, this one has a rash and that one was out staring at the moon for too long.’

As three women, ‘Fresh filthy examples of the evil sweeping our land,’ cower on the gallows for Stoning Day (a cunning inversion of Mother’s Day), I was struck by a frisson of recognition. The setting was one I’d roamed around in. I’d had picnics there. It wasn’t the English forest that I was seeing, but native Australian bushland.

It was a conundrum. Why set a quintessentially English story on the other side of the world? The film was so beautifully composed, so it didn’t seem accidental. Many of the scenes had been shot with specially-selected lenses from the 1960s and 70s, and some scenes had even been shot by candlelight as way to evoke the rich, dreamlike feel. When I thought about it, I wondered if, maybe, the film had been designed so we could see ourselves more clearly, while we believe that we were looking at them over there.

Official Secrets

Rated: MA15+Official Secrets

Directed by: Gavin Hood

Script Written by: Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein and Gavin Hood

Based on the Book Written by, Marcia Mitchell and Thomas Mitchell: ‘The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion’

Produced by: Ged Doherty, Sarada McDermott

Starring: Keira Knightley, Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Rhys Ifans, Adam Bakri, Ralph Fiennes, Conleth Hill.

Described as the untold true story of Katharine Gun, this is a film of a GCHQ translator and spy who took a stand against a war that, in the end, was never backed by any hard evidence.

I remember that first Iraqi war in 1991 – the green lights of warfare on the news like a computer game.  And I remember watching the Twin Towers burn and the silence while watching with work colleagues. Jets flew over the city on that first day of the second invasion (2003).  In Australia the war was felt.  And fought.  And protested against.

Yet, I can’t recall hearing about the leaked documents of Gun.

So the story here is gripping.

Weapons of Mass Destruction.

That was the line.

We went to war because of imminent threat.

Without hard evidence of this imminent threat, the declaration of war was needed to be pushed through the UN.

The Americans desperate to push the vote through send an email to the British GCHQ requesting agents to dig into the UN delegates to find information to turn votes in favour of going to war.

Concern about the legalities of the request, Katharine Gun investigates:

Who sent this email?

Who is Frank Koza?

And because MI6 don’t like the idea of this war;

And when journalist from The Observer, Martin Bright (Matt Smith) is told there won’t be a D-1 sanction against leaking the email;

Suddenly, who is Frank Koza?  Becomes a someone.

Instead of the propaganda feed to the media, here, the film shows the other side, the attempt to stop the machine.

From the viewpoint of Gun (Keira Knightley), this is more a drama than spy thriller.  This is the story about a relatable woman with no political ambitions or motivations, just an impulse to do the right thing, ‘Just because you’re the Prime Minister doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts.’

I’m not always a fan of Knightley, but the weight of the film rests heavily on her ability to hold a relatable view of the injustice of what Gun sees is an illegal war pushed through by any means; to show and understand the impulse to do the right thing, to be a whistle blower, without coming across as being over-zealous.

And she’s great in this role: To make a stand, then realise what’s she done, to standing by her stance, Gun risks everything: her relationship with Kurdish husband, Yasar (Matthew Goode) seeking asylum, her job and her freedom.

It’s a cloak and dagger with a wry British humour.  There’s the underground carpark scene, but really this is an exchange of information while playing tennis.  This is a story from the newsroom and from the viewpoint of a woman trying to live an everyday life.

Who would have thought spell-check took part in allowing a war?!

But in the end, Gun’s continued freedom after admitting the leak speaks to the lengths of coverup and denial about the significance of unfounded evidence of imminent threat.

Doctor Sleep

Rated: MA15+Doctor Sleep

Directed by: Mike Flanagan

Based on the Novel Written by: Stephen King

Screenplay Written by: Mike Flanagan

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis, Zahn McClarnon, Emily Alyn Lind, Selena Anduze, Robert Longstreet, Carel Struycken, Catherine Parker, James Flanagan, Met Clark, Zackary Momoh, Jocelin Donahue, Dakota Hickman.

Doctor Sleep is the sequel to Stephen King’s famous novel, The Shining (1977).

The film here, follows on from director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic, never-to-be-forgotten interpretation featuring the axe-wielding Jack Torrance (Jack Nicolson) – ‘Here’s Johnny!’, opening in Florida, 1980, where Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) lives with his mother far away from any snow, far away from the Overlook Hotel.

But the Overlook Hotel hasn’t forgotten him or his Shining.

Using his magic tricks Danny manages to keep the monsters locked away.  But he can’t escape his own demons or the rage he inherited from his father.

Like the novel, addiction continues to plague Dan.  Except this time, we see his addiction and his journey to recovery.

Running away Dan can’t escape from himself but he finds compassion and through compassion he finds himself.

Looking for another bright light, Abra (Kyliegh Curran) finds a shining kindred spirit in Dan.   She introduces herself, writing, Hell😊

Following the detail of the novel we find Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) and her crew of empty devils who are the, True Knot who are also looking the next bright shining light.

This band of monsters are hunting those most pure.  Children.

‘Live long, stay young. Eat well,’ says Rose The Hat.

And Abra might be the most pure and brightest of all.

So there’s addiction, then redemption, compassion and all the grime of child-killing-devils contrasting to give the horror more kick.

But it’s not all black and white.

Screenwriter and director Mike Flanagan has captured the different layers of character that Stephen King writes so well (and why I’m such a fan), so Dan has his dirty deeds and the evil Rose The Hat is somehow likable in her loyalty to those in her inner circle.

And it’s a good story.  Shown well.

The soundtrack is restrained yet powerful as a heart beats steady, creating a suspense in the waiting that hangs when the beat stops so I could feel and hear my own heart, waiting for the next door to open, the next magic trick.

The stars wheel, gravity shifts, turning a room to slide into another place.

Yet the trickery isn’t over-done.

Flanagan has managed to get the detail of the novel without losing sight of the story.

I really enjoyed the book and have read it twice so I was hoping for a worthy adaptation.

And I got it.

Camille Claudel

Rated: PGCamille Claudel

Directed by: Bruno Nuytten

Produced by: Isabelle Adjani, Bernard Artigues

Starring: Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Alain Cuny, Laurent Grévill, Madeleine Robinson.

Restored version

In French with English subtitles 

It is definitely worth a trip to Winsor for a coffee, a croissant and Camille Claudel.

As a part of their Isabelle Adjani retrospective, the 2019 Alliance Française Classic Film Festival is screening  the 1988 classic, which tells the story of Camille Claudel’s tragic romance with the sculptor Auguste Rodin (Gérard Depardieu).

As the film opens, Camille Claudel is out late at night and all alone. The wind howls, snow is falling, and, despite her full-length skirt and bonnet, Claudel is burrowing into a muddy pit, pawing handfuls of wet clay into a suitcase.

What could possibly inspire such single-minded determination? An audition to work as an assistant to Rodin. Yes. Absolutely. But beyond that, Claudel’s aspirations were so improbable that a film about her life had to be based on a true story. Even at the dawn of modernism, Claudel’s chosen art form was unlikely.

Sculpture has always been hideously expensive and working at scale meant long hours of backbreaking toil in freezing barns and stables. Much to her mother’s (Madeleine Robinson) displeasure, Monsieur Claudel (Alain Cuny) shared his daughter’s ambition and was happy to indulge her. Although, in the end, her father’s indulgence may have turned out to be a poison chalice.

Taken on as one assistant among many, Claudel is working high on a scaffold when her attention is drawn toward a nook on the other side of the studio. From her unseen vantage point she can see Rodin running his lips over his model’s naked flesh. His reputation as a seducer of young women would appear to be well-deserved, until the sculptor later uses the same gesture on a marble torso as he tries to feel the life within.

While kissing the sculptures is generally discouraged in galleries and museums, hewing form from rock is intense and physical, and the film beautifully alludes to the sculptor’s desire to caress the rock, to sensuously experience that moment when the curve of ankle or the bow of a lip first emerges from its casing.

In the role of Claudel’s mentor, Rodin offers keen insights into the nature of sculpture and subtly evokes its poetry, ‘The accident of what is left is a complete emotion,’ but Rodin was years behind in fulfilling his commissions and struggling for inspiration when the affair began. As his muse, his model, his lover and his artistic collaborator, Claudel was the focus of Rodin’s admiration and her name was becoming established at the epicentre of Parisian art, so it must have seemed inconceivable that it would all come apart.

When the unthinkable did happen, Claudel denounced Rodin as the arch-villain who destroyed her. She blamed him for everything from stealing her commissions to undermining her reputation and blighting her exhibitions. She even claimed that Rodin was somehow responsible for the river Seine when her studio flooded.

But there was another less obvious figure involved in Claudel’s downfall. While Claudel was conducting her affairs in the limelight, her younger brother (Laurent Grévill) had been pursuing a successful diplomatic career and quietly gaining recognition as a poet. Ever available and obliging, Paul Claudel was Camille’s closest ally; that is, until he came into his inheritance.

A singular woman in a world conducted by men with agendas, the story of Camille Claudel might not be quite as it appears.

Pain and Glory (Dolor Y Gloria)

Rated: MA15+Pain and Glory

Written and Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar

Produced by: Agustín Almodóvar

Executive Producer: Esther García

Original score: Alberto Iglesias

Director of photography: José Luis Alcaine

Starring: Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nora Navas, Julieta Serrano, César Vicente, Asier Flores, Penélope Cruz.

Spanish with English subtitles.

‘If you don’t write or film, what do you do?’

‘Live, I guess.’

Pain and Glory is a drama, a life story shown in monologue and intimate conversation.

Salvador Mallo’s (Antonio Banderas) life is filled with patterns and colours, water and tiles, suspension and scars.

The story of the film circles his life as he remembers teaching a young builder to read and write when he was growing up in the catacombs with his mother, as he remembers his career writing and making films and the past disagreements with friend and actor, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) whom he hasn’t seen since the premiere of his most successful film thirty-two years ago.

He remembers as the pain of his ailments take pieces from him, his back pain, his migraines, his choking – he can’t create anymore, but he can remember.

This is a film that bleeds the present and the past so the trigger of smoking heroin with the man described, ‘You’re the opposite side of that text,’ Salvador falls, taking him back to the time when he experienced his first desire, his first love, the escape from the ‘bad ring’ of Madrid, to get away from the temptations of addiction to Havana and the Ivory Coast.

But sometimes, love isn’t enough.

He has no regrets.  To recover from his past, he writes the story.

So the past and present are intertwined like his writing translated into this film.

Director and writer, Pedro Almodóvar has taken pieces from his own life, translating them into the film like the character Salvador makes films about his past.

The hair, the setting of the apartment the same as the man himself, Pedro.

Antonio Banderas has just won the Cannes 2019 Best Actor Award (the film selected to compete for the Palme d’Or) for his performance here.  And I can see why.  He just seems to get better with age.  His humble sincerity a warmth felt through the screen.  He’s endearing.

And there’s more to the film than a character study as the scenes cut from the bright sun shining through the exposed roof of the catacomb house, to the animation of red broken lines like the branches of a tree exploding in the drawn lines of a brain, a contrast to the quiet suffering of a man embarrassed of his pain, refusing to allow his housekeeper to tie his laces, wearing loafers, catching taxis, lying in the dark.

But there are no complaints as he loses himself in memory.

This isn’t a sad film, more a poignant tale of all the darkness and light in life – sad and happy and true.

The overriding feeling I got from this film was grateful: life can be cruel, but it can also be kind.

The Boonies

The BooniesDirected by: Brad T Gottfred

Written by: Brad T Gottfred

Produced by: Corey Moss, Brad T Gottfred

Starring: Calum Worthy, Cody Ho, Andi Matichak, Kyle Jones, AmyMarie Gaertner, Lauren Elizabeth.

Promoted as a mystery-comedy, The Boonies follows five seniors at Boone High School somewhere in America, unwillingly reunited seven years after they were once on the same soccer team. The reason? A dead classmate’s video promises a treasure hunt with a million dollars as the prize, taking place inside the college where they will be graduating the next day.

The limited expertise of the film’s technical crew is obvious, as though someone with little film experience thought it would be fun to gather together some friends with only passable technical skills and see how things go. The result is a repetitive, awkward and unentertaining mess, probably aimed at an 18-25 year old demographic but not likely to appeal to anyone over 14.

The group is called “The Boonies” by their dead classmate Doug (Calum Worthy) because he thought the gang was similar to the Goonies (but without their humour, charm or sleuthing skills). Doug, sporting a daggy fringe and an irritating smirk, was a techno whiz kid and inventor before being killed in a car explosion in the college car park, witnessed by all his former friends. He also had access to various sections of the college that were mysteriously closed down, which he repurposed with lots of secret doors and a room devoted to electronic surveillance equipment, ideal for hosting a treasure hunt.

The others in the gang are Teddy (Cody Ko), seemingly the most normal of the group but hiding a Guilty Secret; Chuck (Kyle Jones), a drunken, moronic cowboy with sex on the brain; Holly (Andi Matichak), with a photographic memory, rampant hysteria/tantrums, and a bosom so noticeable that practically everyone calls her derogatory names based on her breasts; Stephanie (Lauren Elizabeth), the bitchy, sexually promiscuous, spoilt girl who constantly yells at and abuses everyone else (so much so it is a mystery why anyone tolerates her); and Elektra (AmyMarie Gaertner), who is now a soulful Goth trying to evade her psycho ex-boyfriend who keeps threatening to kill her (which is apparently meant to be funny).

The dead Doug communicates with his five former friends by text, challenging them to complete the treasure hunt because, as he tells us in one of his many straight-to-camera monologues, he wants them to atone for how they treated him after their group fell apart. He has three conditions they must follow: 1. Keep together; 2. Stay alive; and 3. Confess one horrible thing they each did to someone else in their group, all before the night ends.

This premise, such as it is, had the potential to show the remaining five former friends gradually working together, overcoming their problems and reigniting their friendship in adulthood – in a believable way.

The problem is that each of them, aside from Teddy and Elektra, are thoroughly unlikeable stereotypes, and their success or otherwise isn’t something I could get invested in.

Chuck talks a lot about vaginas, sex and being easily aroused, while the object of his lust, the screaming and abusive Stephanie, is so vile it made her character totally unsympathetic. Her bullying treatment of the gormless Holly, she of the noticeable breasts (since we as the audience are never allowed to forget these exist) is horrible, and I wondered why no one was prepared to call her out on her appalling treatment.

Much of their abusive dialogue was, I assume, supposed to sound snappily sarcastic or humorous, but instead it fell thoroughly flat, was often cringe-worthy and just inappropriate in this age of the #MeToo movement and online bullying.

The Boonies face external threats as well, from three groups also intent on finding the million dollars. This is meant to add to the tension, but the jerky editing and woeful soundtrack detract from this.

One group is the Ex-Cheerleaders, who like wearing their cheerleader outfits and arming themselves with golf clubs; their motivation for being so keen to inflict harm on the Boonies is never properly explained.

Another group, the Outcasts, is led by Elektra’s homicidal ex-boyfriend, and has the uncanny knack of being able to find the Boonies no matter how often they manage to escape.

The third group is the Silver Skulls, bikers with their own reason for wanting the million dollars.

Whenever one of these groups confronts the Boonies, threatening bodily harm, the disjointed editing, intrusive soundtrack and shouted dialogue all work against any potential to build tension or suspense.

I scare easily but there wasn’t one genuine moment of danger that increased my pulse rate. The plot was often confusing, the direction awkwardly paced and most of the action or motivation was illogically played out.

I enjoy witty, well written and acted mysteries and/or comedies, and when I read this was a mystery-comedy, I was intrigued. But there are so many things that don’t work in this film, including the unlikeable characters, the abusive, lame dialogue, the lack of strong or believable motives for most of the cast, the amateur acting (except for Elektra) and the absence of any real sense of danger, mystery or suspense, that I was totally disappointed.

Apparently this film was made in 2017, and I wonder not why it took two years to release it, but why it ever saw daylight at all.

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