Sex, Leins & Videotape #40. Paignton film critic Tom Leins casts a critical eye over this week’s most exciting DVD releases.
Inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s blistering Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road (Icon) 
is a haunting post-apocalyptic fable about a father’s love for his son in a devastated world that has been pushed to the brink.
Cormac McCarthy’s literary reputation precedes him, and turning a book as astonishing as The Road into a movie is a tough task by anyone’s standards. The man charged with bringing McCarthy’s harrowing vision of a ravaged future to the screen is John Hillcoat, a director best known for the brutal Australian revisionist western The Proposition. No stranger to bleak subject matter, Hillcoat has assembled a pitch-perfect cast to help bring the all-too-plausible horrors to life. A haggard Viggo Mortensen stars as The Man, and young Kodi Smit-McPhee stars as The Boy, and the unusual chemistry between the pair brings the central relationship to life.
The post-apocalypse has offered a fascinating movie premise for decades, but Hillcoat’s trump card is his mesmerising use of location. By ignoring ruined urban landscapes and sand-blasted deserts, and concentrating on ash piles and slag-heaps from abandoned mining towns, Hillcoat has reinvented the iconography of the post-apocalypse in emphatic style. These ravaged backdrops provide a fitting tableaux for the minimalist narrative and Hillcoat’s movie offers a gut-wrenching, heart-stopping mixture of terror and beauty. In truth, the movie can’t compete with the raw power of the book, but Hillcoat deserves plaudits for creating such an astonishing visual spectacle nevertheless. Best viewed as an impressive companion piece to an absolutely colossal work of fiction, The Road is well worth your time and attention.
After languishing in the cinematic doldrums for far too long, Guy Ritchie has hit pay-dirt once more with his quirkily enjoyable re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes franchise. With the reliably entertaining Robert Downey, Jr. installed in the eccentric title role, Sherlock Holmes (Warner Home Video) is a boisterous treat that sees Ritchie flex his muscles and channel his robust energies into a story far removed from his usual Cockney gangster fare. Rather than rehash a tried and trusted Holmes story, Ritchie and his screenwriters have conjured up a new villain – the Aleister Crowley-style occultist Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) – who proves to be more than a match for our intrepid hero. Against a sinister, fog-shrouded Victorian background Holmes finds himself plunged into a bizarre case involving a series of grisly murders – improbably enough committed by a dead man…
Ritchie has clearly studied the Casino Royale/Batman Begins playbook, and this brutally efficient reinvention blends bruising bare-knuckle fight scenes with effortless pulp-style storytelling. The combination is instantly engaging – as is the whip-smart interplay between Holmes and Dr Watson (Jude Law). Sherlock Holmes purists may well object to Ritchie’s playful technique (indeed, the sly, insistent suggestions of a relationship between Holmes and Watson have already rubbed many fans up the wrong way), but Sherlock Holmes offers a smart, charming take on a dusty, fusty old character. The combination of Guy Ritchie and Sherlock Holmes is undeniably an odd one, but by stepping out of his comfort zone Ritchie has arguably produced his best movie since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Enjoyable stuff.
Over the last five years France has proven itself to be something of a hot-bed for horror movies, and a vicious new strain of slasher films have subsequently washed up on this side of the English Channel. The latest movie to wash up on our shores is High Lane (Optimum) , the debut feature film from acclaimed shorts director Abel Ferry. The plot follows the exploits of a group of adventurous friends embarking on an ill-advised climbing trip in Croatia. Unperturbed by the fact that the climbing trail has been closed for repairs, overconfident leader Fred urges them on regardless, and it soon becomes painfully obvious why the decrepit trail has been boarded up. Foot-holds come loose, wires snap, and all manner of high altitude mayhem ensues. Despite some less-than-subtle acting from weak-willed, vertigo-afflicted Loic, the inventive camera-work provides some impressively nerve-wracking scenes.
Suffice to say, after an unusual, eye-opening start, the movie degenerates into a standard backwoods ‘survival horror’ movie as it reaches its mid-way point. The enemy is no longer the awkward terrain, but a feral Croatian poacher with a penchant for hunting down human trophies and hacking them up in his log cabin! Although the shift in tone feels slightly lazy, Ferry displays a knack for both stomach-churning tension and visceral terror, and he evidently has the chops to infiltrate the French horror scene and make a name for himself. Vertigo sufferers should probably give High Lane a wide berth, but anyone with a penchant for survival horror is advised to take a closer look.
British director David Mackenzie has carved himself an impressive niche with quirky home-grown movies such as The Last Great Wilderness and Young Adam. Spread (Optimum) sees him head across the Atlantic for his first American feature. Ashton Kutcher stars as Nikki, a shallow womaniser who seduces rich, older women in order to reap the financial benefits and live in the lap of luxury. His latest sucker is Samantha (Anne Heche), a wealthy attorney with a plush home in the Hollywood Hills. When she catches Nikki pleasuring another woman in her home she kicks him out and he is forced to live on his wits and try to secure another meal ticket. However, his resources of charm are wearing increasingly thin, and he becomes co-dependant on sexy fellow hustler Heather (Margarita Levieva) for bed and board.
Kutcher is well cast as the fading pretty-boy, and the movie makes you hope that his real-life courtship with Demi Moore didn’t resemble Nikki’s brutally cynical relationship with Samantha. Interestingly, despite scathing reviews from critics, Spread is nowhere near as bad as some people have made out. It starts well, and ends well – the only problem is the chunk in the middle which is terminally average. Despite some neat scenes, Spread offers little insight into the human condition, and ultimately feels as vacuous as the playboy lifestyle that it seeks to skewer. Overall: not bad, but not as impressively transgressive as Mackenzie’s earlier movies.
