When I saw some pre-marketing for Thunderbirds Are Go!, the revival of the Thunderbirds at London Toy Fair in January 2015, my interest was piqued and I started hoping for something along the lines of the original series. Then I received my screener for the new series and started watching it. This time around, maquettes are involved by the characters are animated. The stories are still simple, following the Tracy family as they save people and the world one adventure at a time.
“The Dead Room” was written by Kevin Stevens and director Jason Stutter who crafter a story seen many times to which they unfortunately bring very little that is new and very few genuine scares. After a family flees their new home in fear for their lives, a trio of investigators is sent by an insurance company to prove or disprove the family’s claim that it’s haunted by malevolent spirits. The haunted house sub-genre having been done to death over the last few years and throughout horror’s history is not re-invented here. Stevens and Stutter do have the advantage of being one of the few films about this set in New Zealand that I know of.
A deaf writer lives and works in her secluded home in the woods where she gets few visitors. Then one night, a masked man shows up and stalks her in an unnerving game of cat and mouse. Director Mike Flannagan and lead actress Kate Siegel co-wrote Hush which all takes place in and around the lead’s, Maddie’s, home. The limited settings work here as Maddie is trying to escape this mad man without help or access to the outside world. This is a movie with a total of five characters, two of which support the bulk of the story. The characters here feel real, not caricatures of real people or stereotypes.
Paris, the anti-gang squad does things their own way, causing much in collateral damage and related costs. A group of highly organized robbers is hitting banks and jewelry stores around the city. The squad goes after them but is stop when a change in management benches them in favor of a more by the book squad. As things are escalating, the original squad decides to go after the robbers even though they are banned from doing so. All kinds of action film goodness ensue.
After Samantha is brutally attacked by a gang on the job, she becomes handicapped and her husband Bruce does all he can to help her live her life and get better. While being the dotting husband she needs, he also has a need to exact revenge on the gang who did this. He embarks on a vigilante journey to avenge her and to try to put his mind at ease. This however leads him down a path of violence and paranoia. His mind begins to slip and he begins taking his issues out on a young woman who they previously crossed paths with.
A train breaks down in the countryside only a few miles from its departure point. The few passengers on board are getting restless as the train staff attempts to figure out what is going on when all of a sudden, a beat howls outside. The train becomes under siege by a beast who wants to snack on its passengers like canned food. The setting and premise here are simple: People in one location, being attacked, needing to escape. Co-written by Nick Ostler and Mark Huckerby, both of whom mostly have children tv show credits, the script works within its limited setting. They build the characters just enough which is to say, most characters are fairly basic, but they work as beast fodder that the viewer care enough about to have a reaction to their demise.
It also means that the last survivors are easy to spot as they are the most developed characters, which is fairly par for the course with horror movies like this one.
A group of four bank robbers run into trouble while attempting to escape. Their simple plan of robbing a bank and getting away goes terribly awry when one of them is killed and the others take hostages. They eventually get on their way to possible freedom with a father and daughter as well as a woman; however, the road to this freedom is littered with obstacles and violence. Enragés is a new adaptation of the short story “Man and Boy” by Michael J. Carroll which was previously adapted by Mario and Lamberto Bava in 1974. Here the screenplay is written by Yannick Dahan, first time writer and director Eric Hannezo, and actor (yet not in this film) Benjamin Rataud.