KRAVEN THE HUNTER : Tuesday 17th December 2024

I saw the MA15+ Rated 'KRAVEN THE HUNTER' earlier this week, and this American Superhero film features the Marvel Comics characters of the same name and is the sixth film in Sony's Spider-Man Universe. It is Directed by J.C. Chandor who made his feature film making debut with 'Margin Call' in 2011 and would follow this up with 'All Is Lost' in 2013, 'A Most Violent Year' in 2014, and 'Triple Frontier' in 2019. The film was released here in Australia and the US last week, cost a reported circa US$120M to produce, has so far grossed US$29M worldwide and has garnered generally negative critical reviews. Apparently, earlier this month and following the projected financial failure of the film, it was reported that 'Kraven the Hunter' would be the final film in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, ending any chance for a sequel or crossover film, although one well known publication stated that this will not be the last film in the franchise . . . . . so who do you believe?

The film opens up with a convoy of prison vehicles driving along a snow covered landscape deep inside Siberia. The convoy comes to halt at a fuel stop so that the prisoners can relieve themselves before continuing their onward journey. One of the prisoners is Sergei Kravinoff aka Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who is assigned a cell with a mean looking MoFo of a man. Kravinoff tells his fellow inmate to give him just three days before he escapes. The next day Kraven is brought to the attention of Seymon Chorney (Yuri Kolokolnikov) a Russian crime lord and fellow inmate, after he successfully overpowers two of Chorney's henchmen in the exercise yard. Chorney asks Kraven who he is, to which comes the reply that he is the Hunter, with Chorney responding that it's just a myth. Within a minute Chorney and his two henchmen are dead, stabbed with the tooth of a lion which Kraven plucked from a lion skin rug on the floor. Kraven then makes his escape through the prison effortlessly clambering up walls, running along roof tops, jumping barbed wire fences, and evading a hail of bullets from the prison guards. Once outside he runs into a snow storm in which is waiting an aircraft to transport him back home. 

We then back track sixteen years, and following the death of his mother, Sergei Kravinoff (Levi Miller), along with his half-brother Dmitri Smerdyakov (Billy Barratt), are taken out of school by their father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) to prepare to take over his drug trafficking operations. During a hunting trip in Tanzania, Sergei is mortally wounded protecting his brother from a legendary apex lion. Almost dead from the savage mauling, he is found by a girl named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova), who, having been forewarned by her grandmother that she would intervene in an accident very soon and give its victim great power, heals him with a serum gifted by her grandmother, and calls for rescue, leaving a tarot card in the hands of an unconscious Sergei. A few days later Sergei comes around in a hospital bed having been officially pronounced dead for three minutes, but now appears to be fighting fit. Nikolai discharges his son from hospital and the three return to their grand home on the outskirts of London. Nikolai reveals he killed the lion to teach his sons a lesson about showing no fear, and in his world it is very much survival of the fittest. Sergei, meanwhile having discovered his physical attributes have become animal like, becomes sickened by his father's actions and his intentions for his sons, and retreats to a sanctuary his mother owned in the remote wilderness of eastern Russia, leaving Dmitri behind to fend for himself.

Fast forwarding to the present day and Kraven travels to London for Dmitri's (Fred Hechinger) birthday, which he does every year. Unable to sleep that night on the sofa of Dmitri's lavish apartment, he goes for a walk falling asleep in the park outside Dmitri's building. He wakens the next day and goes back up to the apartment to find Dmitri gone and blood stains on his pillow and bed sheets. Dmitri had been captured by mercenaries, and when Nikolai refuses to pay the US$20M ransom, Kraven tracks down Calypso (Ariana DeBose), now working as an investigative lawyer in London, and convinces her to help track down his brother's kidnappers. 

Meanwhile, Dmitri is met by his kidnappers' boss Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) who took part in an experiment spearheaded by a cutting edge New York doctor, granting him the strength and outward appearance of a rhinoceros which he is able to control by way of a back pack containing a serum which continually drip feeds via a tube into his lower side. When he unplugs the tube, he turns into Rhino but says the process is extremely painful. Aleksei proposes an alliance to overthrow Nikolai, but upon discovering Kraven's connection to Dmitri, Aleksei lures him to an abandoned monastery in Turkey, with the intention of taking out Kraven there, but he survives the ambush. 

Aleksei is then approached by the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott), an assassin who uses ocular hypnosis to disorientate his targets, with an offer to kill Kraven, having carefully studied his modus operandi for years. Tracking Kraven and Calypso to his sanctuary in eastern Russia and using Dmitri as bait, Aleksei and the Foreigner ambush Kraven. Drugging him with neurotoxin, the Foreigner attacks Kraven and is successful in overpowering and paralysing him but just as he is standing over Kraven and about to pull the trigger of the gun pointed at his head Calypso kills him with an arrow straight in to his eye, and revives Kraven with a vile of the serum. Kraven then uses a buffalo stampede to trap Aleksei, who, despite turning into the Rhino and briefly overpowering him, is killed. 

Having determined that Nikolai was the one who revealed his existence to Aleksei, Kraven tracks his father down to a snow covered Siberian forest for answers. There in the dead of night Nikolai states that he knew Aleksei was targeting him and manipulated his sons to remove him. Kraven refuses to kill his father and turns his back on him and as he walks away he drops the ammunition he unloaded from his fathers shotgun on the ground just as Nikolai is attacked and killed by a bear. 

One year later on the occasion of Dmitri's birthday, Kraven again visits his brother in London. Dmitri in the meantime has gained shapeshifting abilities from the doctor who experimented on Aleksei, and after discovering this new found ability disowns Kraven, stating that despite his claims of being morally superior, he and Nikolai were the same - big game hunters searching for their next big trophy. Dmitri demonstrates this to Kraven by changing his appearance before becoming chameleon like and then changing back to his natural appearance. 

At his family home, Kraven comes across a note left for him by Nikolai along with a vest made from the skin and the mane of the killed lion that mauled Sergei when he was young, which he puts on, and takes a seat in front of a mirror.

'Kraven the Hunter' is not a bad film, but it's also not that good either. The plot is fairly thin on the ground, the action set pieces are well enough choreographed, but the CGI is left wanting and sub-par for a film costing well north of US$100M, and, nothing that we haven't already seen before. The dialogue is also pretty lame, and the only saving grace is in the performances of Taylor-Johnson, Crowe, Nivola and DeBose, with the latter being given too little screen time and too little to contribute. J.C. Chandor whose previous film output has been far far better, has crafted a film that seems to have had too much studio and Producer interference, resulting in a film that is sure to disappear into the annals of mediocrity and leaving Sony's Spider-Man Universe to bow out on a whimper.

'Kraven the Hunter' merits two claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a potential five claps.

POOR THINGS : Tuesday 26th December 2023.

I saw the MA15+ Rated 'POOR THINGS' at my local independent movie theatre this week, and this black comedy fantasy film is Co-Produced and Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos whose prior feature film offerings take in his debut in 2001 with 'My Best Friend' and which he would follow up with 'Dogtooth' in 2009, and then his first English language film 'The Lobster' in 2015, 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer' in 2017 and 'The Favourite' in 2018. This film is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray. The film saw its World Premiere showcasing at the Venice International Film Festival in early September this year where it won the Golden Lion. It was released Stateside earlier this month and is scheduled to be released in the UK on 12th January, having so far grossed US$6M against a production budget of US$35M and garnering universal critical acclaim.

The film opens up in London, Victorian era England where scientist and surgeon Dr. Godwin 'God' Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is performing surgery on a cadaver to an audience of students, who under their breath deride his monstrous appearance. One such student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is singled out to become his assistant on the strength of a paper he wrote which grabbed the attention of Baxter. McCandles is welcomed to the grand home of Baxter where he meets with the Doctor's maid Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine). McCandles is tasked with recording the progress made by Baxter's ward - a childlike young woman named Bella (Emma Stone, who also Co-Produces here), whose intelligence is rapidly developing almost by the day. 

In time, Baxter tells McCandles that the woman who was heavily pregnant at the time, had committed suicide by throwing herself off a bridge into the River Thames, and that she had died only moments before he retrieved the body and that rigour mortis had not yet set in. He resurrected her lifeless corpse by replacing her brain with the brain of her still-living baby, resulting in her now having the mind of an infant child. 

With Baxter's blessing, McCandles asks for Bella's hand in marriage, on the condition that that the pair never leave the house, because of the bad influences, dangers and violence that exists in the world outside the security of their own home. Bella accepts but, desiring freedom to explore the world and experience adventures in her own right as her mind matures, runs off with foppish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) who was brought in by Baxter to execute a marriage contract, and who became infatuated with Bella upon their first meeting. Reluctantly Baxter agrees to let Bella go. Godwin starts a new experiment with a young woman named Felicity (Margaret Qualley), whose intelligence is developing at a much slower pace than Bella's did.

So Bella and Wedderburn embark on a grand adventure, starting in Lisbon, Portugal where the two have frequent sex. Bella becomes difficult for Duncan to control as she is not yet mature enough to engage in polite social etiquette and just speaks her mind on a whim. So he smuggles her onto a cruise ship for a change of scenery. Once on board, she becomes friendly with passengers Martha (Hannah Schygulla) and Harry (Jerrod Carmichael) who open her mind to philosophy. Wedderburn becomes increasingly exasperated and begins drinking more heavily and gambling. 

During a stop at Alexandria, Egypt, where Harry and Bella are enjoying a lavish lunch, Harry shows Bella the miserable plight of the locals, the abject poverty in which they live and the resultant death of numerous young children and babies, at which Bella becomes distraught and sobs uncontrollably. Returning to her cabin she finds Wedderburn passed out on their bed in a drunken stupor covered in cash from his gambling winnings. Wracked with guilt over the poverty she witnessed she collects up all the cash and donates away the winnings, which are in turn stolen by a couple of opportunistic crew members whom Bella believed she could trust to do the right thing and pass on the cash to the people who desperately needed it the most.

Unable to afford the remaining trip, the pair are kicked off the ship at Marseille, France after which they make their way to Paris. Having run out of money, Bella begins working at a brothel clearing twenty French francs per client, which only serves to further enrage Wedderburn resulting in his mental breakdown, and which finally leads her to abandon him. At the brothel, she comes under the tutelage of Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter), has no shortage of clients and befriends fellow prostitute Toinette, (Suzy Bemba) who introduces her to socialism.

Meanwhile, back in London, Baxter is terminally ill. He asks McCandles to locate Bella and to return her to him. McCandles does so after tracking down Wedderburn, who has been confined to an institution following his breakdown. Upon her return to London, Bella reconciles with Baxter and renews her vows with McCandles. The two are interrupted by Wedderburn and General Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott) at the alter on their wedding day, at which Baxter is giving away Bella. 

Blessington, who calls Bella by her former name of Victoria, reveals that they were married before her disappearance and that he has come to reclaim her after Wedderburn posted an ad with a picture of Bella in the newspaper. Bella abandons Max at the alter before exchanging their vows to learn of her past life. She quickly comes to the realisation that her former husband has a violent and sadistic streak and that she had in fact committed suicide to escape their unhappy marriage and to save her unborn child from a life of misery. He basically imprisons Bella to the confines of his mansion and threatens her at gunpoint to submit to genital mutilation after which he will plant his seed inside her, and demands she drink a chloroform-laced cocktail to sedate her for the procedure. She tosses the cocktail in his face, causing him to shoot himself in the foot before succumbing to the chloroform. 

Baxter dies peacefully with Bella and McCandles at his side, with his final words being that his surgery is now hers and that his life has been interesting. Bella decides to carry on Baxters work with the help of McCandles, Toinette and Mrs. Prim. Blessington is seen on the operating table where his brain is swapped with that of a goat, while Felicity's intelligence is finally improving. Bella is seen in the garden of her London home with a cocktail in one hand and studying from a book for her final medical exams. 

For me 'Poor Things' failed to land in the same way that it does with the majority of other critics who have given the film its almost universal blessing. That said, you can't help but admire Director Yorgos Lanthimos and his creation of a steampunk bizarro world of OTT characters, locales and emotions writ large mostly by a never been better and a career defining performance by Emma Stone, an equally far removed from his usual roles Mark Ruffalo, and the always dependable Willem Dafoe channeling Doctor Frankenstein. The production values and costume designs are all top notch and look as though Lanthimos squeezed out very cent from his US$35M production budget to bring us a film that looks greater than the sum of its parts. However, this film is hard to pigeon hole, and at a run time of 141 minutes and a film that feels more like an absurdist sex comedy than an intellectual coming of age fantasy drama I couldn't help but feel just a little meh! after all the explicit sex scenes and the vividly rendered set pieces.

'Poor Things' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a potential five claps. 

-Steve, at Odeon Online-

IT COMES AT NIGHT : Tuesday 18th July 2017

'IT COMES AT NIGHT' is a post-apocalyptic psychological horror film made by Director, Producer, Writer and Actor Trey Edward Shults and was made for about US$5M and has so far grossed US$17M, was released in the US in early June and has received generally positive Reviews from critics and audiences alike.

The film opens with a death. That of an older gent, Bud (David Pendleton) who has clearly contracted some contagious disease with open seeping black welts on his body, dark sunken eyes, dramatic weight loss and barely alive when we are first introduced to him. His daughter Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), breathing through an oxygen mask, wearing rubber gloves tends to the frail man, with another masked man Paul (Joel Edgerton), Sarah's husband, looking on. He is loaded into a wheelbarrow, wrapped in a blanket and carted outside to a shallow grave, wherein he is placed face up. Paul, places a cushion over the mans head, unloads his pistol into it, and then douses the now dead body with an accelerant and throws in a lighted match. The body catches alight instantly and sends a plume of blackened smoke up through the trees of the forest where they live.

This sets the scene, where there has clearly been some devastating viral outbreak of seemingly global proportions whereby a deadly contagion is transferable from human to human by both airborne means and by touch - hence the gas mask and the gloves. To save themselves from the inevitable, Sarah and Paul, with their teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jnr.) and trusted dog Stanley, have sought refuge deep within a forest lodge dwelling in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the rest of the world and living a solitary life fending for themselves. It's a meagre existence, but they are alive and relatively safe, albeit constantly on edge and on the look out for fear of attack from the now menacingly outside world.

The next night, while sleeping they are awakened by someone attempting to break into their house. They capture a lone man, Will (Christopher Abbott), and determine that he is not infected, but tie him to a tree, hooded, overnight. The next day Paul questions Will while still secured, and Will advises that he thought the house was abandoned and he was just searching for food and water to sustain his family some fifty miles away. Will offers to trade some of his supplies - chickens, goats etc. in exchange for essential foods and clean water.

Sarah suggests that Will should bring back his family to the safety of their home on the basis of safety in numbers. Paul agrees, reluctantly, and the pair head off in a pick-up truck to collect Will's wife Kim (Riley Keough) and young son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner) and their supplies and livestock. En route they are ambushed by two men, which Paul manages to dispense with but accuses Will of setting him up. Will convinces Paul that this was not so, on the basis that he too tried to fend them off. A couple of days later Paul and Will return with Kim, Andrew and a trailer loaded with supplies and belongings, ready to move into their new shared home.

Later that evening over dinner, Paul establishes the ground rules about living in the house, and that no one must go out at night, that they always venture outdoors in pairs, and that the only way in and out of the house is via the red door, to which he has the only key and it is kept locked and bolted every night without question. The red door leads to another room, a sort of plastic sheeted quarantine room, which leads outside. Over time the two families begin to bond, an element of trust is forged and a degree of normalcy sets in. They eat together, play games by candlelight in the evening, and co-exist in relative harmony.

One day, Stanley the dog begins barking uncontrollably at some unseen presence in the woods. Travis follows Stanley deeper into the woods, but looses sight of him but still hears his barking . . . until it stops abruptly. Paul arrives bringing up the rear, and Travis insisted that he heard something in the woods, but saw nothing. Paul derides Travis for being careless, and they decide to return home, saying that Stanley knows the woods and will return home safe by the next morning.





Later that night Travis is awakened by a nightmare he has about his grandfather Bud. He walks through the house to discover Andrew lying asleep on the floor in Bud's old bedroom, apparently also suffering a nightmare. He leads the young lad back into his parents room where Will and Kim are sleeping. Shortly afterwards he hears a sound coming from downstairs. Creeping down to investigate he discovers the red door to be ajar and a sound coming from the room beyond. He quickly wakens Paul and Will who panicked, investigate to find a sick and bloodied Stanley lying on the floor.

They shoot and burn the dog. Sarah suggests that a sleepwalking Andrew may have opened the door, but given that Paul has the only key, how is that possible? At this point tensions between the two families start to rise, and Paul suggests that the two families should isolate themselves from each other in separate parts of the house to cool off for a few days, and to ensure that they are all free from infection.

The next morning Travis overhears a conversation between Will and Kim, that they should leave and straight away. Travis lets his parents know what he has heard and how Andrew may in fact be infected, and therefore by default, so would he be too. Paul and Sarah confront Will and Kim about their potentially infected son, but they staunchly deny this, but refuse to let the others see Andrew. A power struggle breaks out resulting in Will taking Paul captive and demanding food and water provisions and that they be allowed to leave immediately with their 'healthy' son. Paul and Sarah manage to overwhelm Will and lead the family out of the house, where the two men get into a brutal fight. Sarah shoots and kills Will in the back while he is beating Paul with a rock. Kim tries to flee with her son but stumbles to the ground. Paul shoots and kills Andrew leaving a distraught mother wailing uncontrollably. Paul shoots her dead too. The film ends with Paul, Sarah and Travis's worst nightmare coming true as they learn of their fate bestowed upon them by the family they tried to help, and an unseen force.

Critics have been generally positive in their Reviews of 'It Comes At Night', but for me the film just didn't click. Sure, this is atmospheric, moody and creepy at times, but there are none of the usual horror tropes we have come to expect from end of the world post-apocalyptic virus infected fare, and this is a welcome redeeming feature it must said. But equally there are no jump scares in this film, little by way of suspense and the premise is a little too predictable, if remotely plausible. The horror here does not come from flesh eating rampaging zombies, or from some other outwardly force, but from some unseen viral infection that is never really explained except that it is airborne or transmitted by touch, and takes hold of its victims within a day. I also struggled to determine exactly what comes at night - other than fear, anxiety, distrust and paranoia under the cloak of night-time darkness with the real enemy coming from within! But, I guess that's what the Director intended, thinking that somethings gotta give when you throw two desperate fighting for survival families together unexpectedly under one roof. There are also several plot holes and unanswered questions which just leave you guessing. You can save yourself the price of a cinema ticket and catch this on BluRay, DVD or digital download soon and watch it from the comfort of your own lounge room.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-