International Weirdness : “Suburban Coffin”

As a general rule, when a movie’s IMDB summary is scant on details, you know something’s up. I mean, whoever makes a film can go in there and write whatever blurb about it they want, and yet writer/director Benjamin Rider — the guy behind 2018 UK production Suburban Coffin — submitted only a cryptic, one-sentence description of the fruits of his labor (and 2,000 pounds of his money). Verbatim, it reads : “The devil, disguised as an insurance salesman, appears in the suburbs of London.”

Which, fair enough, is what this flick is about — but surely that can’t be all it’s about, can it?

Actually, uhhhmmm — yeah, it can. Clocking in at just over an hour, this is nevertheless a bit of a slow burn, and probably features a few too many characters for its own good. Alasdair Melrose turns in pretty solid work as Old Scratch himself, and of course temptation is the name of his game — but those tempted (and otherwise) aren’t exactly the most compelling characters, nor are the performers tasked with bringing them to some semblance of “life” apparently up to the task, so my message to the likes of Angie Adler, Lily Smith, and Lucas Sokolowski (who cuts an absurd figure as Diabolos), is : don’t quit your day jobs just yet. Harsh, I know, but I gotta call ’em like I see ’em.

To that end, Rider himself isn’t exactly ready for prime time at this stage of his career, either : a number of the scenes in this film are awash in weird lighting that obscures the proceedings (perhaps for the best), his eye for shot composition borders one the non-existent, and there are weird things going on with the sound that sometimes distract and/or detract from the general goings-on, which frankly need all the help they can get to remain interesting.

The news isn’t all bad, though — I guess. The emptiness of the suburban setting really does come through more by default than anything else — when all you’re doing is pointing, shooting, and hoping for the best it’s pretty hard to screw up capturing the character of a locale to at least a cursory extent — and the pacing improves a bit toward the end, but I defy you to remain actively interested all the way up to that point. It’s not an impossible task, but it is a difficult one, and given that it doesn’t pay anything, I’d have to advise that it’s really not worth the attempt on your part.

So, that’s me being the stereotypical “negative Nellie,” I suppose, but what can you do? I take no particular pleasure or pride in trashing obvious labors of love such as this, and I give Rider credit for getting his extremely modest little number all the way to Amazon Prime’s streaming service (I couldn’t tell you whether or not it’s seen a Blu-ray or DVD release), but beyond that I really can’t think of anything to fill in on the “plus” side of Suburban Coffin‘s ledger. Better luck next time to all involved, but it’s not like that “next time” is anything I’ll be looking forward to based on the evidence offered up here.

**********************************************************

This review, and all others around these parts, is “brought to you” by my Patreon site, where I serve up exclusive thrice-weekly rants and ramblings on the worlds of comics, films, television, literature, and politics for as little as a dollar per month. At that price you’ve literally got nothing to lose, and your support also ensures a steady supply of free content both here and at my fourcolorapocalypse comics site, Do give it a look, won’t you?

Oh, and I suppose a link would come in handy. Here you go :https://www.patreon.com/fourcolorapocalypse

 

International Weirdness : “Sniper Corpse” (A.K.A. “Corpse Sniper”)

Coming our way from the UK in 2018 and “boasting” a production budget of 30,000 pounds, writer/director Keith R. Robinson’s Sniper Corpse (now available for streaming on Amazon Prime under the closely-related title of Corpse Sniper — I honestly couldn’t tell you if it’s seen a Blu-ray or DVD release) has precisely one chance to make it : put succinctly, it absolutely needs to punch above its weight class.

Certainly, for a flick with no money it attempts to tell a pretty ambitious story : recently-widowed Diane Keely (played with something very much akin to actual professionalism by Eleri Jones — keep your eye out for her in future), whose husband was killed in action, goes searching for his purportedly “missing” remains  — and some answers — all the way into the heart of darkness, that “darkness” being embodied by one Dr. Craybrick (Tony Eccles, who delivers a solid performance himself), who’s the mad genius behind a military program that re-animates the dead for purposes of conscripting them back into service. We’ve established that the acting is well above standard for this sort of thing, then — shout-out to Kit Smith as Braddock in this regard as well — but what about anything and everything else?

Okay, I’ll level with you : there’s some very dodgy CGI on offer here, but when Robinson and his EFX crew go the practical route, the results are actually fairly impressive, and the same is true in regards to this flick’s moody, atmospheric cinematography, as well as its front-of-the-camera production values in general. Nothing’s perfect — there’s literally no way it could be — but more or less everything that you do see exceeds what you expect to see, and for a “micro-budget” production, that’s likely the highest form of praise one can bestow upon it.

Robinson, in other words, has earned the right to take a bow here, as is true for his talented cast and crew, including both performers who bring the so-called “Dark Soldier” to life, body actor (is that an actual term?) Jordan Murphy and voice actor Howy Bratherton.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t suffer from some glaringly obvious flaws — again, this scenario was more or less inevitable. You can only do what you can do with what you’ve got, of course, and while Robinson and company appear to have gone all-out in terms of putting together a reasonably competent visual spectacle, the script lets the side down pretty frequently, with glaring plot holes (why are British soldiers fighting in Riga, Latvia in the first place?) and a tired anti-drug premise giving the proceedings a decidedly dated feel to them.

But, honestly, as far as gripes go, that’s about all I’ve got, and it really ain’t much — so maybe shutting up is the wise course of action at this point, which is something I’ve heard from my family and friends on too many occasions to count. If you come into this thing expecting a masterpiece of some sort, then you’re bound to walk away from it with your head shaking somewhat vigorously, but if you’re willing to give Sniper Corpse a chance to impress you — both for what it is as well as how much more it is than it could be (does that even make sense? I sure hope so) — then it’s sure to do so.

*******************************************************************

This review, and all others around these parts, is “brought to you” by my Patreon site, where I serve up exclusive thrice-weekly rants and ramblings on the worlds of comics, films, television, literature, and politics for as little as a dollar a month. At that price you’ve got nothing to lose, and your support also ensures a steady supply of free content both here and at my fourcolorapocalypse comics site. Give it a look, won’t you?

Oh, and I suppose a link would come in handy. Here you go :https://www.patreon.com/fourcolorapocalypse