Brawl In Cell Block 99

Title: Brawl In Cell Block 99

Director: S. Craig Zahler

Released: 2017

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Don Johnson, Udo Kier, Marc Blucas, Tom Guiry

Plot: Bradley Thomas (Vaughn) a former boxer and drug mule finds himself drawn back into his old life when he is laid off from his job at an auto-repair company. However when a pick up gets botched he finds himself imprisioned and with a debt to repay to his former employer Eleazer (Mucciacito) who has now kidnapped Bradley’s wife Lauren (Carpenter). Now Bradley has to assassinate a fellow inmate being held in a maximum security facility.

Review: Perhaps if Tarantino had not been on his own kick to revitalise the Western genre with “Django Unchained” and “The Hateful Eight” we would perhaps see director S. Craig Zahler in much more of a mainstream light especially with his own take on the Western with “Bone Tomahawk” memorably bringing cannibals to the wild west while somehow managing to combine intelligent plotting with jaw dropping violence and now with this film he attempts to do the same for the prison drama.

Continuing the recent move into more serious fare for Vince Vaughn following his memorable turn on the largely forgettable second season of “True Detective”. Here Vaughn is very much the velvet glove inside the steel fist as he plays the hard hitting Bradley who thinks little of the brutal damage he inflicts on those who stand in his way and this is after we’ve seen him dismantle his wife’s car with his bare hands after he discovers that she has been cheating on him. At the same time he’s not just some mindless psychotic thug with his soft spoken and straight to the point attitude while frequently insisting he’s called Bradley and not Brad which makes him a very much a different sort of character than you would expect, especially considering the journey that we follow him on as he has to get from his initial imprisonment at a medium security facility to the maximum security facility of Redleaf by essentially beating the living hell out of anyone he can.

On equally strong form are the supporting cast which see’s Udo Kier as the go between from Bradley’s former employee and whose dark threats regarding the fate of Bradley’s wife in perticular the fate of their unborn child which hints at the violence to come. Don Johnson is on equally great form as Warden Tuggs who also uses the threat of violence and the generally dire conditions of his prison and much like Bradley plays against type as he constantly retains an air of cool, even when the situation around him is getting increasingly out of control never giving us the balistic meltdown we expect him to be building towards.

Despite the premise this is far from he all out action fest that you might expect. Yes there is certainly a lot of action here with some incredibly shot and wide framed brawls really making the most of Vaughn’s boxing training he undertook for the role but much like with “Bone Tomahawk” Zahler teases out these moments, spending the first hour establishing his characters and the botched drug deal which leads to Bradley being incarcerated but its never boring especially with Zahler showing the same kind of flair for dialogue as he has for violence

Shot with an intentional grindhouse eye for violence here it’s most jarringly cartoonist in how its approached with arms being broken and noses blooded it only gets worse when Bradley finally reaches the titular cell block 99 located in the depths of Redleaf and were order is maintained through the use of shock belts and less than humane treatment of the inmates considered problematic to be sent down there. Unquestionably these moments are cringe inducing and even slightly nauseating in places thanks to the fantastic sound design which really makes you feel the full impact of these moment. However compared to the superhero style of action and quick cuts its almost refreshing to see how Zahler holds back and just shoots the action almost from the view point of the onlooker. Yes Bradley might be overpowered in the damage he’s able to inflict with no real explanation as to how he’s able to achieve some of these almost superhuman acts of violence.

As of now Zahler might be one of the few directors alongside Richard Kelly, The Soska Sisters or Quentin Tarantino who I’m excited to see what they do next which at the time of writing is the equally evocatively titled “Dragged Across the Concrete” which will see him taking on the police procedural which after seeing his first team films has me only the more excited to see what other dark delights are yet to come.

Evil Dead (2013)

Title: Evil Dead

Director: Fede Alvarez

Released: 2013

Starring: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Jessica Lucas, Lou Taylor Pucci, Elizabeth Blackmore

Plot: David (Fernandez) and his friends arrange to meet at his family’s cabin with the plan to help David’s sister Mia (Levy) kick her heroin addiction by going cold turkey. However when one of the group discovers the Naturom Demonto (aka the book of the dead) they unwittingly unleash the evil in the woods.

 

Review: When this film was first announced it was unsurprisingly greeted with groans of disapproval from the fans of Sam Raimi’s original trilogy who for years had held out for a forth film, something that was seemingly being squashed with this film. Equally with the current track record for remakes for horror remakes not being exactly spectacular you can understand why most people were sceptical and really the main reason it’s taken me until now to actually watch it. However what we have here is not so much a remake or rebook, but rather an indirect sequel of sorts which carries over the ideas of the trilogy while at the same time introducing a new group of characters instead of trying to work in any members of the established cast, an idea which would also convince Bruce Campbell to sign on as a producer having long resisted the idea of remaking the films which helped him rise to cult stardom as he didn’t want to see anyone else play Ash.

Clearly a fan of the original films director Alvarez here making his feature debut while also co-writing the script with Rodo Sayagues (with further script doctoring from Diablo Cody) clearly isn’t trying and reinvent the wheel here, as builds he film following the same rules of the previous films, while at the same time peppering the film with numerous nods to those film, as he even manages to find a way to work in Raimi’s trademark Oldsmobile.

Despite the cast being made up of Unknowns with perhaps the exception of Jane Levy (sadly not a red head here) they are still make for an interesting group with each character different enough or having their own role, to stop them from being yet another disposable group of teens. Sadly this doesn’t seem to stretch to general intelligence as seen by the fact that we have one of them messing around with the book, which this time comes wrapped in plastic and barbwire, let alone numerous notes scrawled in its pages not to read it, which for some unknown reason still doesn’t deter Eric (Pucci) who you’d wrongly believe to be the smart one from reading it and of course unleashing all kinds of gooey terror on the group.

One of the main concerns going into this film was that the gore which made the first two films stand out, let alone land the first film on the Video nasties list would be absent especially in these times were studios are actively seeking lower ratings in order to guarantee larger box office returns. Thankfully this wasn’t the case here as it more than delivers in the gore stakes, perhaps even surpassing that of the original as over 70,000 gallons of fake blood were used with 50,000 alone being used for the finale were it literally rains blood. To further put this into context the original only used 200-300 gallons and here it really is put to effective use, more so with Alvarez insisting on using old school effects and only using CGI to touch up which is always welcome.

While the film follows several similar beats to the original film such as locking a possessed member in the cellar, here Alvarez aims to bring his own shocks even reworking the notorious tree rape scene from the original film which honestly comes off a lot more shocking than the original. Elsewhere we get plenty of bodily mutation with such highlights as arms being torn off and one character attempting to cut their own jaw off. A lot of the gore is also surprisingly refreshing in its originality even if perhaps some of it does come off a little cornball such as one character taking a bread knife to her possessed arm.

While the setting for the film is certainly haunting enough as it combines scenes of heavy rain and creepy mist which made me wonder if they were taking art direction from “Silent Hill” as especially seen with the opening featuring a girl staggering through the woods only to be ambushed and bagged by a bunch of deformed yokels, only for Alvarez to pull the rug from under us as he reveals that these are actually good guys and trying to help her father soon leading to one of the early shocks. While this general tone is maintained throughout it does however suffer thanks to a plodding plot which certainly causes the film to sag in the middle as Alvarez doesn’t seemingly know the direction in which to take the film. This becomes especially present when things start getting distracted with trying to reverse the possession instead of sticking with the original concept of making it to dawn. We also get some confused plot about a demon being summoned by the souls of the group being possessed something which lost me largely down to it seemingly being written into the plot in the final quarter.

While certainly better than the most of the horror remakes currently being churned out and an enjoyable enough experience, it suffers largely due to the pedigree of the films it’s trying to remake so the fact that Alvarez clearly was trying to do something different than just remaking the original certainly was a welcome surprise, it’s just a shame that its questionable plotting stops it from being better than it is.