MOVIEJOURNAL 2017 (PART NINE)
What follows is a list of all the films I've watched this year, excluding films that I'd seen before. My 4-star rating system uses * to indicate shite to be avoided, *** to indicate films worth seeing and **** to indicate works of brilliance. Everything else gets a "meh"-like **.
Index
** Antiporno
* The Ballad of Tam Lin [aka The Devil's Widow]
* The Book of Blood
** Cuento de Navidad (A Christmas Tale)
*** Lady Macbeth
** Luther the Geek
/** Psychomania [aka The Death Wheelers]
* Seventh Moon
*** Straight Outta Compton
** Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
*** The Witches [aka The Devil's Own]
All reviews
LUTHER THE GEEK (USA 1989 / Carlton J Albright)
**
Cult horror about a maniac who's paroled from prison despite being a triple murderer who, entirely predictably, notches up his fourth killing the moment he gets out. He's known as "the Geek" according to the dialogue (though "the Freak" in the credits) due to his habit of tearing into his victims' necks with his sharpened dentures, reminiscent of carnival geeks who'd bite the heads off live chickens. And that's the link to his habit of clucking like a hen, rather than speaking; there's your cult credentials right there. As he quickly goes on to stage a basic home invasion, the film plays like a less artsy, lighter version of the 1983 Austrian thriller Angst, though that's not to say it's either without artistry or totally lightweight. Director Carlton J Albright's filming is mostly unremarkable, though he's clearly proud of the shots he gets through a balustrade on the staircase, while the gore is really grisly. True, it's mainly (though not entirely) limited to the same effect of an eviscerated neck, but it looks great. Weirdly, the special makeup artist responsible doesn't appear to be credited, though IMDb reckons it's someone who'd worked on Evil Dead II and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, so his credentials are good. Watch out though: the movie gets incredibly boring towards the end.
LADY MACBETH (UK 2016 / William Oldroyd)
***
In 19th century northeast England, Katherine is newly wed to, and therefore the property of, unpleasant landowner Alexander. He orders her to confine herself to within his house, and to wait up for him when he's been drinking, but he's unable or unwilling to consummate the marriage. So when he goes away on an extended business trip, Katherine starts having it away with the new stable lad. "Bitch gets restless if she's tied up too long", as he says of one of the estate's dogs, in a line that's a little too unsubtle. Also knocking about the place is Katherine's dutiful maid, Anna, and it's around her that the frustrations of the storyline revolve. Because while you long for Katherine and Anna to become friends and confidantes, this is set in a buttoned-up age where communication is not open enough, and it's about a young woman who's incredibly selfish and heartless, so rather than work through their problems together, Katherine just uses Anna as a scapegoat for her crimes. Yes, crimes, because, like Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Katherine turns to murder to get what she wants. This is a cold, austere film, much like Alexander's large but underfurnished manor house, and I enjoyed Florence Pugh's portrayal of Katherine as she transforms from a blushing bride into an ice queen.
THE BALLAD OF TAM LIN [aka The Devil's Widow] (UK 1971 / Roddy McDowall)
*
Information is scant, but apparently The Ballad of Tam Lin exists in two versions: a subtler director's cut, and a more horror-themed theatrical release (presumably the version titled The Devil's Widow), though it wouldn't surprise me if the only differences are in the title and how lurid the posters were. I'm not sure which version I watched (it did have the original title), but it ended with 15 minutes of long-overdue action consisting of the titular Tom Lynn ("Tam Lin" if you say it with a Scottish accent) being chased through the woods, attacked by an anaconda and a bear (or a man in a bad bear costume; it's hard to know) and a fire stunt. I say "long overdue" because it's a drama turned increasingly tedious melodrama up to that point. Based on the lyrics of an old folk song, it has 30-something Tom torn romantically between a lovely girl about 10 years younger than him, and the domineering lady of the manor with whom there's a similar age gap in the other direction. While dull, it is at least evocative of a particular era and lifestyle: of hippies, jazz clubs and house parties that go on for days. It reminded me at times of Five Dolls for an August Moon, but I find that to be Mario Bava's most boring giallo, so even that wasn't enough to reel me in.
CUENTO DE NAVIDAD (A Christmas Tale) (Spain 2005 / Paco Plaza)
**
Stephen King-style nostalgia abounds as five children in 1985 (four boys and a girl one, inevitably) discover what they initially think is a body in the woods. But actually she's alive, knocked temporarily unconscious having fallen down a deep hole. When the kids discover that she's a bank robber who's hidden two million pesetas somewhere, they keep her alive until she lets them have the money. When they're not dealing with their trapped cash cow, they're doing gratuitously 80s things like playing Simon, talking about The A Team and The Karate Kid, and - most presciently but also very spoilerishly - watching bad zombie movies. So when we see how manky the thief's injured leg is - and is that a bite mark...? - it's obvious where we're headed. And while the eventual zombie action is underwhelming, the traps our heroes build are ingenious, and by far the highlights of a movie that seems to go on much longer than it's 74 minutes. You'd expect something with such a short running time to move along at a good clip, but it's actually quite dull at times. I think the problem is that we've seen it all before; this is, after all, essentially a Spanish take on It, but with a rotting woman instead of a supernatural clown.
VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (France 2017 / Luc Besson)
**
Maverick spaceship pilots Valerian & Laureline have to save an enormous space station from terrorists whose home planet has been destroyed. I think that's their mission anyway; admittedly I'm out of my comfort zone with a $177m space opera, full of alien races, incredible technology and endless, endless bloody CGI. But given how funny and adorable the director's previous sci-fi epic, The Fifth Element, was, I'd hoped for good things. Sadly this is a weak follow-up. I never warmed to either lead character: as Valerian, boyish-looking but gravel-voiced Dane DeHaan just seems too pleased with himself, while you'd have thought that $177m could've hired a proper actor to play Laureline, rather than perma-pouting fashion model Cara Delevigne, who refuses to emote for the entire running time. Worse than the casting is the sub-par CGI. I don't understand why poor computer animation is used to create so many human-like creatures (two arms, two legs, one head, about five or six feet tall) when prosthetics, costumes and animatronics look so much better. It's not all bad... the "Space Oddity"-themed title sequence is great, and the heist that follows is quite exciting. But it quickly loses its sense of humour, and it's all downhill from there.
THE BOOK OF BLOOD (UK 2009 / John Harrison)
*
As a true Brit, I absolutely loved the opening close-ups of a particularly manky looking fry-up. Unfortunately, we quickly leave the realistic environs of the greasy spoon, and things start to go south when the heroine is revealed to be a somewhat glamorous American professor of the paranormal, albeit one played by an English actor half-heartedly doing an accent. She moves into a haunted Edinburgh townhouse, and out of only partly professional interest, she takes in her newest student, because he appears to have psychic powers. The first act of this bollocks is so full of exposition, flashbacks, incidents and so-crass-it's-funny dialogue that it's obvious that it's been badly adapted from pulp horror writing; Clive Barker's, no less. But this is a far cry from the heights of Hellraiser, even though it does feature a Doug "Pinhead" Bradley cameo and a similar pair of comedy removal men (one of whom pulls the kind of fake-out prank that only horror movie bit-parters would ever think to do). Some silly sauciness keeps things moderately interesting early on, but the film soon gets as uninteresting as its very brown colour scheme, a palate that director John Harrison doesn't deviate from even during a Hell sequence that demands something a lot more dynamic.
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (USA 2015 / F Gary Gray)
***
This biographical drama about N.W.A founders Eazy E, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre can be pretty eggy at times, but it's an interesting enough watch. It begins as the three friends are about to form the group, ends with the creation of Aftermath Records 10 years later, and doesn't really dig any deeper than what you can learn from reading their Wikipedia page. Dre and Cube are two of the film's producers, and it's suspicious how well they come out of it compared with E and their manager, both deceased, whose scheming behind the others' backs forms the main storyline. Dre hovering over the production is presumably responsible for the death of his younger brother making it into the final edit, despite it having no dramatic relevance whatsoever. Plus, Corey Hawkins, who plays him, is quite flattering casting, shall we say. The corniest moments come when we get little "origin stories", of Dre learning the term "chronic", of Cube inventing the "bye Felicia" meme, and inevitably, a scene of harassment by cops which might as well be followed by a voiceover stating, "And that's how we came up with the idea for 'Fuck tha Police'". F Gary Gray's direction is very workmanlike, when a nearly three-hour biopic could do with some Scorsese-like flair.
ANTIPORNO (Japan 2016 / Sion Sono)
**
If you've ever wondered how Sion Sono manages to make so many movies (37 to date; five in 2015 alone!), then here's something that demonstrates that they're not all as elaborate as, say, Tag, nor as long as Love Exposure. It's a 76-minute quickie shot largely in a bright yellow studio flat, or a set representing one, complete with director and film crew at the fourth wall. In this room, a young woman, Kyôko, talks to herself while throwing herself around almost balletically, describing herself as variously a whore and a virgin, apparently confusing the meaning of both words in some kind of pro-sex, feminist statement. She's soon joined by her PA, whom she looks down on, and a small gang of sexed-up girlfriends. The director intervenes, the lead actresses fight, and in the funniest sequence Kyôko has an explicit dinner table conversation with her parents about cocks and cunts and indecency. This is either politically astute philosophical polemic or self-indulgent sexual silliness - I'm not sure which - but Sono keeps things colourful both visually and metaphorically, while Ami Tomite's performance as Kyôko is full-on and, even if no one else does, she at least seems to know what's going on.
THE WITCHES [aka The Devil's Own] (UK 1966 / Cyril Frankel)
***
A solid Nigel Kneale-scripted mystery revolving around Joan Fontaine, who's very good as Gwen, the new school headmistress in a close-knit English village that, ominously, hasn't had a Christian church for 200 years. A kindly woman, she is pleased to see one of her students, Linda, forming a nascent relationship with a fellow classmate, but everyone in the village except for this newcomer believes that the kids should be kept apart, and Gwen doesn't understand why. Also, in a bit of backstory that makes for an entertainingly silly prologue, Gwen has recently recovered from a nervous breakdown that followed a spooky experience while working somewhere in scary old Africa. Future sitcom favourites Michele Dotrice, Leonard Rossiter and Rudolph Walker all crop up, and everything's very jolly and artificial in a quaint way; despite the rural accents you know that this Hammer production barely strayed 10 miles from the company's Windsor base. By the same measure, though, once Gwen discovers the macabre reason behind the villagers' interest in Linda, it slips into the usual "posh actors playing dress-up" nonsense that turns me off so much British horror of the sixties.
PSYCHOMANIA [aka The Death Wheelers] (UK 1973 / Don Sharp)
***
This bikesploitationer might be quaintly tame and silly, especially for 1973 when other movies were really starting to toughen up, but it's decent entertainment all the same. Shaggy-haired posh boy Tom, leader of the presciently named motorcycle gang the Living Dead, is the son of a medium, so unsurprisingly he believes in "the other side" and life after death. So, having failed to persuade his girlfriend to enter into a suicide pact, he goes it alone and rides to his doom off a bridge. And then, following his unique burial (upright, on his bike, in a hole that's not quite deep enough really), he returns to life, unscathed and immortal, impressing the hell out of his fellow bikers, who decide to join in the fun. This is an odd one, because it frequently has the look and feel of a Children's Film Foundation romp, with its young cast and supernatural-but-not-in-a-scary-way premise, despite the suicide theme. That said, the living dead Living Deaders do have something of a homicidal bent, their immortality apparently leaving them immune to arrest and prosecution too (I suppose you can't charge someone who's legally dead). The music is as funky as the decor at Tom's mother's house, even though such wild design doesn't ring true to her character: she's played by Beryl Reid, for fuck's sake.
SEVENTH MOON (USA 2008 / Eduardo Sánchez)
*
The third film from Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sánchez isn't a huge departure from his debut. Although not a found footage picture, it retains the handheld camera and basic premise of people getting lost and scared. A pair of American newlyweds are on honeymoon in Hong Kong, and on a day where the locals mark the legend of the "hungry ghost", they get drunk and take a ride out to the mainland countryside for reasons the script doesn't really go into. In fact, we never really get a chance to know what much about the couple or what they're like, and I think that harms the film. We only ever see them relaxed and happy during the travelogue-style opening credits; after that they're either bickering or screaming. For during that trip out of town, their driver goes missing while they're sleeping off the booze, and they find themselves in the middle of nowhere (rural China being an enormous place that you wouldn't want to get lost in) and pursued by pale, skinny humanoids not unlike those from The Descent. And that's it. There's a lot of walking around in the dark, it's often too dimly lit to make out what's happening, and aside from its unusual setting, it's a horror flick with absolutely no ambition or even an iota of originality.
Index
** Antiporno
* The Ballad of Tam Lin [aka The Devil's Widow]
* The Book of Blood
** Cuento de Navidad (A Christmas Tale)
*** Lady Macbeth
** Luther the Geek
/** Psychomania [aka The Death Wheelers]
* Seventh Moon
*** Straight Outta Compton
** Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
*** The Witches [aka The Devil's Own]
All reviews
LUTHER THE GEEK (USA 1989 / Carlton J Albright)
**
Cult horror about a maniac who's paroled from prison despite being a triple murderer who, entirely predictably, notches up his fourth killing the moment he gets out. He's known as "the Geek" according to the dialogue (though "the Freak" in the credits) due to his habit of tearing into his victims' necks with his sharpened dentures, reminiscent of carnival geeks who'd bite the heads off live chickens. And that's the link to his habit of clucking like a hen, rather than speaking; there's your cult credentials right there. As he quickly goes on to stage a basic home invasion, the film plays like a less artsy, lighter version of the 1983 Austrian thriller Angst, though that's not to say it's either without artistry or totally lightweight. Director Carlton J Albright's filming is mostly unremarkable, though he's clearly proud of the shots he gets through a balustrade on the staircase, while the gore is really grisly. True, it's mainly (though not entirely) limited to the same effect of an eviscerated neck, but it looks great. Weirdly, the special makeup artist responsible doesn't appear to be credited, though IMDb reckons it's someone who'd worked on Evil Dead II and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, so his credentials are good. Watch out though: the movie gets incredibly boring towards the end.
LADY MACBETH (UK 2016 / William Oldroyd)
***
In 19th century northeast England, Katherine is newly wed to, and therefore the property of, unpleasant landowner Alexander. He orders her to confine herself to within his house, and to wait up for him when he's been drinking, but he's unable or unwilling to consummate the marriage. So when he goes away on an extended business trip, Katherine starts having it away with the new stable lad. "Bitch gets restless if she's tied up too long", as he says of one of the estate's dogs, in a line that's a little too unsubtle. Also knocking about the place is Katherine's dutiful maid, Anna, and it's around her that the frustrations of the storyline revolve. Because while you long for Katherine and Anna to become friends and confidantes, this is set in a buttoned-up age where communication is not open enough, and it's about a young woman who's incredibly selfish and heartless, so rather than work through their problems together, Katherine just uses Anna as a scapegoat for her crimes. Yes, crimes, because, like Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Katherine turns to murder to get what she wants. This is a cold, austere film, much like Alexander's large but underfurnished manor house, and I enjoyed Florence Pugh's portrayal of Katherine as she transforms from a blushing bride into an ice queen.
THE BALLAD OF TAM LIN [aka The Devil's Widow] (UK 1971 / Roddy McDowall)
*
Information is scant, but apparently The Ballad of Tam Lin exists in two versions: a subtler director's cut, and a more horror-themed theatrical release (presumably the version titled The Devil's Widow), though it wouldn't surprise me if the only differences are in the title and how lurid the posters were. I'm not sure which version I watched (it did have the original title), but it ended with 15 minutes of long-overdue action consisting of the titular Tom Lynn ("Tam Lin" if you say it with a Scottish accent) being chased through the woods, attacked by an anaconda and a bear (or a man in a bad bear costume; it's hard to know) and a fire stunt. I say "long overdue" because it's a drama turned increasingly tedious melodrama up to that point. Based on the lyrics of an old folk song, it has 30-something Tom torn romantically between a lovely girl about 10 years younger than him, and the domineering lady of the manor with whom there's a similar age gap in the other direction. While dull, it is at least evocative of a particular era and lifestyle: of hippies, jazz clubs and house parties that go on for days. It reminded me at times of Five Dolls for an August Moon, but I find that to be Mario Bava's most boring giallo, so even that wasn't enough to reel me in.
CUENTO DE NAVIDAD (A Christmas Tale) (Spain 2005 / Paco Plaza)
**
Stephen King-style nostalgia abounds as five children in 1985 (four boys and a girl one, inevitably) discover what they initially think is a body in the woods. But actually she's alive, knocked temporarily unconscious having fallen down a deep hole. When the kids discover that she's a bank robber who's hidden two million pesetas somewhere, they keep her alive until she lets them have the money. When they're not dealing with their trapped cash cow, they're doing gratuitously 80s things like playing Simon, talking about The A Team and The Karate Kid, and - most presciently but also very spoilerishly - watching bad zombie movies. So when we see how manky the thief's injured leg is - and is that a bite mark...? - it's obvious where we're headed. And while the eventual zombie action is underwhelming, the traps our heroes build are ingenious, and by far the highlights of a movie that seems to go on much longer than it's 74 minutes. You'd expect something with such a short running time to move along at a good clip, but it's actually quite dull at times. I think the problem is that we've seen it all before; this is, after all, essentially a Spanish take on It, but with a rotting woman instead of a supernatural clown.
VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (France 2017 / Luc Besson)
**
Maverick spaceship pilots Valerian & Laureline have to save an enormous space station from terrorists whose home planet has been destroyed. I think that's their mission anyway; admittedly I'm out of my comfort zone with a $177m space opera, full of alien races, incredible technology and endless, endless bloody CGI. But given how funny and adorable the director's previous sci-fi epic, The Fifth Element, was, I'd hoped for good things. Sadly this is a weak follow-up. I never warmed to either lead character: as Valerian, boyish-looking but gravel-voiced Dane DeHaan just seems too pleased with himself, while you'd have thought that $177m could've hired a proper actor to play Laureline, rather than perma-pouting fashion model Cara Delevigne, who refuses to emote for the entire running time. Worse than the casting is the sub-par CGI. I don't understand why poor computer animation is used to create so many human-like creatures (two arms, two legs, one head, about five or six feet tall) when prosthetics, costumes and animatronics look so much better. It's not all bad... the "Space Oddity"-themed title sequence is great, and the heist that follows is quite exciting. But it quickly loses its sense of humour, and it's all downhill from there.
THE BOOK OF BLOOD (UK 2009 / John Harrison)
*
As a true Brit, I absolutely loved the opening close-ups of a particularly manky looking fry-up. Unfortunately, we quickly leave the realistic environs of the greasy spoon, and things start to go south when the heroine is revealed to be a somewhat glamorous American professor of the paranormal, albeit one played by an English actor half-heartedly doing an accent. She moves into a haunted Edinburgh townhouse, and out of only partly professional interest, she takes in her newest student, because he appears to have psychic powers. The first act of this bollocks is so full of exposition, flashbacks, incidents and so-crass-it's-funny dialogue that it's obvious that it's been badly adapted from pulp horror writing; Clive Barker's, no less. But this is a far cry from the heights of Hellraiser, even though it does feature a Doug "Pinhead" Bradley cameo and a similar pair of comedy removal men (one of whom pulls the kind of fake-out prank that only horror movie bit-parters would ever think to do). Some silly sauciness keeps things moderately interesting early on, but the film soon gets as uninteresting as its very brown colour scheme, a palate that director John Harrison doesn't deviate from even during a Hell sequence that demands something a lot more dynamic.
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (USA 2015 / F Gary Gray)
***
This biographical drama about N.W.A founders Eazy E, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre can be pretty eggy at times, but it's an interesting enough watch. It begins as the three friends are about to form the group, ends with the creation of Aftermath Records 10 years later, and doesn't really dig any deeper than what you can learn from reading their Wikipedia page. Dre and Cube are two of the film's producers, and it's suspicious how well they come out of it compared with E and their manager, both deceased, whose scheming behind the others' backs forms the main storyline. Dre hovering over the production is presumably responsible for the death of his younger brother making it into the final edit, despite it having no dramatic relevance whatsoever. Plus, Corey Hawkins, who plays him, is quite flattering casting, shall we say. The corniest moments come when we get little "origin stories", of Dre learning the term "chronic", of Cube inventing the "bye Felicia" meme, and inevitably, a scene of harassment by cops which might as well be followed by a voiceover stating, "And that's how we came up with the idea for 'Fuck tha Police'". F Gary Gray's direction is very workmanlike, when a nearly three-hour biopic could do with some Scorsese-like flair.
ANTIPORNO (Japan 2016 / Sion Sono)
**
If you've ever wondered how Sion Sono manages to make so many movies (37 to date; five in 2015 alone!), then here's something that demonstrates that they're not all as elaborate as, say, Tag, nor as long as Love Exposure. It's a 76-minute quickie shot largely in a bright yellow studio flat, or a set representing one, complete with director and film crew at the fourth wall. In this room, a young woman, Kyôko, talks to herself while throwing herself around almost balletically, describing herself as variously a whore and a virgin, apparently confusing the meaning of both words in some kind of pro-sex, feminist statement. She's soon joined by her PA, whom she looks down on, and a small gang of sexed-up girlfriends. The director intervenes, the lead actresses fight, and in the funniest sequence Kyôko has an explicit dinner table conversation with her parents about cocks and cunts and indecency. This is either politically astute philosophical polemic or self-indulgent sexual silliness - I'm not sure which - but Sono keeps things colourful both visually and metaphorically, while Ami Tomite's performance as Kyôko is full-on and, even if no one else does, she at least seems to know what's going on.
THE WITCHES [aka The Devil's Own] (UK 1966 / Cyril Frankel)
***
A solid Nigel Kneale-scripted mystery revolving around Joan Fontaine, who's very good as Gwen, the new school headmistress in a close-knit English village that, ominously, hasn't had a Christian church for 200 years. A kindly woman, she is pleased to see one of her students, Linda, forming a nascent relationship with a fellow classmate, but everyone in the village except for this newcomer believes that the kids should be kept apart, and Gwen doesn't understand why. Also, in a bit of backstory that makes for an entertainingly silly prologue, Gwen has recently recovered from a nervous breakdown that followed a spooky experience while working somewhere in scary old Africa. Future sitcom favourites Michele Dotrice, Leonard Rossiter and Rudolph Walker all crop up, and everything's very jolly and artificial in a quaint way; despite the rural accents you know that this Hammer production barely strayed 10 miles from the company's Windsor base. By the same measure, though, once Gwen discovers the macabre reason behind the villagers' interest in Linda, it slips into the usual "posh actors playing dress-up" nonsense that turns me off so much British horror of the sixties.
PSYCHOMANIA [aka The Death Wheelers] (UK 1973 / Don Sharp)
***
This bikesploitationer might be quaintly tame and silly, especially for 1973 when other movies were really starting to toughen up, but it's decent entertainment all the same. Shaggy-haired posh boy Tom, leader of the presciently named motorcycle gang the Living Dead, is the son of a medium, so unsurprisingly he believes in "the other side" and life after death. So, having failed to persuade his girlfriend to enter into a suicide pact, he goes it alone and rides to his doom off a bridge. And then, following his unique burial (upright, on his bike, in a hole that's not quite deep enough really), he returns to life, unscathed and immortal, impressing the hell out of his fellow bikers, who decide to join in the fun. This is an odd one, because it frequently has the look and feel of a Children's Film Foundation romp, with its young cast and supernatural-but-not-in-a-scary-way premise, despite the suicide theme. That said, the living dead Living Deaders do have something of a homicidal bent, their immortality apparently leaving them immune to arrest and prosecution too (I suppose you can't charge someone who's legally dead). The music is as funky as the decor at Tom's mother's house, even though such wild design doesn't ring true to her character: she's played by Beryl Reid, for fuck's sake.
SEVENTH MOON (USA 2008 / Eduardo Sánchez)
*
The third film from Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sánchez isn't a huge departure from his debut. Although not a found footage picture, it retains the handheld camera and basic premise of people getting lost and scared. A pair of American newlyweds are on honeymoon in Hong Kong, and on a day where the locals mark the legend of the "hungry ghost", they get drunk and take a ride out to the mainland countryside for reasons the script doesn't really go into. In fact, we never really get a chance to know what much about the couple or what they're like, and I think that harms the film. We only ever see them relaxed and happy during the travelogue-style opening credits; after that they're either bickering or screaming. For during that trip out of town, their driver goes missing while they're sleeping off the booze, and they find themselves in the middle of nowhere (rural China being an enormous place that you wouldn't want to get lost in) and pursued by pale, skinny humanoids not unlike those from The Descent. And that's it. There's a lot of walking around in the dark, it's often too dimly lit to make out what's happening, and aside from its unusual setting, it's a horror flick with absolutely no ambition or even an iota of originality.