BAIT – This horror-thriller from the director of 'Before Dawn' has a lot going for it (if you're me, that is). For one thing, it's shot around my neck of the woods (in Halifax / Leeds / Huddersfield / Hebden) – not a genre first, but hardly the norm. Another plus is the presence of raddled stand up comedy renegade Charlie Chuck, here occupying a small role as a sleazy indoor market dweller – there's just no way I could ever give a bad review to a horror flick starring that guy. Anyway, 'Bait' is about two women who run a stall on said market. They want to upgrade and start 'living the dream', and the offer of a loan from nice guy money lender Jeremy seems like a solid proposition – until he turns out to be a massive arsehole who basically viciously beats or kills anyone who can't cough up. 'Bait' hooks into the day-to-day horrors of austerity riven England, where the worst off face a kicking from Cameron and the very real prospect of slipping through the economic safety net (what's left of it) and into the clutches of tw*ts like this loan shark guy. That's a pretty interesting angle for a genre movie, and 'Bait' plays its hand well, delivering strong performances from all involved, together with some well sustained tension in the latter half. It doesn't slouch on the horror aspects, this being, after all, essentially a kind of exploitation film rather than an episode of 'World In Action', and there are some brutal punch ups and bits of gore towards the end. Where it falls down, for me, is in its sense of style – it doesn't really have one. It's all a bit flatly done. That's OK, a film like this maybe has to be more about substance than anything else, but it sort of comes across like a particularly gritty ITV drama at points. Again, whether that's good or bad is all a matter of taste, but for my money it could've done with something like the loose-but-urgent realism of, say, Shane Meadows. There's also some silliness that needed to be explored more for it to work (local cops in cahoots with loan shark... OK, I can buy it, but not when it's tossed in as a throwaway answer to the obvious question “if you're being threatened to the point of murder by a homicidal man, why don't you at least report it to the police?”) In the end though, there's enough going on here to justify it as a pretty good flick in my eyes, and it's always a pleasure to see the great Rula Lenska, looking supernaturally young after all these years.
JULIA – The recent Ashley C Williams film. It's basically another rape-revenge scenario, with Williams as a meek medical technician who survives a brutal assault by a gang of vicious yuppies. She gets involved in a radical therapy aimed at relieving trauma by way of victim empowerment – here, taken to an extreme degree – and, before you can say 'Ms 45', turns into a leather clad avenger. Things get messy when she decides to revisit her assailants and dish out some sweet justice. 'Julia' is, well, I guess it's a tale of two films, one of which is nigh on pitch perfect, the other basically preposterous. OK, to take the first angle – this film has really good aesthetics. It looks great, the textures, visuals, sounds and William's performance are all really top rankin'. Maybe it's something which appeals specifically to me, but I think the director and associates have done an impressive job of managing to splice a latter day indie palette into 'Maniac' (remake) style neon-slick techno-noir, and then into a kind of seventies Franco / Rollin feel. Lots of really evocative, sometimes striking images and tones, from the electro soundtrack to the feverishly lit scenes of cultists hard at it during their bloodletting and sex rituals (I'm not going to oversell it, this latter stuff doesn't predominate). However... the other side of things is a bit more problematic. Rape revenge films, yeah we all know the politics are often dodgy, but there are different approaches. What rankles about 'Julia' is that it sells a particular scenario on the back of feminist ideas about taking power, but doesn't bother to do justice to any of those ideas. I know it's 'just' a horror film, but there's something smarmy about paying lip service to these things only to have your female leads do a blood smeared shag, or else dress up like a 'Nuts' reader's wet dream. Maybe the director thinks that by doing this HE's 'deconstructing the male gaze' etc etc, but for me there's too much contradiction. Too much contradiction everywhere else too – for instance, this therapy business – basically, go out and kill guys who are a bit sleazy and make a move on you. That's the premise. How's that going dispel trauma, exactly? Again, it's just a movie, I know, I know, but... particularly when therapist guy boldly tells Ashley to “not make it personal. You must transcend the ego”. What, when you're out killing people? How does that work, again? In the end, the therapist is shown to be crazy in a beautifully thrown away and utterly senseless revelation, so yes it's obvious that his techniques were always going to be questionable, but I don't know what it says about the film's inner logic when none of these otherwise smart women go “wait on - these therapy ideas are bollocks! I might as well just go out and take revenge in a standard 'rape-revenge' movie kind of way rather than dress up kinky for the boyz and resort to these bizarre and protracted ritualistics”. OK, the films inconsistencies pile up to point where they teeter over into “can just about get away with playing the 'dream-like' card” territory, so maybe, patronising fan-boy take on feminism aside, it's all good. Absorbing and messy, 'Julia' will hold your interest and attention, and I look forward to what the director does next.
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