Hello, and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week, we take you through the biggest new cinema releases and why you should be excited for them. This week has a couple of horrors (one of which actually came out last week but for some reason didn’t come up on the list of upcoming releases I normally rely on, so I’m picking it up now!).
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
Undertone
In Undertone, the hosts of a paranormal podcast (including Nina Kiri’s Evy) are anonymously sent some mysterious creepy sound files. When they play them backwards, the noises start to haunt Evy’s home, as does whatever malevolent entity is causing them.
In a very overstuffed genre, Undertone’s USP is its use of sound as the dominant driving force behind its scares. And it looks like it’s accomplished that goal pretty effectively, with distorted speech and music, unnatural vocal clicks and croaks and other unsettling audio. But there are also some fun creepy visuals in the trailer, with figures lurking just out of focus in the background and plenty of shadowy corners and off-screen space.
As I’m a bit late discussing this one, there is a little more public reaction to draw from than I normally have to work with. Undertone has a critic score of 74% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, but just a 50% audience score, suggesting it plays with some interesting creative ideas but they haven’t all landed particularly well with the public. It sounds like it takes its time to build a sense of dread before anything exciting happens, which may have put some people off. My Mum saw it and fell asleep, which is never a great sign for a horror.
- Undertone on IMDB
- Undertone on Rotten Tomatoes
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
The Mummy is a classic movie monster with a long cinematic heritage, from the old Hammer movies to the brilliant (and soon to be revived) Brendan Fraser adventure films, to the less brilliant Tom Cruise one, which was meant to start a new Universal horror cinematic universe but never quite took off. Now director Lee Cronin (Evil Dead Rise) presents a new take on the ancient Egyptian curse. When a little girl named Katie goes missing during a trip to Egypt, her parents (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa) lose hope. But eight years later she is found in a sarcophagus, having been subjected to something horrific, leaving her body scarred and mutilated and her mind even more so. As they bring her home and try to rehabilitate her, they soon discover that her kidnapping was even more sinister than they’d realised.
There is a lot of suitably gruesome imagery here, particularly of papyrus bandages being peeled off flesh like flayed skin, and the makeup team have done an incredible job of realising what a little girl would look like if she was mummified alive. The first half of the trailer suggests that this will be a more personal take on the Mummy film, with a slow burn sense of dread punctuated by the shock of seeing kids do horrific things (in a way reminiscent of last year’s Bring Her Back). It looks incredibly creepy right up until Katie speaks, when all the subtlety suddenly vanishes. The second half of the trailer adds a load of sub-genre tropes, such as sandstorms, bugs crawling out of skin, and some sort of plague-vomit, all hinting at a big supernatural climax – which could be fun too, just in a very different way. Hopefully Cronin has been able to stitch the two approaches together and doesn’t have Katie saying too many horror cliches.
Overall I really like the look of this one. And if all it does is whet my appetite for the return of Rick and Evelyn O’Connell then that’s time well spent too.
- Lee Cronin’s The Mummy on IMDB
- Lee Cronin’s The Mummy on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
For an original take on a horror classic, it’s Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
Trailer of the Week
This week has seen the first trailer drop for Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest prequel to the Hunger Games stories. It follows a young Haymitch Abernathy, played in the original films by Woody Harrelson and here by Joseph Zada, as he competes in the second Quarter Quell – the beefed up Hunger Games put on every 25 years. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire saw Katniss compete in the third Quarter Quell, where the special rule was that all the tributes were winners of previous Hunger Games. This time round the selling point is (was) that twice as many tributes are taken from each of the districts, making this one of the most brutal games in the history of the franchise. But the film’s big selling point for us is the opportunity to see many adult characters from the original films re-cast as their younger selves. As well as Haymitch, there’s Jesse Plemons as Plutarch Heavensbee, Elle Fanning as Effie Trinket, Kieran Culkin as Caesar Flickerman, Maya Hawke as Wiress, Kelvin Harrison Jr as Beetee, and the great Ralph Fiennes as President Snow. On top of that, there are plenty of new characters both within and without the arena, including fellow tribute Maysilee Donner (McKenna Grace), Haymitch’s love interest Lenore Dove Baird (Whitney Peak), and Glenn Close’s tribute-picker Drusilla Sickle. The trailer doesn’t give too much of the action away, but there’s plenty to get excited for including a chariot race and a lush, Midsommar-esque garden set-up for the arena. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping hits cinemas in November.
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