Down the Tubes

Film: Creep (2004); Death Line (Raw Meat)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Sometimes, a horror movie is just a variation on a theme. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a horror movie that is about some sort of subterranean humanoid or critter that hunts humans for one reason or another. Creep from 2004 is yet another entrant into this particular category of horror movies. The location here is the London Underground and the creature is some form of mutated human. This is a pretty standard entry in this genre; if you’ve seen Death Line, you’ve seen this in large part.

We start with Arthur (Ken Campbell) and George (Vas Blackwood) working in the sewers under London. They find a tunnel in one of the walls and Arthur goes to explore it. George eventually follows him and discovers Arthur injured and in shock. Moments later, a woman appears, screaming for help, only to be dragged off into the darkness.

Ten Days of Terror!: Severance

Film: Severance
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television

If you’ve listened to any of the reviews done by Mark Kermode, you know about Danny Dyer. How exactly do I explain Dyer? Danny Dyer is what you get if you start with Jason Statham and remove all of the physicality, toughness, and lowbrow charm. He’s like someone pretending to be Jason Statham, but having nothing to back it up. What that means is with a movie like Severance, I’m torn. This is a movie I’ve been interested in seeing since I knew about it, but the presence of Dyer in a prominent role gives me genuine pause.

The basic idea for Severance has tremendous potential. A group of people who work for a weapons manufacturing company called Palisade Defense is sent to a remote location for teambuilding exercises. Through a series of planned accidents, they are instead detoured to what proves to be a former asylum about which there are a series of rumors and legends. Soon enough, they discover that there are people in the woods trying (and generally succeeding) in killing them.

Three Sides, Four Dimensions

Film: Triangle
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

I’m not always a huge fan of films that trade on time travel. The traditional time travel film has a person or people moving backward or forward in time, having a particular adventure or adventures, and then returning home. Modern films that deal with time loops and time travel tend to be a lot more convoluted. Triangle is a case in point. The loop that we’re going to deal with here is complicated, folds in on itself, and repeats in strange ways.

I give the writer/director Christopher Smith a great deal of credit in that respect. Triangle manages to go quite a bit beyond being merely clever. It’s devious, and eventually all of the strange chicanes of the plot make a certain amount of sense. I’m not sure that absolutely everything resolves as it should, but at the very least, most of it does. And while like many films of this nature there is ultimately no explanation for what happens, there is a twisting path that does allow for a narrative of sorts, if a very odd one.

Does Sean Bean survive?

Film: Black Death
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

One of the reasons I love the horror genre as much as I do is because, since it often tends to be a low-budget genre, you get to see a lot of people at early points in their careers. In the case of a film like Black Death, actors like Sean Bean and David Warner were certainly established by this point in their careers. This is much less the case with eventual Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne, who looks like he’s about 12 in this.

As you probably can guess from the title of this movie, Black Death takes place during the plague in Medieval England. The plague has just reached a monastery where young novice Osmund (Redmayne) lives. Osmund, for all of his dedication to his god, has an illicit relationship with Averill (Kimberley Nixon), who has taken refuge in the monastery. Realizing that the plague has come to them at last, Osmund sends Averill away. She tells him that she will wait for him in the nearby forest for a week.