Black Death (2010)

With the premiere of the second series of Game of Thrones only days away, I decided to re-watch the first series, planning to watch one episode a day for ten days, finishing the day before the new series started. I ended up watching all ten episodes in four days and needed to do something to satiate my appetite. Short of watching the series again I had no idea what to do. Then I remembered that I had the film Black Death to watch. A medieval horror-action-drama starring Sean Bean, I thought it would be perfect to fill the gaping hole in my life that is yet to be filled by new episodes of Game of Thrones. It was only after I'd watched it that I discovered that it starred two other GoT actors: Emun Elliott, who played Marillion, the minstrel who had his tongue cut out after singing a song about King Robert and Carice van Houten, who will play Melisandre in series two, a priestess and adviser to Stannis Baratheon. Incidentally, I'll be doing a summary of the first series of GoT pretty soon. Now, on with the film...

The year is 1348 and the bubonic plague is sweeping across England. Young monk Osmond (Eddie Redmayne) works in a monastery with his secret lover Averill (Kimberley Nixon). When the plague reaches the monastery, he sends her away for her own safety and remains at his post, bound by his vows. When Ulric (Sean Bean), a knight acting on the orders of the local bishop, arrives and asks for help in locating an isolated local village, Osmond, who knows how to get there, sees a way to escape the monastery whilst not breaking his vows. Ulric explains that the village has been untouched by the plague because a necromancer has made a deal with the devil. With the approval of the Abbot (David Warner), Osmond joins Ulric and his men, Wolfstan (John Lynch), Swire (Emun Eliott), Dalywag (Andy Nyman), Mold (Johnny Harris), Griff (Jamie Ballard) and Ivo (Tygo Gernandt).

Along the way to the village, they come across some villagers who are preparing to burn a woman they suspect of being a witch. Osmond insists on freeing her and Ulric does so, before killing her himself, saying that the villagers would have killed her anyway. Then, Griff starts coughing up blood and it is revealed that he has the plague. Osmond hears his last confession and he is executed. One morning they are attacked by a gang of outlaws and Ivo is killed whilst saving Osmond's life. Finally, they reach the swamp that the village is hidden inside. The village, a suspiciously quiet place with a majority of women puts them all on their guard. A man called Hob (Tim McInnerny) welcomes them and when they tell him they are travelers seeking refuge, he offers them refuge for the night. At a meal that evening, they meet Langiva (Carice van Houten), who shows Osmond Averill's body, telling him they found her several days ago. Later that night, Osmond wanders away from the village and spies on Langiva as she performs a ritual and Averill rises from the grave. He rushes back to the village but he is too late as Ulric and his men have been drugged.

They wake in a caged pit in the ground that is half-full of water. Hob and Langiva offer the men freedom if they renounce god. They refuse, so Dalywag is executed. They offer again and Swire says he will renounce god. He renounces god and is apparently freed but is in reality taken away and lynched by the villagers. Osmond is the next to be taken out of the pit but he is not executed. He is instead taken into a house where he is shown the apparently resurrected Averill. Left alone with her, he begs forgiveness and kills her. He then takes her body outside and strikes out at Langiva with a knife but the villagers overpower him. The defiant Ulric is then taken out of the pit and tied between two horses and slowly stretched. He again refuses to renounce god, angering Langiva and Hob. He asks for a moment to speak to Osmond, allowing Wolfstan and Mold the chance to cut their bonds with Osmond's dropped knife. Ulric has Osmond open his shirt, exposing lesions on his chest. He laughs as he tells them that he has brought the plague into their village and they will all die. He is torn apart by the horses and Wolfstan and Mold then break out of the pit and attack the villagers, most of whom flee. They slaughter the remaining villagers but Mold is killed by Hob, who is then knocked out by Wolfstan. Osmond goes after Langiva, whose disembodied voice taunts him, telling him that that Averill was not really dead, that she was drugged and then buried alive so as to convince him that she had been resurrected and that he was the one who killed her. As the film ends, Wolfstan and Osmond go back to the monastery. Wolfstan will take Hob on to the bishop and Osmond takes over from Ulric, hunting down and executing women he suspects of being witches and that no-one knows if he ever found Langiva or if he was just seeing her guilt in the eyes of the accused.

I had fairly high expectations for Black Death but it missed them by a considerable margin. Sean Bean phones in his performance and although there are some nice historical touches (the group's cart being pulled by oxen and the plague doctor's costume for example), the whole thing's very ho-hum. Their journey from the monastery to the village is really dull and the events that punctuate it (the suspected witch, Griff's execution and the run-in with the outlaws) are predictable distractions from the storyline. Also, try as it might, I couldn't help but be reminded of Monty Python and the Holy Grail at several points: at the beginning when the plague strikes the monastery I half-expected the guy pushing the cart of bodies to start shouting "bring out your dead!", when they encounter the woman about to be burned at the stake I was waiting for Osmond to bring out his larger scales and ask the villagers "what do you burn apart from witches?" and when they reach the mostly-female village I was looking for a plaque on the entrance declaring that they were entering "Village Anthrax". Humourous and accidental comparisons to Holy Grail aside, this film has few redeeming qualities. Even the gore, which could have been considerable, was almost non-existent. Director Christopher Smith is much better than this, having previously directed Creep, Severance and Triangle. Black Death is hopefully just a misfire in his otherwise sterling record.

A drearily dull effort which did nothing to fill the Game of Thrones-shaped hole in my life.

4 out of 10.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation of the classic fairy tale is a lot like her preceding film, Twilight: it's a load of tween nonsense. I don't know how, but she took a dark, gothic fairy tale about a wolf who eats people and stalks a girl in a red hood and turned it into boring, bland, clichéd rubbish.

The film begins as it means to go on: Red Riding Hood, here named Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), is spying on some shirtless lumberjacks in the middle of a forest. It's very badly lit, with ridiculous soft focus shafts of light falling through the trees, which for some reason, all have toothpicks coming out of them. The toothpick-trees are only half as wooden as Seyfried and Shiloh Fernandez, who plays Peter, the lumberjack Valerie is "in love with". They have no chemistry. At all. They spend the entire film looking at each other like they've just met. Apparently the two had met before they made the film and didn't like each other and Seyfried only took the role after Hardwicke persuaded her. It shows.

Valerie might be "in love with" Peter, but she's engaged to another man, Henry (Max Irons, Jeremy's son). Oh, what will Valerie do? What will Peter do? "If you love her", Valerie's mother (Virginia Madsen) says to Peter, "You'll let her go", I finished for her. Silly, clichéd dialogue aside, we quickly move onto the action. Valerie is told her sister has been killed by a werewolf and we're shown her dead body, which hardly has a scratch on it. She's been mauled to death by a giant fucking werewolf and she looks like she tripped over something. Brilliant, we won't even get some gory deaths to make up for the rest of the film. A band of villagers decide to kill the wolf, setting off straight away so as to ambush it during the day because apparently werewolves burst into flames in sunlight. Just how obsessed with vampires is Hardwicke? Anyway, they set off straight away, and get to its cave in the middle of the night. That makes complete sense. Henry's father is killed and the rest of them come back with it's head just as Gary Oldman turns up.

If everyone else in the film is as wooden as the toothpick-trees, Oldman's as hammy as the pigs they sacrifice to try and appease the wolf. He plays the mad Father Solomon, a man with silver fingernails (remember that) who rants about the wolf and the red moon until the wolf turns up. And it's awful. It's all CGI and it's neither convincing nor scary. It kills some people and telepathically tells Valerie to come away with it. I'm sure someone could have made a good film here. Give any aspiring director the job and tell them that if they make it anything like Twilight you'll stick them inside Father Solomon's giant metal elephant and you'd end up with a better, darker film than this.

Anyway, for the next hour or so the wolf kills people very cleanly and people are accused and suspected of being the wolf. Then, Solomon decides to duel it. Unfortunately, he duels like a little girl and the wolf bites his arm off. The wolf tells Valerie to come with it, she refuses and goes to her grandma's house. Once there, she finds that her grandma (Julie Christie) is dead and her father (Billy Burke) is revealed as the werewolf, like anyone cares. He shares some boring dialogue with Valerie until Peter attacks him with the world's smallest axe and Valerie stabs him in the chest with Solomon's severed arm, killing him with the SILVER FUCKING FINGERNAILS. I'd say it's an anti-climactic end to the film, but that would imply that the film had been building towards something. Either way, it's the stupidest death since Mr. Big swallowed a bullet of compressed air and floated away like a balloon in Octopussy. During the fight with Valerie's father, Henry was bitten, meaning he will become a werewolf, but not before he and Valerie have sex and make werebabies. "If Amanda Seyfried goes topless, would that be enough to save this film?", I mused to myself as the couple started kissing. It wouldn't have been, even if she had done.

Skip Red Riding Hood and watch The Company of Wolves or An American Werewolf in London instead. Gary Oldman's ham can't save this rubbish, although it does at least trundle along despite its runtime of one hour and forty minutes. If it dragged, it would have gotten even fewer points.

3 out of 10.