Movie Review: Apollo 18

Apollo 18 (2011) 

Directed by Gonzalo Lopez Gallego 

Written by Brian Miller

Starring Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen, Ryan Robbins 

Release Date September 2nd, 2011

Published September 2nd, 2011 

Call it The Blair Witch Project on the moon; Apollo 18 takes the found footage horror sub-genre into outer space. The story of a lost NASA mission hidden from the public for nearly 30 years, Apollo 18 somehow manages to seem fresh and exciting even as it recycles the edgy tensions of the Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity.

By official account, the Apollo 18 mission never happened. However, footage has somehow popped up on a conspiracy obsessed website and it reveals footage shot by three astronauts of a mission to the moon gone horribly wrong. In the course of 85 minutes we will watch what begins as any other mission to the moon, as it becomes a slowly unfolding tragedy.

The mission goes off without a hitch, from launch to the landing of two astronauts on the lunar surface as a third circles the moon waiting to drive everyone back to earth. Once on the moon however, strange things begin to happen. First, communications breakdown between the moon lander and NASA.

Then, in a shocking and unexpected twist, the astronauts find that they are not alone on the moon; another country has recently been on the moon and they left behind terror in their wake. I won’t spoil the surprise as many other critics already have; I will only say that there is blood and plenty of it on the moon.

Apollo 18 was directed by the ingenious Spanish director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego who makes clever use of ancient camera technology, the film is set in 1974, to limit what we can see and reinforce the film’s found footage premise. The cameras that the astronauts were instructed to plant on the moon give us static images that when lingered on require audience members to search the screen for clues in what becomes a tense search for signs of life.

Actors Warren Christie and Lloyd Owen are cleverly cast as the terrified and confused astronauts. Both actors are vaguely recognizable but are not so well known that they take you out of what is supposed to be an assemblage of found footage edited into ‘documentary’ form. Cast Matt Damon as one of the astronauts and the movie-ness would undermine the notion of found footage.

Apollo 18 doesn’t break any new ground but the film is well shot, the scares arrive in a strong rhythm keeping the audience in a state of perpetual tension and the finale leaves no questions about the astronauts’ fates. Most importantly, Apollo 18 has one moment, one big scare, that will elicit more than a few terrified shrieks.

And you know what? That’s really all you can ask of a movie that is essentially The Blair Witch Project on the moon.

Movie Review: Daddy's Girl

Daddy's Girl (2018) 

Directed by Julian Richards 

Written by Timmy Hill 

Starring Jemma Dallender, Costas Mandylor, Jesse Moss, Britt McKillip

Release Date September 29th, 2020

Published August 23rd, 2022 

Daddy’s Girl opens on an ambiguously ominous sight. A very sad young woman sits at a kitchen table with a gun in front of her. It appears that she is going to kill herself before we cut away and begin the story. The kitchen table scene is in the future, the next act of the movie will be about how we arrive at that kitchen table and what has made this sad young woman so desperate as to be considering ending her life. 

The young woman at the kitchen table is Zoe (Jemma Dallender). Zoe’s life is as tragic and horrifying as the opening scene indicates. Zoe lives in a backwoods town with her father, John Stone (Costas Mandylor). John is a serial murderer who uses his daughter as bait to lure in his victims. The two go to bars and seek out young women on their own, preferably drifters who might not be missed all that much. 

These young women are seduced by the idea that if this older man has this beautiful younger woman on his arm that he must be harmless. That’s when he slips something into their drink. Zoe becomes part of the seduction and the idea of kinky sex drives these young women to go home with the couple. There is no sex waiting in that backwoods home however. Instead, John takes these women into his dungeon and tortures for having thought they would go home with a man and a woman for sex. 

John is not interested in sex with his victims, he only has eyes for his daughter. Yeah, the movie appears to go there. I can’t say for sure that John is actually Zoe’s biological father but she does call him daddy and your skin crawls when she does. Zoe is not fully complicit in John’s crimes. The film indicates strongly that she’s been groomed and abused into this position and that perhaps John had murdered Zoe’s mother in order to frighten her into compliance. 

John’s double life as serial killer and loving father/owner of a small town mechanic shop becomes threatened by the arrival of a new young deputy. Deputy Scott Walker has recently returned to his hometown from several tours in Iraq as a military police officer and has been tasked with investigating the disappearance of a local girl. Scott is not the only newcomer in town as he meets a drifter named Jennifer (Britt McKillip) just as she is arriving in town. He warns her about missing girls in town and she indicates that she’s not staying long. 

That last part is deliberately vague as Jennifer has a part to play in how Daddy’s Girl plays out. Daddy’s Girl is a nasty little slasher movie that never finds a second gear after general cruelty toward women. It’s not that the movie is nasty and misogynistic enough to be memorably awful. Rather, it’s a more mundane sort of misogyny rather typical to the horror genre and thus nothing special. I can’t bring myself to completely condemn Daddy’s Girl, it’s neither poorly made enough or hateful enough for harsh condemnation. 

No, in fact, in the performances of Jemma Dallender and Britt Mckillip we have two charismatic women who give the story more credibility than the movie can bear. Both actresses are quite compelling with Dallender having a lot of trauma to play with and McKillip a mysteriousness that is intriguing. Their coinciding stories are remarkable for how these two actresses play their roles. It's a shame that their performances are undermined by how trashy the movie around them is. 

Daddy's Girl wallows in the muck of the genre and it never feels organic or well displayed. Instead, the trashiness takes away from what little good there is about Daddy's Girl. 

Movie Review: Eros

Eros (2004) 

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar Wai

Written by Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh, Torino Guerra

Starring Gong Li, Chang Chen, Alan Arkin, Robert Downey Jr, Regina Nemni 

Release Date April 8th, 2005 

Published August 18th, 2005 

Three brilliant directors come together for a series of short films under the title Eros. Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michaelangelo Antonioni contribute short films to a trilogy that via the title Eros are about sex... or are they.

The Hand, Mr. Wong's contribution, is sexual in subtext but seems more about an unusual and somewhat disfunctional connection between two strangers. Chang Chen plays a tailor, a mere apprentice when we first meet him, who is assigned to make a dress for a high class prostitute, Ms. Hua played by Gong Li. In their first meeting Li's prostitute sexually humiliates the tailor. She claims it will make him a better tailor and she's right.

Soon he is inspired and continues for a number of years crafting beautiful outfits for the prostitute. The nature of the relationship is mostly business but as time passes and the prostitute falls on hard times she finds that the tailor, though he has never touched her, is the only man who has ever really known her body. The two have an erotic connection through the clothing that is more powerful than other relationship either has ever had.

I love the way Wong Kar Wai uses slow motion. By simply slowing the frames by a fraction and showing his actors moving at just slightly slower rate of speed he gives the impression of a montage without edits. The slow motion marks the slow passage of time. The film covers this relationship over a number of years and they pass in dreamlike fashion.

The Hand is unquestionably the best of the three films in Eros.

Steven Soderbergh's contribution to Eros is called Equilibrium and it stars Robert Downey Jr. as an ad executive and Alan Arkin as his shrink. Shot mostly in black and white the film has the look of a noir detective story with rascotro lighting, Downey wearing the traditional private dick garb, the fedora and trenchcoat and there is a mystery albeit one from a dream.

In the dream there is a beautiful naked stranger, a nondescript hotel room and a ringing phone. Dream analysts I'm sure could have a field day with this scenario however neither we nor Mr. Soderbergh is as interested in the dream as we are in the bizarre behavior of Arkin as the shrink. While Downey lays on the couch with his back turned and his eyes closed, Arkin is frantically trying to get the attention of someone outside his office window. What was the point of this film? I have no idea. I know it's exceptionally well shot. The look is beautiful and every angle Soderbergh chooses is very eye catching, often distracting from the somewhat meandering plot.

Equilibrium is an interesting exercise in filmmaking technique and maybe if you are more observant than me you can glean some hidden meaning from it. On that basis I recommend checking it out.

You however might as well skip Michaelangelo Antonioni's contribution to Eros, an Italian exercise in softcore porn called  The Dangerous Thread. The film is a pointless and painfully protracted exercise in female exploitation. As a couple argues about the end of their relationship, they pass a beautiful woman in a restaurant. The man asks if his soon to be ex knows the woman and she does. The woman lives in a castle just a few miles away. The man visits this beautiful stranger and with a few words they are in bed. Then the beautiful woman and the ex girlfriend each go for a walk on the beach in the nude. They meet somewhere in the middle and simply regard each other for a moment and the film ends.

I must say that Mr. Antonioni is a legend. I have seen his L'Avventurra and was blown away by its beauty. But now at more than 90 years old the master has become nothing more than an ogling old man. That is fine in private but on film it's rather tedious.