BUG - the 'Darkmatters BUG SEASON kicks off' review

Bug (18)

Dir. William Friedkin

Reviewed by Matt Adcock

If paranoia is contagious… Then I’m freaking, I'm jumping like a jumping jack and dancing screaming, itching, squealing, fevered, feeling… hot hot hot!!!

And you will be too if you take this express elevator to insanity. Bug sees Director William Friedkin evoking the genius he hasn’t showed for 30 something years – it’s a horror / thriller / mindbend of the highest order… That’s obviously a subjective experience but if you’re on the market for a metaphoric descent into the mind of a weirdo (perhaps that’s why you’re reading Darkmatters anyway?)...
Bug should be your next stop…

You could say that this is a riff on post-traumatic stress disorder but the harrowing tale of what happens when nutjob loser Peter (Michael Shannon) meets lonely waitress Agnes (Ashley Judd – giving the performance of her career) in a cheap motel is a glimpse into the very mouth of madness…

With an ominous ringing phone – a certain harbinger of creeping doom – we get to see a love story between two intensely damaged individuals… swapping dialogue like - Peter: I am the drone, to which Agnes replies: I am the mother queen.

In fact here’s my favourite scene which will give you taste:

Peter: You want to know what's going on? All right, then you listen to me, you listen to what I'm going to tell you, because you don't know the… enormity of what we're dealing with here…

Agnes: I'm listening…

Peter: May the 29, 1954, a consortium of bankers, industrialists, corporate C.E.O.'s and politicians held a series of meetings over three days at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland. They drew up a plan for maintaining the status quo…

Agnes: What is that?

Peter: It's the way things are. It's the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer…

Agnes: All right.

Peter: They devised a plan to manipulate technology, economics, the media, population control, world religion, to keep things the way they are. They have continued to meet once a year, every year, since that original meeting. Look it up.

Agnes: O.K….

Peter: Under their orders, the C.I.A. had smuggled Nazi scientists into the States to work with the American military at Calspan, developing an inner-epidermal tracking microchip…

Agnes: Wait…

Peter: A surveillance tool, a computer chip implanted in the skin of every human being born on this planet since 1982. An early test group for the prototype was the People's Temple, and when the Rev. Jim Jones threatened to expose them, he and every member of his church were assassinated… But it wasn't enough just to track people, to spy on them, they wanted control. They created the Intelligence Manned Interface biochip, a subcutaneous transponder, a computer chip imprinted with living brain cells. They needed lab rats to test it, and they found us: me, in the gulf, and another soldier working at Calspan at the time: Tim McVeigh.

Agnes: Oh, no, wait…

Peter: They turned us into… zombies, remote control assassins, then picked Tim up, chucked him in a prison factory. But I found my chip and cut it out, so they sent me back to the lab for further testing and a new experiment… They can't get to everybody, people slip through the cracks, or find the chip and remove it, like me, or Ted Kaczynski. They need a chip that will self-perpetuate, that will spread, like a virus, that people can pass to each other, to everyone.

Good stuff huh?

So having escaped her abusive ex-husband Goss (Harry Connick Jr.) who’s recently been released from prison and is on his way back to her, Agnes – who is still vulnerable having lost her six year old son (how, we’re never quite sure), is at a very low ebb when Peter and his bug infested blood turn up…

Bug is the closest thing you can get to experiencing an on screen insanity inducing claustrophobic nightmare which merges delusion with reality as bugs begin to disrupt the lives of Peter and Agnes...
It’s not a happy story, but this is an important film and a worthy headline entry into the Darkmatters ‘BUG SEASON’…

DARKMATTERS RATING SYSTEM (all ratings out of maximum 10):

Endorphin Stimulation: ööööööö (8)
- Bug will ransack your head

Tasty Action: öööööö (6)
- More a slow burner but there are some flashpoints

Gratuitous Babeness: öööööö (8)
- Ashley Judd does white trash with style

Mind Blight / Boredom: öööööö (6)
- This is going to freak some people out (alot)

Comedic Value: öööööö (6)
- The funnies dry up once the bugs move in

Arbitrary final rating: öööööööö (9)
- Powerful and desperately sad, this is a must see film

Liable to make you:
"try to extract your own teeth with pliers to make sure there aren’t any bug nests in them…"

DM Poster Quote:
“Oh – I like it when that lightening comes – yes I like it a lot…"

"Matt's new skinwork wasn't a hit with his wife"

The Somnambulist - review

The Somnambulist

By Jonathan Barnes

Reviewed by Matt Adcock

“Be warned. This book has no literary value whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre…”

How can you not fall in love with a book that not only opens with this but also uses it as the sales blurb on the back cover?

As a big fan of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell which I stumbled upon by chance and was blown away by (my review here http://darkmatt.blogspot.com/2006/07/jonathan-strange-mr-norrell.html) – I was surprised to be equally taken by this lower brow but higher energy and vividly grotesque murder mystery. Which I again came across in Waterstones and just had to buy on the spot.

The hero is Edward Moon - a conjuror and amateur detective who hangs around with the titular Somnambulist, a giant bald mute who drinks only milk and who communicates using a chalkboard. Oh and it seems that the Somnambulist is impervious to physical harm – as in Moon’s stage who he survives being run through with swords without any obvious ill effects.

This novel is as promised in the blurb an absolute lurid delight, escapism at its finest, nonsense for sure but packed with a weird and wonderful cast of characters such as a crazed cult leader, a mix and match shady government Directorate run by a tragic albino and a scarred operative who likes Chinamen a little too much… Then there’s Cribb – a guy who lives his life backwards through time and my pick of this motley crew – a pair of unstoppable demonic killers who appear and act like two public schoolboys… who say things like "Murder sir? I say. What larks."

The Somnambulist is a detective novel, but it’s also a suspense thriller / pulp fiction tale of horror, one thing is for sure – it’s a great debut and an inspiration to us working on our first novels!

Can’t wait now to read his next book The Domino Men conspiracy theory you've ever heard about the royal family and the true story about where the power of Number 10 really lies. Apparently there’s a treat for Somnambulist fans as a certain couple of characters are kept within a chalk circle in a cellar beneath Downing Street…

Overall öööö1/2 (4.5/5 all is not as it seems - this is no sleepwalk!)

In the Valley of Elah - review

In the Valley of Elah (15)

Dir. Paul Haggis

Reviewed by Matt Adcock


The Valley of Elah is the middle-eastern place noted in the Bible where the young shepherd boy (and one day King) David managed to kill the Philistine giant warrior champion Goliath – with nothing more than a well-aimed slingshot. This is the epic recreation of the that famous battle, no actually this is Paul ‘Crash’ Haggis’ cutting anti-war film that rips the jugular out of any romantic notions that signing up for the armed forces is cool or praiseworthy.

Tommy Lee Jones is on top form as Hank Deerfield, a retired Sergeant whose soldier son Mike has mysteriously disappeared after coming back from his latest tour of duty in Iraq. Charlize Theron plays detective Emily Sanders who gets dragged into the investigation when it looks like there may be foul play – and a possible military cover-up due to ‘something that happened involving Mike overseas’.
Jones is awesome as the devoted father, determined to find out what happened to his son, sketchy clues to which he uncovers on media files recorded on Mike's mobile phone. Haggis who wrote as well as directs stirs up a veritable hornets nest of rage and anguish, grief and betrayal, but all of it is ratcheted up in a slow burning way. Whilst In the Valley of Elah is no action thriller, it is a gripping, smouldering fuse that leads all the while to something very nasty.

If looking for a feel good or life-affirming movie, you should move along – watching Elah is like taking a depressing punch to the frontal cortex (that part of the brain generally thought to be where higher-level thinking takes place). The plot unfurls at a walking pace but you won’t be able to help yourself thinking ahead, all the while trying to figure out ‘whodunit’ and perhaps more importantly ‘why did they do it’?

There is excellent chemistry between Jones and Theron (in a wonderfully friends trying to help each other way); plus there are moments of stunning cinematography that elevate this over and above your average ‘war screws you up’ political effort. Elah hasn’t been very well received in the States, which doesn’t surprise me as it makes for a pretty damning case against the current administration’s foreign policy on Iraq. With this and No Country for Old Men, Jones has found a superb vein of recent form and this film has brought him an Oscar nominations to boot.

NEW DARKMATTERS RATING SYSTEM FOR 2008 (all ratings out of maximum 10):

Endorphin Stimulation: öööööö (6)
- 'thinking' rather than being 'blown away with excitement'

Tasty Action: öööö (4)
- not masses but some bursts of tension

Gratuitous Babeness: öööööö (6)
- Theron is hot in an understated way here

Mind Blight / Boredom: öööö (4)
- this won't keep everyone on the edge of their seats (brain required)

Comedic Value: öööö (4)
- Not a comedy by any definition

Arbitrary final rating: ööööööö (7)
- Quality film, powerfully made and packed with decent acting but maybe not a classic

Liable to make you:
“vow not to sign up for the armed forces"

DM Poster Quote:
“if we create killing machines, can we expect them to stop?”

"so I heard you have a thing about Oscar nomated stars!?"

Darkmatters: H O M E