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Reviews
Dog Soldiers (2002)
Proper B-Movie goodness
Neil Marshall obviously found a the Big Book of B Movie Cliches somewhere in a car boot sale - this film is everything a proper horror B movie should be; and it's British, which is just the icing on the cake :)
The storyline is standard fare for the genre - this time it's set in the Scottish highlands, and the protagonists are a bunch of British army soldiers, but basically we're still dealing with classic Evil Dead formula horror here. Our squaddies get abandoned out in the middle of nowhere as part of an exercise, but the exercise goes horribly wrong when they discover the opposing squad have been brutally and horribly slaughtered. You can probably work out the rest from there - the plot twists, such as they are, are pretty obvious, and you can probably guess the outcome of the film within the first 5 minutes. But, hell, if you're going to watch a B movie for *plot*, then you're going to be sorely disappointed whichever one you see.
What you *really* want out of a B movie is lots of blood, badly animated monsters which you only ever see in extreme closeup or silhouette, cheesy one liners, a cute girl, lots of those situations where you *know* that he shouldn't be standing by that window because there's a damn... oh, that was *so* obvious! and lots of cheap special effects - and that's exactly what you get. The set pieces are wonderfully grotesque set pieces, and there are plenty of brilliantly conceived oneliners. The werewolves themselves are of the proper cliched wolf-standing-on-hind-legs variety, and the squad fighting them has all the elements you'd expect out of a cliched movie army platoon - the nutter, the fraidy-cat, the technician, the hero, the sergeant with a family, the evil captain... Everything that should be there is, and in abundance.
Dog Soldiers is never going to win any Oscars, but it's not trying to. There's not a lot more you can say - it's a B movie, and a very, very good one at that. It does exactly what it sets out to do, and that's really no bad thing. A rollercoaster 100 minutes of werewolves, guns, explosions, blood and one-liners; it won't be to everyones tastes, but for it's target audience, it's destined to become a cult classic.
Eskimo Day (1996)
Well made, well written, poignant comedy drama
This is a superbly written and acted comedy drama about the emotional trials and strains on a family as the eldest children go through the University applications process. It focuses particularly on the mothers role in the family, and how she fears she will become redundant after the children leave. (The title refers to an ancient Eskimo practise whereby when the children leave, the mother sees her role as being finished and she just walks out into the snow to die.)
We follow three prospective students through their interview days at Cambridge university, and the relationships they strike up with each other - and how the families react to this as well; a major part of this is the reaction of the rather more 'well-bred' girl's family to the unstated suggestion that she has fallen for the boy from the more 'normal' family.
The plot is very simple, and is really secondary to the superb acting and exploration of the emotions experienced by the families.
It was a particularly poignant drama for me, as it was screened just at the time I was going through exactly the same thing. It pressed all the right emotional buttons, and Maureen Lipman's role as the overworried mother is superbly well played. I'm not sure if it's possible to get hold of this film any more (as it was only screened as a TV movie) but it's definitely well worth seeing if you can. See also the follow-up, Cold Enough for Snow.