Hey folks, Harry here... and look... Robin Williams is in another small quality genre film. With FINAL CUT & ONE HOUR PHOTO - Robin has been taking very good parts in very small films - and doing a great job with them. Looks like he's made another great one. Actually both of these movies have great reputations and sterling word of mouth. LIONS GATE picked up THE DESCENT and I haven't yet heard a release date on that one... Meanwhile THE BIG WHITE doesn't even have a U.S. distributor yet. This is a shame, sounds fantastic!

Hi Harry and AICN staff.

Here are my last two reviews from the German FantasyFilmfest in Frankfurt and i'm not sure if you're interested or if you're going to use it because you had already some reviews of The Descent. But i'll send it to you anyway and i'll make it short this time.

"The Big White"

Directed by Mark Mylod this film sets in a small village in Alaska where the financially troubled travel agent Paul (played by Robin Williams) tries to get a big insurance policy for his missing brother but it's being refused 'cause either the brother should be missed for at least seven years to be signified as dead or the dead body should be presented as a proof. 1 Million Dollars could be his big chance to leave Alaska with his wife (played by Holly Hunter) and to begin a new life in a more warm and sunny place. This chance comes when he founds a frozen dead body in a garbage container. His idea is to show this body as the corpse of his own brother and cash the 1 Mill. $. He prepares this body and let it falls down a cliff. Everything looks very cheap but the reported police comes to the result that he must be killed by a wolf.

The insurance agent played by Giovanni Ribisi is very suspicious about all that and starts to investigate and suspects that the body is not Paul's brother. All the disputes between him and Paul ends in a funny argument in the insurance company but the insurance agent can't really proof anything. Now the insurance company is not the only one who is interested in Paul and the corpse. First there are the two guys (one is played by Tim Blake Nelson and the other big guy i don't know) who hid the body in the garbage container and want the body back.They find a little piece of meat of the body in Paul's old ice box and they take Paul's wife as a hostage until they get the body back. Paul lies to them that he gets 100.000 $ from the insurance company and the two hostage-takers want the half. The only thing what Paul has to do is to get the money and take back the buried body from the graveyard after receiving the insurance money. In that whole time his wife has to spend the time with the two stupid hostage-takers and she drives them crazy. Paul's wife suffers from the Tourette syndrome and Holly Hunter gives a hilariously and quirky performance in cursing them and repeating all kind of funny expressions in a very fast way and you can't help but laugh all the time. Here the Tourette-Syndrome is not really presented as a hard sickness but as a character element of Holly Hunter (combined with her distinctive voice!) to make her very likable. All the time when i saw her on the screen i just wanted to hug her 'cause she was so cute. She's reason enough to watch this one. After reading the newspaper that he's killed by a wolf Paul's REAL brother (played by Woody Harrelson) appears in a fucking mad mood and wants half of the money. This time Paul lies that he gets (only) 50.000$. Now the whole film is about Ribisi who tries to proof that Paul is a fraud (and tries to save his relationship with his girlfriend), Woody Harrelson who's enraged about Robin William's action and the two hostage-takers who wait for the dead corpse and are peeved about Holly Hunter and her very funny Tourette syndrome swearings. In all that between is Robin Williams who has to hurry to get the money and solve all the problems.

Robin Williams is again in his element and i'm really surprised what kind of roles he took in the past years. And i associate all the latest films with the color white. Don't ask me why but movies like Insomnia, One Hour Photo and The Big White have many settings where you see much of white. White walls, white rooms or white snow and so on. This film begins with a wide white landscape (with Holly Hunter in her pyjamas running in the snow) as Robin Williams wants to gives us a wink "Hey guys i made a film with my favourite color white again". Yeah i know it's just a coincidence and my brain is driving me crazy. I really don't know if this film is going to be succesful in the box office but i really hope so. It has few beautiful shots of the white landscape and the film reminded me a little bit on Fargo but this one had more funny and comical moments. It's a comedy with it's own fingerprint by Mark Mylod and i'm sure i'm gonna buy the DVD. I just hope this film doesn't go under like other small movies (The Machinist last year or The Simple Plan from the 90s which i recall right now). I really recommend this one and i'm sure you'll have a good time with strong performances by Holly Hunter (MUST SEE...i'd say oscar worthy) Robin Williams and Woody Harrelson. Giovanni Ribisi and Tim Blake Nelson are perfectly casted. Ribisi and Williams are great together especially in the insurance office where they both try to proof to the director that they're right and start teasing eachother. Just great.

"The Descent"

Before i write about The Descent let me tell you how i thought about Dog Soldiers, the early film by the same director Neil Marshall. It was a boring piece of sh*t which was perhaps only good for TV or direct-to-video but definitely a no-no for the theater.

I yawned so much in that film that i only wished this would end as soon as possible. It was so predictable and had so many stupid and dumb moments...just awful. And the way it was shot and the music...just everything was so bold simple and strikingly stupid that i thought what the hell did the director thought to make such a movie??? And moments like this one: This soldier walks in the forest and suddenly the werewolf appears and his goddamn machine gun doesn't work??? Hello? Am i stupid or what? So the whole movie ran that way and i thought how lazy you must be to write such a boring film. The whole fucking movie was full of lazy movie cliches. And a low-budget is not an excuse for all that. It had nothing which was fun or really gory or humour or frightening or somewhere you'd just cringe (ok ok, i cringed when this guy had the sword between his teeth) and whatever. (and please don't compare this shit to AnAmericanWerewolfInLondon) So as you can imagine i had a low low low expectation on The Descent and wasn't really hyped from all the early reviews from aicn because i thought that those guys must have loved DogSoldiers so all of them didn't mean anything to me. Now when "The Descent" started i was worried in the first 10 or 20 minutes because with DogSoldiers on my mind i became horribly pedantic.

There is this woman who has this bad accident and i won't tell you what exactly happens but when it happens it was so fast and so early in the film that i was a little bit surprised. But hell, not really something which you haven't seen in other movies but with stronger impact. The first thing i noticed was that this film is shot like a real film for the cinema. Here you can see that the director made a big progress (or took a better DP or both) and the music feels like a real score and not this cheap shit you heard in DogSoldiers. One year later after the accident this woman and all her friends go cave diving in Achnapelle mountains. Hmmm wait a minute it was not Achnapelle. Apanachel...no Chappanapel...DaveChappelle...you know this well known forest/mountain area in the US which sounds like a name by the Native Americans. Apanache? Apanachel? Chanel? Jeeezzzz whatever, you guys in America definitely know what i'm talking about. So the group consists of 6 or 7 women and the leader of them is this Asian woman who has more experience then the others and is the errr strongest one to express it simple. This woman who had this accident has still nightmares and imagine things from the past and the audience gets a taste of it through a few shock moments which works actually pretty well and this was the first time when my brain told me: hmmmm perhaps this is going to be fun and not like this big poo which is called DogSoldiers. Now the group finds this big and deeeeeeeeep hole and starts to cave diving or whatever you call it. And they find all these little ramified and very very narrow holes they all crawl through and at this moment i thought: WHAT THE FUCK. THESE WOMEN DON'T EVEN LOOK LIKE THEY HAVE EVER DONE THIS BEFORE and they spend their fucking free time to crawl through this superblack darkness and think that this is fun? And this woman who had this accident a year ago and has nichtmares and imagines this voices of "i'm not gonna spoil" do this shit in the dark??? Very believable but hell, it's a Horror movie right?

SPOILER

And then all this shit happens around them when a few areas collapses and they got stucked. And then they find out that their leader/guide doesn't fucking know where they are. She wanted to discover this unexplored! cave system.

SPOILER END

Yeah fucking rrrrrright. Again one of this stupid tricks or excuses by the director/writer to let the participants fall into this bad fucking situation. SIGH

But then this film starts to fire the engine and MUTATES INTO AN INTENSE HORROR MOVIE. When they meet the first creatures all hell breaks out and they have to survive and escape this goddamn cave system. At this moment my brain just stopped to annoy me with all this shitty "omg Descent is going to be the same shit as DogSoldiers" because my senses were too engaged not to let me scare or cringe but they failed me many times and that's the good thing about this movie. While DogSoldiers was a boring crap this one is quite entertaining and has many "holy shit" moments and all the guys in England who have already seen it certainly know what i'm talking about. When you have seen many Horror films you just know from the feeling when the next shock moment will strike and often you can expect them here too but they're still so intense that i cringed a few times.(So be prepared when the music stops ok?)

There are moments where you're emmersed in an intense fight scene and it ends with something nobody in the theater expected.

POTENTIAL SPOILER

This happens with the Asian lady who fights against one of these creatures, turns around and...holy mother. I reacted with a loud "ooooooooh" at this moment.

POTENTIAL SPOILER END

The movie is full of it and you see every brutal moments in gory detail when the women and the creatures fights and tortures each other. And i even wished them to survive although i wanted them all die in the beginning of the film where they were in the house talking and chatting (yeah my thoughts were: I hope everyone of them are killed at the end of the film). And it has a beautiful and a little disturbing ending and the people in the theater just loved it. As i already said this movie is shot more professionally then DogSoldiers and there is this thing i noticed very often through the film how the shots are edited. (and it's different than in DogPoo errr Soldiers) There is a row of images which are all in a certain closer shots. And i don't remember having seen this kind of shot/editing technique so consequently where you have many many closer shots of the people in a certain movement and perspective. I can't explain it 'cause you have to see it by yourself but pay attention in the part where they are outside with their backpacks and walk to the cave.

It's absolutely intended where the senses of sensitive guys like me are in an alert mode which is a great way to prepare the audience for this kind of Horror film. And the music was fine too and supported the moments very well and the creatures were more frightening then these crappy werewolves in DogSoldiers (though i have to admit there was some oddness and strangeness about them) and although you see them many times you just don't get used to it completely. Nice makeup design. K, i'm sure you're fed up with my complainings about DogSoldiers but prepare for The Descent which is a very good and very bloody Horror flick.

If i had to rate this one i'd give it a B (with a BIG BIG) +

Your CurryIce