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Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine2.5

RESEÑA EN ESPAÑOLSPOOKTOBER VI: THE HAMMER OF HORRORHave you ever seen a movie lots of people seem to like but you can’t honestly understand why?Yeah, this is that movie for me.Posters, reviews, and even the Wiki description led me to believe this was going to be a “horror” film, and those creepy, dead-looking kids had me expecting something terrifying, unsettling, and eerie. At best, I thought it would be Hammer’s take on Village of the Damned. Instead, what I got was first some teen angst movie with bikers, then a whole romance between a young woman and an older man who eventually find themselves trapped in a government facility experimenting on children. The kids are cute enough, and they have cool powers, which we get a taste of here and there. Our leads try to save them from the evil doctors and whatnot—you know the drill.The performances are solid. Everyone does their job well, though I wouldn’t say anyone stood out to me. Okay, maybe Oliver Reed? But he’s Oliver Reed; he always finds a way to stand out, though he and the rest of the cast don’t have much to work with. This premise has been done to exhaustion, but some films manage to leave an impression—whether it’s through campy or evil performances by the villains, cool special effects, or a main storyline that fleshes out the characters. Unfortunately, I feel this was missing for me. The film is well shot, and that ending was kind of bleak, so it has that going for it.All in all, I was pretty disappointed with this one, as I was hoping for something more. It has the bare bones of a good film, but there was something missing in the writing for me.SPOOKTOBER VI: THE HAMMER OF HORRORTODAY SCHEDULEThe Phantom of the OperaThe DamnedParanoiac

Ian West3.5

Starts off like a teens gone wild movie where the sister of lead goon Oliver Reed shacks up with an older man and they head off on his boat... then they stumble into a secret government facility with radioactive children and this thing takes a big turn into bleakness. Satisfying sci-fi yarn from Hammer pulled the rug out from me—I genuinely felt for the children in this and the impending narrative doom was quite the gut punch.Cool movie!

Lexzilla3.0

What a gloomy and strange thing this is. All fatalism and polemics but with the catchiest theme tune. When it started, I thought it was going to be kind of seaside gang film or even a wrong-side-of-the-tracks romance, but then the film does this sharp left turn into mystery fuelled sci-fi nuclear destruction paranoia. And yet somehow it all ends up very watchable, possibly even chilling.It’s not without problems though, the dialogue veers a little too close to pretentious flimflam every so often and, most strangely, all the adult actors are out-acted by the kid cast. Not that the children give revelatory performances, just that none of the adults are at their best. But thankfully none of this fully detracts from the atmosphere this builds with its off-kilter story pacing and black and white coastal moodiness.