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Our critic round up the week's other new releases
1/2
2 November 2012

It Always Rains on Sunday

Cert PG, 92 mins

****

Few films made in postwar Britain were as vivid as Robert Hamer’s 1947 study of a March Sunday in the lives of a Bethnal Green family upended when a bored housewife (Googie Withers) faces an ex-lover (John McCallum) escaped from Dartmoor and seeking refuge.

Hamer paints a poor but still chipper East End community with a sure touch and the period of ration books and semi-legal activities with caustic honesty. A brand new print helps to show that the British cinema of the period was often far better than its contemporary reputation has become.

Halloween

Cert 15, 91 mins

****

John Carpenter, a brilliant young director with only two films behind him in 1978 (Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13), changed the face of horror movies with this super-efficient, almost machine-tooled frightener, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, right.

A few years later, about 60 per cent of American movies were of the stalk-and-slasher variety. Hitchcock’s Psycho and Powell’s Peeping Tom were obvious influences but at that time Carpenter was resolutely his own man and also had a cinematographer in Dean Cundey who was later recognised as one of the best. Incidentally, psychopath Michael Myers’ mask was actually a Captain Kirk fancy-dress item sprayed white and with its eyes reshaped. What a let-down.

Stitches

Cert 18, 90 mins

**

Conor McMohan’s comic horror film has comedian Ross Noble as a cynical children’s clown who, cruelly mocked by his young birthday audience, falls to a grizzly but accidental death. Bullied Tommy, the birthday boy (Tommy Knight), can’t get the incident out of his mind. But he’s not actually having hallucinations since the clown comes back from the grave years later to torment those, now teenagers, who caused his death.

McMohan lays on the blood and gore with a trowel but also with a spiky sense of humour. It would be a better film if it was structured more strictly and less determined to murder not just the rather nasty teens one by one but probability too. Even so, there are laughs to be had, Knight is good, and Noble revels in playing a second-rate clown who takes first-class revenge.

Dark Tide

Cert 15, 94 mins

*

There’s not a lot to be said in favour of this clumsy South Africa adventure about a boat owner (Halle Berry) who takes thrill-seeking tourists out into dangerous waters to observe the sharks.

The tourists are, in fact, very silly indeed since they insist on leaving the cage which protects them underwater. The result, of course, is as obvious (and unconvincing) as the script. There are some nice Capetown locations but a great big fish tank at Pinewood was apparently used for the underwater scenes.

Welcome Abroad

Cert 12A, 95 mins

**

French director Jean Becker is 79 now and still on the go. His latest film has Patrick Chesnais as a veteran artist who has a bit of a block, walks out on his wife and joins a 15-year-old stray (Jeanne Lambert) on the road.

The performances are fine but the whole seems bland, as if Becker was determined not to fall into the paedo trap.

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