In short: A Lonely Place to Die (2011)

Warning: there shall be slight structural spoilers

A group of friends and acquaintances (Melissa George and Ed Speleers among others) are on a mountaineering trip in the Scottish Highlands. They stumble upon a little girl hidden in what amounts to a buried large wooden box. They obviously free the kid and start to make their way to the closest village. That’s quite a stretch away, and even though our protagonists are clever and tactical in their approach to the situation, the people who have buried the girl soon take it upon themselves to fetch their victim back and kill all of the unhelpful witnesses they seem to have acquired.

Clearly, not everyone will make it back to civilization, and even there, the survivors’ troubles won’t stop, for the small town standing in for it isn’t exactly police central. As a further complication, the kid’s father has sent out some armed and violent men to find her.

Julian Gibley’s fine thriller surprised me repeatedly while I was watching it, particularly since it turned from one type of thriller into a different one half way through, not exactly subverting genre expectations but shifting the sub-genre the film operates in and the connected plot beats and clichés around rather nicely. This does make the film somewhat less predictable than expected, the shift from survivalist thriller to something taking place in a less isolated environment coming at just the right moment to keep the viewer expecting some very specific plot developments on his toes.

I also appreciated how ruthless the film’s first two thirds or so got rid of its characters, going for the quick and the painful rather than the melodramatically prolonged. The villains here are after all not very interested in making our protagonists suffer – unlike those in many other wilderness based thrillers and horror films – but only in getting rid of them. The tone becomes a bit more melodramatic later on, but at that point, Gilbey has earned the melodrama, as his characters have earned the sympathy of the audience.

Speaking of the protagonists, like our villains, they too are a bit different from your typical backwoods slasher fodder in that they are not hateful creatures you only want to die and watch take their shirts off; we’re not in the realm of very deep characterisation here, but the actors are decent enough and the writing sure-handed enough I didn’t want to see them die more than their actual killers did.

In the wilderness part, Gilbey makes excellent use of the Scottish landscape, the isolated feeling open spaces can provoke as much as cramped ones do. There’s precision to the action and suspense scenes, and only in the final third the film loses some of the resulting momentum through rampant overuse of slow motion by people not named John Woo. But at least it’s not whoosh cuts or a uselessly wavering camera.

And really, if “uses a bit too much slow motion in its final thirty minutes” is the worst I can say about a film, it must have been pretty good.

Howl (2015)

Not that Howl, it’s the October-fit one.

British train guard Joe (Ed Speleers) does not have a very good day. For one, he’s a train guard; then there’s the fact he’s just learned he hasn’t got the promotion to supervisor role he applied for. The actual new supervisor is a little prick who’ll lord it over him forever, and already starts with giving him a double shift - which means night train duty. Last but not least, Ellen (Holly Weston), the woman on food trolley services (I’m sure there’s a proper term for that on British rails, but I’ll be damned if I can find it) he’s got a crush on doesn’t seem to reciprocate.

Things actually go downhill from there, for right in the middle of Thornton Forest, the train comes to a halt. When Joe and Ellen try to find out what’s going on, they find the driver (Sean Pertwee saying hi for a few minutes) missing. The audience knows he’s been eaten by a werewolf while examining what exactly he just crashed into.

Not surprisingly, nobody else on board knows how to drive a train. Help won’t be coming too soon, either, for there is – of course – no cell reception, and the very weak connection to the train emergency services can only promise help in about four hours, and then falls into the big black hole of things whose existence the film will just ignore.

Four hours is much too long for the passengers, especially banker asshole Adrian (Elliot Cowan), so soon, everybody trudges through the dark woods in the direction of the next station. For a short while, that is, because soon the werewolf attacks, and the travellers will just have to barricade themselves in the train. It’s going to be a long night.

Given this time of year always makes me even more hungry for all things containing monsters than is my usual state of mind, and that I’ve a bit of a thing for stories set on trains, Paul Hyett’s werewolves on a train movie Howl has its work really cut out for it when it comes to this viewer. The film doesn’t disappoint me either, seeing as it features its monster early and often, doesn’t balk from killing off more sympathetic cast members comparatively early, and does make good use of its train.

There are, of course, all the typical elements of your siege movie, too, with barely avoided ingresses of the monster, panicked fights in confined spaces, people (well, bankers) being the worst monsters of them all, other people cracking up in various appropriate ways as portrayed by a bunch of capable and sympathetic actors, while others find their inner strength in adversity. It’s not very original, to say the least, but the film’s script goes through these standards with verve and conviction, adds elements and character traits that situate the proceedings very concretely on the British Isles in the 2010s (local flavour is always important), and does very clearly understand the structure it uses well enough to know which parts it needs to change for the situation at hand and which ones to keep. That last one might sound like a curious element to praise but I’ve seen a lot of movies in my time that shoot themselves in the foot (camera?) by missing out on the fact that certain things that work in a sheriff’s office don’t work so well on a space station, for example.

The werewolves are in fine shape too, sharing a basic form but showing individuality as well as expressiveness, and – once we get to that part of the film – are really fine (and rather fun) caricatures of the people they once were, adding monsters(!) to the generally fine impression this werewolf train siege epic made on me.

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