sundancekid26

Crafted in Britain by director Joe Wright, Atonement tells the story of young author Briony Tallis who becomes jealous of her older sister's illicit love affair with a servant. And with this, she finds a love letter meant for Cecilia (her sister) written by the servant Robbie Turner and misconstrues it as a letter written with sadistic-perverted undertones when in reality it was a second draft that Robbie deemed to silly to use. Briony assumes that Robbie is a nymphomaniac and it is with this notion that she accuses Robbie with the rape of her younger sister. Upon hearing this, the Tallis family has him arrested and he ends up in World War II whilst Cecilia winds ups being a nurse. The rest of the movie revolves around Robbie trying to find his way back to Cecilia and also displays the cathartic process that Briony faces upon reaching adolescence and realizing the life-changing mistakes that she made. Atonement is sort of stuck in the middle in regards to whether it renders primarily on emotion or story. It is based on an Ian McEwen novel, so it does use some story elements in the latter segment of the film, such as when the story falls into the 'war-romance'-type category. The first half however feels highly eastern-oriented with well-placed shots around staircases and through windows that draw us into the secret love affair that Cecilia and Robbie have undertaken. The first part of the movie feels almost like a different film altogether. It feels quite artsy in spots and a lot of shots do not help to push the story forward. Having only seen two of Wright's films (Pride and Prejudice being the other) it's hard to lump his style into being specifically east or west. Pride and Prejudice had a lot of eastern elements in its use of detailed steady cam shots that follow its main characters around the sprawling English countryside. Atonement also has this, with an amazing 10-minute long steady cam shot that follows Robbie on a beach through the after effects of war. The shot is so magnificent that you forget about the lack of cutting and you start to feel as if you can taste the acrid flavor of rusted steel on a battleship or the stolid stench of soldiers' breath and spent bombs. The shot is very well choreographed as well as we see literally hundreds of extras that weave in and out of frame, each doing their own duty. Joe Wright uses background action nicely to tell different stories of different people without even giving them lines. Just watch the steady shot as it follows Robbie past a somber-looking band play a waltz or as he shoves into another soldier; a very well executed shot indeed. This shot does have an eastern-feel to it as it does not push the story forward but focuses on allowing the audience to see through the eyes of the main character. Editor Paul Tohill does a great job as well; his editing is never too fast paced but doesn't lag behind either. When he splices, he makes sure that we have enough time to fully incorporate ourselves within the basis of a shot. Again, his lack of editing in the steady camera scene helps to reinforce this. This can also be seen by assessing the scene that takes place near the end when Briony has come back to apologize to Cecilia and Robbie. His edits are now quick and slightly robust and help move the story along as we feel and see the tension-filled apartment room. The medium shot of Robbie when he almost decks Briony is tremendously powerful.

The Tingler is a film that was primarily used as a gimmick to fight the emergence of television popularity in the 50's. Released in 1959, it was produced and directed by the infamous William Castle. It was one of the last films Castle would make with Vincent Price; it also stars Judith Evelyn, Daryl Hickman and Patricia Cutts. It is the story about a pathologist Dr. Warren Chapin (Price) who discovers that when a person is genuinely scared, a parasite named the 'Tingler' will begin to grow on the person's spine and eventually strangle them from the inside.Dr.Warren's partner, whose wife is a mute and thus cannot scream, uses this discovery to frighten his wife to death. In an autopsy, Dr. Chapin removes the Tingler from the wife's spine causing the creature to escape. The rest of the film is about their pursuit of the tingler. William Castle has been no stranger to gimmicktry in his films;he's been using techniques to scare theatre going audiences since the early 50's. The Tingler is no different. William Castle used parts from World War 2 airplanes to devise a gimmick called "Percepto". These little devices cost Castle $250,000 to manufacture-almost the entire budget of The Tingler! Percepto would wait until specific scenes in the movie and then shock the unsuspecting seat occupant into a frenzy. Only a few seats were equipped with percepto however. In conjunction with percepto, Castle also hired audience members to faint and then be taken out by nurses. These were just two techniques devised to get a maximum scare from the audience. They were only used in larger theatres however. The last technique in The Tingler worth mentioning would be the infamous colour scene. The entire movie was shown to audiences in black and white except for one scene. In this particular scene everything is still black and white except for a bathtub full of blood with an arm reaching out to kill a woman! Their aren't very many redeeming features for a movie such as this. It's my least favourite Vincent Price film which I've seen. His acting is very average in the picture and many of the supporting actors don't contribute much at all. Again, I's hard to discuss anything else about The Tingler since everything is so average! The camera-work,lighting and set design; everything is just so monochrome and plain. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you try and keep an open mind and remember that this is 1959, you'll enjoy the movie a lot better. Just an odd bit of trivia: this could very well be the first film to contain the drug LSD. Apparently screenwriter Robb White had tried the drug at a university and decided to toss it into the script. Overall, The Tingler isn't horrible. It is definitely one of the flat out weirdest films I've ever seen which earns it some points. It's not a movie that you can watch a million times over; but if your looking for a summer afternoon kind of movie, The Tingler could be it.

Offerings is your basic slasher horror film. Directed, edited, written and produced by a man named Christopher Reynolds, it stars Loretta Leigh Bowman (Ya, I've never heard of her either) and a few other unknowns. John Radley is your typical neighbourhood weirdo/mute. The only difference is that he eats animals and his mother treats him like filth (including butting out her cigarettes in his breakfast). John's only friend is a girl named Gretchen. Naturally, Gretchen gets teased by everybody for hanging it with someone as introverted as John Radley. So one day the neighbourhood kids push Johnny down a well and leave him their. The incident leaves his face horribly disfigured and damages the limbic region of his brain, thus destroying any conscience he had in the first place. To make a long story short, John ends up murdering his mother, being placed under sedatives in a pysch hospital for 10 years, and breaks out after impaling a few people with needles. Get the picture? The rest of the story deals with him coming back and murdering all of the kids that did him wrong. He severs off their body parts and leaves them on the now teenage Gretchen's doorstep as his 'offerings'. It's pretty much like every other clichéd horror flick released in the 80's. One thing you're bound to notice in the first 20 minutes is that this is almost a scene-by-scene rip-off of John Carpenters 'Halloween' (Scott, I'm looking your way). No seriously, I could almost picture Carpenter watching this and cursing. We have a few Carpenter-isms to point out: An almost EXACT copy of his synthesized music, a pudgy cop who would rather bust a kid for porn then find out why body parts keep showing up randomly, horny teenage girls who would rather wear belly tops then watch the news, a psychology professor who thinks he can catch the killer and of course several ominous camera angles that either show us whatever the killer sees or shows us his eyes. All of these things add up to a very basic horror movie. I'll give it some credit though; there is a scene near the beginning that really made me cringe. I'm still trying to figure out if animals were actually killed on set. Apparently, on John's journey from the pysch back to his hometown, he eats various animals he finds in the countryside. Well our director Chris Reynolds decided to show some pretty grotesque close-ups of the carcasses-including flies! On a more supernatural note, I noticed that the guy who played the older John (Richard A. Buswell) also played a car driver in 'Rain man'. What makes this weird is the fact that these are the only two films that he's ever been in and I reviewed them both on the same night! Talk about creepy… Overall, the acting is what you'd expect in this type of film. The weird thing is that sometimes an actor will talk with a Texan sort of accent in one scene and then talk totally different in the next. I only mention this because it happened more than once; and well, it was kind of weird. The best acting performance came from a grave-digging intern who portrayed the clichéd, creepy caretaker mould to a tee. Some of the flaws of Offerings: A couple of shots blatantly cross the axis of shooting. These scenes don't even include the killer, so I don't think the director was trying to make us "feel" any sort of emotion; it just came across as being erroneous. The film is also irrevocably dark most of the time. In some scenes you can tell the only lighting present is the flashlight a character is holding. This is probably why about 90% of the movie takes place outside or around the vicinity of daylight. So aside from being overly predictable, unrealistic at times and a carbon copy of "Halloween', Offerings could do a lot worse for itself. If you found this cheap enough somewhere, it could make a pretty good purchase for 1 or 2 viewings perhaps. Actually, it would probably make a better rental.

6/10