Starve Acre

Starve Acre

Director ~ Daniel Kokotajlo

Writers ~ Daniel Kokotajlo, Andrew Michael Hurley

2023, UK

Stars ~ Matt Smith, Morfydd Clark, Arthur Shaw

 

It’s the Seventies and, apparently at the encouragement of his wife, archaeologist Smith moves his family back to the desolate farmhouse where he digs up his traumatic past there and into a Folk Horror plot. Their young boy is also acting up, quite disturbingly, saying that a voice called Jack makes him do bad things.

 

Although it may superficially seem a departure from Kokotajlo’s previous film about Jahovah Winesses, ‘Starve Acre’ is just as much about the damage caused families, cults, tradition and Faith. It’s also a genre exploration of grief so it’s a dour piece, with the tone of Seventies supernatural brilliantly captured: the BBC MR James adaptations, Nigel Kneales ‘Beast’ episode ‘Baby’ and ‘Robin Redbreast’ mostly come to mind. Certainly, this must be the most authentic-feeling Seventies British Supernatural homage since Mark Jenkin’s ‘Enys Men’. ‘Starve Acre’ is slicker and doesn’t have the sticky-taped together edges that typifies the era, but the ambiance seeps in and become a fine facsimile. There’s a lot of homage and riffing on past cinema around, and perhaps there always will be, and Roger Luckhurst gives a lofty reason for it:

 

“If we have lived through the crisis of this latter-day version of capitalism, stumbling on undead since at least the 2008 economic crash and the Anglo-American political convulsions of 2016, no wonder horror has been a privileged way of exploring the traumatic origins and monstrous progeny of this era.”

[Roger Luckhurst, “So Retro: why modern horror is in thrall to the past”, Sight & Sound: October 2024, volume 34, Issue 8, pg’s 40-3]

 

This too, because horror has always been rummaging in haunted and ugly pasts and social anxiety. But an example such as ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ might enjoy Nineties recreation, it is also about realising the distance between childhood loves and adult awareness. ‘Starve Acre’ is very contemporary in its self-awareness as a treatise on grief, and the period is of secondary importance. The past is plotting against you. However, there is a simpler, more direct conclusion in that these films are simply reaching for what the creators loved as youths. Giallo is namechecked frequently from this era, from ‘Maxxine’ to ‘Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes’, and you can barely move for Eighties recreations and Carpenteresque synth-scores.

 

It’s this retro-atmosphere and Matt Smith performance that are the strengths of this film: Smith is an excellent slippery actor, so that you never know quite where you stand with him, if he can be trusted (and that’s why I liked his Dr. Who, investing the character with a proper edginess although let down by scripts and re-imaging The Doctor as a superhero). The highlights of 'Starve Acre' are when Smith reveals some of his past in a rare moment of openness and the reanimation of a rabbit. It’s the latter that spices things up as we move towards the inevitable.

 

Folk Horror has always excelled at dread, and ‘Starve Acre’, although meandering, does have this. If it doesn’t quite reach for more – although the perversity of the rabbit has potential – it still provides a decent descent into the uncanniness of grief, of failing to overcome trauma, as well as the oddness and fear of small communities and rare faiths. And therefore, it digs up a lot of raw horror themes in appealing genre packaging.

Blade Runner

Blade Runner

Director ~ Ridley Scott

Writers ~ Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples, Philip K. Dick

1982, US-UK

Stars ~Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young

 

[This refers to The Director’s Cut.]

 

A classic, of course, but also surely an influence on all sci-fi that came after, ‘Metropolis’, ‘2001: a space odyssey’ or ‘Star Wars’. And of course, Scott’s own ‘Alien’. Just the opening cityscape – dark, fiery, neon – swooning to Vangelis’ transcendent-ageless 80s synth crescendos and diminuendos is iconic. The retro-futurism neon, cyberpunk, the crammed together population, claustrophobic urbanism – Deckard’s place seems part apartment, part airduct, just one neighbourhood away from Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ – the seemingly eternal nocturnalism, smog and rain… it’s a timeless mash-up feel of the antiquated and the futuristic. Zeppelins populate the sky along with flying cars – and chortle at the old brand names being advertised in the backdrops, although Coca Cola seems a constant. It feels lived in and plausible: part dazzle, part slum. Douglas Turnbull’s effects are both stunning and immersive. The highest of tech exists alongside entropy, the population distracted by the promise of living off-world. 

 

There’s so much detail to get lost in (a headline about mining on the moon; Deckard climbing over a sofa to cross his over-stuffed apartment) filtered through such a dreamy atmosphere that it takes and rewards multiple viewings to digest. It's marred by the moment where Deckard comes over all let’s teach the lady what she really wants where noirish romance involves a little rough foreplay. It’s an attitude that hasn’t aged well, even when all else still feels timeless; a misstep that glares because so much else is balanced so immaculately. Otherwise, the existential drama hinges on the What Does It Mean To Be Human? that Philip K. Dick’s original specialised in (whilst also cribbing the term “blade runner” from William S. Burroughs). If the question is why would they manufacture android-slaves to be so human-like, even giving them false memories, then surely we can look no further than our tendency to anthropomorphism as much as to Other, or indeed our desire to make AI and CGI as life-like as possible. The question of Deckard’s humanity looms large, but the Why? and What does it mean if he isn’t? gets smothered in the teeming mess and bric-a-brac of this society.

 

Harrison Ford has that look of a bad boy fearful of being discovered to be decent, an engaging vulnerability. Despite his apparent reputation, it has to be noted that Deckard doesn’t seem a convincing hunter of replicants: he only lives because his prey decides to do something else rather than immediately kill him (except when he shoots from behind). There’s an uncanniness to all the performances, a certain oddness that makes everyone memorable. Of course, it is Rutger Hauer that steals the show, chewing the scenery just with the crawl of his smile and delivering an improvised quintessential monologue… “I’ve seen things…” 

 

 

The Land Unknown

The Land Unknown

Director ~ Virgil W. Vogel

Writers ~ László Görög, William N. Robson, Charles Palmer

1957, US

Stars ~ Jock Mahoney, Shirley PattersonWilliam, Reynolds

 

So, it is the effects that everyone will see as dated, but it’s the gender politics that are most tiresomely of the era. The dialogue is mostly exposition or “Gee you’re a woman and I can hardly contain my manliness.” Shirley Patterson as Margaret Hathaway has to swing between smart, brave, capable and Scream Queen; all the stakes rest upon her gender. Her male colleagues are bland and unmemorable without her, and it’s left to Henry Brandon to do the acting heavy-lifting as Hunter, the sole survivor of a previous fated expedition, traumatised by solitude in a savage land. He gives a stony performance of suppressed psychosis as a man on a mission to bring the surround fauna to extinction in the name of self-preservation.

 

This hints at something harsher than the film can really get to grapple with, as does a T-Rex warded off by helicopter rotor blades and Hunter’s designs on Margaret. There’s something struggling to surface here, something about savagery and civility and self-sacrifice, but it is all put right with the two leads getting together. Of course.

 

 

But we’ve come for the world of dinosaurs, and to this end Vogel’s direction is attentive and wise, elevating this B-movie pulp at least to something immersive and entertaining. The descent into this world is one of the film’s highlights, and the fact it’s all on sound-stage only adds to the otherworldly feel. The matte paintings, miniatures, puppetry and all tricks thrown in have their distinct retro-charm. The dinosaur effects are mostly primitive yet delightful – except the fighting genuinely monitor lizards. Yes, they seem to have descended into the land of a giant man wearing a ‘Rex costume, but the hydraulics give it animation. The Elasmosaurus terrorising the river is better and probably has the best moments. The effects team give it their all – diving in, they often have credits in far superior and recognisable work – and we’re a long way from the dazzle of ‘King Kong’ (1933), this being exactly the kind of thing easily parodied, but there’s undemanding fun to be had.