Even Elysium’s director thinks his film is a mess – but a decade on, it deserves a second chance

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Matt Damon runs around the US in 2154, when civil liberties are eroded, healthcare is for the rich and wealth inequality is soaring. But its sci-fi! Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email When director Neill Blomkamp followed up his acclaimed debut feature, District 9, with the cyberpunk dystopia Elysium in 2013, it was met with a resoundingly mediocre reception. It’s a movie that even Blomkamp has disavowed. “I fucked it up,” he said bluntly in a 2015 interview . But I think he’s too hard on himself: a decade on, Elysium might be worthy of re-appraisal. In 2154, Earth is an overpopulated, polluted dust bowl. The wealthy elite live on the luxurious space station Elysium, where they have access to advanced medical technology and other essentials denied to the surface population. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/W2lbPwj via IFTTT
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She Came from the Woods review jolly romp raising the ghosts of 80s teen horror

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Summer-fun-and-slashing tale of camp counsellors in bloody peril has clear cinematic ancestors but the young cast gives it fresh appeal

This silly but pleasingly jolly horror film offers an update on that perennial staple of the genre: the summer camp beset by a supernatural malignancy. And much like a campfire tale tailor-made to terrify impressionable listeners, this has a streak of self-referentiality that makes it feel ludic as well as lurid. After a 1940s-set prologue that’s explained later, the story settles into the 1980s, a time when this sort of summer-fun-and-slashing package with a large ensemble cast was all the rage (see Sleepaway Camp, The Burning, and of course the Friday the 13th series).

It’s the last day of the season at Camp Briarbrook, and the assorted kids get ready to head home after one last performance-assembly in the mess hall. The camp counsellors, who predictably span the spectrum from theatre nerds and dweebs to glossy teen beauties ripe for terrorising, are also psyched to spend the night partying once the kids are gone. The camp’s owners – paterfamilias Gilbert McCalister (William Sadler), his daughter (Cara Buono, Dr Miller in Mad Men), and her two sons Shawn (Tyler Elliot Burker) and Peter (Spencer List) – look on indulgently, little realising that by the end half of them will be murdered or at least traumatised one way or another. Is the mayhem caused by the undead spirit of camp nurse Agatha (Madeleine Dauer), who bears a grudge for things Gilbert did in the 1940s? Or is there a more quotidian explanation like bears, a hornets’ nest or UFOs?

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