Wyndham’s famous tale was made into a fea- ture film in 1962, appeared as a radio series for the BBC seven times and was developed into a critically acclaimed TV miniseries in 1981. For this new version, writer Patrick Harbinson (TV’s 24 and Millennium) has tweaked the storyline a bit, setting it in contemporary London where the triffids are bio-engineered plants that have saved humanity from the threat of global warm- ing by becoming a source of clean-burning oil. After an unusual display of solar flares renders most of the population sightless, the triffids es- cape their refinery prisons and attack the help- less human smorgasbord stumbling all around them. The series follows a group of sighted sur- vivors who have banded together to fight the sen- tient shrubs, only to be preyed upon by other survivors eager to use the chaos to propel their own greedy motives. The cast is a fairly solid
group of B-listers and some master thespians (including Brian Cox and Vanessa Redgrave) who appear all too briefly but are still marvelous to watch. Redgrave, especially, clocks in a won- derful performance as a psychotic nun. The en- tire outing is a dazzling blend of live-action and CGI, offering some stunning vistas of an aban- doned London reminiscent of those seen in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. The triffids also re- ceive a modern makeover; the villainous vege- tation is presented here as scary, tentacled monsters rather than hulking celery stalks. Shot on HD Digital, the entire 180-minute
miniseries is now available on DVD and region- free Blu-ray, replete with deleted scenes, cast interviews and a solid making-of featurette. It’ll make you think twice about being a tree-hug- ger!
LAST CHANCE LANCE SOFT-SERVE SADISM
FREEWAY KILLER Starring Scott Anthony Leet, Dusty Sorg and Michael Rooker
Directed by John Murlowski Written by David Birke Image
Here are three things you should know about
William Bonin. One, he was a serial killer who, with the help of several young accomplices, raped and killed no less than 21 young men and teenage boys in California, between 1979 and 1980, and remains suspected of fifteen more murders. Two, in 1996, he became the first per- son executed by lethal injection in California. Three, as of this writing, none of the usual Z- movie suspects – including Ulli Lommel and the dreaded Chris Fisher – have gotten around to making a shitty film about him. That last factoid
Green Hell: Plant life attacks in The Day of the Triffids.
may just save the fair-to-middlin’ effort that is Freeway Killer from being unjustly lumped in with so many inferior serial killer films from the last five years or so. While not devoid of problems – both the script
and an obviously low budget keep the film from feeling as authentically “period” as it aspires to – this workmanlike effort succeeds largely on Scott Anthony Leet’s performance as Bonin. It’s a long- standing truism that most serial killer roles require an actor to bring the crazy but resolutely shun the kray-zee, and Leet pulls it off admirably with his odd brand of pasty, sweaty, grinning/gri- macing panache. It’s all the more remark- able that Bonin is pre- sented in such a thoroughly unsympa- thetic fashion, given that the most sadistic aspects of his crimes are barely alluded to. We witness multiple murders but no rapes, and there’s scarcely any hint of the horrific tor- ture to which most of Bonin’s real-life victims were subjected. The refusal to sensationalize a true serial mur-
der case may be seen as admirable up to a cer- tain point, but here it ultimately accents the film’s curious squeamishness over addressing Bonin’s homosexuality, a perfectly relevant plot point that is barely hinted at. The supporting players – including the wonderful Michael Rooker (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), who ap- pears to have been thrown into the mix purely for marquee value – are impressive, but Leet’s remarkable portrayal is the main attraction here. Well, that and the minor miracle that Lommel and Fisher didn’t get their mouldy mitts on this story first.
JOHN W. BOWEN SHOW ‘EM YOU’RE A TIGER
TONY Starring Peter Ferdinando, Ricky Glover and Neil Maskell
Written and directed by Gerard Johnson Revolver
Tony (Peter Ferdinando) is a bit of an oddball:
nervous, socially awkward, unhealthy, sexually repressed – and what do you know, he’s also a serial killer. This short, low-budget British feature, which focuses on an average week in Tony’s ut- terly detached and mundane life, is vaguely rem- iniscent of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, although Tony doesn’t manage to achieve the depth of its predecessor. The violence – and gore – is very understated,
though this actually works well, since it’s con- trasted with the explicit psychological violence that Tony encounters every day as the local weirdo in his poor London housing estate, where he’s berated, rejected, mocked and humiliated by almost everyone he meets. The overriding sense is of a man completely disconnected from other people. Tony just doesn’t fit in with anyone – the local junkies, the people in the pub, the patrons of his favourite gay bar, a random prostitute – and yet his killings are moti- vated by a psychotic pragmatism, rather than anger. The moment of purest insight into his character comes when a licensing officer at- tempts to take away his TV, and Tony strangles him with an electrical cord (a reference to Henry?). For him, it seems, killing is just a prac- tical way of dealing with people who scare him, usually because they threaten, in one way or an- other, the comparatively stable existence he’s built for himself, alone.
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