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The potential is here but the po-faced screenplay contains painful dialogue, the performances are wooden, with the exception of the ever-reliable Peña, and not a single chill runs up your spine. Kindly priest Father Lozano (Michael Peña) eventually calls on Cardinal Bruun (Peter Andersson) to intervene and the stage is set for a showdown between faith and evil. The cut finger requires a trip to the hospital for stitches and everything changes.Īngela starts to attract evil ravens, gain strange powers and she subsequently spends a significant 40 days in a coma. Angela (Olivia Taylor Dudley) is an ordinary American woman, beloved by boyfriend Pete (John Patrick Amedori) and protective dad Roger (Dougray Scott). That’s the lesson to be learned from The Vatican Tapes, an underwhelming supernatural thriller that feels like yet another variation on The Exorcist. Take care when cutting your next birthday cake. If nothing else Allen’s weird and wonderful curio allows us to see Under Milk Wood through fresh eyes and that’s not such a bad thing. It is a tale infused with a melancholy yearning for lost loves, missed opportunities and happy dreams that are never likely to become reality. This is a community like many others held together by gossip, religion, sex, death, respectable public façades and unruly private desires, often depicted in a graphic manner that would never have passed the censor 60 years ago.
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The pleasing performance from Church suggests she could well have a future as an actress. There is nosy postman Willy Nilly (Matthew Owen), the Reverend Eli Jenkins (William Thomas) with his abiding love of the community, Mary Ann Sailors (Sharon Morgan), who declares to one and all: “I’m 85 years, three months and a day old,” and lovely Polly Garter (Charlotte Church) who spends her life tending to washing and babies. As the day dawns and the town “smells of seaweed and breakfast”, we meet a range of outrageous, libidinous characters including henpecked schoolmaster Mr Pugh (Boyd Clack) who dreams of poisoning his insufferable wife but would never act on that impulse. There is sincerity and feeling in his rasping voice even if it doesn’t quite match the nimble timing of Burton. This is not a film for purists: be prepared to surrender to its gaudy, earthy exuberance. It is bawdy, eccentric and pitched somewhere between a Carry On romp and the surreal sensibility of Monty Python. However, Allen approaches his task with energy and affection, creating a film that has the feverish quality of a half-remembered dream. Kevin Allen’s brightly coloured, hyperactive new version never quite dispels the notion that this play works best on radio. Making a film version has always seemed like a hiding to nothing as any images the filmmaker creates are unlikely to compete with your own vivid imagination.Įven when Burton joined the illustrious company of Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole in a 1972 screen version of Under Milk Wood it wasn’t a rousing success.
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It is a radio drama in which the poetic language flows with the speed of a swollen river and paints a picture of the inhabitants’ hidden desires.
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What helps most is having an actress who knows how to say those four little words: You all will die.Richard Burton’s rumbling, sonorous tones still provoke goosebumps as he transports listeners to the fictional Welsh village of Llaregubb (say it backwards) when the dark of night creeps towards the light of dawn. The tapes of the title seem to fulfill some universal contractual obligation to feature found footage in horror movies, but the ending at least is gratifyingly grandiose. Her flick of an eyebrow or odd change in posture is more gripping than the film’s usual scare tactics. She conveys unnerving shifts in self-awareness and sinister intent with her eyes. The director Mark Neveldine deploys queasy lighting and a trembling score, but his best choice is to let Ms. When she’s sent home, a Vatican cardinal (Peter Andersson) arrives to perform an exorcism she could be the Antichrist, and the church keeps an eye out for that sort of thing. Moving to a psychiatric hospital only brings on more violence (and mind-reading skills). People are hurt around her her military-man dad (Dougray Scott) and boyfriend (John Patrick Amedori) fret ravens keep turning up.
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Dudley works up an expressive arsenal of gestural detail and shades of mood that are worth watching amid the film’s rigmarole of satanic possession.Īngela goes from sunny to malevolent through freak events that leave her in a coma, which proves temporary. Evil often takes the same tired forms in horror movies, but in “ The Vatican Tapes” it shines - and glowers and shrieks - when it takes the form of Angela (Olivia Taylor Dudley), a suitable candidate for exorcism.