Parky at the Pictures (DVD 4/7/2019)

Following a caption claiming that what we are about to see is `based on truth, lies and what actually happened', narrator Øystein Aarseth (Rory Culkin) informs us that his life story is not going to end well. He is known as 'Euronymous' and is the guitarist in an Oslo-based band called Mayhem. However, when drummer Manheim and vocalist Maniac quit, Euronymous and bassist Jørn 'Necrobutcher' Stubberud (Jonathan Barnwell) are joined by Jan Axel 'Hellhammer' Blomberg (Anthony De La Torre) and Swede Pelle 'Dead' Ohlin (Jack Kilmer), who has a fixation with mortality after losing consciousness following a severe beating. When the band moves into a remote villa, Dead sleeps in a coffin and hangs a cat corpse from the rafters of his bedroom. He even dares Euronymous to shoot him in the head while out hunting a black kitty in the woods. 

For all his eccentricities, however, Dead has the voice that makes Mayhem a cult success and he astonishes Euronymous during one gig by flinging a pig's head into the audience and cutting himself so that his blood spurts into the audience. The gig is filmed by ligger Jon 'Metalion' Kristiansen (Sam Coleman) and watched by Kristian 'Varg' Vikernes (Emory Cohen), who approaches Euronymous in a café to tell him how much he admires the band and its ethos. Their myth is further boosted when Dead slashes his wrists and throat before blowing out his brains and Euronymous goes to a garage to buy a camera to take doctored snaps of the crime scene before calling the cops. He even had necklaces made from fragments of Dead's skull. But Necrobutcher calls him sick and gets fired. 

Borrowing money from his affluent father, Euronymous opens a record shop called Helvete (`Hell') and Stian 'Occultus' Johannsen (Lucian Charles Collier), Gylve 'Fenriz of Darkthrone' Nagell (Andrew Lavelle) and Bård Guldvik 'Faust' Eithun (Valter Skarsgård) become part of the Black Circle that Euronymous hopes will become the centre of his empire, which also includes a record label, Deathlike Silence Productions. Among his other new friends is Ann-Marit (Sky Ferreira), who flirts with him out of a sense of danger, and Varg, whose attempts to fit in incur the mockery of the increasingly power-crazed Euronymous. However, the music he makes with his one-man band, Burzum, impresses Euronymous, who overlooks the fact the newcomer is a teetotal vegetarian, who denounces metallists who pose in satanic t-shirts without having the courage of their nihilist convictions. 

But Varg (aka Count Grishnackh) is only just getting started. In order to promote his debut album, he takes up Euronymous's dare and torches the ancient wooden Fantoft Stave church in Bergen. Moreover, he becomes a fabled stud and Euronymous is so jealous of his success that he gives him a Dead necklace and invites him to join Mayhem, along with Hungarian vocalist Attila Csihar (Arion Csihar) and guitarist Blackthorn (Wilson Gonzalez Ochsenknecht). Euronymous joins Varg in using bibles and a bomb to burn down a church that was built on the site of a sacrificial altar to Odin. But regaining the initiative over the group proves harder than he had anticipated and he realises that Varg is gunning for him. 

Alienated by the church burnings, but made curious by slasher movies to know what it feels like to kill someone, Faust stabs a gay man to death after being followed home from a bar. He celebrates by joining Euronymous and Varg in starting another blaze. But, even though he sleeps with Ann-Marit, the pressure of being the leader of the Black Circle starts to get to Euronymous and he has monochrome nightmares about Dead. Moreover, he wishes he could brings things back under his control, as he becomes increasingly paranoid that the police are spying on him at the shop. 

It's now 1993 and Mayhem record their first album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and Varg and Euronymous fall out over a plan to burn down Oslo cathedral. Covinced he needs to take assertive action, Varg arranges an interview with Bergen journalist Finn Tender (Gustaf Hammarsten), who doesn't have to try too hard to trick him into posing for photographs with pagan and Nazi paraphernalia and incriminating himself as an arsonist. But, while he is arrested, the police have no evidence and Varg is released as Euronymous does a phone interview with Kerrang! magazine's Jason Arnopp (playing himself and not very convincingly) and Norwegian Black Metal becomes a cult phenomenon. 

On his release, Varg accuses Euronymous of being a fraud who has stolen his ideas and his money and now intends cashing in on the publicity his interview generated to promote Mayhem. He quits the band and is disgusted to discover that the Dead necklaces have been made from chicken bones. In a bid to get him off his back, Euronymous draws up a contract to return all the rights to Varg's music and sends it with an accompanying letter hoping that they can remain friends. However, while shooting his mouth off, Euronymous had once boasted that he wanted to kill Varg and make a snuff movie. In an incautious moment, Faust had confided this information to Attila, who tells Varg and he vows to get his revenge in first. 

Renting a copy of Renny Harlin's Die Hard 2 (1990) to provide him with an alibi, Varg has Attila drive him from Bergen to Oslo. He is furious when they have to stop to use his credit card to buy petrol, but has regained control by the time they arrive at Euronymous's apartment. Ann-Marit has just cut his hair short and he is typing a press release about Mayhem's future plans when Varg rings his bell. Surprised to see him, he lets him in and has no idea what his visitor is talking about when he mentions a murder plan. Consequently, he is completely off his guard when Varg plunges a knife in his stomach and leaves him to stagger off to find a spare set of keys to his locked door. Varg makes him self a chocolate milk drink before renewing his stabbing frenzy on the stairs, as he tells Euronymous he has brought this upon himself by being an embarrassment who talks big, but never follows through. 

Finishing him off by penetrating his skull, Varg runs away, leaving a blood smear on the banister. He gets into the car and says nothing, as Attila drives away. As the news breaks, however, the cops make arrests and we see Varg, Faust and Attila being taken into custody. In voiceover, Euronymous urges the director to stop all the sentimental sensationalism, as he is proud of creating true Norwegian Black Metal and demands to know what he (we) have ever done.

Although it's soaked with gore throughout, Jonas Åkerlund's descent into the depths of the Norwegian psyche is also sprinkled with deliciously dark wit. The child murdering message on Euronymous and Dead's answering machine is unsettlingly amusing, while the sight of Varg in corpse make-up nibbling on a crispbread is bound to raise a smile. As is the fact that the parents of these lost boys are so oblivious to what they're getting up to that they supply them with potted plants, spaghetti dinners and the funds to record their albums, as if they were the quartet in The Big Bang Theory. Of course, Euronymous and Varg are very much nerds, whose lank headbanger hair and scruffy black attire only reinforces the social gaucheness that makes it so astonishing that Varg is such a hit (albeit a misogynist one) with the ladies. Indeed, it's their insecurity that makes them take everything the wrong way and prevents them from having conversations that could resolve a multitude of problems. 

As Aites and Ewell's actuality demonstrated, Varg and Euronymous were pretty much like this in real life, as the former was driven by a sense of outsider rage and the latter by his pride and grief at Dead's untimely demise. But both Rory Culkin and Emory Cohen play their roles with a winking gravity that is echoed by the score contrasting so markedly with the pounding metal numbers has been composed by Icelandic avant-rock outfit Sigur Rós. Pär M. Ekberg's cinematography and Emma Fairley's production design are also on the nose, while the hair styling and effects make-up contributions are also worth noting. 

Åkerlund also directs with considerable flair, although he is more successful in showing how difficult it is to stab someone to death than he is in suggesting how easy it is to burn down a wooden church. The script co-written with Dennis Magnusson also has its glitches, as too little socio-religious context is provided to prompt Mayhem's rebellion, while the failure of authorities to latch on to the nihilistic aspects of Black Metal seems a touch specious. Nevertheless, for all its Spinal Tappishness, the film has caused as much of an outcry in Norway as the recent Anders Brevik studies, Erik Poppe's Utøya: July 22 and Paul Greengrass's 22 July (both 2018).

Horror fans will be delighted to see the name of Fangoria among the production credits on Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund's Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, as the magazine has been the bible of gorehounds since 1979. Indeed, it was around when Charles Band launched the original franchise, which has racked up a dozen titles between Puppet Master (1989) to Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017). Yet, despite boasting a screenplay by S. Craig Zahler - the director of Bone Tomahawk (2015), Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) and Dragged Across Concrete (which just happens to go on general release this week) - this non-canonical reboot falls flat on its smug face in striving to push the buttons of those who might not see the funny side of a slasher about Nazi automata going on a killing spree in an America whose president flatly refuses to distance himself sufficiently from the white supremacists who cheered his election to the echo. 

The action opens in Postville, Texas in 1989, as André Toulon (Udo Kier) makes a clumsy attempt to chat up Nancy (Betsy Holt) and her bartender girlfriend, Candace (Victoria Hande), only to be repulsed by the fact they are lesbians. As they drive home discussing motherhood, they are killed when Toulon leaps out in front of their vehicle and barricades himself in a secret room in his mansion after whispering instructions to his minions to stay out in the shadows and out of sight until the time comes for their reunion. 

Flashing forward three decades, fortysomething comic-book artist Edgar Easton (Thomas Lennon) finds himself moving in with parents Tom (James Healy, Jr.) and Suzanne (Laurie Guzda) after his divorce. His stern cop father thoroughly disapproves of Edgar's lifestyle choices and the fact he is serving behind the counter at a comic-book store owned by ageing slacker, Markowitz (Nelson Franklin). Moreover, he despairs at his son's fascination with the ghoulish Toulon puppet that his deceased brother brought back from a sleepaway camp years before. Despite cutting himself on the blade and hook hidden in the doll's hands, Edgar is keen to attend the fan-con marking the 30th anniversary of the Postville slayings and he invites half-his-age neighbour Ashley Summers (Jenny Pellicer) along for the ride. 

Untroubled by the prospect of playing gooseberry, Markowitz also invites himself on the trip and they check into The Brass Buckle hotel, where the desk clerk, Howie (Alex Beli), upsets Markowitz by alluding to the fact he is Jewish. As part of the convention, the trio go on a tour of Toulon's mansion, which has been left unaltered. Conducting proceedings is Carol Doreski (Barbara Crampton), who was one of the cops who found the dead girls and raided the house on the night Toulon was killed. She regales us with details of his French childhood and puppeteering prime in Nazi Germany before he fled Stateside when the war began to turn, with a wife who jumped off the liner rather than spend another day in his company. 

Showing off Toulon's memorabilia, including books from the library of Adolf Eichmann (the architect of the Final Solution), Doreski takes the party past a torture chamber (where Toulon had brutalised some Jewish women) into the workshop where the maniac made his dolls and allowed himself to be gunned down. Edgar gets a chill on seeing Toulon's mausoleum in the grounds, but it more unnerved to discover that the puppet he was planning to sell has been stolen from his room and, when he calls reception to report the theft, Ashley hears a sinister voice utter `Remain in the Shadows' in French. 

Meanwhile, Jewish couple Jason (Stephen Brodie) and Rachel Gottlieb (Mary Katherine O'Donnell) return to their room to find their Kaiser puppet under the bed. No sooner has Jason retrieved it than the doll's eyes burn red and it drops the glove from one of its hands to turn its arm into a flamethrower to frazzle the Gottliebs in a trice. Nearby, Richard (Serafin Falcon) and his pneumatic trophy girlfriend, Goldie (Kennedy Summers), are stabbed to death by Edgar's puppet, while Hezekiah Buckland (John D. Pszyk) gets to urinate on his own severed head after being attacked by a flying samurai robot. 

While Markowitz gets to know bartender Cuddly Bear (Skeeta Jenkins) and waitress Nerissa (Charlyne Yi), Detective Brown (Michael Paré) comes to investigate the theft of Edgar's doll, only to learn that Hedwig Wagner (Anne Beyer) has had all five of hers taken. She survives to tell the tale, unlike Christian (Seth Martin Canterbury), who has barely finished lying to his mother over the phone about beating the booze before he is eviscerated by another blade-wielding doll. Meanwhile, Betsy (Tina Parker) finds her lesbian lover Anne (Ryan Rae) floating in her own blood in the bathtub, while a heavily pregnant woman (Deanne Lauvin) wakes to find a murderous marionette has invaded her womb and emerges through her bump with her baby. 

When the first bodies are found, Brown ignores Edgar's suggestion that they are dealing with hate crimes and orders the guests to meet in the lobby. Annoyed at being disturbed while discussing superheroes with Nerissa, Markowitz is puzzled why there's a doll in his room. But inter-racial couple Strommelson (Matthias Hues) and Princess (Amber Shana Williams) are even more bemused, as she is butchered, while he has his spine ripped open so that one of the puppets can climb inside and turn him into a human marionette. 

Panic sets in when the power fails and a whole bunch of people are massacred while trying to escape. Locking themselves in the bar, the survivors ask Markowitz to act as bait so they can capture one of the puppets and take it apart to see how it works. A cop has his arm ripped off while trying to protect Doreski, but they succeed in disabling one of the puppets. Moreover, when an infant Führer clambers out of Strommelson, Ashley guns it down and Markowitz (who claims to be an avenger for the six million) tosses it in an oven to see how he likes it. He doesn't survive long after this atrocious wisecrack, as Doreski orders everyone to barricade themselves inside rooms and Markowitz is drilled through the back by a puppet that drops in through a hole in the ceiling. 

Nerissa also perishes when she mistimes a jump into a dumpster beneath the window. But Edgar and Ashley make it in one piece and head to the old Toulon place to destroy the puppets at source. After confiding their feelings for one another, they ram the mausoleum and jolt Toulon's rotting skeleton into life. However, the puppets lose their energy and drop off their victims back at the hotel. Rising from his casket, Toulon grabs Ashley by the throat, only for Edgar to belt him with a tyre iron. Staggering back to the vault, Toulon finds an old Nazi pistol and shoots Ashley dead before lumbering off into the woods, as the sirens of out-of-town reinforcements can be heard in the distance. 

As Edgar signs copies of his graphic account of the encounter, a nerdy fanboy asks if he is going to do any more and a cheesy `To Be Continued' caption fills the screen. Given that Charles Band is among the executive producers of this retool, it seems entirely likely that the two franchises could co-exist in parallel, as the original series has long been defying the law of diminishing returns. One thing's for sure, any sequel almost certainly won't have Zahler as its screenwriter (which is perhaps as well, as the `plot' is merely a feeble pretext for getting the victims into the slaughterhouse, while the characterisation is non-existent), although Laguna and Wiklund, who had previously produced Wither (2012) and Animalistic (2013) in their native Sweden, would presumably bite the hand off anyone offering them another crack at creating such gory mayhem.

Providing they can forgive the decision to turn Toulon from a Holocaust survivor into a genocidal Nazi, genre freaks will probably be purring at the presence of Re-Animator (1985) star Barbara Crampton, while commending the contributions of SFX specialist Tate Steinsiek and composer Fabio Frizzi, who is celebrated for his association with Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci. But this is a deeply unpleasant piece of work that invites us to be appalled by the odd slaying and guffaw with postmodernist knowingness at the rest. However, there's nothing big or clever about such self-satisfied manipulation, which dares viewers to surrender to the onslaught and laugh at the unpardonable. 

It's perhaps no accident that the original video nasty boom coincided with the surge to the right swept Ronald Reagan to power and this preeningly provocative and garishly unnecessary remake certainly reeks of Trumpist bravura. Adherents will doubtless claim that the makers have their tongues firmly in their cheeks. But not everyone who watches this reprehensibly faux transgressive trash will be in on the joke.

Although it's rarely discussed, a fair number of detective fiction's most popular sleuths have an obsessive nature and Simon Fellows puts this observation to potentially intriguing use in his sixth feature, Steel Country. However, while it offers some cogent insights into daily life in the Trumpist Rust Belt, Brendan Higgins's screenplay fails entirely to convince as a whodunit, as it places far too much reliance on contrivance and character quirk in order to snap its ill-fitting pieces into place. 

Donny Devlin drives a bin lorry in the rundown former steel town of Harburgh, Pennsylvania. While on his rounds with Donna Reutzel (Bronagh Waugh), Donny notices that six year-old Tyler Zeigler (Nolan Cook) isn't at his window to wave as he does each week and he raises the matter with Wendy (Christa Beth Campbell), the 11 year-old daughter he fathered after a one-night stand with Linda Connolly (Denise Gough), who is embarrassed by their liaison because Donny has a former of Asperger syndrome. She is now dating Randy (Cory Scott Allen) and Donny is unhappy that he keeps buying things he can't afford to curry favour with Wendy. 

She gets cross with her dad when he hacks into her social media page to ask Tyler's older brother, Justin (Christian Finlayson), if his brother is okay, as she already gets teased at school for having two dads. However, when he hears that Tyler drowned in the creek, Donny is crushed and offers his condolences to the boy's mother, Patty (Kate Forbes), when he sees her smoking on the front step. She's puzzled why the cops seem to think he wandered into the woods when she knows he was a timid child who was afraid of his own shadow. But, when Donny mentions this to Sheriff Mooney (Michael Rose), he is warned to keep his nose out of other people's business and not draw attention to himself. 

Wheelchair-bound mother Betty (Sandra Ellis Lafferty) is also concerned about Donny's limited social awareness and fears that he might fall off the wagon after a period of being dry. But Patty's remark plays on his mind and he decides to conduct his own investigation. He asks his cop buddy Max Himmler (Griff Furst) why Mooney isn't taking the case seriously and is told that they were warned off digging too deeply to avoid upsetting the grieving family. So, when he next collects the trash from the house, Donny rootles through the bin bag and not only finds a nodding American footballer toy, but also torn-up phone records that reveal numerous calls to Dr Joel Pmorowski (Andrew Masset). 

Seeking solace in the felt pen collection he sorts in times of stress, Donny takes Donna into his confidence and, when he receives a note inviting him to a midnight rendezvous on the railway bridge, she offers to drive him. When two hooded figures try to force Donny into jumping on to a passing train, Donna shoots at them in the darkness and a terrified Donny wakes Max to ask why people are trying to kill him. Eager not to get involved, but aware a miscarriage of justice has taken place because Mooney didn't order an autopsy, Max tells Donny to seek out mutual school friend Bill Frankel (Eric Mendenhall) because he can provide him with the backstory that might contain some clues. 

Deciding to take a more direct route, Donny makes an appointment with Pomorowski to talk about Wendy and asks if he was having an affair with Patty. He also demands to know why the doctor didn't order an autopsy and he claims that Patty didn't want one in case it threw up evidence that her son had been abused by his father, Jerry (Jason Davis). Acting on this information, Donny threatens to crush Jerry with his car unless he confesses and he swears he would never harm his kid. On getting home, Donny finds the flap cap he wears to work pinned to the front door with a sharp knife. 

Donna suggests dropping the case and starting a romance with her. But Donny backs away when she tries to kiss him and offends her by mentioning the child she had to give up for adoption. Convinced he still has a shot with Linda, Donny meets her out of work and she tries to let him down gently before blurting out what she only slept with him because they were drunk and that she wants nothing to do with him. Having sorted out his pens, Donny goes to the cemetery and exhumes Tyler's body and drives it to the neighbouring city, where Frankel is a forensics expert. But he is mortified when Donny shows him the corpse in the back of his truck and asks him to examine it for evidence of abuse. 

Refusing to be intimidated by Mooney when he punches him in the face, Donny gets home to find Donna waiting for him with a press cutting about an abuse case involving George Atzerodt (Jared Bankens). He is now a mechanic in Pittsburgh and Donny drives to see him to ask about his ordeal and he gets back to Harburgh to learn from Max that Frankel has examined Tyler's body and ordered an investigation into his molestation. Driving to see the Zeiglers, Donny is told by a weeping Patty that she thought the doctor fancied her and allowed him to be alone with her son to please him. But, when she realised the truth, she was told by Mooney that she would go to prison for neglect if she informed on them. Aghast to discover that two such trusted residents could be so sordid, Donny calls on Wendy to tell her how much he loves her before killing Pomorowski with a crossbow and surrendering to Mooney and his posse in the tantalisingly unresolved denouement.

Having given such a deft performance in a challengingly sensitive role, one might have thought that an actor of Andrew Scott's standing would have argued with his director and screenwriter that the ending they had devised was so preposterous that it would sink an already leaky plot. However, he was made to enact a situation that would beggar belief if what had gone before hadn't been similarly riddled with improbabilities. Yet, despite the lurches in the plotline, the Irish actor best known for playing Moriarty in Sherlock (2010-17) and The Priest in Fleabag (2019) continues to make us believe in a spectrum misfit who walks with his feet at ten to two and whose inability to gauge the impact his inquiry is having makes him a target for those intent on keeping their dark secret hidden.

There's something of David Lynch's original series of Twin Peaks (1990-91) about the set-up and production designer Erik Rehl and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind do a decent job in turning Griffin, Georgia into a Pennsylvanian backwater pocked with telltale Trump/Pence election posters. But, while Fellows provides a reasonably acute outsider's impression of a community that seems unable to learn from past mistakes, he is seemingly content to go along with the flaws in the debuting Higgins's inexpert scenario, in which witnesses and suspects alike appear to have faulty filters and too much stress is placed on Donny's condition to justify inconceivable acts like digging up a body and meting out vigilante justice.