Have you seen Marvin Krenäs Blood Glacier? The similarity between that one and Billy O’Brien’s Scintilla is that you expect something and get something else. Not in a bad way, by no means, but for an unprepared viewer or just wants 90 minutes of simple entertainment this might be too much. Blood Glacier for example is on the surface a rip-off of The Thing, when in reality it actually is a relationship-drama about a man and his former girlfriend and their mutual love for a dog. Scintilla might seem like the normal “let’s go down in a bunker and get attacked by monster”-storyline, but its quite far from it. It’s more a… no, I won’t say anything. But it’s an oddity, in a good way.
The great John Lynch is the tough mercenary Powell who together with his team and the woman who hired them in the first place infiltrates a rebel base somewhere up in the former Soviet Union, to find “something” and bring it back to civilisation. At first everything goes well, one team goes undercover as computer experts, taking over the control room, and the rest goes down in the underground facility hidden under the base. But they’re not alone… Soon they find themselves fighting a very, very special enemy with an eye for killing!
It’s tricky to describe Scintilla, which is a mix of… horror, thriller, some drama, and a little bit of something else. The style is raw and dirty, with gritty and not especially pleasant locations - all shot in the north of England, West Yorkshire. The first half is quite normal, a typical team-on-a-mission movie, one those we’ve seen hundreds of times since the dawn of time. Maybe an exaggeration, but it’s a pretty common setup for a genre movie. The feeling of dread, shit and depression is high and just when it becomes a little bit annoying the movie takes another turn, slightly cheesy, but cool and that leads us into the rest of the story.
There’s a nice touch of retro design, a character who might been have stuck there since the early eighties or seventies, and that whole storyline changes the style completely. It’s still a rough and angry movie, but somehow gives it a magical injection of imagination - still very British, of course, but at least it triggers my mind. Not every question is answered, which is good, and and instead we’re almost left alone there with the other characters, trying to understand what the hell is going on and what we’re fighting against.
There’s gore also. No in any copious amounts, but there’s a couple of exploding heads and bodies, impalings, squibs and random bloodshed - all to keep the horror fans awake between the more serious strangeness. I admire Scintilla for not going totally commercial, to not be yet another SyFy movie (and I love SyFy movies!) - it’s a risk, of course, but hopefully it will find an audience who wants something else than the usual corridor/underground/catacombs-horror.
I wish I could tell you more about the plot and the cool effects, but I refuse to! This is something for you to discover yourself.
"Have you seen Marvin Krenäs Blood Glacier?"
No, not yet.
"The great John Lynch is the tough mercenary Powell"
Lynch is very underrated....not afarid to get his hands dirty either, just look at Isolation (2005) a film thats really entertaining.
I found that film from Joachim.
"Maybe an exaggeration, but it’s a pretty common setup for a genre movie."
Yeah maybe.......but sometimes it works.
And you can put various spins on it.
"but hopefully it will find an audience who wants something else than the usual corridor/underground/catacombs-horror."
So there is some kind of spin here?
Cooool.......
"I wish I could tell you more about the plot and the cool effects, but I refuse to! This is something for you to discover yourself."
I see...don´t ruin the surprise for future viewers.
Good review and thanks Fred, I haven´t seen it yet.
Posted by: Megatron | October 08, 2014 at 23:23