Review – The Turning (DVD)

jasonimpey.co.uk

Title: The Turning
Genre: Action Thriller, Horror, Urban Legend
Language: English
Director: Jason Impey

A monstrous murder and murderous monsters. That pretty well sums up The Turning, a new zombie thriller by British Indy filmmaker Jason Impey.

It took me a few weeks to get my head into watching this film. I’m not a huge fan of zombie flicks. I don’t even know if I’ve seen the Night of the Living Dead from start to finish.

But the deeper I got into this one, the more I enjoyed it. The acting is surprisingly strong. And the cinematography is quite creative.

Also noteworthy is the extensive use of black-and-white flashbacks. The reasons behind some stark and ugly situations are gradually explained as the story jumps, several times, between past and present. And the switch from color (for the present) to B/W (for flashbacks) makes the film a cinch to follow. This is good for folks (like me) who tend to pick up on a film’s atmosphere and environment, sometimes at the expense of remembering every storyline detail.

There are some graphic images of violence in this film (although the sex scenes are surprisingly tame). And its repeated use of the “F”-word didn’t do much for me. This kind of fare certainly is not for everyone. But, gruesome zombies aside, The Turning doesn’t conjure up anything that doesn’t already exist. So we could say that it merely points to some aspects of society that, for better or worse, are out there.

As for the stiff and twisted zombies, some are a bit more convincing than others but, on the whole, these scenes come off pretty well.

How can you tell a real zombie from a fake one? you might ask. Well, if zombies belong in the realms of urban legend, folklore and myth, some depictions just hit the nail on the head better than others.

Scholars of folklore and myth have written countless pages about the close connection between love and death. Joseph Campbell devotes an entire chapter of his The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology to what he calls “The Ritual Love-Death.”

Campbell talks about the same kind of mythic themes that crop up in The Turning–themes like love, infidelity, jealousy, violence, death and resurrection. The only difference is that this raw shocker flick brings to life what many ‘respectable’ researchers also delight in, but only under several layers of institutional varnish and, sometimes, shoddy obscurantism.

Now, being an open-minded person has its pros and cons. One pro is that you keep growing by not shutting out those things that could be upsetting. A con is that, well, sometimes you just get totally grossed out.

Toward the end of the movie, I instinctively threw up some psychological shields to guard against some icky props and abject imagery that I’ll never like. But, to be fair, the film treats these vile images responsibly. It’s just the images, themselves, that make me squirm.

An unexpected ending involves eugenics and reminds me of that warped, sadistic scientist played by William B. Davis in The Outer Limits episode “Worlds Within.” Only this time, the wacko is a woman.

Some may find this film unpleasantly dark and creepy. Others might take it as a bizarre freak show or, depending on your outlook, a tongue-in-cheek lark. Whatever you make of it, The Turning calls to mind Shane Carruth‘s sci-fi sleeper, Primer. Both films are proof positive that you don’t need a bloated production budget to push boundaries and, in so doing, make a statement.

–MC

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