As long as there are still ways to spruce up an old, cinematic trope, it seems that some movies will truly never, ever die. For example, there’s a really good chance that Ridley Scott’s Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing will probably still live on in some form long after the inevitable heat-death of the universe wipes the galaxy clean like an intergalactic wet wipe; the the latest movie to come along and ride those chilling coattails comes from a rather unexpected source.
Rapper/DJ Flying Lotus has already given sci/fi horror fans a taste of his directorial talents with the Ozzy’s Dungeon segment of long running anthology franchise V/H/S, but with Ash, he manages to get an entire movie in which to give us the full force of just how trippy he can be. Roping in familiar aspects from the aforementioned Alien and The Thing and then scattering further elements from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Paul W. Anderson’s Event Horizon, the fledgling director is obvious hoping to put a new, brain melting spin on familiar sci/fi horror, but does he succeed in making us kiss his Ash?
On a distant planet named with a bunch of random numbers and letters, but nicknamed “Ash”, astronaut Riya wakes on the floor of her quarters with absolutely no clue as to why or how she’s there. Her motor functions and her ability to do all the science-y, astronaut stuff still remains, but almost everything from that last few days has completely gone bye-bye which proves to be extra inconvenient when she discovers that the remainder of her crew are all either dead or missing. Judging by the bloodied corpses of the crew that she does find, Riya correctly surmises that murder is afoot and struggles to try and remember what exactly went down. However, when her memories do start to return, they do so so fast and violently, she is forced to slow their roll with anesthetic medical patches which gives her the time she needs to figure things out herself.
However, when a one-man rescue attempt shows up in the form of Brion, he soon tells her that due to the lack of oxygen in the base, they’ll both soon asphyxiate due to the poisonous, natural atmosphere is they don’t take their next available chance to return to an orbiting space station once it aligns, they probably won’t be returning at all.
However, as dedicated to discovering the truth as she is surviving, Riya starts pushing the deadline even harder in order to recollect what happened only to become suspicious of the possibility that maybe she might have been responsible for the murders in a whole number of different ways. But if that’s true, how can she possibly trust anything that she’s seeing and thinking right now?
Has the demise of the crew come from without in the form of some funky alien threat, or has the danger come from within and gripped on of the crew in a berserker madness. Watch this space…
I have to admit, I really wanted to be scooped up by Flying Lotus’ Ash and thrown screaming into the psychotropic depths of cosmic horror in a way that invoked an unholy union of Alien (yes, that again) and the skull searing likes of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy. To be fair, at times Ash comes promisingly close to the mark and I’ll admit I probably would have enjoyed it more if I’d witnesses it’s visuals on the big screen where they really could have taken hold, but it seems that once again I’ve been struck with the curse of knowledge as the main thing that stands out about the film is that it really is a shameless amalgamation of every single sci-fi flick I’ve already mentioned thus far I’m this review. Actually, you know what, fuck it, throw in Daniel Espinosa’s Life too for good measure.
That’s right, you can be a visually as bold as you want, but when you start reminding people of a film that itself reminded people of another film, it’s kind of tough to concentrate and not play “spot the influence” literally every five minutes when yet another familiar trope raises its tentacle. However, I do remember saying the same things about fellow cosmic horror, The Void a fair few years back and I ended loving that after a much deserved rewatch, so who knows, maybe if I give it some space to marinate, I’ll regard it more warmly. However, I must confess, despite being let down by a fairly derivative script, Flying Lotus does manage to elevate the material with with visual flair which coats your usual space labs and futuristic living quarters in the type of rich, colour-coded lighting of Dario Argento’s Suspiria as blues, reds and the occasional green fight to the death to highlight the immaculate jawline of a bloodied and batshit Eiza González and the furrowed brow of Aaron Paul, aka. Hollywood’s most intense forehead.
The actors, including The Raid’s Iko Uwais, Next Goal Wins’ Beulah Koale and Flying Lotus himself, fill their roles (and their blood soaked jumpsuits) decently, but as the majority of their roles are mostly seen in hazy flashbacks, they end up being rather thinly sketched pawns who are propping up the main double header of González and Paul. However, as they are basically required to be in a constant state of confusion and disorientation, it’s actually the sparkly visuals and weird quirks which carry the tone almost completely (I loved the perversely cheerful Japanese medical kit and oddly insectoid spacesuits) and it has to be said, for a woman stranded on an alien planet, surrounded by murdered colleagues and who has know idea what’s actually real, González looks unrepentantly stunning throughout when she should surely be looking like she’s been dragged through a space-hedge backwards and forced to remain awake for at least a week.
As for the central conundrum? Well, I’m a self confessed sucker for cosmic horror through and through, so all the body horror, mind fucking and melodramatic mood lighting do work on me a fair amount (installing red light bulbs in a space station is surely a recipe for mental disaster no matter what lurks on the planet outside), and when the climax kicks off and the focus shifts on psychological scares to far squishier ones, it packs in all the body horror and whirling tendrils you’d expect. However, it’s still not enough to dispel the cosmic notion that you’ve seen all this stuff before and even though Flying Lotus’ grasp on the look, tone and sound of the movie (he’s unsurprisingly all over the score, too) is incredibly promising, you just can’t shake the over-familiarity of this spaced odyssey.
On the other hand, being the glass-half-full kind of soul that I am, I did figure out the best way to view Ash that actually makes its derivative nature more of a pro than a con and that’s not to see it as the child of all the many references I’ve already dropped, but instead as a jazzed-up up, LSD infused upgrade of all those janky Alien ripoffs that occured during the 80s such as Galaxy Of Terror, Forbidden World and Creepozoids. Taken on a grungy, exploitation level, Ash suddenly takes on a new identity and plays far better, giving Lotus’ feature calling card a neo drive-in feel that plays to its weakness and strengths even far better than playing it slick.
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