Australia's Best Movie Magazine

Film reviews

Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

search the site

Enter search term:

newsletter

Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter

Enter search term:

Needle (Film)

by Joshua Blackman | July 25, 2011 11:57 | Edited August 01, 2011 17:17

It may not be innovative or stylistically impressive, but this modest horror flick still delivers decent scares.

A low budget Aussie horror that's more Dario Argento than eighties splatter flick, Needle is a passable genre effort with decent scares. Dario Argento, of course, is the director of the classic Italian dreamscapes, Suspiria and Inferno, and one of the most famous proponents of the giallos of the seventies and eighties - murder mystery thrillers that invariably ended up in a cacophony of blood and revelations. There's plenty of that here, though there's none of the stylishness or inventiveness that made those histrionic horrors so intoxicating.

 

Needle has all the generic elements of your typical slasher: a half-dozen nubile twenty-something college students, the severe teacher who may know too much, and the no-nonsense cop who grows dourer by the minute at the increasingly gruesome murders. The pretty young things are being lopped off one-by-one by a killer who uses a strange device - one that looks like a cross between a music box and a contraption from Saw - to create wax voodoo dolls of the imminent victims. Despite the limitless possibilities of inflicting torture on a wax figurine (how about some melting faces, Raiders Of The Lost Ark-style?), the resulting kills are based around the basic needle-on-doll concept, which grows repetitive.

 

These scenes, however, are effectively edited in a series of close-ups of the machine, the victims, and the ominous gloved hands of the killer. Michael Dorman (Daybreakers) is the biggest name amongst the young leads, though Ben Mendelsohn and John Jarratt also pop up in enriching cameos. There are fleeting moments of gore, though bar one impressive rock-climbing incident, they're relatively tame by today's standards. The denouncement, too, is over a little too quickly. Needle is never more than an intermittently dull, very modest B-grade horror film. For better and worse, that's just about what it aspires to be.