DVD reviews: The Divide | ID

The Scotsman’s film critic Alistair Harkness casts his eye over recent DVDs...

The Divide

Momentum, £12.99

HORROR films don’t get more grimly tedious than The Divide. Set in New York in the aftermath an unexplained disaster, it’s a torture-porn riff on Lord of the Flies, revolving around a group of apartment building residents who fight their way into their paranoid caretaker’s survival shelter and promptly shed all traces of civility once it becomes clear there’s not going to be any escape. With the caretaker played by a scenery-chewing Michael Biehn, the rest of the cast are pretty much divided into stock characters: victims in waiting (Rosanna Arquette, Courtney B Vance), psychos in waiting (Milo Ventimiglia, Michael Eckland) and Ripley-esque heroines in waiting (Laura German). With little in the way of actual character development, there’s really no justification for the two-hour running time, something that feels even more punishing owing to the single location. Style-over-substance French director Xavier Gens (Hitman) delivers the odd arresting image, but mostly he just revels in debasing his actors by getting them to act out degrading scenarios with no compelling narrative purpose.

ID

Anchor Bay, £9.99

Like Alan Clarke’s The Firm, the similarly made-for-TV film ID is one of the few movies about football violence that doesn’t fetishise hooliganism. First released in 1995, the film, directed by the actor Phil Davis, revolves around an undercover police operation to infiltrate the crew of an East London football club in the mid-1980s and follows Reece Dinsdale’s ambitious copper as he gets in too deep and forgets who he is. Though that’s a fairly cliché-ridden idea, the film still packs a wallop thanks to a surprisingly gritty turn from Dinsdale and solid support from a host of now very familiar TV faces (Philip Glenister, Sean Pertwee, Claire Skinner, Lee Ross). Davis’s decision to never show a frame of football is also an elegant way of underscoring how divorced from the game the violence really is, though what remains most impressive, especially after the glut of dreadful football violence-themed films that have invaded cinemas over the past decade, is how well the film manages to convey the rush of violence without condoning it. Though the characters lose their way, the film never does, as evidenced by the powerfully ambiguous ending, something that hopefully won’t be ruined by the planned sequel.

• To order these DVDs, call The Scotsman on 01634 832789

Related topics: