A background in rap and grime music videos, made on the cheap in a late noughties Islington, informs Charlotte Regan’s impressive directorial debut. It’s experience that floods a tale of social hyper realism with emotional intelligence and a street smart awareness that stories can find their true awakening through visual expression. Words alone are only one part of the equation. Certainly, there’s extraordinary lyrical beauty behind Scrapper, which is itself defiantly atypical. Having nailed over two hundred shorts across her teens – before graduating to bigger collaborations with Mumford & Sons, Wretch 32 and Stereophonics – Regan is no newcomer. That doesn’t stop her first feature from feeling outrageously assured.
It’s the vulgarity of Seth MacFarlane’s bromantic comedy Ted that comes to mind when watching Strays. That, rather than more obvious overlaps with the more wholesome likes of Homeward Bound and The Incredible Journey. Both by Disney. Certainly, a wilfully – gleefully, even – unnecessary blitzkrieg of F-bombs within the opening ten minutes puts pay to any notion that the film might offer up family friendly canine fun. The wilderness of penis, poo and pee-ff gags that follow merely do to hammer home the point. Strays puts the ‘R’ in grrrr. Disney it is not.
It really shouldn’t be so tough to transform Disneyland’s beloved Haunted Mansion ride into a robust family spookfest. The attraction boasts a cult of kookiness, ripe and ready for the picking. There are characters decades in the fine tuning and ingenious animatronic effects primed for direct transfer to cinematic fun times. Rob Minkoff’s 2003 effort plumbed heavy on undead slapstick, casting Eddie Murphy for rent-a-mouth zane. It’s a far more fondly remembered nostalgia dump than any film with barbershop busts has any right to be but did a least enjoy a certain exuberant energy. Two decades on, Justin Simien’s reboot lands dead on arrival. The only real scare this time is a realisation that this incompetent mess comes from the man behind Dear White People.
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