FILTH AND IDIOCY

THE DARKEST HOUR

2012-01-26T18:43:00.000+01:00

СОДЕРЖИТ ПОДРОБНОСТИ СЮЖЕТА (AND NO, I'M NOT GOING TO STOP POSTING SPOILER WARNINGS IN THE APPROPRIATE LANGUAGES, SO THERE)

I know it's almost gone from the cinema circuits after only a few weeks, but [1] time was when a week was all you ever got and [2] it's had some terrible reviews which I genuinely don't feel were deserved. Certainly this alien Armageddon thriller is no masterpiece and it is hugely reminiscent of Skyline (which was okay but scarcely an instant classic), but it's more fun and far less thuddingly noisy than Battle Los Angeles, and rattles along efficiently enough with some impressive scenes of urban devastation in the company of some teens not quite annoying enough to have you cheering for the alien invaders.

Having been shafted in a business deal involving social networking apps, a couple of hotshot Americans are drowning their sorrows with some cute American tourists in a top Moscow nightclub when the sky lights up with countless falling shimmers of light. But these lights are actually vicious and voracious alien creatures made of pure energy, that disintegrate their prey on contact. Within a few days, all but a handful of people remain alive, including our two couples and the hateful bastard who stole their business deal: how long can they stay on the streets? How can they possibly get back home? What do these creatures want and do they have any weaknesses that can be exploited to stop them?

The Darkest Hour benefits from being set in Moscow - it makes a change to see somewhere other than America being devastated all the time (although an early sequence shows the familiar logos of Starbucks and McDonalds), it puts our heroes' friends and families out of the way, and it also places them in further difficulties as they're in a strange city where they, and we, don't know the language or even the alphabet. The effects are fine, of course, but by this time and at this level they really shouldn't be anything less than fine. If there are some questionable plot moments - one character falls into the river but needs to be rescued from the bus depot some distance inland; and surely it would be quicker if they used bicycles to get around the city - they're really pretty minor; it's a film about luminous alien energy monsters wiping out Moscow after all.

Happily, 20th Century Fox have released the film in a 2D version along with the 3D (unlike Entertainment's release of Underworld: Awakening which was 3D only, despite the extra dimension being entirely pointless and merely rendered much of the film needlessly dark). I only watched it in 2D - I'm increasingly reluctant to cough up the 3D premium unless there's a monumentally good reason for it, such as the film being directed by Martin Scorsese or Dario Argento - and in all honesty the film loses nothing by being viewed in the mere two dimensions that most other films manage with perfectly well (and of course, the two dimensions that the DVD and BluRay release will be stuck with). Timur Bekmambetov was one of the producers.

***

BLACK RAIN

2012-01-25T16:53:00.000+01:00

ストーリーの詳細が含まれます

I've never been the biggest Ridley Scott fan. He's made two genuine masterpieces, the marvellous Alien and the magnificent Blade Runner, but more recently he's drifted away into relatively uninteresting fare (and in the case of Robin Hood, thoroughly tiresome). Body Of Lies and American Gangster were fine: they're well made films, but they didn't have the beauty and magic of those two early showstoppers, particularly Blade Runner which is one of the richest, most gorgeous and endlessly rewatchable movies ever made. Purely on a visual level it's utterly jaw-dropping (and literally so: that was my reaction when I first saw it at my local Granada) and that look - the steam and neon and whirring fans - is such a part of it that I really wish Scott made more movies with that aesthetic.

And happily Black Rain is a film with that aesthetic as well: great chunks of it could have been shot on the same sets, and the end result is that 1987 Tokyo looks so much like the Los Angeles of 2017 that the film's almost great to start with. It's a pity that the substance of the film doesn't reward quite as much as the photography and production design do. Tough, cynical New York cop Conklin (Michael Douglas) captures Japanese gangster Sato and, along with his partner (Andy Garcia), is assigned to escort him back to Osaka, where Sato is wanted in connection with an ongoing mob war with older oyabun Saigu. But Sato's men take him before they're even off the plane and the two Americans are reduced to mere observers as the local police take charge....

It's a culture-clash film, between the rigorous code of honour in both the Japanese police and the yakuza, and the go-for-it individual attitude of the brash, vulgar Americans. Sato's behaviour is as much of an affront to the yakuza as Conkin's is to the Japanese police force. And gradually, just as Conklin learns something of honour, shame and respect (in particular concerning his own corruption), their "handler" (Ken Takakura) learns to use his own initiative to take more direct action rather than strictly observing the rulebook. But in truth I'd like it a lot more if Conklin wasn't such a naturally unlikable character - he's hard to warm to, and his charmless and foul-mouthed borderline racism (borne out of ignorance rather than malice) makes him a weak protagonist.

Nonetheless, Black Rain is certainly worth seeing for the beautiful visuals of Osaka at night and the fabulously attractive portrait of modern Japan. When I saw it on the big screen back in the 80s I was probably overwhelmed by these aspects of the movie, but watching it on a non-anamorphic DVD (with, it has to be said, pretty mediocre picture quality) the visuals, and the Hans Zimmer soundtrack, are inevitably diminished. It's still a decent enough three-star film, and it's still worth seeing, but probably not as good as you remember it.

***

HEART OF GLASS

2012-01-24T22:58:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Eh? What? WHAT? I'm not exactly a philistine and I'm all in favour of movies that do something interesting or offbeat or a little bit different, but when it comes to unbounded Art the lack of limitation enjoyed by absolute creativity can bring its own problems - specifically boring into submission any viewer who isn't on the same aesthetic wavelength. In this instance what is apparently supposed to be some kind of historical allegory emerges as cripplingly dull, failing completely to engage the viewer and boasting an admittedly unusual gimmick that achieves nothing except making the movie even sillier and less accessible. And it's got hurdy-gurdy music in it - the most grating and annoying musical instrument ever devised.

Heart Of Glass isn't a plot-based film: set in 18th century Bavaria and concerns a small village renowned for its production of spectacular red glassware - but unfortunately the factory foreman has died without revealing the secret of the Ruby Glass and without it the glassworks, and thus the town, faces ruin. No-one can find the details of the process; meanwhile everyone steadily goes nuts, holding a party in the village pub for a dead man, and a philosophising cowhand (who may or may not have paranormal abilities) is brought in to solve the secret of the glass.

The big gimmick about Werner Herzog's 1976 film is that almost all the cast were performing under hypnosis - why? If it was to get them to behave as though they'd just been hit round the head with a really large rock then it worked, but frankly nothing is gained from having them speak and movie so awkwardly that it looks like they had no idea what they were doing (which they presumably didn't). Rather than a European art film, it feels like some kind of transmission from outer space - if they made movies on Mars this is probably what they'd look like. It's got a dreamlike feel, and as with most dreams nothing makes sense, people drift in and out without explanation and talk what in the real world would be arrant nonsense.

Despite some nice imagery, it's achingly dull and too impenetrable to rack up much interest even at a slim 90 minutes. I'll admit I'm a relative newcomer to Herzog's work and it may well be, like Jean-Luc Godard and Weekend, that this movie really isn't the best place to start (although I rather liked his Bad Lieutenant film, and I remember rather admiring Nosferatu as well). I'm told Aguirre: Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo are better ways into his films; let's hope so. This one genuinely hurt to watch.

*

THE STUD

2012-01-24T00:00:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND TITS

There is a certain pleasure in watching older British movies that have nothing to do with the acting, writing, photography and so on. Many are a curious archive capsule of times lost and there's a strange nostalgic appeal in the cars, the clothes, the music and the attitudes; how people dressed, how they spoke, how they behaved. Certainly that's the main attraction of this sleazy and tacky sex movie in which everyone's thoroughly horrible, selfish, with more money than soul and are obsessed primarily with themselves and their own pleasures in the glitzy and hollow world of exclusive London discotheques in the late 1970s.

The Stud himself is Oliver Tobias, manager of a supposedly glamorous London club but with plans for a club of his own. But he doesn't have the money, and he's really just the plaything of wealthy but absurdly named Fontaine Khaled (Joan Collins), bored wife of an elderly businessman. For reasons that are presumably in the Jackie Collins novel that I obviously haven't read (and equally obviously am not going to), this charmless middle-aged Lothario gets the hots for Fontaine's sweet and innocent teenage stepdaughter, seducing her on the first evening.... but then starts falling in love with her! What with all the other women he's servicing, it's not surprising that he's literally shagged out and too tired to perform to his usual high standards at Fontaine's Christmas orgy in a Parisian swimming pool. But back in London, her unsuspecting husband has found the incriminating videotape of her and The Stud going at it like billy-o in a lift....

Don't misunderstand: The Stud is rubbish. I first saw it back in the 1980s on a pre-cert VHS; I didn't much like it then and I certainly don't like it now. Pretty much every single person in it you would cheerfully push down a mineshaft, the dialogue is awful, and the sex scenes are astonishingly artless and unarousing (yes, you get to see Joan Collins OBE naked a few times). The action stops more than once for long sequences of disco dancing at the club, and the sound mix on several other disco sequences means much of the dialogue is lost in the music. But it's still somewhat interesting for its nostalgia content and its depiction of gaudy, empty and rather pathetic lifestyles. There's a sequel, The Bitch, which I also saw on VHS more than 20 years ago and didn't much like, and which I'll probably still not like when they send that to me as well.

**

Two in one:

HAYWIRE

2012-01-22T17:49:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS. OUCH.

It's an odd thing. When martial artists start out in movies they usually do so at the bottom end of the industry - cheap thick-ear action movies. See the early works of Jean-Claude Van Damme or Chuck "Chuckles" Norris. Yet somehow Gina Camaro has come almost literally out of nowhere to not just land a starring role alongside Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Michael Douglas, Channing Tatum and Ewan McGregor, but in a film directed by one of the top Hollywood A-list name directors of our time, Steven Soderbergh. How on Earth did she luck out with that? How on Earth did they get Soderbergh - director of a two-part biopic of Che Guevara and the three Ocean's movies - to direct what is basically a direct-to-video action B-thriller? Alternatively, what was it about Haywire that so interested him? It's rather like discovering that Lemon Popsicle was made by Stanley Kubrick.

Real-life Mixed Martial Arts champion Carano stars as a freelance agent doing dirty work for the US Government: following a rescue operation in Barcelona, she's given a new assignment in Dublin, where she's double-crossed, unwisely, by her paymasters, and is forced to go on the run, clear her name and deal with the shady cabal of villains. That really is pretty much all there is to it: it's a standard B-movie action thriller that 20 years ago would have been a Cynthia Rothrock movie, but is now backed by a proper director and a surprisingly heavyweight cast - a cast that also includes Antonio Banderas, who for some reason is wearing a Saddam Hussein beard and for much of the time is unrecognisable.

Yet Haywire (which is a pretty meaningless title) is really far better than the usual thud-crunch-wallop littering the DVD rental shelves. It's got a wonderful 70s look to it, with long takes rather than rapid-fire hyperediting, impressively choreographed and inventive fight scenes which have been shot so you can actually see what's happening and which genuinely look painful, and an enjoyable funk score from David Holmes, one of Soderbergh's regular composers. In truth it isn't a great film, and Carano probably isn't going on the Academy's radar any time soon (although she does the job perfectly well), but it's fun to watch and an interesting mix of director and genre. Once more I call upon Woody Allen to make the next Resident Evil movie.

***

W.E.

2012-01-21T20:11:00.001+01:00

WTF, MORE LIKE. CONTAINS SPOILERS.

This is a baffling movie on a number of levels, not the least of which is "Why?". Madonna's second film as a director (the first, Filth And Wisdom, was back in 2008 but still remains unreleased in the UK) is narratively and musically all over the place. I don't know the strictest details of its historical accuracies - whether they met at this castle or that hotel and wore those colours - but it's a fair bet that even at a house party full of chinless toffs on champagne spiked with Benzedrine, Mrs Simpson didn't gyrate to Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols while in front of a Charlie Chaplin movie. Nor did Wallace and Edward dance to Henry Mancini's Lujon at a time when the composer was still in short trousers. Using anachronistic source music is of course a long-standing Hollywood tradition - A Knight's Tale is set in the 14th century but stuffed full of songs by Queen, David Bowie and AC/DC - but it leaps out in something that's presumably designed as a proper period piece.

Narratively W.E. is a mess as well: it filters the famous story of Wallis Simpson's (Andrea Riseborough) scandalous relationship with the heir to the British throne (James D'Arcy) through the marital breakdown of a woman in New York in 1998 who just happens to have a similar name and an unexplained fixation on Wallis. Wally (Abbie Cornish) is neglected, cheated on and beaten by her charmless dick of a husband but finds solace with a Russian security guard (Oscar Isaac) at Sotheby's where there's an exhibition and auction of Wallis and Edward memorabilia. This intersplicing might have worked if the two stories were even vaguely alike, but they never match up, so it ends up as two completely different movies - one a present-day romantic drama and one essentially an episode of Downton Abbey - and someone else is switching channels between them at random intervals; sometimes a few scenes, sometimes one single shot.

So what was it all about? Who's it aimed at? What's the demographic? If it had been up to me, I'd have ditched the modern stuff entirely and turned it into a camp knockabout full of snappy one-liners, knob gags and posh buffoons falling over: Carry On Up the Monarchy or something. If you're going to make a film about alleged Nazi sympathisers, go mad. Go all the way and have everyone cavorting about like they're in Allo Allo or some kind of Mel Brooks extravaganza. But in the wake of The King's Speech (the events of which obviously overlap with this movie) that would probably be a difficult sell even in an era of lame Wayans Brothers parody movies.

But Madonna hasn't down that. Instead we're left with this melange of two completely different movies glued together, one historically questionable and the other essentially unbelievable. If she's have stuck with one of the stories - either one, it doesn't really matter which - W.E. probably wouldn't have been too bad, but it's the interlocking between the two that, for me at least, really doesn't work. And it's not even funny, which could perhaps have been a saving grace.

**

UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING

2012-01-20T21:58:00.000+01:00

SPOILERS UNDER.

Don't go. That's the short version. Stay home and do something else: anything else. Wash the cat or something. It's not that this latest Underworld movie is an abomination and a blight on cinema's good name - it's actually a tolerably silly piece of monster nonsense mainly notable for having Kate Beckinsale running around in skintight black shiny trousers yet again - but what knocks a star off the rating is the worthless 3D that frankly cements 3D's bad reputation. It doesn't work, it isn't necessary, and the loss of light through the polarising filters (which doesn't usually matter that much) is a serious problem in this case given that, like the other Underworld movies, much of it takes place in the dark and at night, lit entirely in steely grey-blue, and most of the cast wear black. And even the worthless 3D wouldn't matter too much if there was a 2D version released at the same time.

But the film is only being released in 3D: there doesn't appear to be a single cinema running the 2D version. Whether this was the decision of the cinema chains (it's a bumper week for new movies this week) or Entertainment Film Distributors (who submitted both versions to the censor), it's a bad deal for audiences who now have no choice but to stump up the extra cost on the ticket price for an effect that simply isn't worth it. The best advice is simply to not go. No matter how much you like vampires and werewolves and monsters and Kate Beckinsale leaping about the place in her shiny pants, wait for the BluRay which will come without this shameless ripoff of a 3D effect.

Underworld: Awakening kicks off with Selene (Beckinsale) and Michael (Scott Speedman, who isn't actually in this film except through footage from the first two films) captured by the mysterious Antigen Corporation, as the humans discover the existence of vampires and lycans and set about exterminating them. Yet both of them are placed in cryogenic capsules by mad werewolf scientist Stephen Rea for twelve years until she's released and discovers she has had a child (presumably genetically). The child is injured by a pursuing lycan and taken to a nearby secret vampire coven lorded over by Charles Dance. But the lycans are right behind them....

It's all resonably acceptable fangs and claws twaddle enlivened by enough blood and gore to garner the film an 18 certificate. And there are some nifty (albeit CGId up the wazoo) action sequences such as Selene's getaway van assailed by lycans in heavy traffic, although much of the one-on-one fighting seems merely to involve firing hundreds of bullets at each other from machine pistols that never need reloading (again, a long-standing Hollywood convention that's usually not a massive problem but it's curiously annoying here). If only they'd released a 2D print as well: there's not a single shot from start to finish that warrants an extra dimension.

**

ASSASSINATION GAMES

2012-01-19T13:49:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND --BANG.

Are top contract killers interesting characters? If you believe the movies, they're impervious to emotion and living in isolation, cynically contemplating the human condition while simultaneously working out new ways to murder people they've never met. They may travel the world wearing sharp suits and cool sunglasses, bumping off despicable people in spectacular and amusing ways, but would they make for good dinner guests? What could you possibly talk with them about? Invariably, the screenplay arc for these ruthless, machine-like loners is either that they start to develop vaguely human feelings about people, they become the target themselves and fight back using their vast experience and skills, or they have to team up with another top contract killer to really kick some final reel backside.

All three tropes show up in Assassination Games, the latest Jean-Claude Van Damme thriller in which two assassins end up on the same job and have to work together: one cold and remorseless, one angry and enraged, both capable of massacring a roomful of utter bastards without a qualm. Van Damme is in it strictly for the money and British kickboxer Scott Adkins wants revenge against the foul gangster who gangraped his wife and put her in a coma. But it's all a convoluted scheme to get rid of Adkins because he knows about high-level corruption at Interpol. Meanwhile JCVD, stoically unfeeling, has his humanity very slightly awakened by the battered woman in the apartment next door....

Like Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Camille Francois Van Varenberg (usually a more personable screen presence but pretty unlikeable here) has gone to Eastern Europe for his straight-to-DVD years, presumably because it's cheaper to make this kind of film there than in the US. Assassination Games is a miserable film as far as women are concerned: there are two principal female roles, one stuck in a coma after a gangrape (ickily, Van Damme's own daughter, who was also a coproducer) and the other regularly beaten and ultimately bloodily murdered, and even the housekeeper gets shot in the back. They're just there to provide the motivation and justification for the revenge sequences: this is a movie about blokes and killing and sadism and corruption and bigass guns. Shame then that the end result is so drab. The odd bit of crunchy violence aside, it's formulaic, grubby and nothing more than perfunctory.

**

Bang bang:

ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS

2012-01-18T12:23:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, BUT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT BY NOW, WHY THE HELL NOT?

Back in the early and mid 1980s, at the height of the video nasties hysteria, this genuinely spectacular Lucio Fulci zombie movie was one of the bigger titles. Admittedly it's below the notoriety of the Big Three (Cannibal Holocaust, Driller Killer and I Spit On Your Grave) but still a more significant title than the likes of Forest Of Fear or The Werewolf And The Yeti. I probably first discovered it around 1985 via a fourth-generation bootleg VHS (paired, I think, with Romero's masterpiece Dawn Of The Dead) and then renting the cut 18-certificate video version, but it wasn't until a Eurofest screening in December 1996 that I saw the complete film clearly, in a 35mm focussed print rather than through the smear of tape-to-tape copying and tracking hash. At the time you still couldn't get it legally in the UK and you had to make do with those precious VHS dupes or try and get an import tape through Customs.

The very idea that this harmless and silly, and obviously fantastical, piece of nonsense could ever be thought obscene, to the extent of being successfully prosecuted in the UK courts is a testament to the utter absurdity of the wanton idiocy of the video nasty farce. Any movie that has a sequence with an underwater zombie attacking a shark is so beyond the bounds of common sense that it can neither deprave nor corrupt, nor eroticise. (Indeed, the overwhelming sense is one of admiration because it looks phenomenally dangerous and physically uncomfortable.) When films are hacked about these days it's for contentious scenes of sexual violence, rather than the obviously faked splatter effects which no longer trouble the censor.

These days, it's just not a problem and you can get Zombie Flesh Eaters completely uncut with very little difficulty. Hell, LoveFilm even stream it! It's just a pity that it's really not one of the frankly barking Lucio Fulci's best splattery horror movies: it doesn't have the surreal, doom-drenched atmosphere of City Of The Living Dead or the warped dreamlike illogic of The Beyond. (I really need to see The House By The Cemetery again.) What it does have is a handful of show-stopping gore sequences, most notably the celebrated splinter-in-the-eyeball that was the main casualty when it hit UK cinemas more than 30 years ago. That the plot is nonsense almost doesn't matter: a deserted yacht arrives in New York, and a top reporter (Ian McCullough) and the boat owner's daughter (Tisa Farrow) trek down to the Antilles to find out what happened. Hitching a lift to the cursed island of Matoul with a holidaying couple, they discover a doctor (Richard Johnson) trying to stop the dead coming back to life....

Strange new disease or local voodoo rituals? It doesn't really matter: it's a dumb Italian zombie movie. But it looks fantastic: while the murk of video disguised the gore effects (perversely making them look better because you couldn't really see them properly), BluRay reveals them in pinsharp clarity and they still look pretty damn good. Some of the zombie make-up jobs are pretty unremarkable but the splatter moneyshots of the zombie kills are still impressive. Doesn't really save Zombie Flesh Eaters from being a very silly film - if you're trapped in a wooden building, the weapon of choice really shouldn't be the Molotov cocktail - but an entertaining one. Mention should also be made of the splendidly doomy and remorseless Giorgio Tucci and Fabio Frizzi theme music.

As trashy Italian gore movies go, Fulci's were among the best: not only did they deliver the gore but they were perfectly well made, albeit rough and ramshackle, and if nothing else, rewatching Zombie Flesh Eaters has pushed me in the direction of revisiting other European zombie flicks of the period. In addition to seeing Fulci's The House By The Cemetery again, I also want to find a copy of Zombie Holocaust, with the same star Ian McCullough on the same island, driving the same blue Land Rover and probably wearing the same shirt.

***

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL

2012-01-17T02:22:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Never mind the Bourne movies, this is the franchise the James Bond films should be wary of. When it comes to the glamour, globetrotting, guns, girls and gadgets, the demented antics of the IMF are precisely the kind of thing the 007 crew should be doing rather than emulating Jason Bourne's humourless personal crises. (Irrelevant aside regarding Bourne: I much prefer the first of the series rather than the hand-held grit of the two Paul Greengrass sequels.) You can almost see Brosnan or Craig - though admittedly not Sir Roger Moore - starring in this latest and possibly best of the M:I films as easily as Tom Cruise.

Ricocheting from Budapest to Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is breathless action on an industrial scale right from the start and barely lets up with hair-raising stunts, crunching fight scenes, ticking countdowns and outrageous gizmoes. Beginning with Tom Cruise's jailbreak (to the appropriate tune of Ain't That A Kick In The Head by Dean Martin), the mission is to remove a top secret file from the Kremlin archives, containing details of a potential nuclear terrorist codenamed Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist). But then the operation goes wrong: the Kremlin is bombed, the whole of the IMF disavowed - and Cruise, along with Simon Pegg, Paula Patton and analyst Jeremy Renner, must retrieve the launch codes for Russia's nuclear arsenal. This means intercepting the trade on the 118th floor of a premier Dubai hotel.... Cue vertigo attacks and clutched armrests throughout the audience as Cruise starts clambering up sheer sheet glass outside the building.

The great joy of the movie is watching the extra complications thrown in: it was pretty damned impossible to start with but the writers gleefully keep lobbing in more and more obstacles. It's not enough that they have to infiltrate the Dubai hotel computer system, for example: it's on the 125th floor and they can only access it from the outside of the building. Oh, and the electric suction gloves he has to use to climb up aren't entirely reliable. Oh, and by the way there's a sandstorm approaching. And the rubber mask generator isn't going to work. And the launch codes are going to be verified so they can't substitute dummy ones. And....

It's Mission Audacious bordering on Mission Absolutely Ridiculous, and yet they pull it off. Once you accept you're watching something so outlandishly unbelievable and thoroughly preposterous it might as well be a cartoon of stick men, you can settle into the sheer stupidity of it all and it's as much delirious popcorn entertainment as I've had in a cinema in ages. The makers haven't taken it so seriously that they've squeezed all the fun out of it as the Bournes did; but MI:GP knows it's a giant heap of silly and so it plays with a big dumb smile on its face. Better, it's a team game rather than a showcase for the star, with reluctant Renner, glamorous Patton and computer whizz Pegg all pulling their weight. Even so, it's still Cruise's movie and he is the right man for it.

Okay, some of the computer effects (such as the Kremlin bombing) look a bit weak, and the villain's motivation for starting a nuclear war is perhaps implausible even in this context: rather than power or revenge or money, he just seems to want to prove a philosophical theory about mankind. But the genuinely painful-looking combat sequences (particularly the climactic one-on-one between Cruise and Nyqvist in an automated Mumbai car park) and the non-stop thunderous action and races against the clock are what count and they're done so well I want them all to go and make Mission Impossible 5 immediately. Right this minute.

****

MARGIN CALL

2012-01-15T23:12:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS. POSSIBLY.

Only a matter of time before the financial crisis sparked a film or two: we've had Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (which was okay although I tend to like my Oliver Stone shoutier than that) and now this independent banking drama/thriller which does mainly consist of men barking jargon and buzzwords at one another. Mercifully, it's not completely incomprehensible although you do need to pay attention, and the one thing that leaps out is that it's not the traders on the phones who are the villains of the banking apocalypse: they're just the troops on the grounds and they're no safer than anyone else. It's the hawks in the boardrooms, at the very top of the structure, that are the outright hateful bastards and they're safe and always will be. The blokes actually selling the bad deals are just doing their jobs.

The wikipedia page that explains what a Margin Call actually is might as well be written in Ferengi for all the sense it makes; thankfully the film simplifies everything right down to the point where even I can almost grasp what's going on. At an unnamed banking corporation, a freshly redundant Stanley Tucci passes an incomplete file to Zachary Quinto; Quinto analyses it and deduces that the company is right on the brink of financial annihilation. It's passed up the chain via Paul Bettany, Simon Baker (incidentally a dead ringer for Jamie Oliver), Demi Moore and Kevin Spacey but it's not until CEO Jeremy Irons shows up via helicopter at two in the morning that it's decided the only way out is to Sell All These Toxic Debts As Quickly As Possible To Whoever Will Buy Them - a strategy which may result in everyone losing their jobs and the bank's reputation being trashed to the point that no-one will ever want to trade with them again, but Irons will survive. And survival is everything.

It's hard to feel any sympathy for the analysts on the trading desks: they're paid ridiculous amounts of money for buying and selling imaginary stuff. Bettany's character takes over a million a year, Spacey's considerably more. But uberbastard Irons, secure and remote from the trades themselves (and indeed from Planet Earth) is on eighty-nine million dollars; he's the genuine hate figure who will throw everyone and everything to the wolves - even his own people who'll man the phones and save the corporation for him regardless of the cost to themselves and the mugs they've sold worthless stuff to.

I rather enjoyed Margin Call although I suspect it's not going to be a big attraction. I guess you can interpret it as a message movie about what happens when banks are allowed to do what they like regardless of the consequences, though that's really a message we're already more than familiar with through the news. As a drama, it works perfectly well: to a financial outsider, the babbling about historical volatility levels and market capitalisation is really the same brand of nonsense Doctor Who employs every time he sets up an ionic neutron stabiliser field. And, even two years after Up In The Air, the callous and mechanical procedure of laying off redundant personnel is still shocking (I've been made redundant twice over the years and in neither instance was it as heartless and unyielding as this). Worth a look.

***

SHAME

2012-01-15T22:21:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Phwooooar! Get a load of this! Actually, no. Much of the advance word on this film has concerned the full nudity and frank sex scenes, but those going into the movie should know - or they'll find out pretty quickly - that it's not a sex film, it's not a porn film and it's emphatically not an erotic film. For a start the most casual of the frontal nudity is Michael Fassbender and it's probably this as much as the less graphic coupling and tripling sequences that secured the film an NC-17 rating in the States. To be fair, they get the dong shots out of the way fairly early on rather than sprinkling them throughout, presumably so you can, er, get the measure of the movie and not have it distract you from the drama later on.

Shame tells of Brandon (Fassbender), a man entirely uninterested in relationships or emotional commitments, he's only interested in, obsessed by, and addicted to sex. A top executive doing unspecified things at an unspecified company (it's not made clear but it doesn't really matter), he devotes a significant amount of his working time and all of his leisure time to sex, porn, hookers, online webcams, adult magazines, picking up strangers on the train, in bars, wherever and whenever. It's all under control and he has no shame about it (even when his office hard drive is taken away by the IT department and found to be groaning with porn videos), but things start to change when his more spirited, more emotional, more alive sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) turns up uninvited to stay with him. Each of them is all they really have, but her presence is disrupting his entire existence of cold, deadening, meaningless sex....

It's an interesting film but it's far too austere. Just as Brandon doesn't feel anything, neither do we. Presumably we're not supposed to, but then that makes it tougher to get involved in the drama. Nor, I suspect, are we supposed to like Brandon very much, and the arrival of Sissy makes him even less pleasant company. Only at the end does he literally break down like a regular human being would: before that he's not just an inhuman shag machine, he's one that he's really not much fun to be around. So really, why are we expected to want to spend an hour and forty with him?

On a technical level it's much better: loosely put together with very long takes and almost no music, although some of the cinematography is a bit odd, occasionally putting Fassbender right at the edge of an otherwise blank widescreen image. Despite me being lukewarm about it, I'm still glad it's getting national distribution and taking screens away from the dying Christmas blockbusters (it would have been so easy to leave Happy Feet 2 running for another week). It's very cold, and it's not a great film, but it's worth seeing.

***

BUNRAKU

2012-01-15T15:55:00.001+01:00

AAAARGH!!! MY EYES!!! STOP IT!!! AARGH!!! I CAN'T SEE!!! PLEASE STOP IT!!! CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS.

Generally speaking, I'm a big fan of colour film. I don't mind black-and-white, I loved The Artist, I certainly don't mean to suggest that Casablanca or Son Of Frankenstein should have been made in garish three-strip Technicolour, and the mere presence of greens and reds doesn't make Carry On Up The Jungle a better film than A Night At The Opera. On occasions, imaginative and unsparing use of excessive colour can help transform the movie into an unreal, surreal nightmare - the most obvious example would be Dario Argento's glorious Suspiria. Or it can be used to evoke something else entirely, such as the primary-coloured nonsense of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy designed with the newspaper strip's colour scheme in mind.

The retina-punching colour palette chosen for Bunraku is just part of the wildly stylised look: it's a post-nuclear martial-arts action movie with heavy Spaghetti Eastern overtones, shot on theatrical-looking studio sets and interspersed with brief animations that either look like cut-up cardboard or Maurice Binder title sequences. Everything's drenched in scarlet, green, magenta or orange (or any combination of the three), many of the villains wear natty red suits and there's barely a shot goes by that hasn't been colour-coordinated to death. Sometime after the apocalypse, possibly somewhere in the Far East, a nameless drifter (Josh Hartnett) arrives in town seeking an unspecified vengeance against the local crime boss Nicola The Woodcutter (Ron Perlman with dreadlocks). He teams up with a samurai warrior (Japanese TV and music star Gackt) seeking a medallion stolen by The Woodcutter, and a nameless bartender (Woody Harrelson) to take on his nine top killers and his army of red-suited henchmen in order to reach the Woodcutter for a final confrontation and to exact revenge

Bunraku is actually a form of 17th century Japanese puppetry, and there are moments when cardboard cutouts on strings are dangled before the camera (although if Wikipedia is to be believed, it's not really that kind of puppetry so I'm not entirely sure what the point of the title is). The palette of the movie is overdrenched in coloured filters and looks like Kill Bill Volume 1, The Warrior's Way, Speed Racer and Sukiyaki Western Django, and Sin City if it had been in colour. And it's generally quite enjoyable fare: it's too long at a scratch over two hours, some of the dialogue is terrible, the Japanese language sequences aren't subtitled, and The Drifter's motivation is pretty feeble, but it's entertaining and visually fascinating, with a good cast (Demi Moore and Kevin McKidd show up as well). Mysteriously, it doesn't appear to have any main credit sequence.

***

Buy It Here!!

PAUL

2012-01-09T18:57:00.008+01:00

LI'HEBLTH QI'PWUU ZAWAAKA [MADEY-UPPY ALIENSPEAK FOR "CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS"]

Some months ago I wrestled with the possibility that I might be a nerd. I fought against it: deep down, why wouldn't I want to be normal, why wouldn't I want to be like everyone else? But a glance at my CD shelves as they buckle under the weight of film scores, and my DVD shelves creaking with fantasy and horror - both in strict alphabetical order which means The Empire Strikes Back goes under E - rather gives it away. Likewise the Scala programme framed on the wall, or the Mr Flibble glove puppet propped up on my Yamaha keyboard. I think I'm probably entry-level rather than hardcore veteran nerd but that's as far as I'll go at present.

And is nerddom such a bad thing anyway? Nerds invented websites and mobiles and streaming music and all the fun stuff. Nerds have a passion, be it film, sci-fi, politics (tell me William Hague isn't a nerd), technology or music. Pity, then, that nerd is Normalspeak for "socially inept weirdo". The popular image of the nerd is the bespectacled loner with bad hair who wouldn't know a vulva from a fish finger but can name every episode of Babylon 5 and Red Dwarf in order of broadcast and is terribly useful for clearing up formatting problems with Microsoft Word. Mainstream media isn't about to rehabilitate the geek image - just as a soap opera character with a Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer poster on his bedroom door is being marked out as a potential murderer, so one who believes in aliens and watches way too much Deep Space Nine is basically there to be pointed at and mocked, like he's got three heads or something. Just because you dress up as Worf or Deanna Troi in your spare time doesn't make you less of a person.

Maybe nerds have to do their image makeover themselves. A couple of years ago we had the agreeable Fanboys - a film for, by and about nerds - and now, with a much higher profile (like a proper cinema release and bigger names attached) Paul, which has likable SF/fantasy nerds Nick Frost and Simon Pegg touring the US in a Winnebago to visit ComicCon in San Diego as well as various UFO and alien sites including Area 51 and the Black Mailbox in Rachel, Nevada. (Nope, I had to look it up.) While they bicker and banter and are constantly mistaken for honeymooning civil partners, they suddenly encounter Paul, a wisecracking alien fleeing the US military and looking to get back home. But mysterious agents in black are on his trail, along with a couple of rednecks and the bible-thumping father of the fundamentalist Christian girl (Kristen Wiig) they've inadvertently abducted....

It's generally enjoyable although there's a touch too much swearing which gets tiresome after a while and it really doesn't need it. Paul, a predominantly CGI creation voiced by Seth Rogen, gets most of the grosser material although it's a film that wants to be sweet and funny rather than a lowbrow exercise in disgust. It's also a film that plays a good game of Spot The Movie, as the film is loaded with lines and references from Star Wars, ET, Close Encounters, Battlestar Galactica and several others, whether it's dialogue, T-shirts or the presence of Sigourney Weaver in a prominent role and a Steven Spielberg flashback gag. Oddly, the one I liked best (being a soundtrack nerd) is the roadside bar where the house band is playing a country and western cover of Cantina Band from the Star Wars score - but why don't Pegg and Frost's characters notice it? Nice to hear a bit of 50s-era spooky sci-fi theremin on the soundtrack as well.

I liked it, and while I don't know that it's up there with Hot Fuzz (which does go on a little too long) and Shaun Of The Dead, it's still an enjoyable, sweet and smart action/fantasy/comedy that's genuinely difficult to hate, and it manages to make the nerd double-act at its centre personable and human: you do want to spend the time with them, and crucially I think much of it would work even if you're not a nerd yourself. (I watched the theatrical version rather than the extended cut; despite the five minute difference in running time I gather there's little to choose between them beyond some alternative shots and takes and a little extra dialogue.)

****

THE IRON LADY

2012-01-06T23:27:00.001+01:00

THE LADY'S NOT FOR SPOILING

Trying to produce a biopic of Margaret Thatcher must be one of the great impossibilities of our age. Anything less than a fawning slobberfest and the Right will be out to get you, anything less than a shrieking hatchet job and the Left will be out to get you. Just as the BBC is only neutral and balanced when it's biased in your favour, so any examination of Thatcher will be absurdly one-sided unless it agrees precisely with your own point of view. In the event the only thing to do is to at least attempt to be scrupulously fair, to put the pros and cons with demonstrably equal weight. Have they managed to pull off that feat? I think they have, just about.

Should they have waited until she'd passed away before attempting a biopic? There's a measure of questionable taste in The Iron Lady's depiction of Baroness Thatcher as a lonely, confused old woman in the grip of dementia, as she talks with the long-departed Denis (Jim Broadbent), but while it's queasily uncomfortable viewing, it's not as if she's babbling incoherently and dribbling into her sandwiches in front of Countdown; she's a long way from losing her marbles yet. Various moments in the modern world - a TV report, the price of milk, photographs and other memorabilia - trigger memories of her early years in the Conservative Party and her first attempts to become an MP, up to the key moments of her tenure in Downing Street, from the Brighton bomb to the sinking of the Belgrano, her 1979 election victory to her 1990 removal.

It makes for a frustrating structure as it flits between then and now, and what it really needed was an Oliver Stone in historical shouty mode, where the film could bellow facts and opinions in your face for hours (see JFK and Nixon). Sadly they didn't have Oliver Stone, although even he's calmed down these days; they've got Phyllida Lloyd, director of Mamma Mia! (which I haven't seen and don't ever wish to) although there are points where the film does a good montage of TV news footage and reconstruction, Thatcher now and Thatcher then. As with the Stone movies there are plenty of brief appearances from familiar faces as other familiar faces - John Sessions has a few moments as Edward Heath, Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe, Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine!

There are also pacing problems: in a film that runs 105 minutes there's a lot to get through very quickly and some of it is very rushed. We see Michael Foot once, Kinnock is reduced to one line of voiceover, Scargill isn't even namechecked and the fateful membership ballots are passed over too quickly for us to feel enough of their impact. BUT: Streep is terrific, as you'd expect, and it earns points for not choosing the easy, lazy option of taking potshots at an old woman. And the makeup for the elderly Thatcher is superb. It's not a perfect film, but it's a fascinating piece of recent history dramatised, and there are elements of an intriguing character study. Not an outright success, but it's a damned good start to the New Year.

****

LIST: THE WORST FILMS OF 2011

2011-12-31T07:11:00.001+01:00

Wasn't 2011 a ghastly year for movies? There were plenty of candidates for the Worst List: it's honestly been difficult narrowing it down to a mere ten titles. Many of the potentials were merely mediocre rather than outright objectionable or imbecilic, though, and the final selections are films I've really hated, or films I've been massively disappointed by, rather than ones I've merely not liked very much. The list is slightly skewed to start with: there aren't any romantic comedies or digimations on there as I don't go and see them (not being a professional salaried film reviewer for whom Adam Sandler films are part of the job); these are films I went to see wanting to like them, rather than ones I knew in advance (or strongly suspected) were likely to stink.

As with the Best Of 2011 list, the film must have received a regular commercial UK cinema release in 2011 (as listed on Launching Films), so the tiresome A Horrible Way To Die and the atrocious Inbred don't qualify as they only had festival screenings and didn't show up at local Odeons, Vues or Cineworlds. Thank goodness.

Anyway, the list:

10. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
Sneaking under the wire at year's end comes this entirely pointless English language restaging of the perfectly good Swedish original. There's nothing in it that's half as impressive or interesting this time around, and it's mainly notable for being yet another duff Daniel Craig movie, the third of the year after the nonsensical Cowboys And Aliens and the tiresome Dream House. A crashing disappointment, particularly coming from David Fincher who really should be better than this.

9. CONAN THE BARBARIAN
They didn't have Schwarzenegger or Milius, Von Sydow, James Earl Jones or Sandahl Bergman, a Basil Poledouris score or an Oliver Stone script. What did they have? Marcus Nispel, some muscled bloke with bigger hooters than the female lead, and converted 3D. Awful.

8. SUCKER PUNCH
Heavily fetishised jailbait fantasies for the undiscriminating pervert (the bit where someone says schoolgirl Emily Browning is actually 20 years old is basically "start your engines, boys"). None of it makes a blind bit of sense, the whole thing is CGId into oblivion and the absurdly inappropriate 12A suggests the BBFC are giving these ratings away in packets of cornflakes.

7. THE RESIDENT
Hammer are nominally back, but this is a Hammer movie in the way that Police Academy 6 is a Warner Brothers movie, i.e. not really. It's a crashingly dull and ordinary thriller in which the psycho is blatantly obvious (there being only four significant speaking roles, it's scarcely a mystery worthy of Miss Marple), nothing much happens and Sir Christopher Lee has a couple of scenes (including yet another deathbed exit).

6. SLEEPING BEAUTY
Another chance for dirty old men to pleasure themselves over Emily Browning in the dark, but this one is Art, so that's okay. Pretentious and tedious "erotica" that's basically porn with dull talking bits in between. Look: if you want porn, go watch some porn. We won't think any less of you than we do already.

5. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3
A prequel detailing the early hauntings when the heroines of the first two movies were terrorised as children (but not explaining why they'd forgotten all about it by the time they were adults). Incredibly dull, stupid, completely unscary and can we please stop with this lame found-footage gimmick now, please? It doesn't work and it's visually ugly.

4. THE WOMAN
I missed this at FrightFest so only caught up with it on DVD and for a while I genuinely thought it was going to suddenly top the year's list. It's a stupid, tiresome and thoroughly obnoxious piece of mean-spirited sadism; it's incredibly boring and entirely unbelievable, and the debate about whether it's misogynistic simply isn't worth having. My overriding question is what the hell was the point of this film? It's horrible.

3. TRANSFORMERS 3: DARK OF THE MOON
Oh, for God's sake.

2. APOLLO 18
Nope, apparently we can't ditch the lame found-footage gimmick yet. Yes, they've gone to a lot of effort to make it all look like 16mm and videotape of the period, but it would have been easier, quicker, probably cheaper and certainly less visually annoying to actually make a film, rather than feebly pretending they haven't. Stop it.

1. HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN
Not counting midnight shows where I've fallen asleep and have missed great chunks of the action, I've only ever walked out of one film (Zombie Women Of Satan). This tedious and diseased parade of cheap atrocities and sub-Troma taboo-busting would most probably have been the second if I'd been on an aisle seat. Genuinely the vilest and most misanthropic film I've seen in years. Yet everyone else - literally everyone else - loved it, and I don't think I'll ever understand that.

There were plenty of other below-par offerings on show: Justice, Abduction, Dream House, Immortals, The Green Hornet, 30 Minutes Or Less, Wake Wood, Cowboys And Aliens (it really wasn't Daniel Craig's year), Attack The Block, the Fright Night remake: all of which should have been far better.

LIST: THE BEST FILMS OF 2011

2011-12-31T04:05:00.002+01:00

Wasn't 2011 a terrific year for movies? Certainly it's been better than the previous year: looking back at my Best Of 2010 list there were a few films that probably didn't deserve to be there, but they ended up there simply by way of there not being enough competition. Happily, 2011 has produced a sterling set of titles, and not only am I generally satisfied with my final choices but I'm annoyed that some perfectly decent titles haven't made the cut.

On the subject of last year's list, there was of course one glaring omission: the original Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. That was because I'd seen it back in 2009 so I forgot about it when compiling. No such oversight this year: I've used the UK release schedules as a guide so even if I saw the film in 2010 it counts to this year's lists if it's had a general - or even limited - theatrical release in 2010 rather than festival screenings. (Sadly, The Artist isn't going to be available to include in the list due to the distributors not releasing it out of the West End until the start of 2012.)

Not that I'm anywhere near qualified enough to detect themes, but if there has been a theme this year that I've particularly welcomed, I'd suggest that it's films harking back to earlier eras of film: two of my top three all refer back to earlier styles of film-making, openly celebrating the actual technique of making movies in days long gone. Here's hoping people can actually learn from this: not just to celebrate the days of better film making, but to actually make better films.

Enough prattle. The list:

10. THE AWAKENING
A solid, well-crafted and creepy ghost story in the best British tradition, although with an occasional feel of an episode of The X-Files, The Awakening boasts a strong female lead (Rebecca Hall), a nicely conveyed period setting and several damn good scares and jumpy moments. Maybe it loses it slightly towards the end with a too implausible extra twist, but overall I thoroughly enjoyed it. More please.

9. THOR
I'm not much of a comicbook superhero fan. Nor am I colossally interested in the ongoing Avengers uberproject in which a whole bunch of absurdly costumed weirdos face off against each other. But Thor was such unexpected fun: visually terrific in the Asgard scenes, and Thor himself was an interesting and likable enough hero. Lord Sir Kenneth Shakespeare Of Branagh may have been an unlikely choice to direct (it's a bit like hiring Stanley Kubrick to direct The Dukes Of Hazzard), but it's paid off.

8. BLACK SWAN
This was on many lists for last year because of festival screenings but it didn't actually come to commercial cinemas until January 2011, so there. Everyone loved it, and I certainly liked it a lot: it's a weirdo psychological horror movie with a ballet setting and that lovely sense while watching it that you haven't got the faintest clue where the hell it's going. I somehow still wish I'd liked it more, and probably need to see it again.

7. RED WHITE AND BLUE
This emotionally raw and powerful love story knocked me sideways when shown at the 2010 Frightfest, to the extent that I couldn't bear to go back in for the next movie (The Last Exorcist), and had to go for a long walk to let it sink in. Shocking, brutally violent, and yet ultimately quite moving; nowhere near enough people saw it.

6. TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
Sometimes the public get it right and support a movie that justifies it. In 2010 it was Inception, in 2011 it was this incredibly miserable and grimy spy drama entirely bereft of helicopter chases, kickass explosions and anyone under 50: espionage as an abstract game of imaginary chess where you didn't know which pieces were whose. And it makes no concession to the audience: pay attention or you're lost. Oh, and the cast is breathtaking.

5. 13 ASSASSINS
It's from the certified nutjob director of Visitor Q and Ichi The Killer, but this superbly paced and gorgeously photographed samurai action movie almost makes it worthwhile putting up with the usual incoherent Takashi Miike gibberish. Culminates in an apparently endless village battle that leaves just about everyone dead, but just as gripping is the first act's political exposition and plot machinations. Marvellous.

4. JULIA'S EYES
Watching this absorbing Spanish thriller (produced by Guillermo Del Toro) I was suddenly thrust back to the Scala Cinema more than twenty years ago, watching vintage Argento gialli. Genuinely exciting and beautifully done. Why can't we Brits make genre films as good as this? Why aren't we even trying?

3. HUGO
An absolutely charming movie that may be all over the place, veering wildly between moving drama, knockabout comedy, kiddie fantasy, action - but finally hangs a hard right turn out of nowhere into the joys of the very birth of cinema with the strange and surreal fantasies of Georges Melies. And it's probably the best showcase yet for intelligently used 3D in mainstream cinema (although the case for 3D has yet to be indisputably made).

2. INSIDIOUS
The most genuinely scary time I've had in a cinema for years: from the creators of the gory but unscary Saw franchise and the increasingly tiresome and unscary Paranormal Activity series comes an entirely bloodless and truly frightening haunted house movie. Granted that it drops the ball in the third act, but it works not just while it's screening but days later when you're alone in the flat, late at night and it squirrels back into your mind. Utterly brilliant.

1. SUPER 8
Joyous, joyful and thrilling kids' action/SF movie that's not just a near-perfect recreation of the late 1970s (I don't give a toss that this song or that toy wasn't actually there until 1980 - it's still in the spirit of the era) but the idea of kids making movies for the sheer fun of it. I'd love for children to come out of Super 8 inspired to grab the nearest camera and start shooting. Beautiful, exciting, a near perfect kids' movie and a damn good summer blockbuster. (And if you're carping about the lens flares - get over it.)

Honourable Mentions to some films that bubbled under but didn't quite make the cut. In no particular order: Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, Rango, Fast Five (shut up!), Red State, Drive, The Skin I Live In, I Saw The Devil, Confessions, A Lonely Place To Die and True Grit. And to be honest, that list alone would have made an acceptable Top Ten.

BLACK CHRISTMAS

2011-12-30T14:56:00.000+01:00

DING DONG SPOILERY ON HIGH

A big old house at night. Obscene phone calls. An unseen maniac killing sorority girls. The camera taking on the killer's POV. A shifty and suspicious boyfriend. Useless police officers. A familiar cult movie actor in an authority role. "The calls are coming from inside the house!" A nuisance cat. A creepy attic, a creepy cellar. Twist ending where the horror isn't really over. How many times have these join-the-dots ingredients come up in every cheap slasher movie ever made? Admittedly part of the fun of slasher movies is enjoying the tropes of a Halloween, as much as seeing them wittily subverted in a Scream. Fine, but they weren't tropes to start with: this pioneering Canadian slasher came four years before Halloween, five before When A Stranger Calls and six before Friday The 13th. More than those movies, this is the one with a greater claim to inventing the cliches in the first place.

Yet first doesn't always mean best, and it's curious that Bob Clark's 1974 slasher Black Christmas doesn't actually work anywhere near as well as some of the films that came after it, specifically the big franchise-starters Halloween and Friday The 13th. Certainly it has incident and it kicks off with the dirty phone calls right from the start (very dirty - the handful of C-words is probably why the film still retains its 18 certificate after more than thirty years), but once it graduates to killing its sorority girls rather than making obscene noises at them, it settles into something that now seems painfully obvious and predictable unless you actually saw it back in 1974. Suspicion is cast firmly and early on Olivia Hussey's ridiculously creepy boyfriend Keir Dullea, yet it couldn't possibly be him and there's no motivation given. But who else could it be?

Frustratingly, the film elects not to reveal its antagonist, simply letting the end credits run over the sound of the ringing telephone. Personally I feel that's a copout, like Agatha Christie ending a novel before Poirot gets round to his ten-minute deconstruction and unmasks the villain. Whether it's because the idea of an unknown murderer is more horrific than a known one, or because Clark and writer Roy Moore believe it doesn't really matter, it leaves the movie without a tidy and satisfying conclusion.

I know it's heresy but I probably prefer the 2006 remake, partly on the grounds that there's more in the way of upfront gore (this original version is pretty restrained in the ketchup department) but partly because they do actually bother to identify the killer. The slick and bloody but empty Glen Morgan version may not be much of a film overall (it's an enjoyable popcorn slasher rather than a work of actual quality) but I have a soft spot for it. But I can't get enthused about Bob Clark's original: it's okay, and it's good to see Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea and John Saxon (I've never been a fan of Margot Kidder, though), but it's really no more than okay.

**

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

2011-12-26T23:07:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS, CONTAINS NO POINT WHATSOEVER.

Why, deep down, didn't we suspect this all along? Why did we have our hopes up for this revisitation over all the others? What had this got going for it that The Thing, Fright Night, Let Me In, Conan The Barbarian and all the other recent remakes didn't have? Well, it had Steven Zaillan scripting from a highly regarded source, it had a sterling cast including Daniel Craig, Steven Berkoff, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard and Joely Richardson, and of course it had David Fincher directing. Even ignoring the fact that outside of the Bonds (and even there he's only scored 50 per cent) Daniel Craig has an uncanny and unerring ability for picking duff projects (see Dream House and Cowboys And Aliens), how could this possibly go wrong?

Easily. Though The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo tells, frequently word for word, the same story as the Niels Arden Oplev version - crusading but disgraced journalist investigates the murder of a young girl forty years previously, aided by the angry, punk-haired computer hacker of the title, and in the process uncovers long-buried family secrets, corruption and sheer cold evil - it brings absolutely nothing to the table but the star names and English language dialogue (and the latter you could have as an English dub on the original's DVD release anyway). If you've seen the original, David Fincher's film holds few surprises, but even if you haven't, I genuinely believe it won't grab your interest.

It's as if they're really not trying. Oh, it looks great: it's drained of colour and light with the permanent snow, much of it takes place at night, everyone's dressed in drab colours and driving black cars. And I'll confess a liking for the modern Swedish architecture (mainly Stellan Skarsgard's hilltop house - if I win the lottery that's the kind of place I'll have). But it's dramatically uninteresting - neither Craig nor Rooney Mara are any kind of substitute for Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace at bringing their characters to life, and even the hideous rape sequence doesn't have the raw power of the original's. (If they didn't want to be compared to an earlier film, they shouldn't have made another version of it, and they certainly shouldn't have made an inferior version of it.)

There's also the language question: why is everyone speaking English when it's taking place in Sweden, the newspaper signs are all in Swedish and magazine covers are in Swedish? Granted it's a dramatic device as old as theatre - Hamlet doesn't have to be performed in Danish - but why are the TV news and the press cuttings in English? There's even an absurd moment when they spell a sign out - "S...N...that's a K.... Carpentry!" And why is no-one but Rooney Mara putting on some sort of accent? (Okay, they probably didn't want it to sound like a Muppets convention where everyone's come as the Swedish Chef.) It's an inconsistency that could easily have been avoided by just putting everything in English.

Matters aren't helped by the sound mix rendering chunks of the dialogue unintelligible (although that may have been the 35mm print or my local's audio system at fault), and by the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score that's been indiscriminately ladled over the movie like custard - but ladled over roast beef rather than an apple crumble. How can a director who's worked with proper musical composers like Howard Shore, Elliot Goldenthal and David Shire possibly have signed off on this ambient soundscape of droning and plinky-plonk noises? (The album release covers three CDs and frankly you might as well listen to your fridge defrosting.)

So ultimately we've ended up with a nothing movie: an A-list director, a heavyweight cast, some fabulous set design - but it simply never hangs together the way it should - and the way it did a few years ago (and presumably in the book as well). It isn't different enough from the earlier film to make it much more than a translation rather than a film in its own right. Niels Arden Oplev's film was terrifically entertaining and gripping, and this just isn't in the same league. Most importantly, from the director of Se7en and Zodiac - and even Panic Room and Alien 3, which I believe is massively underrated - it's a crashing, crushing disappointment. (Sadly, it looks like a remake of the next of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire, is in development for 2013, although it doesn't appear on Fincher, Craig or Mara's IMDb pages.)

**

YOUR HIGHNESS

2011-12-16T13:16:00.000+01:00

HERE BE YE OLDE SPOILERS

Kids ruin everything. More precisely, teenagers ruin everything. Specifically, the teenage demographic in multiplex cinema and film-making has put the tin hat on the concept of adult (as in grown-up rather than porny) entertainment. With the overwhelming majority of films released targeted at people under 25, intelligence and wit and cleverness will always be outnumbered by vulgarity and rude words and tits. It's no longer adult in the sense that it's aimed at adults, it's merely adult in the sense that it's not for kids. The 15 certificate doesn't signify anything beyond the unsuitability for 12-year-olds, and perversely, the endless references to knobs and tits and miscellaneous sexual weirdness is childish rather than mature. It's significant that the critical quote emblazoned on the front of the DVD box, claiming it to be The Funniest Movie Of the Year, is from Nuts magazine.

In days of old, when knights were bold, there was the handsome Prince Fabious (James Franco), forever on noble quests to slay wizards and cyclops; and his idle brother Prince Thadeous (Danny McBride), concerned only with sex and loafing around enjoying himself. But Fabious' virginal simpleton bride Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) is abducted before the wedding by the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux), and the two brothers and their companions must rescue her before the eclipse of the two moons that will mark the conception of a dragon with which Leezar will rule the world (or something). Also along for the ride is vengeful Natalie Portman, but might there be a traitor in their midst?

Essentially Your Highness is Carry On Questing. Or Onan The Barbarian. Or Monty Python And The Holy Krull. Or indeed Hawk The Stoner (the word Highness having a double meaning, haha). But what it's most reminiscent of is The Black Adder: the first series where Edmund was a cowardly, obnoxious idiot (McBride even has a hapless sidekick accompanying him), and for all the period detail and generous budget (by BBC standards), it wasn't massively funny. On one level this movie is amiable knockabout nonsense with good production values, some decent effects (albeit mostly CGI) and an all-star cast that also includes Charles Dance, Damian Lewis and Toby Jones. But the steady flow of sweary gags about willies, bums, tits, bestiality and wanking gets tiresome after a while. Nor is it explained why almost everyone is putting on an English accent when - bearing in mind the eclipse of the two moons - the movie isn't even set on this planet.

Much of the movie was clearly improvised - see the extras on the DVD - by just leaving the camera running while the principals make up a dozen slight variations of the scene, and then picking the dirtiest version and not the funniest. McBride makes for a charmless lead - granted, on one level the character is supposed to be charmless, but surely the hero should not be so charmless that you genuinely don't want to spend any time looking at him? The same problem beset McBride and director David Gordon Green's earlier, generally terrible, Pineapple Express. Here we also get a lot of casual F-bombs as well which don't sit well against the medieval setting but they've have been put in because it's supposedly funny. Clearly they were having a ball making it but it just doesn't translate.

**

Verily, forsooth, penis:

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER

2011-12-15T11:51:00.004+01:00

I FORESEE SOME SPOILERS

Maybe I'm the only one left, but I still watch Woody Allen movies in the hope of agreeable, civilised, cultured entertainment with a brain and with a sense of humour that doesn't rely on poo, knobs or crass sexism and stereotypes. Perhaps it's not entirely fair to suggest he hasn't made a genuinely terrific movie for about 20 years - I've missed some of them, and some haven't even been released to the UK - but even the best of his more recent ones certainly aren't up there with Annie Hall or Love And Death. (And that said, even some of the classic "early funny ones" aren't as good as everyone makes out: I honestly struggled with Everything You Always..... and even Sleeper.)

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is a loose assemblage of vignettes chronicling the various relationships of two London couples: elderly Anthony Hopkins who has a midlife crisis and ditches his slightly dotty wife Gemma Jones for prostitute/actress/gold-digger Lucy Punch, and Naomi Watts (Hopkins and Jones' daughter): attracted to her married boss Antonio Banderas but herself married to struggling writer and general tool Josh Brolin - who is in turn attracted to Freida Pinto, the musicology student next door. Pinto is in turn already engaged to a diplomat, Watts wants a family, and Jones is falling into spiritualism courtesy of dodgy medium Pauline Collins.

It would be marvellous if it had all ended with custard pies or a fight at a wedding. But it doesn't really end at all: it just stops abruptly with a voiceover to the effect of "and there we must leave them", so even if you were passingly intrigued by these people and their non-hilarious situations, there's no sense of resolution. And it doesn't have one single joke in it. It doesn't even have any jokes that don't work - jokes which you know are jokes but which aren't funny: not only are there no laughs, but there are no failed laughs.Nor are there any particularly interesting characters you want to spend any time with: aside from a pleasing turn of fate for the odious Brolin it's hard to care about any of these mewling, self-absorbed individuals and their self-inflicted problems. So in addition to not working as a comedy, it doesn't work as a character drama and for a Woody Allen movie that's not good enough. You don't expect car chases or Martian invaders in an Allen film but you do expect character and/or comedy and/or drama.

Maybe it's London's fault. I haven't seen Scoop or Match Point (Scoop wasn't even released in this country although it did creep out on BBC2 one night) but Cassandra's Dream was a similarly unsatisfying and humourless stodge; before this he did Vicky Cristina Barcelona which was mildly amusing (although no real laughs) and since You Will Meet... we had the rather charming (but still far from hilarious) Midnight In Paris. And his next one's set in Rome. But the last funny one - the last one with actual hahaha oneliners in it - was Whatever Works (which nobody but me seemed to like very much), a film set in Allen's New York. Possibly as a result of the home turf, Whatever Works has 26 entries on its Memorable Quotes page on the IMDb. You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger has just one which is, to paraphrase Arthur Dent, "obviously some strange usage of the word Memorable that I wasn't previously aware of." (Genuinely, I looked at it not three minutes ago and can't remember it.)

It's also an odd mixture of accents as Hopkins does Hopkins, Punch does Chav, Banderas does Spanish, Brolin does American, Watts puts on English (but uses the American pronunciation of "imbecile" to rhyme with "whistle" rather than "Lucille"). Obviously it's always good to see Sir Anthony, and it's pleasantly surprising to see people like Philip Glenister, Lynda Baron, Anna Friel, Meera Syal and Ewen Bremner turning up for tiny roles. But it just isn't any fun and you're left wondering what the point of the exercise was. Allen is now 76 and he really doesn't need to make a film or two every year, especially if it's just for the sake of it. It is a civilised, cultured film, and you can believe in these people; you're just not that bothered what happens to them.

*

You Will Buy:

THE THING

2011-12-06T18:03:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERY THINGS

Yet another desecration of an acknowledged and accepted classic, another heretical exhumation from the vaults in an ill-advised quest to recapture the magic that was fatally doomed from the start. Time after time they've blundered into the most familiar territory and completely missed the point. Whether it's Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm Street or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or second-tier minor horrors like Friday the 13th, The Stepfather or My Bloody Valentine, they've failed repeatedly and spectacularly - and if you're setting the bar as low as Prom Night, why even bother? If they can't even raise more than a "whatever" response from mean-spirited exploitationers like I Spit On Your Grave or Last House On The Left, how can they ever hope to achieve anything with a film that people actually love? (Sole exception to this would be Zack Snyder's version of Dawn Of The Dead is fine, which is some achievement given that Romero's original is the greatest film ever made.

This all-new The Thing is, technically, a prequel in that it details the events at the Norwegian base (prior to the lone dog escaping to the American outpost at the start of Carpenter's film), although it's practically a remake as it attempts to restage many of its highlights. Tracing a mysterious signal, three of the Norwegians fall down a crevasse and discover a craft, and subsequently a creature frozen in the ice. Once they've flown in top paleontologist Mary Elizabeth Winstead from Columbia University, they set about thawing The Thing out - until it bursts loose and starts doing exactly what it would later do at the American base: masquerading as one (or possibly more) of the humans and then turning into a surreally squishy monster when it's found out. Gradually the cast are whittled down (mostly set on fire) until a climactic "face" off within the Alienesque confines of the alien craft....

John Carpenter's The Thing is a bleak, shocking, endlessly rewatchable and visually stunning SF/horror movie with eye-popping effects, a perfect Morricone soundtrack, a taut and suspenseful script and a terrific cast of character actors. Matthijs Van Heijninger Jr's The Thing differs in only nine respects. In making a prequel, they've stymied themselves by negating any suspense or excitement: we know pretty much how it will end and that most if not all the cast will die horribly. This doesn't just mean we don't care who's really The Thing, it means we don't - we can't - care who lives or dies. But even though several members of Carpenter's cast weren't immediately sympathetic or likable, you were still gripped throughout. Here, both the structure and the indistinguishable nature of the roster of characters mean it's impossible to get involved.

More damagingly, far too many of the Thing effects are computer generated and frankly they look it. Because they're just ones and zeros on a hard drive that have been cut and pasted into the shots, they don't scare and they don't revolt; despite some interesting imagery it's impossible to be scared of something that so clearly does not exist. More crucially, many of those CG effects simply aren't very good and to be honest they might as well be a hand-drawn cartoon for all the effect they have (at one point they were on the level of the incoherent Japanese zombie movies Junk and Wild Zero which were about ten years ago). Surely the whole point of The Thing is that it's indistinguishable from reality, but too often it's painfully obvious what's real and what isn't. Marco Beltrami's score occasionally has echoes of Ennio Morricone's doom-laden score for the 1982 version, but too often resorts to his standard crash-bang horror movie style he's been working in pretty much constantly since the first Scream. Which is okay, but unfortunately the contrast is highlighted by the inclusion of Morricone's end title music at the end.

It is clear that they've tried to make a movie that harks back to the 82 version. It's got a pleasantly old-fashioned grainy look, it's frequently lit and shot in a similar style, and they not only run the main credits in the same typeface but they even kick off with the older version of Universal's logo (although for some reason they include the copyright date for the more recent one in the closing crawl). But the CGI kills it, the largely interchangeable and identically bearded cast mean you lose track of who's dead or alive (Mary Elizabeth Winstead excepted, because she's the only one who looks any different to everyone else) and none of it is a fraction as enjoyable, scary, surprising, funny, weird or interesting as Carpenter's film.

[Continual reference to the earlier film, rather than viewing it on its own terms, is entirely fair. If they didn't want the comparison with John Carpenter's film, they shouldn't have made a prequel to it.]

**

FANATIC (THE LAST HORROR FILM)

2011-12-05T10:28:00.001+01:00

INT. MASSIVE SPOILERS. DAY

Early on in this 1980s slasher movie, the fantastically sleazy Joe Spinell is seen sitting in his New York taxicab reading Issue 38 of Starburst magazine; page 42 of which contains a report on the making of this very same film, and page 43 consists of a full colour photograph of Caroline Munro in costume and on the set! Horror films about horror films are less of a tightrope and more of a tripwire. Unless you're incredibly sure-footed and you know exactly what you're doing (in other words, unless you're Wes Craven) the odds decree that you're almost certain to tumble into a black hole of injokey self-referential hogwash: too often it can end up as an exercise in showing off how many movies you can quote in 90 minutes (see the worthless Hack! as an example).

Fanatic, originally released on UK video as The Last Horror Film (and nothing to do with The Last Horror Movie or Die! Die! My Darling!), is an oddly fascinating, though not entirely successful attempt at film-within-film-within-film from 1982: shot largely at the Cannes Film Festival the previous year (without permits), written in two weeks, supposedly part-improvised and, to judge from the Making Of reports from Cannes that ran in Starburst around the time, a completely different beast from the original conception. Created as a response to audience demand for the horrible Maniac (a film I can still find little love for), it told of top horror actress Jana Bates (Caroline Munro) being stalked around Cannes by New York cabbie and delusional loser Vinny (Joe Spinell). Her husband, her producer (and ex), her director, an agent are all murdered, all receiving handwritten notes warning them "You have made your last horror film".

There's little doubt that most of the movie (and indeed the title Fanatic) is setting up Vinny as the maniac: a repulsive loner obsessed with horror movies and with pathetic delusions of being a great filmmaker who's going to Cannes to direct "Jana Bates" in his Dracula film - which is clearly not going to happen. (Nor, in honesty, is "Jana Bates" ever going to snatch a Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival away from the likes of Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep, as we see the Jury's ballot cards being completed!) Yet towards the end it pulls a plot twist that changes everything: it's too absurd but it does allow for a sweeter ending. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn't lay the blame for real-life violence with horror geeks as it originally did; while it continually juxtaposes news broadcasts of terrorist bombings and assassination attempts on Reagan and the Pope with coverage of horror movies and press conferences (where "Jana Bates" is asked about the conflation of real and fictional violence), it finally twists that round and decides that the killer is emphatically NOT confusing movie horrors with genuine ones.

The Cannes footage itself is fantastic: everywhere you see posters, billboards and cinema hoardings for Evil Under The Sun (a far more genteel example of the murder genre), For Your Eyes Only, Zulawski's Possession and even Cannibal Holocaust showing at a tatty backstreet screening room. There's a pleasingly geeky coincidence to be found: the film for which Jana Bates is being honoured is called Scream, and there's a huge promotional billboard for a movie entitled Stab (the name of the slasher movies within Wes Craven's Scream series), although that turned out to be a pre-production title for the Scheider-Streep thriller Still Of The Night.

Fanatic (and, to add to the title confusion, not THE Fanatic as it appears on the UK DVD box) is pretty shoddily put together, there's some ropey acting, and several scenes don't make any sense, but it's engaging, there are a few decent scenes and memorable moments, particularly Jana being chased by Vinny down the spiral staircase of the Hotel Martinez and through a crowd who all applaud it as a clever publicity stunt for some crazy horror movie. I don't know that it's a better film than Maniac on a technical level; it's certainly a less repellent one and I'd rather have this than the promised Maniac 2 (abandoned when Spinell died at just 52). Or, worse, the supposedly upcoming Maniac remake with - of all people - Elijah Wood! For the behind-the-scenes guerilla footage of Cannes '81, and for Munro and Spinell, it's worth a look, although the British DVD is pretty shabby with indifferent picture quality (very poor in night scenes, or when everything's suffused in red or blue) and presented in 4:3. Still, oddly enjoyable.

***

AVENGING FORCE

2011-12-03T18:00:00.001+01:00

CONTAINS THWACK THUD MAJOR THUMP WALLOP SPOILERS OOF

The third of Cannon Films' triumvirate of regular action stars, after Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris, Michael Dudikoff was the least of the three, both in terms of acting skills and martial arts mastery. While Norris was a bona fide world karate champion and Bronson was an effortless screen presence and a highly experienced actor, Dudikoff wasn't any of these things - he's a former model and martial arts student but he really isn't an actor at all. However, he has accumulated 54 acting credits on the IMDb page, including an episode of Dallas, a bit part in Tron, Enter The Ninja and three of the American Ninja series of low-grade kickabouts. Happily, he isn't required to act in this typical Cannon meat-headed nonsense which interestingly predates John Woo's Hard Target.

Avenging Force apparently originated as a sequel to Invasion USA of all things but Chuck Norris couldn't do it, so they gave it to Dudikoff instead. Despite being 14 years younger than Norris, he's nominally playing the same part and, having retired from the CIA Very Special Forces to New Orleans to look after his young sister, he finds himself dragged back when his best friend Steve James, running for Senator, is the target for a murder attempt by a secretive group of racist millionaire whackjobs known as Pentangle (presumably unrelated to the British folk band of the same name). In addition to sending out incompetent minions to botch absurdly public assassinations, the leaders of Pentangle like to dress up as historical warriors and hunt men to their deaths in their private swamp. Once they get a sniff of Dudikoff's skills, they foolishly decide to use him for their next Most Dangerous Game....

Despite having plenty of biff-kerpow headkicking fight sequences, Avenging Force isn't particularly good: it's as if they scaled the whole project down once they realised they couldn't have Chuck Norris for it. The final action sequence is pretty good, as Dudikoff takes on the lunatics from Pentangle in a swamp during a torrential rainstorm, and some of the stuntwork is sufficiently dangerous-looking (particularly in a burning house); John P Ryan has fun as the head of the organisation, getting to spew obnoxious racist bile left and right, and it's surprising in that the villains kill off a couple of children, which is surely even more of a taboo than killing puppies. But much of it is still formulaic, predictable and unstylish to look at, and it never overcomes the George Lazenby-shaped hole where a charismatic leading man should be. Dedicated fans of low-rent karate actioners should get their money's worth, but everybody else....

**

Wallop!

TAKE SHELTER

2011-12-01T02:17:00.000+01:00

GIMME SPOILERS

This is an interesting film, but it's not what it's been billed as, at least on the cinema websites. Cineworld claim it's a "haunting psychological thriller" but while it may be psychological, it's not a thriller and it's not haunting; and according to them it "blends heartfelt domestic drama with disaster movie spectacle", which is again only half right. Fine: Cineworld need to put bums on seats and billing the film as "a bleak psychological character piece ..... that blends heartfelt domestic drama with a man possibly succumbing to delusions and/or an inherited mental condition with the occasional jumpy bit" isn't going to sell them much popcorn and nachos. This certainly isn't a horror film, despite the approaching Apocalypse; it's a character drama focusing on a man's mental disintegration.

Take Shelter stars Michael Shannon as Curtis, an ordinary small-town family guy with a blue-collar job and a loving family: out of nowhere he starts having dreams of an apocalyptic storm. But are they genuine visions of an imminent Armageddon - visions which become more vivid as the film progresses, with people or creatures of some unknown and unseen kind snatching his child away - or merely the early signs of schizophrenia, the same condition that wrecked his mother's life at about the same age? Curtis doesn't want to take any chances and doubles the size of the family's tornado shelter - but what will it cost him (and not just financially)? And are his wife (Jessica Chastain) and his deaf daughter in more danger from him and his obsessions than from this mythical storm, that might just be one of the regular twisters that affect that part of the country? Or is it all in his head?

It's a very low-key movie, it's very believable and it certainly feels like an authentic portrait of that world and those characters, and it has a pleasantly chilling ending that wraps the film up very neatly. I'm also glad that the apocalypse wasn't presented in religious terms. But it's far too long at a scratch over two hours, and it badly needs trimming in the sags between the dramatic peaks. Take Shelter has been critically lauded, perhaps too much (it's not "an American Masterpiece"!) and it won one of the Fipresci Prizes in Cannes from the International Federation Of Film Critics, but while I admired the film in places, I found it a bit of a slog in places. It's definitely overlong, and too downbeat and humourless, but at least partially successful as a drama and the more I think about it the more I like it.

***

10 TO MIDNIGHT

2011-11-30T01:50:00.000+01:00

20 PAST SPOILERS

Probably the best of Charles Bronson's films for the Cannon Group (certainly better than the amusing but silly Murphy's Law and the thoroughly inept Assassination): this is a resolutely sleazy, cheesy and nasty-edged slasher movie-cum-cop thriller with the barest nod towards presenting an intriguing moral and ethical dilemma, but which is really far more interested in a maniac slashing up defenceless young women with plenty of blood and screaming. It's surprisingly tacky for a film that was released at proper cinemas rather than straight to video or onto the drive-in and grindhouse circuits.

And as a title, 10 To Midnight doesn't even mean anything. Bronson is a tough LA homicide cop (again) on the trail of a sadistic maniac knifing women: he and his new partner Andrew Stevens come to suspect calm, smiling Gene Davis not just for the murders but the obscene phone calls directed at the student nurses at the local hospital - and one of the nurses happens to be Bronson's daughter (Lisa Eilbacher). And she just happens to be attracted to Andrew Stevens. But adopting the ethos of "forget what's legal, do what's right" (the tagline and the "moral" of the movie) and snarling the killer line "the way the law protects these maggots, you'd think they were an endangered species", Bronson goes too far. Having decided the case against Evans isn't strong enough, and despite his apparently unbreakable alibi for two of the killings, Bronson plants traces of blood on the maniac's clothes, unaware that Evans is such a psychopath that he commits his crimes in the nude....

At least he does in the original version: releases apparently vary and the TV version loses all the swearing and nudity (and Evans keeps his underpants on every time he kills someone) but the British DVD appears to be the complete cut of the film, with some graphic murder scenes involving naked women that were taken out of the earlier VHS releases of the film by the BBFC. But any nasty edges are smoothed over slightly by the sight of a reputable action star like Charles Bronson, 61 at the time, appearing in what would most likely have been picked up as a video nasty were it not for the presence of a bona fide Hollywood Legend in the lead role. It's not very good, but for sleazy nudity and violence, 10 To Midnight does deliver.

***

Available:

MURPHY'S LAW

2011-11-29T02:20:00.001+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND UNFULFILLED KINKINESS

If you think Charles Bronson, chances are the titles that leap to mind instantly are the Death Wish series, The Great Escape, Once Upon A Time In The West, maybe The Dirty Dozen - his A-list films. Probably less likely to come to mind immediately would be his later B-movies for the Cannon Group, films like Assassination, 10 To Midnight or this very silly cop thriller in which he spends a good chunk of the first hour handcuffed to a woman forty-three years his junior. Sadly, there isn't much in the way of development for their May-December (or more accurately, February-December) relationship: he's 65, she's 22, and frankly it would have been a far more fascinating film if either or both of them had been perfectly happy (or better still, enthusiastic) about the situation. Alternatively, if the ages had been reversed and Justin Timberlake was handcuffed to Angela Lansbury.

Murphy's Law ("if anything can go wrong, it will", a maxim that's actually included in the lyrics of the end title song) isn't to be confused with Jack Murphy's Law: "Don't **** with Jack Murphy!". Jack Murphy (Bronson) is a tough and grizzled homicide cop with a short temper and a fondness for the bottle. His wife has left him, shacked up with a sleazy bar owner and taken up dancing in a strip club; he's trying to arrest a mobster for murder. But then he's arrested for the murder of his wife - all the evidence says he did it - and the only way out is to go on the run. Trouble is, through an absurd set of circumstances he's handcuffed to Kathleen Wilhoite as a punkette car thief with an astonishing talent for creative swearing, so they both have to track the real murderer down....

It all climaxes at the Bradbury Building, probably most famous as the location for the final reels of Blade Runner and, according to GoogleMaps, it's still there. Murphy's Law is boneheaded nonsense with an interesting odd-couple on the trail of a serial killer trying to dodge the police as well as the mob, but it is rather fun with a near-geriatric Bronson paired with street trash Wilhoite snarling out insults like "you snot-licking donkey fart" and "dildo-nose": things which are simultaneously hilariously inventive and tiresomely childish. Bronson's always great, but it isn't really one of his better films (10 To Midnight is trashier, nastier and funnier). Made in 1986.

**

Don't "mess" with Jack Murphy:

DREAM HOUSE

2011-11-27T17:53:00.001+01:00

DETACHED, THREE BEDROOMS, SPOILERS EN SUITE.

There are quite a few things you have to ensure when making a twisty psychological thriller with a supernatural angle. It's not just the performances and production values are up to an acceptable standard, nor that there any any great gaping holes in the narrative or moments when you cheat on your own rules. What's most important is that the audience isn't at least three reels ahead of you. In these post-Sixth Sense days, we know there's going to be a twist and you have to work damned hard to hide it or disguise it - but this new chiller barely bothers to try and as a result the Big Reveal isn't accompanied by a dropped jaw and a gasp of "Blimey!", rather a smug smirk of "Thought so" (or a shrug of "congratulations on catching up, I was here an hour ago"). Admittedly there are a couple of other reveals - one of which doesn't make any sense - but the main plot development is so dazzlingly, blindingly obvious that spotting it is the intellectual equivalent of completing a four-piece jigsaw.

At the start of Dream House, Daniel Craig is a top editor for a major publisher who quits his job to slob about in his new house with wife Rachel Weisz and their two adorable little daughters, and write a novel. But there seems to be someone lurking around outside, the neighbour across the road (Naomi Watts) is initially unfriendly, and a group of local teens are sneaking into his basement because the previous occupants were brutally murdered: apparently the husband shot his wife and two daughters, and was put into a psychiatric hospital. But what really happened that night? Might someone else have committed the crimes? And why?

If you haven't figured out the Big Reveal now (and you haven't seen the trailer, which supposedly gives away everything short of a free pizza and Daniel Craig's phone number), it's really not difficult: exactly how many people interact with Rachel Weisz's character? Figure that out and you're there, leaving the film puffing laboriously on behind. Shyamalan's hide-in-plain-sight trick disguised the character interactions quite neatly but we're wise to the concept now, and Dream House makes no attempt to camouflage the blatantly obvious. The result is a bland, competent but thoroughly uninteresting film with no surprises and no scares (apart from once nicely timed Boo! moment); not just a horror film for people who don't usually watch horror films, but a horror film apparently made by people who've never watched a horror film and don't really know how.

**

LONE WOLF MCQUADE

2011-11-25T11:47:00.048+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

I'm not the world's biggest Chuck Norris fan. I've seen most of his movies from his Golden Age - the 80s and his time with Cannon Films - but I wouldn't really say that any of them were neglected classics in need of rediscovery. Some of them are a touch too flagwaving and jingoistic for my taste - Invasion USA, The Delta Force - while others are entertaining enough but entirely disposable and I've no urge to put any of them on my DVD shelves. Code Of Silence, for example, is a bog-standard cop thriller with a terrific David Michael Frank score and a great villainous turn from Henry Silva, but blows it in the final reels with a silly remote-control robot thing that looks like Robocop via Blake's Seven.

I first saw Lone Wolf McQuade on the bottom half of a double bill with The Terminator at the tiny little Star Centa four-screener in the Swiss Centre just off Leicester Square (recently bulldozed). Rediscovering it twenty-six years later, it now stands as probably Norris' best film: a tough, violent action yarn with Chuck as Jim McQuade, a legendary, no-nonsense Texas Ranger in El Paso up against an arms trafficking ring led by David Carradine, following the inadvertent injury of his daughter (Dana Kimmell, from Friday The 13th Part III) during a massive weapons heist. The only question, since it's carved in stone that the movie's going to end with Norris and Carradine kicking seven bells out of each other at Carradine's desert base, is whose side the widow Parkinson (Barbara Carrera) is on.

Lone Wolf McQuade is infused with, indeed drenched in, the Spaghetti Western spirit, thanks mainly to an overblown Francesco De Masi score that's full of twangy guitars, whistling (by Alessandro Alessandrini), organ, choir and harmonica in the best Morricone tradition, along with the barren desert setting and Norris doing the stolid, impassive hero routine (oddly enough, if you believe the IMDb, the film was originally conceived for Kris Kristofferson). Even the opening credits slide onto the screen in that instantly recognisable Spaghetti Western typeface! There's also the sight of the "Eastwood Hospital" although that's probably real since it's mentioned in the acknowledgements in the end credits (although GoogleMaps suggests there's currently no hospital of that name in El Paso).

It's generally an enjoyable, silly, violent B-movie with equal parts martial arts and gunfire and explosions and, it being former world karate champion Norris squaring off with the great David Carradine (no slouch at the fight sequences), the martial arts stuff is pretty good. In fact much of the action footage is well handled: it's an efficient piece of work that's well shot and mostly well put together (although it is perhaps absurd that McQuade leaves a vital witness in the care of his retired buddy and an inexperienced deputy to go home and suddenly start having sex with Barbara Carrera - shouldn't he really have more important things to be getting on with?). A fun couple of hours and probably Chuck Norris' best film: not a classic but definitely worth a rental.

****

Chuckles:

FEAR CITY

2011-11-24T21:37:00.022+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SLEAZE

Funny old cove, Abel Ferrara. The director and star of one of the most notorious titles on the Video Nasties list (The Driller Killer), alternating commercial projects with personal, micro-budget, rough-edged films. In truth I'm not a big fan of his more famous films: I've never liked The Driller Killer or Bad Lieutenant, and the arty vampire number The Addiction nearly put me to sleep, but I enjoyed the more commercial King Of New York and Body Snatchers (although in both cases it's a long time since I saw them).

And I liked Fear City a lot: it's a hymn to the neon-soaked world of hookers and strip clubs and porn cinemas of New York's Times Square, while it was still a stinking cesspit of vice and degeneracy and before it was wiped clean and turned into something that GoogleMaps Streetview makes me never want to go anywhere near. (But if I had a Tardis, this is when and where I'd go.) That now-lost urban nightscape is brilliantly brought to life here: part unwavering gaze into hell, part slasher movie in which a mad killer is attacking the strippers provided by the "Starlite Talent Agency" run by former boxer Tom Berenger and old friend Jack Scalia. Who will he target next - Rae Dawn Chong, Maria Conchita (Alonso), or Melanie Griffith, who happens to be Berenger's on-off girlfriend and is trying to kick a drugs habit?

Fear City has a terrific cast - there's also Rossano Brazzi as a mafia boss and Billy Dee Williams as the cop on the case - and a sense of authenticity in its feel for the streets and the clubs, and the lowlifes who live and work there. It's a 42nd Street grindhouse movie set and shot on 42nd Street, and as a document of a bulldozed cultural phenomenon it's fascinating. As a slasher movie, though, it's less successful: the maniac is never identified (the actor isn't even credited) and he's given no reason no carve up strippers beyond being a homicidal maniac. He has no depth, he has no character, he doesn't even have any interaction with the other characters except when he's killing them.

Probably the film's trump is that there's plenty of nudity and violence - far more than on the old video release, which was a TV edit that dropped most of the contentious stuff, and was then cut further by the BBFC before being given an 18. Most if not all of that has been included in the new version, including Melanie Griffith's toplessness, lots of other striptease and lapdance nudity, and the use of chainsticks which the BBFC were perhaps unnecessarily strict on at the time. I've never seen the cut version, but I can only envisage it as a frustrating experience that failed to deliver the grubby goods. This edit is squalid, grimy, sordid and seedy entertainment and probably my favourite of Ferrara's films.

But where is he now? Despite several well-regarded movies on his CV, including King Of New York and the original Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara's later work hasn't had a theatrical release in the UK since 1997's uninteresting The Blackout: the IMDb makes New Rose Hotel (a SF drama with Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento) and Mary (a religion-themed drama with Matthew Modine, Juliette Binoche and Forest Whitaker) sound fascinating, but no-one appears to want to release them in the UK. Pity.

****

Live Girls Here:

THE ROOKIE

2011-11-20T23:57:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS ****ING SPOILERS

Rewatching this distinctly minor Eastwood action movie for the first time since seeing it sometime in early 1991 at the now-defunct Cannon Portsmouth, it's a film that falls right in the middle. On the one hand it's a monumentally silly and implausible cop thriller that's riddled through with rotten dialogue and plot holes; but on the other hand it's a monumentally silly and implausible cop thriller that's been given a level of A-list treatment that it really doesn't deserve in terms of production values, photography and direction. It certainly isn't one of Eastwood's finest films, but as a dunderheaded action flick it is rather good fun.

Charlie Sheen is The Rookie: shiny new partner to grizzled, cynical, hardbitten veteran Eastwood in the LAPD's auto theft division; up against a gang of car thieves led by Raul Julia and Sonia Braga (he's Puerto Rican, she's Brazilian, and they've been cast as Germans for who knows what kind of reason). They specialise in trafficking stolen luxury cars, and more importantly they killed Eastwood's former partner. Sheen's inexperienced dilettante is precisely what the job doesn't require. And when Eastwood is taken hostage by the unintentionally hilarious villains, Sheen has to man up and find him....

"This isn't just a job, it's a ****ing adventure!" bellows their captain for no good reason, as idiocy piles upon idiocy. There's no two ways about it - hell, there's no one way about it: The Rookie is stupid beyond the mere confines of Earth and is genuinely stupid on a cosmic level. An example: in order to track down Eastwood's captors, Sheen sets fire to a bar, yet mysteriously he isn't prosecuted for arson! It's also notable for a frankly unaccountable sequence in which Eastwood's character, tied to a chair, is raped by Sonia Braga's character.

If it wasn't for some well-executed action sequences and car stunt action (particularly an early chase involving a transporter full of cars), the movie would be a total disaster instead of merely a mess. Certainly it's very nicely shot and put together - it has that late seventies look to it and could in places pass for Dirty Harry 6 - and Clint is obviously having fun with it, but good as he is, this is strictly routine and rather more sweary than usual. Enjoyable in parts, but very minor fare. (Watched on BluRay.)

***

Brrrrm brrrrm:

NAVY SEALS

2011-11-20T15:00:00.002+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS. DOES NOT CONTAIN SEALS.

Although things would have been improved substantially if they'd included a few scenes of people throwing fish at Charlie Sheen. Made in the days when Sheen Jr was a decent enough action lead instead of an unemployable basket case (this came just after Clint Eastwood's The Rookie), this is another ridiculous, overly jingoistic boom-bang movie in which the brightest and best of the US military kick Middle East terrorist ass in the name of freedom and democracy, blow things up and shoot everyone in sight. Hurrah! It's incredible to think Hollywood ever made movies so idiotically simplistic.

The Navy Seals are actually the Navy SEALs: the SEa, Air and Land special operations teams of the US Navy. Michael Biehn's squad (which includes Bill Paxton and Charlie Sheen) are assigned to rescue a helicopter crew captured by terrorists: during the mission Sheen finds a hoard of weaponry including Stinger missiles but there is no real opportunity to do anything about them. Subsequent attempts to relocate the missiles, now known to be in the possession of extremists, initially prove humiliatingly fruitless but information provided by half-Lebanese journalist Joanne Whalley-Kilmer eventually leads them to Beirut....

In fairness to the film, the action sequences are perfectly well executed and put together with some decent stunt work and an impressive car chase towards the end. Lewis Teague knows how to make solid, no-nonsense B-movies (Cujo, Wedlock, Cat's Eye, Alligator), and even had a shot at the big time with The Jewel Of The Nile; it's a pity he's been absent from our cinema screens for such a long time. But Navy SEALs is thuddingly crass and predictable: as soon as one of the team is set to be married you know - you absolutely KNOW - he's not going to make it to the end of the film, just as you absolutely KNOW Charlie Sheen will eventually control his wild and crazy adrenaline rush attitude.

Backed by thumping rock ballads and a Sylvester Levay synth score that sounds exactly like Top Gun, it's efficiently made, but it is badly written, overly and overtly flagwaving and ultimately annoying. Matters aren't helped by the poor picture quality of the DVD, which looks one step up from a VHS tape and is in the wrong ratio. I don't recall caring for it very much in 1991 when it quite unaccountably got a UK theatrical release, and I still don't care for it.

**

Bang Bang:

JUSTICE

2011-11-19T11:54:00.001+01:00

MEHHHHH. CONTAINS SPOILERS.

"Meh" is a modern made-up onomatopoeic word which UrbanDictionary suggests acts as a general non-response to any question or statement, signifying indifference to the point of not being bothered enough to form actual words. To be honest, in the case of this Nicolas Cage action thriller the so-called word "meh" is pushing it, as indeed is "huh", "mmmm" and "tch", but I can't find the letter combination for the sound of someone repeatedly punching themselves in the eye, which is frankly the best response.

Justice (originally known as Seeking Justice) has Cage as an ordinary English teacher at a New Orleans high school, whose musician wife (January Jones) is attacked and raped. While at the hospital he's approached by Guy Pearce who tells him that in return for a small, unspecified favour at some time in the future, he can arrange for the rapist to be dealt with - a deal which he unwisely agrees to only to find that the favour is actually to murder a man he's told is a child pornographer. But it's not long before things unravel and Cage finds himself trapped in a city-wide vigilante conspiracy that will protect itself just as efficiently as it washes the human scum off the streets....

The big mystery isn't how a reputable director like Roger Donaldson has been reduced to this morally confused and illogical twaddle; it's what on Earth it's doing in cinemas when its natural home is the £1.50 per night rental racks in corner shops and off-licences. There's a rather nifty action and foot-chase sequence in heavy traffic, but it's sadly undone by some of it being shot with cheap digital equipment with noticeably poorer picture quality, and the film's conclusion sadly degenerates into people emptying guns at each other. And Nicolas Cage can usually be relied upon to flip out and go entertainingly berserk, but he doesn't even afford us the pleasure of a "Not The Bees!!!!!" moment this time out. All in all it's not worth the effort.

*

TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN PART 1

2011-11-18T21:04:00.052+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS. SOB SOB SNIFFLE.

Maybe it's a bit too late to still hold out hope for a franchise to radically improve once it reaches Part 4. It was always a safe bet that the Police Academy series wasn't going to suddenly turn great itself once it got to Citizens On Patrol, and if you didn't like the first three Friday The 13ths then The Final Chapter wasn't going to change your mind. So it is with The Twilight Saga: if you couldn't rack up any enthusiasm for the ludicrously overlong tale of a soulful vampire and an easily annoyed werewolf as they competed for the affections of a miserable teenage schoolgirl, it's not going to suddenly transform into gripping and compelling drama. Similarly, if you are a fan of the series, this entry probably won't disappoint.

The problem with this latest episode - the fourth of five - is not that it's more of the same, although it certainly is more of the same. The last one finished with a soap opera end of season cliffhanger as Edward (Robert Pattinson, dull) suddenly proposed to Bella (Kristen Stewart, wet), and Breaking Dawn: Part 1 kicks off with Jacob (Taylor Lautner, sculpted) ripping his shirt off and disappearing into the woods when he receives his invitation to the wedding. After the ceremony, which appears to have been performed on the forest moon of Endor, Edward and Bella jet off for an idyllic honeymoon on a private island off the Brazilian coast, where everything is perfect - the light, the weather, the ocean, the moonlight. And they finally Get Their End Away.

Such bliss, inevitably, can't last, as Bella falls pregnant. Trouble is, of course, she's human, the father's a vampire, and the embryo is some kind of inbetween thing that we're now told will kill Bella. Flown hurriedly back to the Cullen house and the extended clan, Bella is now gaunt and grey, heavily pregnant far quicker than is natural, and frankly looks like some kind of drug addict: Edward mopes around unable to help, and Jacob keeps changing his mind as to whether he wants to kill Edward, protect Bella, save the baby or return to his tribe. And there may be only one way that she can be saved....

No, it's not that Breaking Dawn Part 1 is more of the same, it's that it's far too much of the same. Even though it's the shortest of the four so far, it's still just under two hours and could really do with serious trimming. (I was actually wondering whether the first three could be hacked down and distilled into one fairly eventful 100-minute feature rather than spread over more than six hours.) I've nothing against substantial running times: the best movies find their own optimum lengths, and a three-hour Carry On Cowboy would be just as wrong as an 80-minute Apocalypse Now. The thing is, these characters simply aren't interesting enough, and don't really do enough, to warrant such a running time not just over this film but the whole of the saga so far.

Lautner gets to do his looking angry, looking sulky and looking besotted (he only takes his shirt off once this time, though); Pattinson spends the bulk of the post-honeymoon section looking miserable and helpless, and Stewart is again so drippy and miserable you can't work out why both the hunky blokes are so obsessed with her. Honestly, she is so wet you could wring her out like a chamois leather. (In addition, she's alarmingly skinny.) The only light relief comes from Michael Sheen camping it up as King Of The Vampires - and he only turns up in an extra bit (between the static credits for director, writer, producers etc, and the final end crawl) which is really a teaser for next year's Breaking Dawn: Part 2. And this movie could really use him to liven things up because it really isn't any fun.

Aside from the autumnal look - everything looks like a commercial for either Timotei shampoo or Flake bars - there's really not a lot I like about the film. Bits of it are silly, there are a lot of dreary guitar dirges on the soundtrack, and much of it is dull: far too much time is spent with what to the adult male mind is more blubbery schoolgirl mush rather than anything dramatic. Again, as with the previous three movies - Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse - I suspect a significant part of my lack of enthusiasm may lie precisely in my not being a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, and not being a member of either Team Edward or Jacob (or indeed Team Bella). If it's not aimed at me, it's hardly surprising that I don't respond to it as much as the core demographic doubtless will. But it's still annoying that I don't get very much out of it.

**

JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN

2011-11-17T21:02:00.001+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS

With one small but significant caveat, I have absolutely no problems with spoofing James Bond. Some of the Roger Moore Bond films are Bond pastiches anyway: Moonraker is entertaining nonsense but has nothing to do with espionage, coherent plot construction, plausibility or even James Bond (and in any case no film with a pigeon doing a double-take or a comedy Thatcher impression, as in the case of For Your Eyes Only, has any right to be taken seriously). The small but significant caveat, however, is that they're funny, so this discounts the three Austin Powers movies, which ran out of steam less than one reel into the first film, and the second was so tediously vulgar I seriously considered demanding my money back (I see from the IMDb that Austin Powers 4 has been announced, in a decision which has to be financial because it sure as hell isn't creative).

Far more successful was 2003's Johnny English, a generally enjoyable Bond spoof (it was even co-written by two of the regular Bond screenwriters) in which Rowan Atkinson recreated his character from a series of Barclaycard adverts: according to the IMDb page it cost $35 million and took $129 million. Eight years on we have Johnny English Reborn and it really is a case of more of the same: English (Atkinson) has retired to seek enlightenment in a Tibetan monastery after an assignment in Mozambique went disastrously wrong. But MI7 desperately need him back as they learn that a mysterious organisation called Vortex is planning to assassinate the Chinese Premier at a forthcoming summit meeting. They have just one lead: a CIA agent in Macau. Can English unmask the members of the organisation and foil their scheme? It's clearly not giving anything away to say "yes, he can".

And like the first one, it's pretty good (in fact it's probably a shade better than the original) although it isn't great. it's Much of the movie's success is down to Rowan Atkinson's comedic abilities, both physical and verbal. In the case of the physical slapstick comedy I'm usually less taken with him - I loathe and detest Mr Bean and won't watch it, although it's the Bean character than annoys me rather than Atkinson - but there is plenty of verbal as well. The weakest sequence is probably the motorised wheelchair chase which really isn't funny or exciting enough.

But it's engagingly silly with a surprisingly strong cast including Gillian Anderson, Dominic West, Rosamund Pike (who was actually in Die Another Day and was one of the best things about that overblown mess), Richard Schiff, Tim McInnerny and Burn Gorman. None of the original cast appear to have returned although I thought I glimpsed Ben Miller as a children's entertainer - the IMDb doesn't list him or the character. Pierce Brosnan was rumoured to be in it, but isn't (possibly linked to the role played by Dominic West?), which is probably just as well as it would probably have punched up the Bond connection too much. In any case the Ilan Eshkeri score not only adapts the theme from the first Johnny English but is clearly emulating the David Arnold sound of the Brosnan and Craig eras.

While there are bits that don't entirely come off, it works perfectly well as a whole and it easily passes Mark Kermode's Six-Laugh Test Of Comedy (although six laughs in a 101-minute film is about one laugh every seventeen minutes which is an absurdly low batting average outside of the world of ITV sitcoms). I know we're all supposed to be sniffy and snobby about the Johnny English movies as though they're really not the kind of movies we should be making. But why? I can't be snobby and sniffy about it: I enjoyed it and I laughed. Stay through the end credits for a clever extra bit.

***

EXTREME PREJUDICE

2011-11-14T15:09:00.118+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

An absolute apocalypse of testosterone and rugged manliness in which two hulking great Alpha Males swagger and snarl and wave their massive manly balls at each other for breeding rights over the sole significant woman in the Tex-Mex district (there might be a secretary with a couple of lines or something, but that's pretty much all there is in the way of any other female interest), while a pride of other hairy-balled Men prepare to prepare to terminate either, both, themselves or anyone and everyone. Reeking of sweaty machismo from start to finish, it's probably one of the most masculine films ever made.

Nick Nolte is the rock hard and incorruptible Texas Ranger - Robocop but less willing to show any kind of emotion - is a small town not far from the Mexican border; just the other side is his one-time friend Powers Boothe, now a big league drugs baron and legally untouchable so long as he stays out of the USA. Between them is not just the black and white of good and evil but the affections of Maria Conchita Alonso: Nolte's current girlfriend but, significantly, Boothe's ex. Into town comes a team of ex-military Special Ops badasses led by Michael Ironside (sending the machismometer into the danger levels), with orders to rob the local bank and remove the contents of Boothe's safety deposit box along with the cash. Things don't go exactly as planned.... For the final reels everyone treks down to Mexico, armed to the eyebrows with bigass firearms: Ironside and his squad to take down Boothe and his men, and Nolte to take back Alonso....

Walter Hill's Extreme Prejudice is, in its action sequences, phenomenally violent, particularly the climactic massacre where pretty much everyone's shooting at pretty much everyone. I'm not sure whether it manages to top the final reels of The Wild Bunch but it's certainly one of the most bullet-strewn final sequences we'd seen prior to the glory days of John Woo. Seeing it again the other night for the first time in maybe 20 years, I think I enjoyed it more this time around: certainly I always liked the Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack (I have the CD: performed by the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra, augmented with synths and big echoey 80s drums) but I don't recall having so much fun with the overly macho characters or dialogue.

Maybe that's a sign of the times: we're used to action movies being a little fluffier and softer these days, restrained to a 15 or even a 12A level rather than a blood-soaked 18, and perhaps the aggressive manliness feels overblown. We could take the Rambo movies at face value at the time but now - as witness the atrocious fourth Rambo movie - such characterisation feel more like a parody. The same went for Road House which I've also rewatched recently, and that's even more macho and crunchily violent: it feels absurd now. That's not to say any of those 80s movies aren't fun, and it's certainly not to suggest that Extreme Prejudice isn't a good movie: it is, but to some extent it's a product of its time.

Still, I had more fun and more visceral thrills with it than many, many modern action movies that consistently fail to reach those standards. The action sequences are properly edited, so you exactly who's where, and not hacked into a thousand subliminal pieces that flash past your eyes like a strobe; and the blood is done properly with squibs rather than cartoonish CGI blobs painted on in post-production. Well worth watching, and well worth rewatching.

****

When men were men, and women were glad of it:

THE RUM DIARY

2011-11-13T12:10:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS *HIC* SPOILERS *HIC*. I LOVE YOU. *HIC*

I'd like to say hopes were high for this, the first Bruce Robinson film in 19 years (after the okay serial killer movie Jennifer 8) and a return to Hunter S Thompson territory for Johnny Depp. But really, hopes weren't that high. Bruce Robinson's most famous and most acclaimed film, Withnail And I, was a film that completely failed to resonate with me at all: quite inexplicably, I am absolutely unique in this and every other person on the planet adores the film to pieces. And I know I'm also pretty much alone in this but I didn't care for Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas very much either: maybe I'm just too old for that sort of thing. So putting the key ingredients of Withnail And I and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas together in the same movie was probably not a recipe that was going to work particularly well for me.

And really, it doesn't. Sozzled struggling novelist Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) arrives in Puerto Rico in 1960, starting off writing the astrology column and reporting from the numerous bowling alleys for the San Juan Star, but it's not long before he's sucked into the orbit of "PR consultant" Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart) and his shady cabal of property developers and insane rednecks planning to desecrate the untouched island paradise with hotels - and Sanderson's free-spirited girlfriend Chenault (Amber Heard).

There's an entirely irrelevant drugs sequence where Depp sees his fellow imbiber's tongue undulate across the room towards him courtesy of some dodgy CGI, there's an even more hopelessly raddled journalist (Giovanni Ribisi) on the staff, there's a vast quantity of rum consumed. Sadly, despite (or perhaps because of) the phenomenal amount of drinking involved, The Rum Diary doesn't really amount to anything. It's not a thriller because there are no thrills; it's not a comedy because, apart from a few nice turns of phrase, it isn't funny; it's not a crime movie because there's no sense of law and order and ultimately no justice. What it is, is a character piece about a character who isn't really very interesting. It feels like they were more interested in having the lead character develop his own voice and conscience than telling a fulfilling story in its own right, by simply putting him up against utterly evil bastards that are the easiest of targets: millionaire property developers, tax dodgers, nuke-happy lunatics.

It's not without pleasures: I liked the period detail (at least, nothing leapt off the screen at me as wrong), there were several neat lines of dialogue and nicely colourful characters, Johnny Depp's quite fun and Amber Heard takes her clothes off. But it's an unsatisfying and uninvolving film: I just left wishing more had happened.

**

IMMORTALS

2011-11-12T02:30:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Eh? Wasn't Clash Of The Titans enough of a stinker? Apparently not - and that's before we get the frankly unnecessary sequel in March 2012 - as this is basically treading the same territory, but far better shot and soaked in the comic-book visual flavour of Zack Snyder's 300: everything's bronze and metallic-looking, it's CGI'd to destruction and it frequently cuts to slow-motion action shots of muscular men in leather and skirts battling with swords and pikes. But while 300 got away with its oddly enjoyable mixture of Triumph Of The Will and gay fetish imagery, Clash Of The Titans was mainly dull and uninteresting (and incidentally not a patch on an already average original), and fusing the two together has produced nearly two hours of arrant nonsense, undeniably with a nice visual flair but which really doesn't work at all as either a drama or a dumb popcorn spectacular.

The Immortals aren't just the Greek gods on Mount Olympus, watching over mankind but bound not to interfere (rather in the manner of the Time Lords), but potentially any man who fights for the right things with enough passion and courage with no thought for himself. It's the 12th Century BC and evil King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke, overdoing it) seeks the legendary Epirus Bow with which he can free the Titans from underneath Mount Tartarus and bring down the Gods. Peasant Theseus (Henry Cavill), coached throughout his life by Zeus himself in human form (John Hurt), is driven to seek revenge against Hyperion for the murder of his mother and the destruction of his village. He is aided by Phaedra the Oracle (Frieda Pinto), whose visions could also reveal the location of the Epirus Bow to Hyperion.....

And so on. It's all absolute cobblers, it's too long, it's dull and it doesn't make sense. We don't find out how Zeus can repeatedly lay down the "no interference" law when he himself has been training Theseus from childhood. Nor is it satisfactorily explained why the Gods bothered to chain the Titans up for centuries in a giant box under a mountain (rather than wiping them out when they had the chance), or why they left the Ultimate Weapon lying around where pretty much anyone could find it by chance. That's because Tarsem Singh Dhandwar isn't that interested in plot or performance or character: he's only concerned with the visual look of it and pretty much every scene looks like it's meant to advertise exotic perfumes or expensive chocolates. He's very good at striking images, such as the unreal worlds of The Cell or the fantasy landscapes of The Fall, but not so hot on story and characters, so outside of the pretty visuals there's nothing interesting about Immortals at all. The look is more important that anything else.

More damagingly, it isn't any fun. It's certainly violent in its battle sequences and CGI monster fights (18 seconds was trimmed to avoid an 18 certificate) but no matter how many punches to the face and spears through the heart, it doesn't mean anything. Most of what you're looking at is just pixels on a hard-drive anyway so there's little sense of jeopardy as you never believe any of this is anywhere near real. I haven't seen the 3D version as it was shot in 2D and converted in post-production; the 2D is dull enough, frankly. Perhaps it's an odd decision to release a movie about the imminent extermination of Ancient Greece while the economy of the real Modern Greece continues to disintegrate; as it happens, watching the news coverage of the financial meltdown in the Eurozone is far more compelling.

**

DAWN OF THE DEAD

2011-11-10T13:15:00.001+01:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS, BUT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT BY NOW....

When there's no more room in hell.....It's almost impossible to start even trying to describe what I love about this film: one of the very greatest films ever made and one of the few films that I never tire of watching in any of its various cuts (of which more later). Perhaps because it's not really about the zombies, it's about us, the living. Perhaps it's the idea of abandoning all personal, fiscal and social responsibilities in a playground world where everything's there for the taking - I love empty world and apocalypse movies, and Charlton Heston's The Omega Man is a personal favourite. Perhaps it's the familiarity of the location - we've all been in shopping malls. Or perhaps it's just the idea of unstoppable armies of the living dead walking the earth forever.

Everyone knows the basic setup of Dawn Of The Dead: in a world struggling to cope with the sudden and unexplained return to life of the freshly dead, four survivors flee the infested city and hole up, at least temporarily, in an out-of-town shopping mall where the mindless dead are a little more thinly spread. All they need to do is to clear the inside of the building and seal off the main entrances, and the mall provides pretty much everything that they need: the water and power is still connected, the supermarkets are full of food (including tinned and frozen) as well as clothing, weaponry and tools. Initially it's idyllic, but ultimately the walking dead bumbling around outside aren't the only problem - the remains of the living want a piece of paradise as well.

The opening, detailing the "story so far" as seen through the chaos of a TV news studio degenerating into yelling and childish squabbling, doesn't ease the viewer gently into the apocalypse; rather it starts at full throttle with the collapse of society already underway and no-one listening to the experts whose rational, logical approach goes against all our ideas of social and human dignity. And then not just maintains that pace but increases it with an action sequence as the National Guard storm a tenement block. It really is a film that doesn't let up for its first act at all. While it does eventually allow the audience to get their breath half way through, with the dead pretty much reduced to comedic relief as they fall up and down escalators and into ornamental fountains (they're still a threat, but a manageable one), it is only a brief respite before the real danger shows up in the shape of Tom Savini's anarchist biker gang.

Dawn Of The Dead was the second film I ever saw at the mighty Scala Cinema in Kings Cross: the first was Night Of The Living Dead with which it was playing one afternoon in late December 1986. At that point the VHS video version had been withdrawn as it wasn't certificated under the Video Recordings Act, and it would be another three years before it would be resubmitted to the BBFC (and was then cut, albeit by just a few seconds). At some point I'd obtained a fourth or fifth-generation copy of the full version but it wasn't until 2003 that the film was released with that gorgeous BBFC phrase "All previous cuts waived".

Much of Dawn Of The Dead is fantastically gory, thanks to Tom Savini's make-up and prosthetic effects, with liberal use of blood squibs, bites, machetes, dismemberment and one full-on disemboweling; given the sheer amount of gore it's astonishing that the BBFC didn't completely butcher the film (their site gives the final running time of the original cinema release at 125 minutes). Such moments as the "screwdriver in the ear" and "zombie walking under helicopter blades" are one-off splatter gags but the bulk of the horror is that of the siege: trapped against genuinely overwhelming odds not just by the shambling dead but by other survivors who are even more dangerous.

I tend to alternate between the different cuts of the film: the "director's cut/US theatrical version" which is the standard release version, the "Extended Version" which is 12 minutes longer, and the "European Version". This last edit was the one I watched a few nights ago and even though it's been edited by Dario Argento, it's my least preferred version. Part of the problem is, incredibly, the Goblin score. Whereas the Romero seamlessly mixes those Goblin tracks with an assortment of cues from the De Wolfe music library, the European cut simply needledrops the same pieces over and over again. Given how Argento and Goblin have performed so well together in Argento's own films, it's surprising how the soundtrack doesn't work here. The other problem, I guess, is merely familiarity with the Romero version, so you miss the bits that have been taken out and are surprised by the inclusion of the odd extra shot or line of dialogue.

As part of Romero's presumably ongoing Dead series (six to date), it's probably eclipsed by Day Of The Dead which I think is probably a better film - the writing, acting, effects and claustrophobic setting are all more powerful - yet I still enjoy Dawn a lot more. I've never been a massive fan of the original Night, although I haven't seen it in a long time now, and while the long-awaited fourth film Land Of The Dead was fun, its canvas was too wide. Night, Dawn and Day all concentrate on a small group of people in a confined space, while Land expanded its gaze to a larger cast in a city and the countryside beyond, thus losing focus.

Diary Of The Dead was an interesting entry adopting the "found footage" technique: a stylistic change which fell into the trap that most of the FF films have of keeping its characters pointlessly filming themselves rather than abandoning the cameras and running away from the flesh-eating zombies, and his most recent, Survival Of The Dead, was frankly pretty underwhelming apart from a few amusing moments. It says something, I guess, that I bought the DVD of Survival a few years ago and it's still in its shrinkwrap. Mention should also be made of the Zack Snyder remake from 2004. Which is fine. Since Romero's film is one of my all-time favourites, and the majority of modern remakes have tended to suck somewhere between massively and completely, the bar was incredibly high for Snyder but I actually ended up enjoying his take on it as a gory and entertaining popcorn zombie movie.

But it's just not in the same league as George A Romero's original: one of the highpoints of genre cinema one of my favourite films ever (along, for context, with Aliens and Blade Runner). I never get bored with Dawn and while I wouldn't go so far as to name my (nonexistent) children Peter, Steven, Roger and Fran or get tattoos of the film's logo or imagery, it's probably the only film where it will be stipulated in my will that the DVDs are cremated with me. While Goblin's remorseless "L'Alba Dei Morti Viventi" plays.

*****

When there's no more room in hell....

TOWER HEIST

2011-11-07T20:47:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

It's mystifying sometimes how the universe decides which directors are particularly worthy of scorn. Uwe Boll is the obvious one, hated as if he set fire to everyone's dog when in truth he's no better or worse than a hundred other low-budget hacks, and dodgy as some of his work might be (I still refuse to acknowledge there's a single redeeming feature in Postal), he's not down there with Michael Bay, who comes up with films consistently more tedious than Boll's but at a hundred times the cost. Brett Ratner is also high on the list of Directors You Should Hate, and again for no massively good reason. Some don't see his third X-Men movie in the same blinding glory as the first two Bryan Singer films, but personally I don't see much difference: they're all bloated, overlong and humourless orgies of CGI and uninteresting characters. Yes, Ratner's Red Dragon isn't a patch on Michael Mann's Manhunter, from the same original source novel, but it's okay.

Granted, he's also given us four more Chris Tucker movies than we really needed or even wanted: Money Talks and the three Rush Hour films. In truth I rather enjoyed the Rush Hours when the peerless Jackie Chan was doing his knockabout stuff although Chris Tucker is a spectacularly irritating screen presence and you really want someone to hit him (the only time he's been correctly cast is as a jabbering idiot in The Fifth Element). Like all those movies, Tower Heist is glossy, empty, stuffed with reputable names and, possibly since Chris Tucker isn't in it, rather good fun. The staff at an exclusive luxury high-rise in the middle of New York discover their pension funds have been stolen by multi-billionaire Alan Alda, and led by building manager Ben Stiller, they decide to rob his penthouse to get their money back when it looks like Alda is going to walk free.

How they manage to achieve all this is basically Mission: Impossible (right down to the catchy score, which sounds like it's going to burst into either the M:I theme tune or The Taking Of Pelham 123 at any moment) involving messing about in lift shafts, blocking off security cameras and dangling out of top-floor windows, and once it gets going it's far more entertaining than it had any right to be. I still don't much care for Ben Stiller as a leading man, and you might raise an eyebrow at the fact that the only two roles for black actors are the large woman (Gabourey Sidibe) and the petty crook (Eddie Murphy). Elsewhere, Tea Leoni is the Federal Agent in charge, Matthew Broderick is a guy about to be evicted, and Casey Affleck is the new building manager.

It's good fun, and in an era of Occupy Wall Street and insane amounts of personal wealth held by investment bankers, rather timely. It's not a great film: it won't be troubling most Best Of 2011 lists or Academy votes, but as Friday night multiplex fare it's perfectly alright, with generally likable characters and some nicely amusing moments. Bottom line is I really enjoyed it, and it's certainly the best thing we've seen from Ratner so far.

****

COBRA

2011-11-06T23:13:00.000+01:00

SPOILERS ARE A DISEASE AND I'M THE CURE

As far as demented cop action films go, this senseless Cannon extravaganza from 1986 goes quite a long way. It's probably not as crazy as some of the Italian or Hong Kong ones, but its relentless combination of thudding violence and ridiculous levels of destruction ensure that it's still pretty wild. Sadly, in these wishy-washy liberal times, maverick cops who don't follow the rules and mow down allcomers with submachine guns aren't anything like the box-office draw they were a mere 25 years ago - and even then there wouldn't have been a police department anywhere in the real-life civilised world that would employ Marion Cobretti, a cop who doesn't just make Dirty Harry look like a flower arranger, but makes Genghis Khan look like My Little Pony.

In Cobra, a small cabal of anarchistic nutjobs periodically gather in a disused swimming pool to clank axes above their heads prior to bringing about the New World Order or something (the specifics are never made clear); the principal nutjob is the otherwise unnamed Night Slasher, a hulking homicidal maniac murdering random women in the street. (How this is supposed to overthrow the existing democratic administration is also never explained.) One of his attacks is witnessed by model Ingrid (Brigitte Nielsen), at which point this fearsome killing machine turns into a blundering incompetent who has several golden opportunities to silence her and fails at all of them. Brought off the LAPD's "Zombie Squad", the guys who do the jobs no-one else wants, Lt Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone) gets assigned to guard Ingrid as well as effectively use her as bait to catch the maniac.

It's frankly a mystery why Ingrid continues to stick with Cobretti after an undeniably spectacular car chase in which both of them are almost killed (which wouldn't have been necessary in the first place if The Night Slasher hadn't suddenly forgotten everything he'd ever learned about being a successful serial killer). Nor is it revealed why the best way of killing a woman at a motel is to bring in a 40-strong gang of homicidal gun-toting bikers and reduce the place to a smouldering, bullet-ridden wreck, when one person could simply shoot or even poison her and the cops guarding her: job done quickly, efficiently and quietly, and there's really no need to blow anything up. For what is essentially an exercise in damage limitation for the weirdo axe-clanking cult, there's a stupendous amount of further damage being created. But that's not how things work in the Cannon Universe.

And matters aren't helped by Cobretti's persona: Stallone's voice sounds slowed down in the way that Alvin And The Chipmunks are sped up, he spends way too much time playing with his arsenal of handguns, machine pistols and grenades (I don't believe any of it is standard LAPD issue) and appears to have at least as much of an issue with cops and authority as the nutters do - he's particularly angered by the wet liberal by-the-book cop Andrew Robinson (injokingly cast from his role as maniac Scorpio in the original Dirty Harry). It's a mystery what Ingrid sees in the man, and Brigitte Nielsen frankly isn't the actress to make us understand their budding romance. And Stallone isn't the screenwriter to bring it to life.

And he isn't the right actor for the smart one-liners either (when another maniac threatens to blow up a supermarket, Cobretti's neat response is "Go ahead, I don't shop here anyway"), which need to be delivered by a more personable character. But here he's such a difficult guy to empathise with or warm to that there's little left to respond to but the violence and action sequences. Still, those action sequences are undeniably well done, particularly the car chase (in which two fuel tankers are blown up) and the motel shootout, and Cobretti is such a laughable LAPD officer the movie ends up as stupidly entertaining.

Cobra is a pretty average film, all told: it's a dumb and needlessly violent movie, and it reeks of the 80s with the tight jeans and thumpy synth/rock score. But it's still rather disreputable entertainment and I admit enjoyed revisiting it (I'd forgotten great chunks of it). Maybe nostalgia plays a part in it: I don't remember caring for it much back in 86 but it seems rather more watchable now. Stallone's done a lot better - Tango & Cash is a terrific lunkheaded 80s cop movie - but this is worth a rewatch.

***

Disease, cure:

THE DELTA FORCE

2011-11-06T12:22:00.000+01:00

I CAN REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WAS SPOILERS

Back in the 1980s, Cannon absolutely ruled. Not only did they own a chain of British cinemas (including what are now the Cineworld Haymarket and Odeon Panton Street, and what WAS my local, the magnificent Granada Bedford, which was promptly bulldozed and eventually turned into a Lidl), but they were the specialists in action movies. Sure they produced and distributed art movies and foreign smut, and occasionally had a go at A-list Oscar bait (such as Runaway Train), but they will forever be associated with dumb B-movie actioners, frequently with Charles Bronson or Chuck Norris and invariably of the might-is-right, shoot-first variety, managing to make Dirty Harry look like a social worker.

The Golan half of Cannon's Golan-Globus - Menahem Golan - wasn't just the boss but he also wrote and directed as well (much as I loathe musicals, I really want to see The Apple), including this spectacular flag-waving nonsense in which filthy terrorist scum (led by Robert Forster with a standard issue Bastard Moustache and a shirt so red it hurts to look at it) hijack an American flight and redirect it to Beirut. Before they've issued any demands or terms of negotiation, Forster and his cohorts in the New World Revolution spirit away all the Jewish passengers (bafflingly including George Kennedy as a Catholic priest named Father O'Malley) to a secret dungeon. The Americans respond by sending in The Delta Force: their top commando badass squad led by Lee Marvin (in his last film appearance) and Chuck Norris, who'd retired from the Delta Force but literally turns up at the departure briefing on the off-chance he can tag along.

The first half of the movie is basically an Airport movie (hell, it's got George Kennedy in it) with name actors including Martin Balsam and Shelley Winters among the passengers; the second half is basically Team America: World Police as Chuck Norris and the Delta Force kill all the bad guys with awesome amounts of firepower and explosives - they even blow up a school which doesn't even have anyone left alive inside it! Shamelessly, crassly manipulative - there's a little girl on the flight, a pregnant woman, a survivor of the concentration camps - it's a film whose entire ethos is Chuck "Chuckles" Norris waving the Stars And Stripes in the face of filthy foreign anti-Western scum, and then either shooting them or firing rockets at them from his motorbike.

It's loosely based on the actual hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in June 1985 (the movie came out in 1986) although the Delta Force do not appear to have been involved at any point. At over two hours the movie could do with some trimming, but there are occasional pleasures to be had, including Alan Silvestri's synth score which is full of absurdly heroic fanfares against a thumping disco beat. As an exercise in crash-bang-wallop The Delta Force is not particularly well done - it's efficient but unremarkable - and as pro-West propaganda it's so thuddingly one-sided it's almost funny. It's certainly not very well written, but fans of thicko action movies and Norris' baseball bat acting style should get a few laughs.

**

Bang Bang:

THE AWAKENING

2011-11-04T18:25:00.001+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Huzzah! It is a joy to find, finally, a genuinely creepy and effective British horror movie: one that's entirely in line with the traditional British ghost story, with a couple of unbearably suspenseful sequences and a handful of perfectly timed leap-in-the-air jump moments. And a impeccable setting, a strong and sympathetic female lead, a total absence of idiot nerd humour, a measured pace, full orchestral score - there's very very little in this movie to take issue with. Indeed, if there is a problem it's that post-Sixth Sense, even a moderately informed multiplex audience is constantly looking for The Big Plot Twist - whether he's really dead or she's actually a ghost or it's all a dream - and consequently over-analyzing the movie rather than just sitting back and watching it. This really isn't necessary as The Awakening is quite straightforward and admirably simple without being simplistic: a good solid haunting movie told economically and efficiently and with the minimum of fuss. And scary.

It's 1921 - significantly, not long after the First World War - and Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall), fresh from assisting the police in exposing fake mediums and charlatan spiritualists rather in the manner of The X-Files' Dana Scully, is hired (rather in the manner of Philip Marlowe) to investigate the alleged haunting a remote boarding school for boys after one of the pupils died. She's a sceptic and is ultimately more interested in unmasking the prankster than discovering a real ghost - but there's clearly something in that house that shouldn't be there. What incident occurred there before the house even became a school?

The grim, humourless school is as far from Hogwarts as you can get; it's a cold, bleak, unsunny place shrouded in mist and, once the kids are off the premises (for the half-term break), it's a great spooky location. Perhaps the Big Plot Twist is a shade unlikely, and turning the school groundsman/handyman into a grunting maniac really isn't necessary, but the pluses significantly outweigh the few minuses. In the same vein as The Others, it's a solidly creepy and occasionally very scary movie, and well worth seeing. Alone.

****

COLD SWEAT

2011-11-03T17:16:00.000+01:00

CONTIENE LOS DATOS DE LA HISTORIA

This would appear to be only the fourth Argentinian film I've ever seen, after the impressive thriller The Secret In Their Eyes, Apartment Zero (which is co-British and pretty dull) and something called Blood Of The Virgins which I have to confess I can't actually remember very much about beyond it being a bit rubbish. This horror-thriller-suspense number also isn't very good, although it has a wonky premise and some interesting ideas, but doesn't really work as there's really not enough reason given for the villains to do what they do.

Sometime in the 1970s twenty five crates of dynamite went missing and wound up in the hands of some political extremists; now, more than thirty years on, the two remaining nutters are imprisoning and torturing people in their ordinary Buenos Aires house: setting them incomprehensible maths questions and prowling the house in flameproof suits. One young man goes in looking for his girlfriend whose last text appears to have come from inside....

Sadly, there doesn't appear to be much reason for these two old goats to behave like Jigsaw from the Saw movies. What are they attempting to gain from all this? It really would have helped to have some - indeed, any - explanation, no matter how dodgy. I did wonder if I'd nodded off at some point and therefore missed the crucial bit of exposition, but judging by a few online reviews it looks as if I didn't miss anything because the rationale simply isn't there. Cold Sweat (Sudor Frio) is really little more than an remarkable second-tier torture movie: it doesn't go for the outrageous bloody sadism of the Saws and Hostels but with its pretty horrible idea of soaking people in nitroglycerin, it certainly ranks above the Banes and Caged and Hungers of this world. But "it's silly but kind of okayish" is really the best that can be said about it.

**

FACES IN THE CROWD

2011-11-02T17:37:00.000+01:00

CONTAINS SOME MAJOR SPOILERS AND WHO ARE YOU AGAIN?

I'm always in favour of anything that's described as gialloesque. Which is a great shame as this thriller simply doesn't live up to it: rather than echoing the great Argento and Bava movies, which automatically spring to mind whenever the word "giallo" is used, the film that it most resembles is Michael Apted's Blink - not a staggeringly great film to start with. Sadly, Julien Magnat's Faces In The Crowd is pretty bland, unexciting stuff, and features a genuinely laughable plot contrivance two thirds of the way through that makes absolutely no sense.

Kindergarten teacher Milla Jovovich chances upon a serial killer (dubbed "Tearjerk Jack" because he apparently weeps over his victims), but in the ensuing chase she falls and cracks her head. Recovering, she discovers she has a condition called prosopagnosia, or "face blindness": she can no longer recognise people facially. If someone walks out of the room and walks back in, she can no longer tell if it's the same person. Cop on the case Julian McMahon keeps an eye on her, as her boyfriend can't cope with her condition, but the killer is still out there: does he know that she couldn't identify him?

It's certainly interesting in places as Jovovich doesn't even recognise herself in a mirror, and her friends appear to be different people (her boyfriend is played by twelve actors in various scenes, and even her new therapist is only sometimes played by Marianne Faithfull). Which is fine, especially as it really needed to go stylistically overboard rather than being restrained, as the film has a crunching plot development that hinges on a leading character shaving his beard off for absolutely no reason other than the demand of the plot: worse, in a film about a woman who has trouble with faces, it makes no sense whatsoever for him to remove his one distinguishing feature. Nor does it really matter who the killer is, and it should matter, but it feels like they've plumped for that guy as a random plot twist.

Like rather too many movies, Faces In The Crowd is thoroughly unremarkable. It's not that it's a bad film, it's just not a particularly good one. To have actually done a full-blown giallo would have made the odd plotting more bearable, but it doesn't work in a "proper" film, and Faces In The Crowd just doesn't go nearly mad enough to justify it. Which is a pity.

**

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE II (FULL SEQUENCE)

2011-10-31T23:45:00.002+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND OH GOD I'M GOING TO BE SICK

It was certainly a surprise when this reality-warping sequel was thrown out by the BBFC. Given that the first film was essentially a silly though undeniably grotesque black comedy in which a mad scientist does unspeakable things to passers-by who won't be missed, I imagine we all expected the sequel to be more of the same: gory and grisly but harmless, "100% medically accurate" shenanigans by an overacting maniac with a scalpel. Er, no. Demented auteur Tom Six has upped the ante on everything - sex, gore, violence, death, rape, swearing - and the BBFC suddenly went absolutely mental to the extent of refusing it a certificate. Now, after a little over two and a half minutes of repulsive depravity have been removed, the year's most eagerly awaited sequel (with the possible exception of Transformers 3) finally makes it to the screen. Have the work's messages and subtexts about imitable screen violence been compromised?

Not really. To be honest I don't think The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) has really very much to say beyond its surface story, in which an obese loner's obsession with the first movie leads him to create his own human centipede: abducting people from the car park where he's employed as an attendant, bringing them together in a warehouse and stitching them together the way it was done in the film. Martin is incredibly put-upon: he's a victim of child abuse, his mother hates him, he's hideously overweight, asthmatic, on medication, alarmingly unhygienic, and possibly mentally disabled. (He has no actual dialogue.) The only thing that keeps him going is pleasuring himself while watching The Human Centipede, and his dream of creating his own.

Like his own creation Dr Heiter, writer-director-lunatic Tom Six has had one genuinely brilliant idea and has run with it. In the eyes of the BBFC at least, he has perhaps run too far: the first film was undeniably gross, but harmless and funny; however the second has a more sexual and violent nature to it. Heiter wanted to create a human centipede because he could; Martin wants to create a human centipede so he can have sex with it. And where Heiter's had a mere three people stitched together, Martin wants twelve: one giant 48-legged creation with one mutual intestinal tract. The intestinal tract, of course, was the centrepiece of the horror in the first one: that moment when the front of the centipede can't hold it in any longer, and while it's patently obvious what happens from the face of the central person, it's not actually depicted. The Human Centipede II is a far more explicit film and the depiction of "forced defecation" was one of the issues the BBFC had with it.

Snipped it may be, but it's still there. The same can't be said of the infamous sandpaper masturbation (which now is only alluded to), the barbed wire rape (considerably reduced, with no sight of the barbed wire) and the casual death of a newborn baby (deleted completely). And in all honesty I cannot mourn the loss. The newborn scene would have been a cheap and nasty moment of sub-Troma bad taste calculated entirely to offend and alienate in an otherwise merely revolting horror film. In the same way, I've always felt that rape, a genuine real-life horror for far too many people, doesn't sit well in what is otherwise an absurd and unreal fantasy.

However, as a monstrous and deranged vision of utter horror, The Human Centipede II is a flat-out winner. The black and white photography actually makes everything more disturbing and distressing, where colour would possibly have made it too realistic and explicit. There's only one near-subliminal spurt of colour (hint: it's brown). You don't really want to mention The Human Centipede II in the same breath, or even on the same continent, as Psycho, but monochrome makes the sheer amount of blood and gore more bearable by giving it the look and feel of a clammy, dreadful nightmare: a genuinely revolting and thoroughly unhinged hallucination. It's one of the most unapologetically vile and off-putting movies for quite a few years and kudos to Tom Six for conjuring up a sequel that does indeed make the original look like The Care Bears Go To Fluffyland. Where on Earth can he possibly take the saga now, as we're promised the third episode in two years' time? 3D?

While it's certainly refreshing every so often to have a film that's so deranged and upsetting that the BBFC feel the need to step in, in these lenient times, I could honestly have stood for a little less depravity and a little more of the deadpan black humour of the first movie. For all the gore and grue, The Human Centipede II isn't fun in the same absurdist way; rather it's fun in the sense of absolute overkill, and a few genuine laughs would not have gone amiss. I like the overkill, I like the madness, I like the sense of Martin's joy at his screaming creation. In places it's quite a beautiful film to look at, it achieves what it sets out to do, and I don't believe it's compromised by the BBFC's trims. Worth seeing, but don't eat.

***

LIVID (LIVIDE)

2011-10-31T17:19:00.000+01:00

THE FEWER SPOILERS THE BETTER

Perhaps the film for which hopes were highest at his year's Frightfest allnighter: any film describes as "Argento Meets Fulci" is obviously going to be more interesting as a film billed as "D'Amato Meets Winner" or "Bay Meets Olen Ray". Sadly it doesn't live up to the comparison: to my untutored eye there wasn't much overtly Argento or obviously Fulci in there, and in places it felt a little like Del Toro - but what do I know? This isn't to suggest that it's a bad movie or it's not worth seeing: it absolutely is, although there are moments that don't really work in its collision of fantasy and reality, and it would probably have flowed better if the more unreal visuals had been dropped as the film plays perfectly well without them.

Lucie is a trainee nurse looking after elderly patients in a small French seaside town. One of her patients is a centenarian, a former dance teacher now bedbound, permanently attached to an IV drip and alone in a rambling, crumbling mansion in which, rumour has it, she has a fortune in hidden treasure. That's enough of a temptation for Lucie to rope in her fisherman boyfriend and his brother for a night's undisturbed burglary. But cash and jewellery and gold bullion isn't what they ultimately discover - the old woman had shocking secrets locked away in that house....

The less you know of exactly what's in the house, the better: suffice to say you're unlikely to guess in advance. Livide (Livid in the English title) plays best with its three frankly unsympathetic but not entirely hateful leads exploring the darkened rooms, although since the house is miles from anywhere and the only occupant is in a coma in the bed upstairs, it's a mystery why they don't put some lights on. However, the more overtly fantastical visuals of things floating - whether people or, in one particular scene, the house itself floating in space on its own chunk of rock like a miniature in a snowglobe - don't seem to belong and these don't mesh as well with the real-world bulk of the movie as in, say Pan's Labyrinth (although I had to take two runs at that film to be happy with it bringing the different worlds together); I do think I'd have enjoyed it more if the whole movie had taken place in the "real world".

It's considerably less bloody than the directors' previous film Inside, which closed the allnighter a few years ago and played remarkably well for a foreign language film at four in the morning in an overly heated cinema. Livide is a lot less visceral, more emotional and poetic, and beautifully shot; I enjoyed it, but I do wish I'd enjoyed it more.

**

BAD MEAT

2011-10-31T14:55:00.001+01:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND WEAK MEAT REFERENCES

I like my films the way I like my meat: well done. And sadly this UK-Canadian dish (supported by UK Film Council lottery funding, according the end credits) isn't well done at all: it's tough to chew and hard to swallow. Which is a pity since the basic setup of it - teens in isolated location relentlessly attacked by drooling monsters - is perfectly workable: the rehabilitation/discipline camp for wayward teens setting has been used before, in the so-so Driftwood, for example; it's just the execution that doesn't work properly.

Six young rebels, troublemakers, petty criminals and oiks are placed in the care of a group of fascist perverts in a camp somewhere in the middle of a wasteland of swamps and woods. Initially they're bullied and abused by the staff because the staff are cackling sadists, but a delivery of Bad Meat turns the staff into drooling undead cannibals, while retaining their fascist pervert cackling sadist personalities. By chance the young inmates didn't eat the meat because they were only given raw potatoes. - but can they stop their tiresome bickering and work as a team, find out what's going on, and stay alive?

Why on Earth this went on as the FrightFest allnighter opening I have no idea, because in addition to not being very good, it's patently unfinished. The editing process has reduced the film to a complete mess while whole sequences missing, leaving gaping continuity holes and the fates of some of the characters unexplained. One of the teens is actually killed off in one of those scenes and we only find this out later in a brief line of dialogue - these sequences were shot, according to the writer in a post-screening Q+A, but dropped from what is presumably the final cut! It's all told in flashback by one of the characters, heavily bandaged in a hospital bed, typing the story into a word processor - but whichever character it is, he/she is describing scenes he/she wasn't even in.

Presumably one of those deleted scenes would answer the vital question of why nobody even mentioned telephoning for help - there's no reason why the line would have been cut and it's inconceivable the camp doesn't have a landline or internet connection. One might also ask why the parents have placed their children in the care of people who are plainly and unashamedly Nazis - the maniac in charge even has a framed Nazi uniform hanging on his office wall!

What you do get, in the place of logic and a coherent storyline, is puking. There's a lot of grossout throwing up and vomiting, including a moment, memorable for precisely the wrong reasons, of two lovers heaving over each other at the same time, and another scene in which someone gets their stomach repeatedly pumped after they've eaten some of the meat. Certainly this, and a gratuitous urination scene, are revolting and horrible but for a horror film Bad Meat is more goulash than ghoulish. Undercooked meat is bad for you and ultimately this particular cut isn't fit for human consumption.

*

SLEEPING BEAUTY

2011-10-28T21:15:00.000+02:00

PHWOOOOAAR! CONTAINS SPOILERS

Where's the line? When does it stop being erotica and start being porn? When does it stop being a serious character piece about sexuality and start being a piece of nudie smut? Doubtless this serious new Australian film fancies itself as a proper serious film, worthy of serious consideration as a serious exploration of sex and fantasies and prostitution, but is it really? Personally, I don't believe it. Certainly I can imagine that's what they intended when they started out, but the end result is less a "serious" film and more an arty bit of softcore porn, whatever its inclusion in competition at Cannes might indicate; and surely if you're making a film that involves a lot of frank nudity, you can't be unaware that it's going to be seen by some as a dirty movie, regardless of your original intentions. Pornography is, after all, in the wrist of the beholder. And this IS porn: for all the artiness it's just an old man's grubby fantasy.

The Sleeping Beauty is Lucy (Emily Browning, also seen in the similarly suspect Sucker Punch), a young student who, in addition to a dreary part time jobs in a cafe and an office, signs up as a "silver service waitress": a position which starts off as merely serving port and brandy in her underwear to a gathering of wealthy gentlemen, but leads to her agreeing to being drugged and placed naked in a bed for the old coots to do with her as they will, with the exception of full intercourse. The payments for this service enable her to abandon her tedious office job (which appears to consist entirely of photocopying), and to take a luxury apartment, but is she happy? And what exactly are these men doing to her while she's unconscious?

Deep in the bowels of niche fantasy porn are two particular areas of "special interest": one where the girl is asleep and thus unaware of what's happening to her, and one where the barely legal girl is partnered by a wrinkled and flabby pervert in possession of a bus pass. Neither concept is particularly edifying - the first is horrible close to a rape fantasy - and it is hard to see why any girl would consent to such a scenario, even given the substantial cash rewards. Even though no penetration actually takes place - the men freely admit they're too old to get it up any more - she's still being groped, pawed and manhandled and she's completely oblivious to it. Frankly, "ewwww".

But as much as it might seem fixated on a naked girl and her pensioner clients, it's still an art movie, not just in its long takes with a frequently static camera and the lack of a musical score (raising the question of why there's a credited composer), but in the questions that aren't answered. What was with the handful of berries? Or the drooling woman on the bus? Why did Lucy burn a A$200 bill? Why was there a scene in which nothing happened except Lucy getting out of bed, putting her pants on and getting back into bed? And, most importantly, what happened next? Just as the film seemed to be developing a narrative, where Lucy might find out exactly what happens to her..... it stops. Roll end credits, leaving you yelling "And.....?!?!" Leaving out the things that might be significant, such as Lucy's reaction to seeing precisely what these men get up to, and filling the time with stuff that isn't (one of the gents recites a meandering anecdote about finding an old book for absolutely no reason), it's frustrating and annoying as well as needlessly obscuring the point.

With its main character not only happy to let strange men do whatever they want with her body but to remain ignorant of it, it's tempting (and easy) to conclude that it's actually misogynist. But I'm not sure: the film's writer-director, the producer, associate producer and line producer are women, and it's "presented" by Jane Campion, whatever that means (aside from reminding you of The Piano). Certainly if they'd all been men it would have been far easier to dismiss it as cheap smut for the raincoat trade. As it is, though, is it a statement about something? What? The only thing that's left clear at the end, unfortunately, is that Emily Browning looks nice naked. And if that's what you want out of a movie, buy some porn. At least be honest about it.

*

MY BLOODY VALENTINE

2011-10-27T16:56:00.001+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND

It's strange how tame old X movies can look these days. This typical 1981 slasher movie, regarded by some as a minor classic (enough to warrant a 3D remake a generation later) today sits comfortably as a 15 on DVD. It's a different world now: You actually have to work quite hard to get an 18 today, but back in the early 80s they were dishing out the equivalent Xs like sweets. It's not as if this movie is eye-poppingly graphic - the MPAA removed almost all of the bloody money shots long before the British censors got their scissory claws on it - and there's no nudity or even slightly explicit sex. What there is is a series of kill shots, substantially blunted, punctuating an implausible, illogical and downright ridiculous plot.

The small Canadian mining town of Valentine Bluffs hasn't commemorated St Valentine's Day in twenty years, ever since one Harry Warden went crazy following a mining disaster, and he's still said to walk the streets every February 14th, messily slaughtering anyone in an overtly romantic mood. Cut to the present (well, 1981) and the town is finally preparing to stage its first Valentine's Dance, defying the local miseryguts authority figures, defying the local bartender (who spends all his screen time doing his Crazy Ralph "You're all doomed!" routine), defying the legend of Harry Warden himself. But when the murders begin again, with fresh hearts delivered in heart-shaped candy boxes, and the dance is called off, the idiot teens organise their own secret party at the coal mine....

Much of My Bloody Valentine is absolute nonsense, although admittedly scarcely sillier than a lot of what goes on in dumb slasher movies. It requires that the killer knows exactly where everyone is at all times and can move around in total silence while wearing full mining gear (including a gas mask) and wielding a bloodstained pickaxe without anyone spotting him. It requires that the victims take turns to oblige the maniac by wandering off into the darkness of an unfamiliar setting where they can be ambushed without warning, rather than staying with all their friends in a brightly lit room. And it requires that not one but two couples are so insatiably hot for each other than their lust isn't dimmed by the idea of doing it in a coal mine. I mean, there are less erotically charged places to get it on - most Lidls, most Gents, Stevenage - but the underground "engine room" of a coal mine in the middle of the night doesn't seem to me like a prime location. Still, whatever turns you on.... Sadly, the only penetration going on involves pickaxes and skulls rather than anything romantic or sexual.

The version watched was an old British 35mm cinema print: pink, faded, scratched and jumpy, with the lovely old X at the front, and properly projected at the Prince Charles. The IMDb suggests that it's Quentin Tarantino's favourite slasher movie, but sadly it really isn't very good and doesn't really stack up against The Funhouse, Rosemary's Killer or at least three of the Friday The 13th series (including Part 5, which isn't great but it was my first Friday movie so I have a fondness for it). I wouldn't even rank it with the original Halloween II, which is also massively flawed and frequently illogical but I'll admit I rather like: certainly more than My Bloody Valentine which I really believe would be much better with the splatter payoffs put back in, and would earn it an extra star.

**

GURU THE MAD MONK

2011-10-27T15:33:00.001+02:00

CONTAINS BRIEF SPOILERS

Yet another of those hideous independent abominations that still have some kind of unfathomable currency padding out imported box sets of cheapo obscurities. I am not familiar with the works of Andy Milligan; I can only assume that this nonsensical sleaze quickie is unrepresentative of his career, as it's surely unlikely that a 24-year filmography of 26 feature titles cannot contain anything better than this. You cannot possibly have a directorial career that extensive when every title is incompetent garbage. (Or can you?)

First off, Guru The Mad Monk isn't a monk at all, he's a Catholic priest, although he is mad. Sometime in the 15th century (at least according to the IMDb's synopsis), Father Guru (along with his deformed hunchback servant Igor!) assists a lovelorn lad by saving his beloved from a wrongful execution, but the price is the young man's assistance in Guru's secret body-snatching racket: an operation with which he supplements his meagre income (and also provides a source of nutrition for his vampire mistress).

This could have had some appeal as a full-blown trash epic, but not when you're working with the production values of bestiality porn loops, amateur dramatic-level performances and laughable gore effects (which are only briefly glimpsed anyway). Truly, the money's all on the screen - all $20 of it - and if it took more than an afternoon to write it's only because they're very slow typists. Even though the damned thing only runs for 56 minutes (thereby raising the question of whether it's actually a feature film rather than a long short), it feels about twice as long thanks to the endless swamps of banal, badly delivered dialogue. Milligan goes for talk rather than action, probably because talk is cheap: he really doesn't have anything to show us, and what he does have is so ineptly realised.

Representative or not, Guru The Mad Monk hasn't sold me on Millgan and I've now no real interest in tracking down his other work, even the more attractively lurid-looking stuff like Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Ghastly Ones or The Man With Two Heads (most of which doesn't appear to available in this country anyway). Life is too short, and this, even at under an hour, isn't. Hopeless.

*

DEAD MARY

2011-10-23T15:52:00.001+02:00

SPOILERS MEETS COINCIDENCE!

Reviewers and marketing bods both like to paint movies as A Meets B. It's a shorthand suggesting that if you liked A and B then you'll probably like C, which isn't necessarily true (I like licorice allsorts and steak and kidney pie but I wouldn't want them in the same course) and isn't always accurate. As an example, the dull Detention (not the Frightfest one which hasn't come out yet) has a blurb on the front: "The Breakfast Club Meets The Grudge", which I guess is fair on one level as it pits a bunch of teens in a detention class against a vengeful ghost, but it hasn't the character and charm of the former or the chills of the latter. This Canadian horror movie can be similarly summarised: it's The Big Chill meets The Thing, with a bit of The Evil Dead meets Waiting For Godot and Candyman. Curiously enough, it almost pulls it off.

A group of former high-school friends and their current partners gather for a reunion at a lakeside cabin. It's a particularly fraught occasion as most of them have been cheating on each other: to lighten the mood, one of them suggests they play Dead Mary - the dumb dare game where they each go into the darkened bathroom by themselves and say "Dead Mary" three times in the mirror. (By chance, they sent me Dead Mary just a day after seeing Paranormal Activity 3, a chunk of which has a little girl playing the exact same game, except they refer to it as Bloody Mary.) Like idiots, they play the game - but that night one of them is brutally murdered in the woods. It becomes apparent that they have conjured up Dead Mary, but she's possessed one or more of them. Who's really who they say they are and who's been taken over? Why won't the corpses stay dead? Recriminations, jealousies and petty squabbles abound (usually over who's slept with whose partner/spouse/ex): some are locked up or tied to chairs while they try to figure out which of them hasn't been taken over. Some want to go for help, some want to stay and wait for Ted, who mysteriously hasn't shown up yet.

Since the characters are older than the usual college idiots (although several of them don't look it) they're allowed a little more depth and bitterness, which makes for a nice change although the group's arguments frequently descend to childish taunts about who cheated with who - the "grownup" version of "but he started it". This may be more believable, but it doesn't make them more likeable or more interesting individuals (one of the great things about The Thing is that there's nothing sexual about it: the dialogue, the guys, the creature or the action) and if I wanted to watch a bunch of people getting drunk and having difficulties with their relationships, I wouldn't watch a horror movie. Since the girlfriends and wives are slim, attractive and sexy types, it just makes the guys even bigger idiots for cheating on them.

As a horror movie it's okay: it made me jump a few times and the ancient legend of Dead Mary - a genuine bit of folklore - has a natural creepiness about it. They're clearly trying to do something with a bit more depth and character than the typical teenkill nonsense filmmakers too often settle for: it's not entirely successful but at least they're trying. It takes a while to get going and spends too long with the relationship blather before wheeling Dead Mary on, and I'd perhaps have liked it a touch more if parallels with The Thing weren't so evident: there's even a point where the music score seems to echo that fabulous Morricone pulsing from the Carpenter film. And the corpse in the woods that continues to taunt the survivors is pure Evil Dead. Generally speaking it's worth a look although there's a fair amount wrong with it.

***

DETENTION

2011-10-23T03:07:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND A LITTLE DISAPPOINTMENT

Sadly, this is not the Joseph Kahn movie that I fell asleep in during Frightfest (in my defence, it was the fifth film of the day, and the fourth midnight screening in four days), which I'm now looking forward to seeing when it comes out in the UK as I rather liked what I saw of it, although I confess I didn't entirely get it. But this is a completely different, and frankly unremarkable, high school horror movie with the same title and incredibly low standards of quality which it barely lives up to. I'm usually a fan of unpretentious teen slasher movies if they're done with a measure of wit and skill, and if the potential victims aren't despicable morons; unfortunately there's very little of interest on show here.

Back in the 1970s, an innocent kid accidentally died in the school incinerator after a stupid prank went wrong. Thirty years later, it appears that the vengeful spirit might have returned to terrorise a typically disposable group of idiots who have been given Detention for various infractions. Why them? Why now? As they're picked off one by one, can they figure out what the ghost wants - if it is really a ghost? Can the Principal (David Carradine, to whom the film is dedicated) help? Or the new history teacher, Miss Cipher, who seems unusually interested in the events of years past?

With a bland TV-video look, lack of stylistic flair and poor CGI effects, with its anonymous cast of generic teens (the goth girl, the stoner, the sports hunk, the cute girlfriend, etc) doing stupid things and frequently forgetting that they and their colleagues are in mortal danger, Detention is dull and annoying in equal measure. It has a twist ending that I admit I didn't see coming (but thinking back it's pretty nonsensical), and the teens are a shade more likeable than the usual sex, weed and booze-obsessed halfwits we've seen in too many dumb teen horrors already. But your life certainly won't be lacking if you don't bother with it. Massively unremarkable, and I'd much rather be watching the other Detention.

**

See me afterwards:

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3

2011-10-21T21:54:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS. WHATEVER.

And the found footage bandwagon trundles tediously on. Pretty much identical to the first two Paranormal Activity movies - long stretches of murly lo-fi night vision occasionally interrupted by very slight movement, indistinct noises or things going thud for no reason - this is no better for having the mythology and characters already established in the earlier films because it spends time setting everything up rather than leaping straight into the action, and when the action does come it's pretty unremarkable (including a straight rip from the big jump moment in Paranormal Activity 2, which doesn't work a fraction as well). And for its final act it descends into typical horror movie territory which also doesn't work because it's handicapped by the found footage shooting style.

The first two films concentrated on Katie and Kristi separately; Paranormal Activity 3 looks at the two as sisters back in 1988 when the activity started, possibly through Kristi's imaginary friend "Toby". Initially it's just inexplicable noises off, but Dad sets up VHS camcorders in the bedrooms and lounge/kitchen to try and capture some evidence of what the mysterious presence might be. But who is "Toby" really, and what does he/it want? Will they even be safe when the flee the house and stay with their Gran? Or will the haunting follow them there?

The third act is where the film completely loses it with a melodramatic reveal that's not only staggeringly predictable (even for me, and I'm generally useless at these things) but nonsensical. Much like The Last Exorcism, the movie suddenly lurches for a payoff that doesn't fit. It's also where the rationale for the camcorder usage - which was debatable to start with - breaks down as well, as there's no longer any reason for them to keep filming everything. Aren't they safe now? Yet he keeps on filming, and even wanders around the house in the dark - never putting a light on - with his camcorder.

The crux of it all is the damnable found footage style: a style that just doesn't work. In the Paranormal Activity films and in most others of this genre, it has never worked. One or two have carried it off - Cannibal Holocaust is still the prime example, and at least the first [Rec] managed the trick as well - but in the main it fails because it's being used for the wrong reasons. The found footage technique isn't being used because it enhances the realism and adds verisimilitude; it's being used mainly because it's cheap. Look at the costs and grosses of the first two movies: the first cost a reported $15,000 and took a hundred million in the US alone; it had made its budget back five times over on its opening weekend. PA2 inexplicably cost $2.75m (where the hell did it all go?) but still took forty million on its opening weekend (figures for both films from their IMDb pages).

Such an astronomical return on investment is obviously going to be milked for all its' worth and to hell with concerns about the aesthetic ugliness or the narrative illogic. Not only are the reasons for shooting all this uninteresting footage generally pretty flimsy (at what point does the camera operator think he should really put this huge lump of equipment down and leg it?) but the films tend to look horrible in grainy lo-def camcorder vision, and Paranormal Activity 3 is supposed to be on VHS! (On the subject of the camcorder itself: this is supposedly 1998. Shouldn't the camera be shooting in 4:3 instead of widescreen?)

The fact is that there have always been haunted house movies, and there always will be haunted house movies - and they were, are, and will be, movies. Movies with directors and actors and writers, and effects and lighting and music and editing. Nobody ever tried to pretend that The Legend Of Hell House or The Haunting (either version) were real. They didn't have to: they were movies. They weren't real and the feeble cries of "no, it's real!" is embarrassing and desperate. Here's how you know it's not real: it ends with a cast list and a caption saying "All persons and events are fictitious and any similarity.....". Stop lying to me. Stop lying to us. You're fooling no-one and you're looking stupid. Nor does it even add up logically: exactly who is supposed to have put all this footage together?

In itself, although there are a couple of moderately effective jumps, this third and hopefully final offering simply doesn't deliver. If they'd made a film - a proper film with editing and scoring and lighting, cameras that could dolly and track and zoom and tilt - then in all probability they could have produced a perfectly decent Halloween chiller. Instead, because of their tiresome stylistic choice, they're stuck with the dull visuals and vast tracts of not very much happening for a long time. Yes, there are a few scary moments, but again they're the "Boo!" variety and there's nothing unsettling or disturbing that'll last in your mind.

*

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR

2011-10-18T13:26:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS BLEEDING SPOILERS

It's strange. Here we are in 2011 and complaining left and right about the iron fist of the BBFC rejecting a whole two - count 'em, TWO - films on the grounds of graphic sexual violence (The Human Centipede Part II and The Bunny Game), yet back in 1967 a total of 15 films were rejected by the Board. A few of that year's banned titles have been reissued and are now deemed perfectly acceptable, such as The Trip and Common Law Cabin, but most have never been resubmitted. This is one of those titles: rejected August 4th, 1967, and never seen again, though it would probably pass unscathed these days. Happily it's available in a 12-disc R0 import box set of indifferent horror movies from various sources (this one's in the public domain) and while some of them are genuinely unwatchable in terms of audio and picture quality, some are passable. At least it's in widescreen (albeit non-anamorphic, in lurid colour and irritatingly pixelated at times).

Back in the whateverth century, a homicidal maniac dressed as a Mexican wrestler and known as The Crimson Executioner rampaged through Italy judging everyone as sinners, and torturing and murdering them. Eventually captured and sealed up in his own dungeon, he vowed he would return and wreak his revenge. Cut to 1967, and a group of dim fashion models and disposable idiots turn up at the supposedly deserted castle looking for a photoshoot location. What they find is a former movie actor now living as an embittered recluse with only a couple of bodybuilders in stripey shirts for company. But it's not long before "accidents" occur and the models and photographers start being picked off. Could The Crimson Executioner really have returned?

Shot in "Psychovision" (meaning "colour"), Bloody Pit Of Horror is generally pretty poor stuff: the acting is mainly terrible, there's little gore or nudity and the special effects highlight - a woman trapped in the web of a venomous rubber spider the size of a rugby ball in a room full of tripwires linked to blowpipes with arrows in them - is not only laughably nonsensical but astonishingly badly executed. Nor is the horror and violence is helped by a wildly inappopriate "lightly latin" soundtrack that seems to think everything's more terrifying if a bossanova is playing constantly in the background. If the film has anything going for it at all, it's Mickey Hargitay as The Crimson Executioner: a cackling, gloating, egotistical sociopath torturing helpless models with undisguised relish (and still dressed as a Mexican wrestler). He's great fun, and Hargitay is clearly having a blast. Everything else is sadly pretty mediocre. Directed by Massimo Pupillo under the unconvincing pseudonym "Max Hunter", and nominally based on the writings of the Marquis De Sade.

**

BLACK SNAKE

2011-10-17T22:41:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND INTIMATIONS OF A BAD BAD WORD

For the sake of not being thrown off the internet, I am obviously not going to use That Word: I'm not (quite) that much of an idiot. However, for the sake of clarity, I shall do a spot of "melon farming": substituting an entirely innocent if nonsensical word for ever use of That Word so I don't actually type that sequence of letters but everyone knows the word to which I'm referring. It's the one you really really REALLY can't use these days. But it is used quite a lot by most of the white people in Russ Meyer's genuinely jaw-dropping slave plantation sexploitation movie from 1973. Hint: "nougat". (Not to mention the innumerable uses of "black bitch", "black bastard", "black arse" as well - you're duly warned.)

I'm sure someone with time on their hands and a disregard for all social niceties has probably created a compilation of uses of "Nougat!" in various movies and uploaded it to YouTube, and he/she could comfortably fill a couple of minutes from this film alone. Black Snake (aka Slaves) is a film which Russ Meyer apparently claimed was his statement against racial bigotry, but for most of the time plays like the wettest dream Jim Davidson has ever had. To investigate what happened to his brother, aristo David Warbeck disguises himself as the new bookkeeper at the family's Caribbean plantation where, despite the abolition of slavery, Lady Anouska Hempel maintains the profits by the use of slaves, mercilessly ruled over by drunken Irish rapist/racist bastard Percy Herbert. How long will it be before a revolt? Can Warbeck uncover his brother's fate?

The star of the show is undoubtedly the fantastic Anouska Hempel, striding around with a whip like Isla: She-Wolf Of The Ku Klux Klan by way of Godalming and shouting "nougat" a lot in a hilariously plummy voice. Warbeck is heroically square-jawed as well, Herbert is thoroughly despicable, but it's Hempel's film and she's great, whatever Russ Meyer might have thought of her figure. (Which is absolutely fine, by the way, although there are moments where Meyer has clearly inserted shots of someone bustier, and to hell with continuity.) There's also a black French homosexual, Bible-quoting, much sadistic cruelty and racist violence, and a surprisingly bleak conclusion - and then, perhaps realising that he hasn't included much in the way of wobbly hooter action thus far, Meyer has a pair of black and white couples running through the same locations in the present day while a voiceover burbles something about racial harmony.

It's rumoured that Ms Hempel - now Lady Weinberg, an internationally renowned hotelier - had bought the rights to this and Pete Walker's Tiffany Jones back in 1998 to prevent any more TV screenings or video releases, which makes the appearance of this DVD (which also includes the markedly inferior Wild Gals Of The Naked West) a little odd. Maybe she just watched it one night and thought "Wow, this is actually rather good!" and relented. Black Snake isn't a great movie, but it's one of the better Russ Meyer films I've seen: not as good as Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls but thoroughly disreputable, slightly shocking fun.

***

What did you just say?!?!?!

HEAD HUNTER (KANNIBAL)

2011-10-17T17:35:00.001+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND (INSERT DEITY OF CHOICE) KNOWS WHAT ELSE

There are varying shades of bad filmmaking. The cynically empty lowest-common-denominator genre rubbish (anything by Troma), the big studio festivals of popcorn stupidity (Transformers 3), the cheap "mockbuster" knockoffs (anything by Asylum Films), comedies that aren't funny, fantasies that don't fire the imagination, horror movies that aren't scary or gross, pretentious art movies with nothing interesting to say, remakes and sequels that fail to match up. Then there's the dubious group of "so bad it's good" movies: the likes of Troll 2 or anything by Edward D Wood Jr. (Personally I don't really subscribe to this idea: I don't accept "so bad it's good" any more than "so good it's bad", but many do.) And there are a few instances - a very, very few - where it's so unremittingly terrible, so thoroughly misjudged, so painfully inadequate that it starts to exert a fascination: your only response it to stare at it in disbelief, screaming "In (insert deity of choice)'s name, what the hell were you thinking?!?!?!"

I would submit that Richard Driscoll's wretched Head Hunter, originally known as Kannibal and now reissued with a 3D conversion option, is one such film: a film that has the same car crash appeal of utter embarrassment and humiliation as a standup comedian dying slowly and in utter silence at the Royal Variety Performance. You genuinely watch it thinking "how much worse is this going to get?". The basic idea is that a man seeks revenge against all the members of a Russian-American crime syndicate after his wife was accidentally killed during the getaway of a federal bank robbery. So far, so Steven Seagal. Except that we don't have Seagal, we have writer-director-producer Richard Driscoll wearing his "Steven Craine" acting hat as - seriously - he turns the movie into a vehicle for an extended impression of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.

I've no doubt that YouTube is full of people doing Lecter impersonations into their webcams, and really that's the best place for it: five minutes of harmless clowning around in your bedroom with gags about fava beans and Chianti. A full-length feature film is not the best place for it, even if you can do a really good Hopkins impression, and especially if you can't. Shamelessly stealing the Lecter mannerisms and attitudes - and he even eats someone's liver with what is presumably supposed to be Chianti - isn't the least of it though: he slathers half the movie with pretty but inappropriate classical music (Rossini, Beethoven etc, because it's the kind of music Dr Lecter would like) that might be intended as contrast with the ugliness and bloody violence in a Clockwork Orange kind of way but doesn't work. Rather, it's a contrast to the original score which is simply thudding noise. Even more damagingly, the sound is so atrociously mixed that much of the dialogue is lost in the unnecessary music.

And if you thought Driscoll/Craine was bad as Anthony Hopkins, wait till you catch the cop on the case! It's a staggeringly ripe portrayal of a British police inspector by someone who doesn't appear to have ever seen a British police inspector outside of touring productions of Agatha Christie. Lucien Morgan (whom the IMDb suggests is one of the performers in the "See You Next Wednesday" porn film in An American Werewolf In London") appears to be pitching his performance to to the back of the dress circle and would force a draw in a ham-off between himself, Tod Slaughter and Brian Blessed. For crying out loud, he's wearing a monocle! (Tragically, the only posting on Morgan's IMDb page's messageboard is stating that he's looking for work - and that was eight years ago.) More weirdly still, no less a star than Linnea Quigley, aged 42 at the time, shows up as a lesbian porn mogul and drug trafficker with an outrageous Russian accent and has a couple of mesmerisingly ugly sex/bondage scenes, one of them with Eileen Daly (also sporting a Russian accent).

All of which would be okay if Driscoll was making Carry On Hannibal: you can get away with gaps in logic, overacting and funny accents in spoof and parody. But it's not a spoof: it's a proper, seriously intended horror/thriller and he's not joking! Back in 1985 he'd already earned his non-filmmaking spurs with The Comic (booed off the screen at the Scala, for goodness' sake), and more recently he's cemented his reputation with the incoherent gibberish of The Legend Of Harrow Woods. But someone really needs to take him aside and explain the basics of filmmaking to him because you cannot make films this pitiful and unprofessional, and expect to be paid for it. To say Head Hunter simply isn't good enough isn't enough - if it was a hell of a lot better it still wouldn't be good enough.

As mentioned, the DVD comes with a 3D version, which I didn't watch, firstly because it wasn't shot that way and I won't watch shonky conversion jobs, secondly because the rental disc didn't come with glasses, and thirdly because red/green 3D TV doesn't work anyway; it turns everything murky and the wrong colour (and Head Hunter is pretty murky to start with). And if Richard Driscoll thinks for a second that plastering 3D onto an already deeply idiotic film is going to somehow improve matters, he's even more wrong than he was when he first thought it up. For all its horrible fascination, it's still a thoroughly ghastly viewing experience and - as with The Legend Of Harrow Woods - if you inflict it on yourself, that's your own fault.

*

VENUS IN FURS

2011-10-16T20:02:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS A WHOLE DIFFERENT BUNCH OF SPOILERS

From the synopsis on Wikipedia (you can get the whole of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch's book free online), it appears that this Massimo Dallamano film version is far closer than the Jess Franco film, which bore no resemblance whatsoever beyond having a character with the same name sometimes wearing a fur coat. At least this film is actually about the concept of masochism rather than globetrotting revenge from beyond the grave, and it's technically far superior to Franco's hamfisted zooms and focussing: it's properly photographed, directed and acted.

The masochist in this version of Venus In Furs is Severin, who is on holiday when he sees Wanda, a sexually uninhibited young woman with whom he falls in love. But what he really wants is for her to betray him: to seduce other men and humiliate him - he can only feel sexual pleasure at his own emotional torment. They marry, and they initially embrace the mistress/slave roleplay with gusto: he becomes her chauffeur and watches as she gives herself to other men. But it can't last and one particular man takes his place completely, throwing Severin out completely and even raping the maid in a frankly quite unnecessary sequence (from which the BBFC have removed one minute of footage).

It's also got a nice cheesy listening soundtrack (from the appropriately named Gianfranco Reverberi) and nicely shot, and the interior design of the boudoir is precisely the kind of bedroom I want. However, I don't know that the film does much in expressing and explaining the appeal of masochism - I don't understand how feeling humiliated fuels the sex drive. In Severin's it stems from an incident in his childhood but is that how it normally manifests itself? I genuinely don't know.

Perhaps it's a smidgen unchivalrous, but I'd rather watch Laura Antonelli wander around naked than (the still lovely) Maria Rohm from the Franco film. Generally, I kind of enjoyed it in parts, but as a sleazy sexploitation movie with more attractively showcased nudity than Franco managed, rather than as a serious film about a genuine sexual persuasion (which I'm sure it wasn't intended as anyway). Trivia note: the German versions had extra sequences in which Severin was declared insane; these sequences apparently include an uncredited Paul Muller who also appears in the Franco film.

***

Venus 2:

VENUS IN FURS

2011-10-16T17:39:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

This is the first of two films, both from 1969, allegedy derived from the Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch "erotic classic" novel. In truth this is only nominally a film adaptation of the novel: it keeps the title and a character name or two and ditches the rest, including the whole idea of masochism which was named after the author in response to this book! This is, however, hardly surprising as it's a Jess Franco film, although what is surprising is that it's slightly better than the incomprehensible gibberish and tedium we've grown to expect from Franco. While it hits all the usual low points - overuse of the zoom, horrible focus pulling, artless softcore sex scenes and acres of nudity - its storyline almost holds up (despite a silly ending), it occasionally achieves a dreamlike feeling, and it never actually gets boring.

James Darren is a jazz trumpeter in Istanbul who catches sight of impossibly beautiful Maria Rohm one night and then sees her killed by a group of kinky sadists (including Dennis Price and Klaus Kinski). For some reason that even he doesn't understand, he's buried his trumpet on the beach but when he goes to dig it up he finds Rohm's body washed up by the tide: shaken he starts to bum his way around the world and ends up in Rio, where he takes up jazz trumpeting again - but who should walk into the club but Maria Rohm again?!? Isn't she dead? Darren pursues her obsessively, even as two of the kinky sadists (who have somewhat improbably also pitched up in Rio) meet their ends at her hands. Is she a ghost out for revenge? Back in Istanbul, Darren again walks along the beach, finds another corpse on the water's edge, turns it over.....

The "ghost seeking revenge against her killers" angle is probably the most coherent thing about Venus In Furs, although its hamstrung by Darren's hilarious voiceover of 50s slang along the lines of "Man, I totally dug that chick" - if you thought Harrison Ford's narration in Blade Runner was out of place (which it wasn't, incidentally), it's got nothing on this. Much of it's pretty dull, the dialogue is awful, it's visually ugly although it's undeniably nice to watch Maria Rohm wandering about in various states of undress. Neither as interesting or as technically well made as the Massimo Dallamano version, it is ultimately an average Jess Franco movie, slightly better than many but still hardly worth shouting about. Some of the music is by Manfred Mann.

**

Venus 1:

WILD GALS OF THE NAKED WEST

2011-10-14T21:07:00.001+02:00

CONTAINS LITTLE IN THE WAY OF SPOILERS BUT MUCH IN THE WAY OF BLIMEY, CHARLIE, GET A LOAD OF THE UDDERS ON THAT

I don't entirely get Russ Meyer. On the one hand I'm not much of a fan of his work on the simple grounds that I don't share his passion for women with freakishly massive breasts, although I rather enjoyed Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. On the other he had a unique voice and a style and I'm glad there was an industry that let him express it; there certainly isn't now. If there's anywhere a filmmaker can currently indulge a penchant for 54GGs, it's probably in the world of specialist DVD pornography and that's not a platform from which you can become an international household name. Faster, Pussycat! has been described as the ultimate cult movie and I saw it at the National Film Theatre. Big Busty Whoppers* is a 30-minute video and the IMDb doesn't even list a director.

And Wild Gals Of The Naked West? It's an incredibly cheap "adult" comedy Western desperately padded out to 61 minutes and set in a town so sinful the residents didn't dare to give it a name. Everyone drinks, topless women lasso passers-by from their first floor balcony and haul them up for (offscreen) sex, shootouts and fistfights go on for days, Injun abduct um heap big woman (it's that kind of film - it was made in 1962). One day a meek-looking salesman arrives, miraculously isn't killed during the short walk up Main Street, takes one look at the decadence and insanity, and cleans the place up with his really huge.... pistol.

Much of this is in the style of those silent Western spoof sequences Benny Hill used to make: you expect to see Henry McGee or Bob Todd in cowboy costumes, or hear Yakkety Sax on the soundtrack, except that it predates Benny Hill by many years and is nowhere near as funny. Many of the "jokes" are repeated two or three times because otherwise this would be a 20-minute short and frankly gain nothing from repetition. Certainly it has energy, and ingenuity in dealing with its low budget: the opening "History Of The West" montage is achieved through editing, props, scenery and sound effects and not one single person on screen. Some of the interior scenery is painted on a plain white wall or even dispensed with altogether, even the saloon piano is a plain white shelf with piano keys drawn onto it in permanent marker.

Wild Gals Of The Naked West really isn't any good: none of it's amusing and the continual emphasis on grotesque faces and equally grotesque chests would suggest you've got to be some serious kind of fetishist to find any of this even slightly effective in your downstairs department. But there's certainly some kind of energy to it, some kind of auteurist style to it, and it's ingeniously made in places for the pittance they had to spend on it. But there is a lot better Meyer out there.

* I just typed "big whoppers" into the IMDb search bar and this was the first thing that came up.

**

THE ROOMMATE

2011-10-13T12:37:00.087+02:00

MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN ANY HORROR-THRILLER-SLASHER-PSYCHO MOVIES EVER

Hollywood has never been shy of lifting, plagiarising, ripping-off or just plain copying. The genuine one-offs, the non-recurring phenomena, the true originals are scarce; the studios appear to come with a "Number Of Copies" button that you can just press and - voila - a "brand new" script. Some on the lower rungs, like the Asylum mockbusters (I Am Omega, Transmorphers) will be happy to recycle what was in cinemas two weeks ago (or if they're quick, what'll be be in cinemas in a few weeks' time); others may be more sneaky and xerox something that came out several years ago in the hope people won't notice. In this instance the film they've elected to knock off appears to be 1992's Single White Female, although a few minutes scrabbling round the IMDb suggests it sounds rather like the unrelated Single White Female 2 (which I haven't yet seen) that came out in 2005. Which is appropriate for a film about someone taking over another's identity.

The Roommate is named Rebecca: assigned to a college dorm with fashion student Sara, they start out friendly enough but it's not long before Rebecca is revealed as an insecure psychopath who wants Sara all to herself, and who will destroy, persecute or murder all who stand in her way. Ex-boyfriends, other friends, a leery professor (the last played by Billy Zane).... How long before Sara becomes aware of Rebecca's obsession? Answer: frankly, too long.

It's a 15 certificate in this country, but a mild one, just over the edge of 12A: in the States it was a PG13 so you know there's no meat to be had. No sex or violence and if you're going to going to have a psychological thriller about attractive girls going nuts and killing people, PG13 isn't anywhere near tough enough. It's soft and bland and doesn't deliver. The cast are mainly young and very pretty, though perpetually smirking male lead Cam Gigandet is particularly wet. Even the final reel's girl-on-girl punchup doesn't excite - because we've seen all this before, several times and much better. If you haven't seen all this before, it might elicit a few mild thrills at best. If you have, it's just going to annoy. And no-one's suggesting Single White Female was an unsurpassable cinematic achievement to begin with.

*

Compare and contrast:

THE THREE MUSKETEERS

2011-10-12T22:00:00.000+02:00

EN GARDE! CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Why on Earth drag this old warhouse out of the attic yet again? Certainly the last trip to the Dumas well, Peter Hyams' The Musketeer, was an utter disaster notable only for trying to fuse swordfighting with martial arts and for casting EastEnders' Arthur Fowler as a drooling pervert. The three Richard Lester films of the 70s and 80s (though we didn't really need The Return Of The Musketeers) are probably the best and most enjoyable of them, with their huge star casts; the youthful Stephen Herek version (nicknamed Young Swords at the time) was okay but hardly essential. And they're just the most recent in a string of versions that the IMDb would have you believe date back to 1903! What have they brought to the table this time? Given that it's a Paul WS Anderson film, the answer is 3D. (I should mention that I didn't bother with the 3D this time out.)

Much of the familiar framework of The Three Musketeers remains intact: enthusiastic fool D'Artagnan journeys to Paris to become a musketeer just as they've been disbanded; he picks fights with Athos, Porthos and Aramis before they all team up to take on the fiendish Milady De Winter and the dastardly Cardinal Richelieu as they scheme to discredit the king, execute the queen and take over the country. Happily, D'Artagnan has just met Constance, who fortunately happens to be the Queen's lady-in-waiting, and the now-four Musketeers set off to foil the villainous plot with renewed vigour and loyalties.

Though the romantic leads are pretty terrible (Logan Lerman and Gabrielle Wilde), the film is stuffed with big names not even bothering to disguise the American accents. Milla Jovovich (obviously having fun as Milady), Christoph Waltz as the Cardinal, James Corden in the Roy Kinnear peasant role from the Lester films; plus Mads Mikkelsen, Juno Temple, Matthew McFadyen and - oddly considering he was such a drip in the Pirates films - Orlando Bloom! Sadly too much of the film is reliant on CGI effects sequences, such as an extended airship battle and collision over 17th Century Paris, and some of the computer FX shots would have been deemed substandard fifteen years ago.

It rattles along, and it's fun to watch the supporting cast (though emphatically not the leads); there's some nicely snarky dialogue for the villains and it even sets itself up for a sequel that I genuinely suspect will never happen. It's a romp, it's a silly, lightweight film, there's no sense of seriousness behind it, and you do start wondering whether the country would be better off in the evil grasp of Richelieu than that of a king more concerned with the colour of his outfit than the tiresome details of international politics and peace treaties. Ultimately it's sort of okay but with such source material, merely being okay isn't anywhere near enough, and as such it's a disappointment because it really should and could have been better.

**

SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

2011-10-12T13:05:00.000+02:00

KNOCK KNOCK! WHO'S THERE? SPOILERS!

It's always difficult to get that excited about horror movies where the whole of the action is taking place inside the head of one of the characters. To me it's as much of a copout as "he woke up and it was all a dream". It means that action on screen doesn't necessarily need to make any logical sense (because our dreams and imaginations rarely if ever do), which is a gift for writers who can't write logical stories: if they make everything a dream or a hallucination then they can pretty much do what they like. But then no-one's in danger, no-one gets hurt and nothing is lost - so where's the thrill? It's a fantasy within a fantasy. Where's the excitement and horror in watching people think about getting brutally murdered?

In Someone's Knocking At The Door, a stoned college kid is raped to death after he and his imbecilic friends ingested some drugs they found in the hospital archive: drugs that fuelled the rampages of a couple of serial killers back in the 1970s. (Er, surely they should be in a police evidence vault rather than a hospital.) Anyway, could these drugs somehow be bringing back the spirits of the 70s killers into this reality? And if it is a hallucination, then whose? Certainly the cops seem to think they're real - but are they part of it? Is there really a violent and unstoppable sex maniac running around with a 15-inch phallus or might the hallucinogenic side effects of this unknown chemical be responsible?

Presumably this is a legal prescription drug they've taken, since the bottle comes with a handy list of potential side effects including hallucinations and a coma (which the idiots cheerfully ignore as they calculate the chances are only 0.0001%, only to find the odds are closer to one in one). Or possibly zero, since it's increasingly unlikely that any of this is actually happening. It ultimately gets too confused and gives up towards the end, so what looked like a bunch of horrible things happening to a bunch of tiresome idiots turned out to be a tiresome idiot imagining a bunch of horrible things happening to him and his tiresome idiot friends. And I didn't care. In honesty, I'd have been happier if the horrible things had actually been happening to them because then there would have been some justice.

Frankly, as college sex and weirdness movies go, I infinitely preferred Gregg Araki's Kaboom although I didn't think that was more than okay at best; and while I really didn't like Donnie Darko it's still a better made and more interesting movie than Someone's Knocking At The Door. It's got a grubby indie vibe about it but it's genuinely hard to give a damn, yet again, about a group of uninteresting people to whom these things might not even be happening. Really not worth the time and rental fee, and not a fraction of a very small fraction as interesting as the box blurb makes out. Mysteriously, the opening credits are repeated at the end in a different font, twice.

*

May cause drowsiness:

THE MANSTER

2011-10-10T23:57:00.000+02:00

CANTAINS SPAILERS

Yup. It's not The Monster, but The Manster. Part Man, part Monster. This is an agreeably daft piece of low-budget mad scientist B-twaddle, interestingly co-produced with (and set in) Japan, although it's a Japan where everyone speaks English, with some laughable moments but generally moves at a fast enough pace to gloss over the arrant silliness and iffy make-up effects. Ultimately the worst that can be said about it is that the secondary female lead bears a terrifying resemblance to Edwina Currie; something which frankly scared me more than the Manster on one of its blood-crazed rampages.

There are actually two man-monster Mansters in The Manster: a giant ape creature savages some girls in a bath-house in rural Japan before returning to the mountaintop laboratory of its demented creator Dr Suzuki. Clearly the formula isn't working, so he changes the enzyme and selects a new test subject: he drugs newspaper reporter Larry (Peter Dyneley) with dodgy whisky and injects him with the new improved serum. But it's not long before Larry starts to transform into his inner beast: he loses his focus at work, dumps his long-suffering wife and takes up with Suzuki's glamorous assistant (Edwina lookalike Terri Zimmern in, as far as the IMDb is concerned, her only film appearance). His physical transformation starts with the hairy hand before developing an eye on his shoulder that becomes a second head! (Evil Dead 3: Army Of Darkness nodded to this at one point.) And then.....

The second head itself is a pretty terrible effect: it doesn't actually do anything except sit on the actor's shoulder (probably glued to his raincoat so it doesn't fall off when he runs) and is less convincing even than the one Zaphod Beeblebrox had in the BBC version of Hitch-hiker's Guide. But it is pretty much of the level you'd expect from a Z-list horror movie from 1959: clunky writing: out of nowhere a volcano starts erupting, and the final chunk of dialogue is almost literally unspeakable. Still, it's not supposed to be Citizen Kane. Idiotic, but not without a few moments of loopy charm. The Manster doesn't appear to have ever been released in the UK; this was seen on an imported DVD.

**

THE DEVIL'S ROCK

2011-10-10T10:06:00.000+02:00

AVE SPOILERS

A horror movie set in (on?) the Channel Islands during the Second World War with only four significant speaking parts, that mainly takes place in one underground location - surely this would be a natural for the low-budget British horror industry? It's something of a surprise to find this is actually made in New Zealand! Why didn't we make this? Why did it need people more than eleven thousand miles away to produce something that's so naturally British? Presumably we'd have insisted on a role for Danny Dyer. Anyway, this could have been a perfectly decent, fairly grim and gruesome British offering - not a classic but a solid production - but instead it's a perfectly decent, fairly grim and gruesome New Zealand offering.

Possibly The Devil's Rock is Faroe Island itself, but more likely it's the ugly concrete monolith the German occupiers have constructed upon it. Two Allied soldiers, ordered to blow up the German gun emplacement as part of a distraction from the imminent Normandy landings, hear the sound of agonised screaming, and investigate. But inside, all but one of the Germans are dead, at the hands of a voracious demon conjured up as part of Hitler's ongoing obsession with the occult ("He almost got his hands on the Ark of the Covenant", murmurs the sole German survivor in the film's only humorous moment). Crucially, the demon has shapeshifting powers and can take the form of its prey's loved ones: can our reluctant heroes withstand its/her wiles and complete the banishment ritual as laid down in the Necronomicon?

While there's a lot of blood and entrails, most of the gore is after-the-fact offal rather than the kills themselves, and much of the first two thirds is talk rather than action. But on this occasion it's well enough done. The demonic makeup design is pretty traditional looking - although there is a dodgy CGI distension effect that doesn't really come off - and there's a nice irony in the payoff. Overall it's not bad. I'm just slightly annoyed that we didn't get to do it. (Ignore the critical quotes on the front cover: this is NOT "Saw With Swastikas" any more than it's Carry On Cowboy With Goosestepping.)

***

Achtung:

MELANCHOLIA

2011-10-07T17:44:00.000+02:00

BOO HOO SNIFF CONTAINS SPOILERS SNIFFLE SNIFFLE

You can probably tell from its title that this is not a film of high jollity, and indeed the greatest amusement was generating from no less than six people walking out of the film (and not coming back) during its final screening last night at the Milton Keynes Cineworld. Laughs there are none. Moments of great visual beauty, excessive length, unanswered questions, much that is impenetrable, as you'd expect from auteurist art cinema, but little to dispel the gloom, misery and sense of futility. On one level it's unfair to criticise a miserable art movie for being a miserable art movie, in the same way that you can't knock Friday The 13th Part V for its lack of insight into the human condition, but on another level there are several points where you really want the damn thing to lighten up.

Towards the end of the third Naked Gun movie there's a spoof Oscars ceremony and the nominees are synopsised as "one woman's triumph over a yeast infection set against the background of the tragic Buffalo Bills season of 1991" and "one woman's ordeal to overcome the death of her cat set against the background of the Hindenberg disaster". Well, Melancholia is principally concerned with one woman's battle against catatonic depression set against the background of the impending destruction of the planet Earth. Part One features Justine (Kirsten Dunst) as a spoiled, miserable advertising copywriter on her wedding day - she arrives two hours late at a country mansion hotel for her monumentally expensive reception, disrupts the day's schedule, chucks her job, insults her boss, and cheats on her new husband by shagging a bloke she's only just met (on the golf course). Part Two features her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as she attempts to drag Justine out of a depression so deep she can barely walk, as the planet Melancholia breaks all the laws of physics by breaking out of its orbit from the far side of the sun and hopefully doing a Star Trek slingshot manoeuvre - or possibly then turning round and smashing into the North Pacific. Roll end credits.

The opening ten minutes or so is a gorgeous montage of ultra-slow-motion visuals of Dunst as the apocalypse begins, intercut with CGI effects of the planetary collision, accompanied by Wagner's Prelude to Tristan And Isolde. Frankly I could have just watched that for the punishing 135 minutes, and it would have been lovely, but they cut to an hour of this tiresome wedding reception full of idiotically rich people. Yes, there's John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling, Udo Kier and Kiefer Sutherland, Stellan Skarsgard and Jesper Christensen; it's always good to see them but before long you really are willing the rogue planet to hurry up and smash into them. Then we get a second hour of moping and whining with the two sisters at Gainsbourg and Sutherland's huge mansion (incidentally so enormous you wonder why they didn't hold the first act reception there) as Melancholia does its interplanetary three-point turn and speeds unstoppably towards Earth. While the happy and contented Claire panics in the face of global annihilation, Justine faces it with stolid acceptance.

If Wikipedia is to believed (and I don't believe that everything on there is a lie) Lars Von Trier apparently conceived this movie during therapy for his ongoing depression: he supposedly directed Antichrist while suffering the same condition and while it lacks the extreme and offputting imagery of that film, it's just as frustrating. I really wanted to like Melancholia - I'd actually like to like all movies - and while I genuinely liked isolated, beautiful moments, there's a hell of a lot to be annoyed and bored by. I'm glad "difficult" arthouse cinema is getting through to a few multiplexes and out of the niche circuits; as I believe multiplexes should cater for all audiences and not just shovel out the hollow studio slop. But surely you can have arthouse movies that aren't about deeply uninteresting things happening to deeply irritating people?

**

BLOOD RUNS COLD

2011-10-05T15:29:00.000+02:00

INNEHÅLLER DETALJER I BERÄTTELSEN (CONTAINS DETAILS OF THE STORY)

Bizarrely, this isn't an American film, despite everyone speaking and writing English throughout and apparently being set in the US. Only the non-American accents give it away, but it's actually Swedish, made in Sweden by a substantially Swedish cast and crew, but the lack of any Swedish dialogue or references suggests it was made entirely with the foreign market in mind, to trick the dimbo American audiences into watching a Swedish film without their knowledge. In and of itself it's a silly and frankly implausible snowbound slasher movie, but it looks good, has an impressive bogeyman and boasts some cheerily nasty gore moments.

Blood Runs Cold has a young singer named Winona taking a couple of weeks off at a rented cabin miles from nowhere: she meets up with her ex and a couple of his friends and they all stay the night. But in the morning they find the car vandalised and a deranged axeman (who looks not unlike the Tusken Raiders from Star Wars except covered in blood) starts butchering them and eating them fresh off the bone. Why? Who is he? Why can't her concerned manager find her when he's standing outside the house?

That last reveal is laugh out loud funny, and either a brilliant piece of sleight of the writer's hand or a ridiculous old plot contrivance shoehorned in as a completely implausible twist. I'm tempted to the latter since much of the movie depends on unlikely circumstances - the guy who discovers the car's sabotaged engine doesn't think it worth waking people up to tell them, nor does Winona's ex bother to mention that he's seen someone upstairs through the window. Presumably this cabin doesn't have a functioning toilet since both guys go out in the snow to pee, but it does apparently have several hundred yards of crawlspace and a basement only slightly smaller than the Piccadilly line. And in the final reel there's a breathtaking moment of "blimey, THAT was handy" as the Final Girl lays her hand on the very item she really needs but which had absolutely no business being there.

And it's curious that Blood Runs Cold manages to get away with having its mad killer's backstory and motivations go entirely unexplained when Neighbor failed to pull the same trick just a few days ago with its unnamed murderess. I can only suggest that, like Leatherface or Michael Myers, he's more of a force of nature than any kind of human being - like The Terminator, you can't argue with it, you can't reason with it - whereas The Girl is obviously a reasoning, decision-making person who does what she does out of deliberate choice rather than the primal, unthinking instinct by which Texas Chainsaw or a hundred other bogeymen are powered. It's not a bad film by any means: despite the iffy writing and gaping implausibilities and unlikely incidents, it has an imposing-looking killer, it maintains a decent pace once it gets going and it delivers on the blood and gore (which always looks better against snow). And sometimes that's enough.

***

Brrrrrrrrr:

NEIGHBOR

2011-10-03T17:13:00.001+02:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND WHINING

Another dreary slog through the wacky world of torture porn and, while that label is often incorrectly applied to the likes of Saw and Hostel, it's actually quite appropriate here as there's nothing else going on. It's exclusively concerned with torture and violence, gore and murder; it's not interested in character or narrative as the characters are uninteresting and the narrative nothing but a flimsy thread on which to hang the scenes of screaming and bloodshed. Whole reels of Friday The 13ths and Halloweens go by without anything horrible happening but the overwhelming bulk of this independent cheapie consists of nothing but sadistic violence and splatter. With no level of emotional connection, the sole thrust of the film is the extended scenes of torture and with no rationale to explain why it's happening, it's just an empty succession of nasty gore effects. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is porn.

Presumably Neighbor refers to the unnamed woman played by America Olivo (she's also in Transformers 3, Bitch Slap and the Friday The 13th remake, so by now she can surely recognise a rotten movie when she's hired to be in one) although there's no actual evidence that she's anyone's neighbour in particular. She's basically a homicidal maniac, merrily torturing and killing without a whiff of conscience or remorse; she sets her sights on Don (Christian Campbell, Neve's brother), a local musician gearing up for a performance of his band's new album. And then spends the rest of the movie maiming and injuring him, and murdering his friends and loved ones. Or does she? Midway through it appears she's been dealt with but is that a fantasy? Or does the remainder of the film take place in Don's traumatised imagination?

The violence, which includes drilled feet and thighs, eyelids stapled open, finger-lopping, facial acid burns and slashed limbs, is undeniably well executed with terrific gore prosthetics. The one horror that we don't see, and frankly I can't complain much about the BBFC removing 19 seconds of this, has The Girl inserting a metal rod into Don's penis. But there's no sense of reason behind it - presumably they wanted to make The Girl an unfathomable and incomprehensible monster who does what she does just because, not unlike the maniacs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Probably any explanation would be redundant, and would feel grafted on, but if you're going to set the film in a real suburban world (rather than the exaggerated wasteland of TCM) the characters also need to be rooted in that world as well. There's no mention made of how many people The Girl has killed already, and no mention of how she's managed to evade the law.

And: Carpenter, Hitchcock, Landis, Hodder, Kane, Shaye, Cunningham. You are once again stamping on very thin ice by naming all your characters after genre actors and directors and littering the script with movie references. A respectful tip of the hat is one thing but unless your own movie is worthy of those names and nods then it's just fanboy name-dropping. Halloween was able to do it, Night Of The Creeps got away with it. This doesn't because it's simply not a good enough movie to justify evoking those names (and Shaye and Cunningham I'm not sure I'd classify as genre greats anyway), although I don't think any of the names are actually spoken so it's an injoke reserved for the end credits anyway.

It's an ugly movie, it's a charmless movie, and without much reason to care about or be much interested in any of the characters, good or bad, it's a dull movie. The spectre of a sequel - in which The Girl presumably moves to another town and inflicts meaningless cruelty on another random bunch of people - raises its head at the end and over the closing credits like it's a James Bond movie. Please don't. This is just horrible.

*

HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB

2011-10-03T14:41:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND A SENSE OF BEING CHEATED

You'd think from the reviews on the IMDb that this was a full-on tits and gore extravaganza, with much nudity and senseless splatter. Not that the reviews section of the IMDb are a particular beacon of intelligence - check out their dimwitted bleatings against Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and its lack of machine gun battles and exploding speedboats - but it would appear that this Spanish sleaze offering is available in two versions: one with hooters and blood, one without. Guess which one I ended up with? Not that padding out the running time with around eight minutes of naked women and heart-ripping would have helped much, but given that it's pretty much all the film's got going for it, it's not fair either to the film or the audience to remove it.

Horror Rises From The Tomb (El Espanto Surge De La Tumba) is, at least in its cut version, a pretty dull piece of trash in which the legendary Paul Naschy stars as a warlock, executed in 1454 but vowing revenge. In present day (1970s) Paris, his descendant, also played by Naschy, goes off to his ancestral home with an artist and their respective lady friends. Forced off the road by bandits (who are promptly hung by the locals!) and conned into the extortionate purchase of a crappy old wartime Citroen, they hole up at the mansion with the intention of looking for treasure in the catacombs. What they find is the severed head of the old warlock, which immediately starts possessing people so he can be reunited with his body and brought back to life.

There are zombies, several scythe murders, and a handy magical talisman than can convert the possessed. Mostly, however, there's a lot of badly pan-and-scanned dullness accompanied by a tiresome organ soundtrack. It is entirely possible that the longer version with the nude women and more violence shown in the correct ratio is a better viewing experience, but that's sadly not the version I saw, and the mystery as to how Jacinto Molina Alvarez, aka Paul Naschy, became of the legendary names of European horror remains unsolved.

*

DOUBLE EXPOSURE

2011-10-02T16:55:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

This is a bit of a weird one. It has the feel of a bog-standard American TV movie, but the strong language, casual nudity and the occasional bit of sadistic violence put it far outside the remit of the networks' Standards And Practices rules; although it was released in American cinemas in January 1983 (on a double-bill with Tattoo), it doesn't appear to have had a UK cinema outing but it did get a certificated video release after 10 seconds of BBFC cuts. And it only runs about 94 minutes but it feels long because it's a slasher movie where the slashings are padded out with a lot of character drama waffle.

The fairly generically titled Double Exposure might almost count as a giallo: the setup is that a middle-aged photographer (Michael Callan, who also produced) keeps dreaming about murdering his models and then waking up to find that they have indeed been killed - has he killed them and can't remember? There's certainly a maniac on the loose doing away with streetwalkers and the police aren't making any headway, but is it him? Or his one-armed, one-legged brother? Surely not the camp queen he works for? Or the bald and aggressive bartender? Or even the woman (Joanna Pettet) he's recently fallen in love with?

Sadly, much of the running time is not taken up with slashings or the police investigation, but with Callan getting together with Pettet, Callan ranting at his psychiatrist (Seymour Cassel), Callan and his brother arguing about their Mom, bedding various cheerfully undiscriminating women and going on a double date to a mud-wrestling show. Frankly none of this is interesting - there's a psycho on the loose butchering prostitutes and glamour models and we're spending whole reels watching a tubby guy moon over his new girlfriend. The killer's identity is improbable at best and nonsensical at worst and while there's one genuinely nasty kill sequence (involving a plastic bag and a rattlesnake) there's far too much prattling stodge in between the murders. Overall it's a failure.

*

NUDE NUNS WITH BIG GUNS

2011-09-30T15:34:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS ~~TITS~~ SPOILERS

A does-what-it-says-in-the-tin offering that's exactly what you think it is and is precisely as awful as you fear it'll be: cynical trash sniggering over its "adult" (as in rude) content like a 12-year-old with a copy of Razzle. I'm not averse to screen nudity - as the old line goes, "if it's essential to the plot", and there's certainly a place for it in art and entertainment. But in the best of them - Basic Instinct, Dressed To Kill - there's more to the film than just the nipple count and the thrusting bums. Well, this is not the best of them. This isn't even Basic Instinct 2. Nor is it much of a faux-grindhouse movie: it's more of a mean-spirited morass of sex and violence in the manner of Bitch Slap and Hell Ride; sweaty, ugly lowlifes ruthlessly abusing the meek and innocent. To which the only "adult" (as in mature) response is "grow up".

The principal nude nun in Nude Nuns With Big Guns (and I don't discount the possibility of a thudding pun related to Big 'Uns) is Sister Sarah, sucked into the drugs industry by the Mother Superior and various high-ups in the local Catholic Church: turned into a junkie prostitute at a strip club-cum-brothel, she vows revenge and sets about exterminating the priests and bishops involved (one of whom appears to be attempting the vocal inflections of Christopher Walken for no particularly good reason). In panic, the Church call upon the Los Muertos biker gang, a gathering of phenomenally repulsive individuals operating out of a gas station in the desert....

This is rubbish. And it's not even entertaining in an undemanding Friday night tits-and-gore rental kind of a way. For all the nudity and lesbian couplings, for all the gunfire, rape and sleaze, it's actually pretty dull and tiresome. If you must make wannabe-grindhouse garbage movies, there's no rule that says they can't have some level of quality in them. Like Machete or Hobo With A Shotgun, something that might make an amusing spoof trailer doesn't necessarily translate to a feature-length film (Machete kind of got away with it; Hobo empathically didn't.)

And again: if you want to watch naked women, then buy some porn. This is porn for people who don't really want to watch porn, so they watch this kind of thing because it's a proper film with a proper story and proper characters and there are a few bits where they've got their clothes on. Absolutely not worth the time and money, or indeed the effort expended in pressing the Play button.

*

ABDUCTION

2011-09-30T11:55:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND INACCURATE DEFINITIONS

The misdefining of words occurs twice with regard to this tween action thriller. Not just the intergalactic inaccuracy of the title: the film contains chases, fights, shootouts, martial arts, explosions, foreign spies, teen romance, anger management counselling and baseball, but there's no abduction and no-one is abducted. Secondly, Taylor Lautner is not an actor, whatever it might say on his IMDb page or his passport. He's an actor in the sense that he stands there and says and does whatever's in the script, but he's not an actor in the sense that he does any acting or can actually act. In the Twilight movies, he's there to add some smouldering animal meat to the simpering damprot of the Edward/Bella relationship, and he's performing pretty much the same function here - looking hunky and muscled and occasionally taking his shirt off, although not turning into a werewolf.

Abduction has Lautner playing an apparently ordinary high-school kid who, while researching missing children for a sociology class project, chances upon his own childhood photograph on a missing persons website: and before you can say "shameless plot contrivance", sinister men in suits turn up, murder his parents (who weren't really his parents), and blow up his house for no good reason. Who is he really, and what does he have that the CIA and a cabal of foreign agents both want? He has to go on the run with his cute neighbour, aided occasionally by psychiatrist Sigourney Weaver (who disappears for most of the movie), to solve the mystery, come to terms with his paternal abandonment issues, and look hunky and muscled with his shirt off.

Presumably they knew early on that Lautner had the character expression skills of a chair leg, so they drafted in real actors for the supporting roles: they could do the acting while Lautner got on with the "looking hunky and muscled" stuff. This was a mistake: putting Lautner in the same room as Jason Isaacs, Alfred Molina, Maria Bello and Sigourney Weaver merely punches up the contrast between the people who can act and the star who can't. If they'd cast it entirely with people from daytime soaps and pornography, Lautner wouldn't look so out of place. And if the object was distraction - to surround him with explosions and fights and chase sequences so you don't notice the gaping hole at the centre where a leading man should be - it doesn't come off because most of the action stuff is fatally underpowered (the train fight excepted: I thought that was quite well done).

The distraction technique worked in Eagle Eye, where they shoehorned Shia La Boeuf into an idiotic action movie but at least delivered the goods with the pyrotechnics and stunt sequences. But it doesn't work here. The plot's nonsense, the action scenes generally lack impact and the star is a blank - hardly surprising that Abduction is pretty horrendous stuff. As a middle-aged straight guy, I might not be the target audience - teenage girls who think Robert Pattinson is a bit drippy and prefer the smouldering biceps of the other bloke - but surely even they deserve something of more substance than this? Bizarrely, it's directed by John Singleton, one of the significant voices in the "New Black Cinema" of the 1990s with films like Boyz N The Hood - but now doing anonymous studio fodder like 2 Fast 2 Furious and this tween twaddle. Shame.

**

51

2011-09-29T15:48:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS

The After Dark stable of DTV horror quickies takes a slightly surprising turn for the better here. Recently we've had a string of uninteresting and unremarkable, and indeed missable, films: Fertile Ground, Prowl, Husk, Seconds Apart, and while this new entry is in no way any kind of unsurpassable masterwork, it's still significantly better than the norm and also more fun. Sure it's unoriginal - it cribs blatantly from Alien, Aliens and The Thing as well as the geekier episodes of The X-Files - but it's done with enough energy and wit to get over the silliness, the cheapness, and the shameless copying.

51 obviously refers to Area 51, the chunk of Nevada where the US military supposedly keeps crashed alien spacecraft along with the aliens themselves. To "prove" there's nothing to these conspiracies, the government "agrees" to let a few members of the press into the base and the legendary Hangar 18, and show them enough mind-blowing technology to keep them and the public satisfied. But there ARE aliens on the base and, by unhappy coincidence, they're choosing this same day to make their escape....

Pleasingly, the monster sequences have mainly been done with prosthetics and men in suits (admittedly not brilliant ones - Patient Zero is basically a veined body stocking) rather than duff CGI and, even though they're clearly not working with a huge budget, the effects are generally decent enough. The characters are mainly worth cheering for and nicely sketched it, and there's a layer of humour (including a neat gag about Ronald Reagan). In the second half, it does settle for scenes of idiots and military badasses hunting monsters in dark, underground corridors, and the finale does lack the desired oomph as the film runs out of steam. But as a definatly silly Friday night monster B-movie it's a decent enough rental. Directed by Jason Connery.

***

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

2011-09-27T14:34:00.001+02:00

8839251 CONTAINS 2046816 3518319 SPOILERS 7730165

Now that the summer's over, and the schools have gone back, perhaps cinemas can tear themselves away with occasionally amusing but hollow distractions and put on some movies that demand your attention throughout. Like last year's Inception, if you duck out of this wonderfully bleak and downbeat espionage drama - emphatically not a thriller - for a wee and/or more nachos, you will lose the entire thread of the story. Even if you don't, you have to pay attention as there's a lot that's unspoken and you have to fill in some of the blanks yourself: I didn't move throughout the entire running time and I missed some key plot material in the final stretch of the movie. Go before it starts.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a whodunnit where it doesn't really matter who the villain is - the Russian mole at the heart of the British Intelligence outfit of the early 1970s could be any one of its top brass quartet of Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Colin Firth and David Dencik. After retirement and the death of Control (John Hurt), George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is reluctantly dragged back into "The Circus" when asked to uncover the traitor, entirely unofficially, and with only MI6 agent Benedict Cumberbatch and retired police offiver Roger Lloyd-Pack to assist. Much of the mystery centres around Czechoslovakia - not just the disastrous attempt to bring in a high-ranking Soviet official but a subsequent incident where a relatively junior British agent goes off on his own to bring someone else in - but what really happened? Who's the new source of Russian intelligence so eagerly seized upon by The Circus as a bargaining chip to get in with the Americans? Double bluff? Triple bluff?

Its greatest achievement, aside from showcasing some fantastic acting talent (there's also Mark Strong, Kathy Burke, Tom Hardy and Simon McBurney), is probably capturing the mood and look of that time and that Cold War world and mentality. The glasses, the suits, the smoking, the cars, the decor, the endless game of chess between Britain and Russia. It's a drab, glum world: it even feels drab and glum compared to something like The Ipcress File, let alone the comic strip antics of Bond and Bourne. There are no speedboat chases, no space lasers, nothing blows up, and no-one's having any fun. But despite the lack of laughs and gosh-wow adrenaline rush moments, I really enjoyed it: I enjoyed being immersed in a world of deceit and obfuscation, even if it did get the better of me in places. Beautifully shot, thoroughly absorbing, and a movie of this calibre every month or so would not go amiss.

****

KILLER ELITE

2011-09-26T15:11:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU JUST SAID THAT

There's a certain moment that comes along in movies from time to time that's guaranteed to have me wincing. Not any kind of violence (although I still look away in Saw III when someone pulps their own ankle with a toilet cistern) but the use of hideously clunky lines of dialogue. Lines that land on the screen with a wet thud such as "You remind me of myself when I was your age" as uttered, probably at gunpoint, by Alec Baldwin in Pearl Harbour, or "Yo' momma" by Halle Berry in Die Another Day: iffy movies anyway but not helped by "ouch" one-liners. Well, early on in this knuckleheaded macho nonsense, in an unnecessary effort to big up Jason Statham, the phrase "This guy's your worst nightmare" gets an outing. And they're so proud this that some time later they use it again. Ouch, ouch.

Despite the title, Killer Elite has nothing to do with Sam Peckinpah's 1975 action movie The Killer Elite, but is "inspired" instead from a 1993 non-fiction book by Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Jason Statham is a retired Special Ops type, done with assassinations after almost killing a child and now living in a remote area of Australia - but he's brought reluctantly back into action when his mentor and friend Robert De Niro is held hostage by an exiled tribal leader in Oman wanting revenge against the SAS operatives who killed three of his sons and instructing hardman Jason Statham to take them out. But equally hardman Clive Owen, on behalf of the powerful secret organisation of ex-military types known as The Feather Men, is on the trail....

Odd to see De Niro in a simplistic thudfest like this - curiously, this is the second De Niro movie involving someone falsely claiming to be ex-SAS (after Ronin, and let's just hope he knows how to pronounce Hereford now); Statham does the usual Statham thing which is usually watchable and Clive Owen has fun as what is basically the villain role as he's protecting the dodgy ex-SAS murderers. It's far too long, and it has absolutely nothing for the women to do - there's only one female speaking part of a significance and she's not in it for most of the film - but as a Blokes' Saturday Night Action Movie with fights and chases and shootouts and swearing and grunting, it's perfectly entertaining.

***

HEADHUNTER

2011-09-25T22:50:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND GET ON WITH IT

Nothing to do with the upcoming Norwegian thriller Headhunters (which is supposed to be rather good), nor the genuinely mind-boggling Kannibal which is shortly to be foisted upon a largely unprepared UK populace under the title of Headhunter; this is a rather stupid late 80s horror/cop quickie which really isn't very good but it musters up just about enough energy and silly grue to carry it over the atrocious writing and spectacularly annoying characters, not least of which is the star turn from the hero of the rubbish Jake Speed (remember that one?).

Much of Headhunter takes place in Miami but it actually kicks off in Nigeria where a ritual sacrifice appears to unleash some kind of shapeshifting demon thingy that derives its power from ripping people's heads off. Cut to Florida where a similar ceremony again unleashes the same thing that's tracking down those who fled its appearance in Nigeria: cops Kay Lenz and Wayne Crawford (the latter suffering a spectacularly aggressive marital breakdown which is frankly all that he deserves as he's an idiot) are on the case as headless corpses keep turning up, including their chief suspect. But as it's a shapeshifter that can take the appearance of anyone, how will they know when it comes for them?

Too much time in the opening third is spent with charmless ignoramus Crawford and his collapsing marriage to June Chadwick; not enough spent on the horror element which takes too long to kick in. There's not a vast amount of gore - it's only a 15 - but the effects at least prosthetic and optical rather than unconvincing CGI, and it's fair enough entertainment when it does get going. But too often it goes back to the tiresome station full of cops (including Steve Kanaly out of Dallas!), all of whom are dongs and dimwits and none of whom are even slightly interesting. Kay Lenz and the occasional effective moment aside, this really isn't worth your time.

**

THE LEGEND OF HARROW WOODS

2011-09-24T02:54:00.001+02:00

MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS, ALTHOUGH I'M NOT SURE WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED

Richard Driscoll is back. First off he made The Comic, which generated such an ugly mood at the Splatterfest in February 1990 that it was slowclapped at three o'clock in the morning, and another film which he'd only produced, a serial killer movie inspired by Dennis Nielsen entitled The Cold Light Of Day, was hastily dropped from the running order and replaced with Evil Dead II to mollify a disgruntled audience. Rumour had it at the time that Driscoll was escorted out of the Scala Cinema for his own safety. Years later, there was Kannibal, an unfathomably bonkers piece of outright trash that was a combination of dull lesbian softcore, incompetent police procedural and Sir Anthony Hopkins impressions. (It looks to have gone to the BBFC again recently under the title of Head Hunter, and despite its incoherence I urge you to rent it as soon as it's released because you genuinely will not believe your eyes.)

And now here's The Legend Of Harrow Woods, a random assemblage of atrocious acting, star cameos, dodgy CGI effects and people wandering around in the woods in the dark. A group of friends who call themselves The Internetter's Birthday Club (not only making up words but misplacing the apostrophe) have a tradition of celebrating their birthdays by going out and investigating paranormal activities, and broadcasting their footage online; and this year they're looking into Harrow Woods, not only the site of a witch who cursed the land as she was burned at the stake but also the last known location of a horror writer and his family, who mysteriously disappeared a few years ago in the same cabin in the woods. But the psychic traces of the past horrors are still there....

While the principal characters, who stumble around the drab woodlands uttering dialogue that I refuse to believe was scripted by a grown adult, are played by people who simply can't act, the supporting cast in the flashback sequences is filled out with a surprising array of talent. Norman Wisdom turns up as a toilet attendant for one scene, which is then repeated verbatim except that Wisdom has been replaced by Rik Mayall. No explanation is given for this. Robin Askwith, no less, is the horror writer's brother who's possibly having a long-term affair with his wife. Eileen Daly is in it as a psychic. One of the Internetter gang is Jason Donovan and the writer-director-auteur-genius himself shows up as the legendary horror writer under a pseudonym. Most intriguingly is the presence of Christopher Walken (!!!!!!) who despite prominent billing is not actually in the movie at all; it's just his voice reciting Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, sometimes over a rhythm track that threatens on occasion to turn into a rap.

The lack of any kind of competent script and several performances that don't warrant the term "performance" (and indeed barely justify the words "speaking out loud") from the rightfully unknown main cast aren't all that's wrong - they've decided to release it in red/green 3D despite the fact that most of the action takes place at night and all the flashbacks are in sepia, and despite the fact that red/green 3D simply doesn't work. You don't get decent separation of the two images and everything turns brown. Nor does 3D work terribly well when you're playing with the speed settings within the shot - a technique known as ramping, where bits of the shot speed up or slow down. (The DVD has both 2D and 3D versions; I only watched the 2D.) And it's presumably got its 18 for the nudity in the flashbacks as there's little onscreen violence apart from some below feeble CGI blood splatter and a brief double breast impalement.

Bizarrely, it's one of the few horror movies where one of the dunderheaded corpses-to-be doesn't wave a mobile in the air and bleat that they can't get a signal. Why? Well, it appears that chunks of this were actually shot back in 2001, and more in 2008. It's also unclear how this connects with Evil Calls, for which the IMDb lists the same cast and characters, but which doesn't appear to have been released, or Back2Hell, which would appear to be a sequel but has an even more unlikely star cast (Sylvester McCoy, Patrick Bergin, Bai Ling, Lysette Anthony, Colin Baker, Oliver Tobias) as well as several recurring from this one. Maybe it'll all make sense when viewed as a giant entity. Or maybe, and more likely, it won't because Driscoll simply isn't capable of making even halfway watchable films. This is rubbish: it isn't even fun rubbish, it's pretentious, dull, it looks like a fifth-form student film, it's hopelessly inadequate on all fronts and despite the star turns is worthless, wretched and depressing. If you rent it, more fool you and I have no sympathy for you.

*

CONFESSIONS FROM A HOLIDAY CAMP

2011-09-21T23:56:00.001+02:00

CONTAINS BIG ONES. SPOILERS, I MEAN.

There are numerous mysteries at the heart of this entry in the already mystifying subgenre of British sex comedies. Firstly, how on Earth did writer Christopher Wood get from here to not one but two James Bond films (The Spy Who Loved Me, regarded by many as one of the best, and Moonraker, which isn't but which I do have a fondness for)? It's like being hired to adapt The Godfather on the basis of a couple of episodes of On The Buses. Secondly, how on Earth did Robin Askwith get to be any kind of sex symbol? Granted they were presumably looking for someone unlikely, but with all due respect, surely not THAT unlikely. Thirdly, who let it get this far? This is the fourth of the Confessions saga - after Window Cleaner, Pop Performer and Driving Instructor. (Apparently there would have been more, but the Adventures Of... series picked up where Confessions left off.)

Confessions From A Holiday Camp does, admittedly, do precisely what it says on the tin: the (mainly) sexual antics of the staff and guests at a British seaside holiday camp. Timothy (Askwith) and his mate Sidney (Anthony Booth - and I bet these movies don't get discussed much over the Booth/Blair Christmas dinner) are the entertainment managers, loafing and skiving and generally messing around, until the camp is taken over by former prison warder John Junkin who starts straightening things out. Desperate to keep their cushy jobs, Timothy and Sidney come up with the idea of a beauty contest, but none of the contestants seem to be able to keep their hands off poor Timmy....

Essentially this is nothing more than Carry On Butlins - Anthony Booth's character is actually Sidney Noggett which is a typical Sid James name from the Talbot Rothwell years. By this time the actual Carry Ons had all but ceased after deteriorating rapidly and the ruder, nuder sex comedies with the likes of the legendary Mary Millington, Suzy Mandel and Fiona Richmond were gaining popularity. It's got enough full nudity and softcore coupling to still get it an 18 certificate, and a sprinkling of familiar TV favourites that don't get their clothes off (Bill Maynard, Liz Fraser). But it isn't funny: in all honesty the funniest thing about the film is Lance Percival's comedy homosexual.

It's a product of its time: you could do mincing camp in 1977 but you couldn't do it now. Nor could you include the character of Blackbird, the sole black character in the movie (intriguingly, dubbed by Miriam Margolyes) and the source of now-dubious lines about jungle rhythms and racial tension. I wouldn't say it was homophobic or racist since there's clearly no malice or hatred involved; whatever society's attitudes might be now, they were different back in the seventies. Things change.

Was it funny in 1977? I didn't see it then - I'd guess not very, since most people were presumably there for the plentiful tit and bum action and weren't expecting anything other than the most basic of slapstick and single entendres. Nor, despite the naked women littering the screen, is it particularly sexy (especially when it cuts to Robin Askwith pulling faces). It certainly raises nothing more than .... (wait for it) .... the occasional smirk. If you're going to put nudity into a movie within a narrative context, that context does need to be much better than this. And without the context, it's just porn, and that's even less interesting. The theme song is performed by The Wurzels.

*

QUARANTINE 2: TERMINAL

2011-09-21T16:32:00.000+02:00

DOORS TO MANUEL. CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

First there was the Spanish original [Rec], which was one of the better found footage movies on the grounds that there was a decent reason for someone to be filming all this stuff, and then [Rec] 2, which again worked well enough. Then they remade the original [Rec] as Quarantine, not so much shot for shot as pixel for pixel, on the grounds that American audiences were not only so thick they couldn't master the complexities of reading the subtitles, but they needed a poster that gave away the final image of the movie. It was okay, but if you've seen [Rec] you've effectively seen Quarantine as it was exactly the same film. While they're busy continuing the Spanish-language series with [Rec] 3 and [Rec] 4, we now have a sequel to the remake which is NOT a remake of the sequel, in the same way that Rob Zombie's Halloween II has nothing to do with Rick Rosenthal's Halloween II.

And now we have Quarantine 2: Terminal, which mercifully ditches the increasingly wearisome found footage technique and adopts the more traditional techniques of editing and photography that you expect from a proper film (though, curiously, no music score). The Doomsday Virus thing from the first movie(s) gets loose on an aeroplane in mid-flight and starts infecting people, turning them into slavering zombies. Forced to land when the first victim goes royally berserk, the remaining passengers and crew can't get into the terminal itself and, find themselves sealed up in one of the cargo hangars as the disease control people seek to contain the outbreak....

Occasionally it does lapse back into the POV style with the acquisition of thermal goggles but generally speaking it's made as a proper film since there's no reason within the narrative for any of this to be constantly recorded. Eventually it just becomes a standard zombie movie with the dwindling survivors running around the dark hangar and having to kill one another to stay alive. Much of this is frankly pretty mundane and very difficult to get excited about, no better or worse than dozens of other DTV quickies although it does set itself up nicely for a Quarantine 3.

Even as airborne horror goes - surprisingly a pretty thin subgenre - it's undistinguished; the pinnacle is probably the Twilight Zone story Nightmare At 20,000 Feet (William Shatner or John Lithgow) or the 1970s TV-movie The Horror At 37,000 Feet, coincidentally also with Shatner. Quarantine 2 is entirely functional and unremarkable but never gets off the ground, and while the move away from faux-reportage is to be encouraged, it still needs to be better than this.

**

Upright positions:

DEATH SCREAMS

2011-09-21T00:04:00.002+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS - MAYBE, I'M NOT SURE

Horror fans of a certain generation tend to be nostalgic for movies that perhaps aren't the very best. No-one up to and including the people who actually made them would suggest that Friday The 13th Part II, Happy Birthday To Me or The House By The Cemetery are neglected Works Of Art that were cheated at the world's Academies, but many would take grungy splatter and slasher B-movies any day over the A-list productions we're supposed to like and admire. But even with drive-in slasher ripoffs there are good and bad, and while it's fun to reminisce about films like Rosemary's Killer, it's no fun with the underachieving rubbish like this pitiful 1981 obscurity starring no-one you've ever heard of in which hardly anything happens.

There's really not much point in going through the plot of Death Screams - a homicidal maniac butchers a couple of teens making out by the train tracks. Forty minutes later, after a slab of uninterrupted blathery soap opera that would make a Crossroads fan weep in boredom, someone gets shot with an arrow. More teens then gather by the river to make out, before heading off to the cemetery to smoke, drink and tell ghost stories. Eventually the mad killer turns up, decapitates some idiot in a car and runs around with a machete before being revealed as someone or other. Apparently he saw some tits when he was a kid and therefore grew up with an urge to kill people.

The gore is minimal and what there is isn't massively well done; the characters are all dull and there isn't even a total scumbag to get angry about (and to get pleased about when he/she gets murdered), and some of the performances are so poor you can't believe they're actors rather than people randomly pulled off the street. The killer's motivation is frankly rubbish, two thirds of the movie take place in badly lit pitch darkness, and it plays out against a monumentally inappropriate score that's partly generic synth drones and partly a brass/funk orchestra playing sub-Kojak cop show grooves. Keep up the nostalgia for early eighties slasher movies by all means, but not for this dross.

*

NOTE: I've subsequently been informed that the Vipco release of Death Screams has the reels in the wrong order! This may well mean that if presented correctly, Death Screams is a fairly decent little slasher flick and worth another star or two. However, tough. This is the edit they've released and if Vipco have ballsed it up that's their problem. I can only review what's in front of me. Even if the reels were switched back, there'd still be the rotten music, shoddy acting and absence of gore (for an 18 certificate film) to contend with.

AFTER...

2011-09-17T00:26:00.001+02:00

CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS BECAUSE I DON'T SEE WHY I SHOULD BE ALONE WITH THE MISERY, YOU UTTER UTTER BASTARDS

Less than two weeks after they sent me the tiresome Moscow Zero, in which a bunch of idiots bumble aimlessly around in the dark somewhere under Moscow, they now send me this piss-poor excuse for an apology for a turd of a so-called horror movie, in which three idiots bumble aimlessly around in the dark somewhere under Moscow, but badly told, incompetently shot and without even the frankly variable talents of Vincent Gallo and Val Kilmer to try (and fail) to prop it up and turn it into something approaching a basic level of professionalism.

In After..., Nate, Addy and Jay are urban explorers: thrill-seekers breaking into the world's most dangerous man-made structures (abandoned factories, power stations, bunkers etc) and base jumping off the roof, then uploading their shouldercam footage to the internet. Their next adventure is a quest for Stalin's secret metro system and Ivan The Terrible's torture dungeons, located somewhere under Moscow and handily just down the track from the city's equivalent of the Northern Line. But it's not long before things go wrong. Nate starts seeing things: the body of his and Addy's missing/dead daughter (like many things, it's not made clear) being buried by a literally faceless man, one of the child's drawings in a pile of newspapers. And then there's radiation, jeeps full of soldiers massacring homeless people, and everyone's put on a train which doesn't appear to be stopping anywhere - and Jay and Addy suddenly fritz out of existence in bursts of static. What's going on?

The Big Twist - that Nate is actually dead and his past and alternate life choices are just playing out in his subconscious in the split second before his death - is not only Jacob's Ladder all over again (amongst others) but illogical in that it's predicting the detail of a trip to Moscow he died before taking. Fine - you can prove any amount of plot chasms with enough waffle about near death experiences. What absolutely isn't fine, though, is the style of the piece - it's hyper-edited so every shot lasts a maximum of about 0.75 of a second, every shot is either hand-held or shoulder-mounted (so extremely wobbly), and pretty much every shot is suffused in red or green light that suggests nothing more than David L Cunningham watched Suspiria a couple of times and thought "I can do that". Well, surprise surprise: he can't.

With that, and a penchant for shooting closeups through a fish eye lens that gives everyone a nose the size of the Horn Of Africa, the inevitable response is the same kind of queasy feeling that goes with the words "shouldn't have had the fish". And that's watching it on a 37" home screen. Project this at even a medium sized Cineworld and you'll be knee deep in bile and semi-digested fries by the end of the second reel. Put it on at the Odeon Leicester Square or Waterloo IMAX and the resultant projectile vomiting will be violent enough to affect the Earth's orbit.

Really: how the hell did this get picked up for release? This is from Optimum: a proper distribution company (now Studio Canal), putting out proper A-list films to nationwide cinemas as well as digging out interesting and unusual movies from the world's vaults. Not some backstreet Del Trotter outfit slinging out any old crap they can get their hands on. Why did no-one say something along the lines of "I'm sorry, Mr Cunningham, but your film simply isn't good enough to be distributed in the UK. You clearly haven't the first idea how to direct and you really need to sit down and watch a shedload of movies to figure out how they're actually put together." Why, in short, didn't someone stop it?

Instead, probably out of pity, they've bought the rights to his genuinely nauseous little "film", which promptly gets released to the British public like a botulism outbreak, and David L Cunningham, who has the shameless and barefaced gall to take a co-writing and directing credit on this worthless and insulting waste of time and shelf space, gets a proper director job on a proper film with proper actors (The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, which has people like Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane and Wendy Crewson in it). Truly there ain't no justice. It's not merely that everyone should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves, it's that they should be rounded up and beaten with sticks until they swear, and sign in blood, never to go near a camera again.

It's got the production values of gonzo gangbang pornography, and to even put your name to amateur-night incompetence of this nature suggests a monstrous ego or that you simply don't give a damn about your audience. This really is unbearable and just because genre fans can be quite tolerant when it comes to dodgy acting and directing doesn't mean we'll watch any fetid sludge you throw at us. Paying customers have a right to a basic level of professional competence if nothing else, and we are monumentally short-changed here.

*

RED WATER

2011-09-15T23:01:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND A SENSE OF DEJA VU

Hang on a moment, haven't we been here before? Haven't we "done" CGI shark movies? We've already plodded through Shark Attack and Shark Attack 2 and Shark Attack 3 and Shark In Venice - there can't be much mileage left in indifferently animated shark attacks. Yet they still keep making them. Presumably the shark is the pre-programmed demo creature that comes bundled free with the effects software; if they want a giraffe or a komodo dragon or a coelacanth they've got to buy the upgrades. (Maybe the shockingly unconvincing octopus in Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus was coded by a five-year-old, it certainly looks like it.)

Red Water is a wet TV-movie in which oil prospectors (in a wildlife reserve) set off an underwater explosion that releases a bull shark into the river, which promptly heads off and eats some bit-part players. Near-bankrupt charter captain and former oil worker Lou Diamond Phillips reluctantly teams up with his ex (Kristy Swanson!) and an oil company rep to trek out to the rig to monitor its impact on the local wildlife. Also upriver are some dumb crooks (including Coolio!) looking for $5m of stolen loot and generally getting in the way. And there's also the shark....

It's dull, it's desperately unoriginal, and the CGI shark effects are so lame that it might as well be a glove puppet - you really did see better effects work in Blake's Seven and the latter years of vintage Doctor Who. And it isn't even decent to look at (made in South Africa doubling for Louisiana - and why was that deemed to be cheaper than just filming it in Louisiana?). It's a thoroughly uninteresting one-star experience all the way. Watch Jaws instead. Hell, watch Jaws 4 instead.

*

3D SEX & ZEN: EXTREME ECSTASY

2011-09-14T12:14:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SOME MAJOR SPOILERS AND BLIMEY, CHARLIE, DON'T POINT THAT THING AT ME, IT MIGHT GO OFF

So it's come to this. We've found the level at last. The pinnacle of three-dimensional cinema isn't the finely rendered world-building of Avatar, the giant robot smashy spectacle of Transformers 3 or the constant jabbing of sharp and pointy things in the likes of My Bloody Valentine. No, it's tits. Not only can you get a load of the norks on that, guvnor, you can practically reach out and touch them. Hurrah for technology. Previously, if you wanted to see a woman's rack in three dimensions, you needed access to an actual woman. However, the movie's not exclusively about tits. It's a completely unhinged sexual melodrama about orgies, androgynes, concubines, infidelity, rape, divorce, castration, chastity and penis transplants, cunningly designed as a searing emotional dissection of sexual inadequacy within the marital relationship.

3D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy concerns a young scholar, Wei Yangsheng (the names from the IMDb appear to be spelled differently in the film's subtitles) who cannot satisfy his beloved bride Tie Yuxiang due to a premature ejaculation and a half-inch knob. He attends the hedonistic anything-goes court of the evil Prince Of Ning in the hope of discovering better lovemaking techniques, and strikes a bargain with the Elder Of Bliss, a woman with a five-foot penis wrapped round her thigh and a disconcertingly deep voice (as if James Earl Jones had dubbed Princess Leia instead of Vader). S/he will teach him how to be a great lover - but first he needs a penis transplant performed by two comedy halfwits in a shack. But there's a darker side to things: in addition to Yangsheng's best friend's seething resentment at not marrying Yuxiang himself, the Prince Of Ning is seeking an elaborate and excessive vengeance against the hapless Yangsheng and the innocent Yuxiang, just because he once referred to the prince as a scumbag in a private conversation with a monk....

Much of it is rather fun in a revoltingly trashy bad taste kind of a way (particularly all the penis stuff - and there's a lot of penis stuff in the movie); you will certainly get your £6 worth, with naked girls writhing away throughout, and much in the way of terrifying overacting and maniacal "Bwahahaha!" cackling. And it's sumptuous to look at, set in the same traditional Old China as the bulk of all those Shaw Brothers movies but far more richly photographed. Sadly, the movie slips up considerably when it resorts to the more hideous sexual violence - two scenes have been cut or trimmed on the BBFC's instruction: to remove the non-consensual elements of the first and to defuse the eroticism of violent sex in the second. Frankly the cuts - even though they total nearly three minutes - don't harm the film and the points (such as they are) are still made clear in the narrative.

The CGI gore is pretty terrible and again makes you wish it was just done with prosthetics, and the subtitling shows the same gloriously shaky grasp of English that we enjoyed so much in the golden era of sub-John Woo heroic bloodshed movies. Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is rubbish, with a nonsense plot and an underlying message (true love doesn't require sex) that doesn't really sit well with the constant thrusting and moaning and boobs and huge knobs all over the place. As porn, it does gets slightly wearing after a while, to the point of "put them away, darling, I think we've seen enough for now". It's a mess, it's overblown, illogical and doesn't know when to stop, but I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't rather enjoy it as a mad melodrama.

***

Next year, in the privacy of your own home:

THE BEYOND

2011-09-13T15:51:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!!! AAAARGH!!!!!

Yup, eyes. Much as we might might wince at it and (appropriately enough) look away, there's a special masochistic thrill in watching a bit of eyeball violence. Sharp things in the eyes (Zombie Flesh Eaters, Dead And Buried, Un Chien Andalou) or a straightforward thumb gouging: it's surprising how effective an attack on one of the human body's most vulnerable areas can be. And this movie has lots of eyeball violence. In fact pretty much the entire cast lose their eyesight at some point, whether it's burned out by acid, poked out by a ten-inch nail through the back of the skull or eaten away by spiders. The only person who doesn't lose their sight would appear to be the one who's blind to start with, and she just gets her throat ripped out by her dog.

Not that Lucio Fulci's The Beyond is merely concerned with showcasing the most cinematically awesome ways you can go blind, but it IS a theme. Back in the twenties, an artist was murdered by a lynch mob - crucified as a warlock, whipped with chains, blinded with lime and walled up in the basement of a Louisiana hotel. In the eighties, the now-derelict hotel is inherited by Catriona MacColl but it's not long before bad things start to happen - a decorator falls off the scaffolding, the plumber meets a bad end trying to stop the flooding in the extensive basement, an architect falls off a ladder and has his face eaten away by tarantulas. It's all got something to do with Room 36 - the artist/warlock's old room - and the mysterious occult tome The Book Of Eibon. The hotel is built over one of the Seven Gates Of Hell; can MacColl and doctor David Warbeck escape the zombie horde?

The Beyond is absolute nonsense - nothing makes sense, people are killed off for no good reason beyond ghoulish spectacle, and some of the English translation dialogue is almost literally unspeakable (and when I saw it projected a few weeks ago, the subject of much derisive laughter). Yet curiously it works as a horror movie for precisely the same reasons: a dreamlike lack of logic and an atmosphere of unreality. Not to mention the insanely explicit gore sequences that got the film banned as a video nasty back in 1984 and heavily cut for many years afterwards, although like many of the nasties it's fully rehabilitated now and available complete and uncut from a score of online dealers and high street retailers.

It's probably the best of Fulci's quartet of legendary gore movies: City Of The Living Dead and The House By The Cemetery both have annoying whiny kids that get on your nerves after a short while, although Cemetery is arguably a better story (I'll confess I haven't seen it in many years), and Zombie Flesh Eaters has too much dull stuff between the censor baiting highlights (the splinter scene is a showstopper). Digitally projected on a big screen, complete and pristine, The Beyond looks great, and sounds great with its doomladen Fabio Frizzi score. The silliness and some of that dialogue, inducing more spasms of horror than the cheerful eye-gouging, do count against it. But it's magnificently mad and it's unlike pretty much anything else.

****

Beyond belief:

MOSCOW ZERO

2011-09-13T00:58:00.000+02:00

C0NTAINS S0ME SP0ILERS

Zero is right, frankly. Zero is all it's worth. I can't actually give it zero stars, though: it's a scale of one to five and it gets one just for turning up. Mutiny On The Buses got one star and we all know how poo that was. If this film consisted of nothing but three hours of a nude Seth Rogen setting fire to kittens in slow motion it would get one star. To a reggae soundtrack. And as grim as that sounds, it might still have been slightly more fun than this dreary multi-ethnic DTV plod through the dark.

In Moscow Zero, Rade Serbedzija has gone missing while exploring the hidden catacombs under Moscow; Vincent Gallo and Joaquim De Almeida go down to look for him, having been pointed in the right direction by Joss Ackland and given permission by Val Kilmer! Because somewhere down there are the Gates Of Hell (and oh, how we could do with Lucio Fulci in prime crumbly zombie mode to liven things up) along with invisible demons. Or ghosts. Or schoolgirls. Cue about forty-three hours of people wandering around in tunnels and finding each other, losing each other, solving puzzles and looking for the Gates Of Hell.

Quite why anyone would want to find the Gates Of Hell in the first place is anyone's guess. If they actually exist, and you know where they are, the smart thing to do would be to seal them shut with about thirty tons of steel-reinforced concrete. Instead we get a bunch of people stumbling aimlessly about in badly photographed caverns and underground churches, and going round in circles while Val Kilmer waits for the right moment to block the catacombs off forever. (Why wasn't that done centuries ago?) This is utter nonsense and more crucially it's absolutely no fun; it's a slow and unexciting movie, most of which takes place in the dark so unless you're watching it with the lights off you can't even see anything. Very poor.

*

Less than zero:

CHAIN LETTER

2011-09-05T11:37:00.000+02:00

0-0-0-0- CONTAINS SPOILERS -0-0-0-0

Yet another dim dumb teen slasher movie which shows no sign of logic, plausibility or common sense, but displays every sign that the makers have sat and watched every instalment of Saw and Final Destination and thought "we can do that". Well, it turns out you can't as the end result is by turns dull, stupid and sadistically unpleasant - a charge you could level at a hundred perfectly serviceable teen slashers - but it never combines to an even faintly satisfying whole.

The Chain Letter of urban legend (pass it on to five other people for good luck) is now a threatening email: forward it to five other people or you will die horrible. And anyone who ignores or deletes it does indeed die gory and painfully. Who could be behind it? Detectives Keith David and Betsy Russell plod along ineffectually through the crime scenes but their only clue would appear to be the numbers stamped on the metal chains found at the scene of each splattery death. Then there's the clearly suspicious college media lecturer played by Brad Dourif in an inspiried moment of casting that can have gone no further than "we need a creepy old guy - is Brad Dourif busy?"

The casting of Betsy Russell from five of the Saw movies isn't the only clue to the movie's origins: while most of the kills are down to your basic generic homicidal maniac, one victim does pass in a blatantly Jigsaw-inspired trap in a typically Sawesque meat packing plant. Elsewhere there are slashed tendons, an engine block dropped on someone's head and a particularly vicious opener involving someone chained between two cars. The gore is upfront (it's an 18) and it looks far better than the usual CGI splatter: either the computer effects capability has improved dramatically (unlikely) or they went for prosthetics because they're better.

But it's another one of those films where the mad killer is entirely omniscient and knows precisely when the victim is going to be in the exact position required: the attack via a skylight demands that the doomed teen idiot walk underneath it at some point, otherwise it rather leaves the hook-wielding killer standing on the roof all night like a dick. There's also the unlikely streak of paranoid technophobia: we're all tracked by our phones and Blackberrys and emails and credit cards etc, but who's using all this information and why? Sadly, the cautionary message is shackled - literally - to a dumb slasher flick mainly concerned with gruesome kill shots.

All the teens are pretty but bland and colourless and have no personality to them so the only appeal left is the splattery gore scenes. Granted, it's put together reasonably well on a technical level but ultimately it's just not any good and frankly that's not acceptable. We should expect, we should demand, better than this. The rental shelves and queues are already heaving with horror films that aren't any good and there's no virtue in just adding to the oceans of sludge genre fans already have to contend with. Even nonsensical thicko bodycount quickies should - and can - be better than this.

*

A LONELY PLACE TO DIE

2011-09-05T00:12:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND THE SLIGHT TWANG OF STRETCHED CREDIBILITIES

The closing film of this year's Frightfest was not a horror movie, although it does have a horrible idea at the centre of it: vivisepulture. Rather, it's an outdoors action thriller with some painful physical violence that unfortunately gets more unlikely as it goes on. But so what? You Only Live Twice, Star Wars and Re-Animator are wildly unlikely to start with; that doesn't mean they can't be fun and entertaining and well made movies. And this IS a fun and entertaining and extremely well made movie with only a couple of "hang on a moment" moments to distract.

A Lonely Place To Die actually boasts a very simple setup, with a group of friends gathering together to climb a peak in the Scottish highlands: while traversing the woodlands they suddenly hear a voice, and find an airpipe in the ground. Someone has buried an eight-foot box under the remotest area of wilderness imaginable and placed an eight-year-old girl inside it. Who? Why? They rescue the child but then find armed gunmen - professionals - tracking them with high-powered rifles. They want the girl back and will do anything to get her....

It makes for an exciting thriller with several scenes of people either hanging off mountains or falling off mountains, Melissa George in skintight mountaineering trousers and plummeting through the rapids. Credibility is stretched a little here: as one who'd no more go orienteering than I would set myself on fire, I don't really know the chances of serious injury after some of these falls: I'm surprised they're able to walk or even move afterwards (specifically Melissa George's high tumble, and a man's long roll down a hill clutching the terrified child). But that's nitpicking, really. In the real world, John McClane wouldn't have survived more than 40 minutes of Die Hard and James Bond would have been dead by the second reel of Goldfinger. A Lonely Place To Die isn't reality, it's a movie, and it's a cracking action thriller that's well worth seeing.

****

INBRED

2011-09-04T20:18:00.000+02:00

SPOILERS DOWN T' TROUSERS

Much as I despised Hobo With A Shotgun as one of most repulsive and borderline walkout-worthy films in years, it's a shock to find a movie - again programmed at FrightFest - that's actually even more of a trial to sit through. Nominally it's a bad taste gorefest but it's really just a tiresome parade of thoroughly dislikeable characters, inept gore effects, poor acting and with no real point beyond insulting the intelligence of the viewer. For all the wannabe League Of Gentlemen rural weirdness, Alex Chandon's "film" isn't funny - there's not one single flicker of a smile from start to finish - and for all the emphasis on extreme violence it isn't even slightly shocking or upsetting. It's actually rather pathetic.

Inbred has four young offenders on some kind of ill-advised rehabilitation programme somewhere in the wilds of Yorkshire, with their ineffectual "hey, kids" supervisors. But it's not long before the offenders revert to type and behave like repugnant dicks, and the locals are revealed not just as eccentric, but malformed homicidal imbeciles (thanks, presumably, to centuries of inbreeding), and they don't take kindly to strangers, like, sithee. Who will survive, what will be left of them, and will anybody give a damn?

Not really. None of them are worth any interest or attention, and here's a measure of just how much I really didn't care. Halfway through the indifferent Vile, one of the nastier characters is punched square in her face and there was a round of applause. During Inbred, I couldn't even raise one tiny nod of approval when the most repugnant of the four young troublemakers suffered a brutal, protracted and humiliating death. Even when the arse-scrapings of humanity were being spectacularly exterminated, I still couldn't rouse a shred of interest. All the kill sequences are achieved with astonishingly poor CGI - the standard you might expect have expected from the likes of Asylum and Syfy about ten years ago - so there isn't even any decent grossout.

Throughout the film I was equal parts bored and annoyed. But I was also left feeling insulted: the makers clearly feel that any old rubbish will satisfy because it's a horror movie in a horror festival - it doesn't matter about character or performance or writing if there's some nasty-minded violence in there, and it doesn't even matter if it's done badly because they'll watch anything. Well, thanks for underestimating. Look, I love a flat-out gore movie as much as anything or anyone, but gore by itself isn't enough. The best flat-out gore movies still have heart and wit and character, and Inbred doesn't have any of that. It's shameful, it's absolutely, unforgivably abysmal and it's one of the very worst of the last few years.

*

SENNENTUNTSCHI: CURSE OF THE ALPS

2011-09-04T15:21:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

Switzerland's first horror film, apparently: a dark, grim (if not Grimm) and tragic imagining of a Swiss mountain legend which more or less pulls it off but is occasionally a little too complicated with its time line, with the result that you're sometimes unsure exactly when the flashbacks within the flashbacks are actually occurring and you might lose the thread.

Sennentuntschi: Curse Of The Alps tells of the legend of Sennentuntschi: a woman created by lonely mountain farmers out of straw and rags who came to life (with the Devil's intervention) but took her revenge on them when used and abused as their sex slave. Years later, a body is found at the bottom of the mountain and this reopens the local police investigation into what happened up there all those years ago, though the rest of the townspeople would rather forget the incidents ever took place and refuse shelter to the mute Sennentuntschi (Roxane Mesquida, apparently carving out a career in oddball genre movies: she's also in Kaboom, Rubber and Sheitan), even demanding she be burned as a witch. But what secrets are still kept by the most prominent members of the community?

It's long - perhaps too long at 110 minutes or thereabouts - and generally it's pretty good: it's ravishingly shot, it's engrossing, upsetting and occasionally surprisingly graphic in its nudity and sex scenes (I'm wondering if this is the first even semi-mainstream genre movie to include a scene of double penetration, and I can't think of any others). But I genuinely got lost with the timeline several times as it appeared some events were happening at the same time but then clearly weren't. Ultimately Sennentuntschi isn't entirely successful, but it's terrific to look at and holds the attention well. Worth a look as something different and unusual.

***

DEADHEADS

2011-09-04T11:41:00.000+02:00

NOT THAT IT MATTERS MUCH, BUT A FEW SPOILERS

It might well be that the zombie movie is all but exhausted as there's not a lot more that you can do with them. They've stumbled aimlessly about, they've shuffled remorselessly, they've run, they've climbed the walls. They've rebelled, they've been domesticated, they've used tools. But this is probably the first movie in which the Romero-descended screen zombie has talked - not just with its own kind (as in Wasting Away - there the living couldn't understand it any more than the dead could understand the living) but with ordinary humans - and has not wanted to eat anyone.

The Deadheads are Mike and Brent (Michael McKiddy and Ross Kidder): a couple of guys who wake up in the woods during what appears to be the zompocalypse: the dead are up and ripping people to pieces. But these two guys are dead - victims of a US military experimental something-or-other. They're still thinking and talking - and decomposing. All Mike wants to do is explain to his ex how he feels about her, and to tell her how and why he died, so the two of them and a tame genuine zombie named Cheese hit the road to find her. But the military is on their trail as well....

Horror comedy is a pretty difficult thing to pull off and the number of movies that have managed it is not high - the most famous is probably An American Werewolf In London. Many think they're making it as horror comedies by spoofing horror films (the Scary Movie series) or being ironic about them (the Scream series), but little or no nerdy injokery in Deadheads unless Brent's surname Guthrie is intended to reference Guthrie The Loonie in The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, which is perhaps unlikely.

For all the jokes and bursts of zombie action, Deadheads doesn't make it as a horror comedy because it isn't really a horror movie: aside from the opening zombie attacks it's much more of a wisecracking romantic comedy/road movie that just happens to have undead characters in principal roles. And as a comedy it does score well: most of the characters are nice and normal (zombiedom notwithstanding) and you don't mind spending time with them, and the result is a charming and enjoyable little film. It's not Shaun of the Dead, and it's not Dance Of The Dead (which I really liked) but it's still nicely done and rather sweet: more "ahhhh" than "aaaargh".

***

APOLLO 18

2011-09-03T18:49:00.000+02:00

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A SPOILER

The dreaded found footage subgenre of obvious bullcrap boldly goes into outer space in this unutterable balderdash that's pretty much equal parts dull, annoying and cretinous to a degree that would shame the intellect of a soup spoon. Not only is found footage a long-exhausted film making technique, but it's also a subgenre so restrictive that the question "what do you plan to bring to this project?" can only be answered with the words "Nothing whatsoever". For all the tricky editing on display in this film, its entire existence rests on the notion that it's actually genuine, when it so patently isn't any such thing. Enough. If you can't make films properly, don't make it badly and bleat that it's real. We're not that stupid.

The genius idea behind Apollo 18 is that after the lunar expeditions we know about, there was one extra top-secret one, to investigate claims that the Russians had been there as well. But it turns out there's something else up there: something hostile. With a multitude of television and video cameras and motion detectors, as well as 16mm cine cameras and hours of Kodachrome stock, the two astronauts set out on the surface to find whatever it is. But If there was a second Russian cosmonaut, where is he? And if there was only one, then who - or what killed him? What if it's a life form? What if it's contagious?

Certainly they've gone to great lengths to make it all look real: interspersing the actors' scenes with genuine NASA footage, shooting everything on 16mm and clunky early-70s tape (or processing everything to look like it) in a variety of aspect ratios. But as with all found footage movies, it's a particularly desperate lie: we know that Pirates Of The Caribbean is just as much of a fiction but crucially it's not pretending to be genuine. Here it's as patently, blatantly a work of fiction but really trying hard to look genuine long after it's been rumbled. It's pathetic and the hair-in-the-gate, the scratchy, grainy film stock, and the absence of a music score doesn't make it a whit more realistic. Nor does Bob Weinstein standing up and saying "we didn't shoot anything, we found it!" That's not just a flat out lie, it's not even a plausible lie and it makes Weinstein look like an utter dick for thinking we'll swallow this crap.

It's also a failure it terms of basic logic. If this film was actually a genuine collage of the footage shot by the crew, then how did it end up back on Earth? Was there another mission to retrieve the rolls of exposed film from the abandoned American lander? If so that rather defeats the film's "There's a reason we never went back to the moon" tagline. And similarly, how did NASA obtain the film from the orbiter? Maybe we sent robots or something. I don't suppose it's worth pointing out that several moments on the moon clearly show objects falling at a rate commensurate with Earth gravity: about 9.81, the sort of figure you'd associate with Vancouver, where it was actually shot.

There's no reason why Apollo 18 couldn't have been made as a proper, regular movie with proper edits and effects and music, like most films are. Not only would it have been honest about its fictitious origins but as an all-too-rare SF/horror romp, it might well have been good fun. Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego has made proper films before - King Of The Hill is a fair enough wandering-round-in-the-woods thriller - and there's no reason why he couldn't have done the same here. Instead we get the chaotic and jumpy images, the indistinct dialogue, the tedious Paranormal Inactivity video shots of nothing happening, and a stupid ending that invalidates the whole film's very existence. Utterly abysmal, and possibly one of the worst films of the year.

*

THE CALLER

2011-09-03T12:27:00.000+02:00

SPOILERS MAJOR CONTAINS

There's a certain joy in unearthing a film that's below the radar and finding it to be a little gem, It's your discovery and it falls to you to ensure it's better known. While everyone else was going "meh" over the blockbusters that were hyped to the brink of death before they'd even finished shooting them (hello, Spiderman) or yet more utterly anonymous slasher/torture nonsense, you were off in smaller screens checking out something else you'd never heard of and the gamble paid off. It certainly does with this twisty murder-over-the-years number.

The Caller has Mary (Rachelle Lefevre) fleeing an abusive and violent ex-husband and relocating to Puerto Rico to start a new life. But barely has she moved into the apartment than she starts receiving telephone calls asking for a guy named Bobby, and the woman on the other end won't take Mary's denials seriously. Especially when the caller, a lonely woman named Rose, appears to be calling from the 1970s. Is she a ghost? Is she a time traveller? But when she breaks contact with Rose, Mary's reality becomes physically altered and people start disappearing - and indeed appear to have never even existed....

The despicable ex is perhaps too much of a stereotypical wife-beating bastard: there's no nuance to the character beyond "This Is The Guy We Hate", but that doesn't matter too much. The film's a neat and ingenious, if slightly Doctor Who-ish tangle of paradoxes that more or less works itself out correctly (though I didn't really get the severed finger bit) and rustles up a lot of tension in the film's final confrontation between Mary and Rose - the latter nothing but a voice on the telephone for most of the movie. I really enjoyed it - one of my favourites of this year's FrightFest - but you do need to pay attention to what happens when. Well worth tracking down.

****

KILL LIST

2011-09-03T00:54:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND THAT SAME SENSE OF DISAPPOINTMENT AGAIN

The hype that's come with this new British horror/thriller/drama is frankly absurd. Look at the poster quotes: "One of the best British thrillers in years", "A gut-wrenching chiller", plenty of four and five star ratings. Now, I'll happily admit that opinions are subjective and personal, but really, honestly, this film is absolutely nowhere near as impressive as made out. It's not a bad film, but it's scarcely a classic and I seriously can't imagine (hey, like I'm any kind of authority on these things) it lasting in the public consciousness more than couple of years.

It starts with Jay (Neil Maskell), ex-military and now hired assassin, lured back into the hitman game with the promise of good money and simple hits: he clearly loves his wife (MyAnna Buring) and young son but needs to provide for them so takes the Kill List. The first target for him and his ex-army colleague and partner is The Priest, which goes pretty simply. But the second, known as The Librarian, is a curator of illegal and violent child pornography and that's when Jay goes "off list" - finding and executing the man behind the trade in this material. And the third - the MP - is when it all comes crashing down as the film suddenly changes gears into the apparent world of pagan cults and sacrifices....

So for much of the time it's like a British version of A Serbian Film (in terms of structure but mercifully not the extreme sexual imagery) that plays like an upmarket Danny Dyer movie in which Jay shouts and rants and kills people, and then in the last reels it suddenly becomes The Wicker Man. It's an odd mix and it doesn't really come off; the gear-change is too abrupt and the final moments don't really seem to make any sense. That's a shame, because up to that point I was finding it reasonably engrossing and involving. Don't believe the hype: it's good, but it's quite definitely not great.

***

SINT

2011-09-02T23:07:00.000+02:00

BEVAT BESCHRIJVING VAN DE DRAAIEN VAN HET PERCEEL (CONTAINS DESCRIPTION OF PLOT TWISTS)

Santa Claus: what a bastard. About this time last year we had Rare Exports, the Finnish anti-Yuletide horror movie in which Santa was an absolute bastard who'd been encased in a glacier for thousands of years. Before that, you probably have to go back to the brace of rubbish 80s Santa slashers: Don't Open Till Christmas (rubbish) and Silent Night, Deadly Night (also rubbish). Now here's the Netherlands entry in the "season of illwill" genre: here the local equivalent of Santa is an absolute bastard who shows up every time there's a full moon on December 5 (every 36 years or so, apparently) and slaughters people.

Sint (Saint) is concerned with the legend of St Niklas, a homicidal bishop and his evil zombie acolytes, the Black Peters. 36 years ago, a kid called Goert was the sole survivor of one of Niklas' attacks: now he's a cop ridiculed as a hysteric for his warnings that it will happen again, tonight. Inevitably Niklas does appear and the carnage starts. But can Goert even find Niklas and the Black Peters, as everyone in town is dressing up in those costumes for the traditional December 5 festivities?

Dick Maas has made some terrific and enjoyable little movies in the past - Amsterdamned, The Lift, and its American reworking Down. And Sint is certainly not a bad film by any stretch - it's perfectly well done and sufficiently entertaining, and the dreaded Niklas is an imposing looking bogeyman figure. But for some reason it's a tad underwhelming and I was a little uncomfortable with the number of children who got killed over the course of the movie for no adequate reason (in the sense that they weren't rescued from the clutches of the Black Peters and thus perished in the final conflict). A Christmas movie in which kids die?!? There are some wonderful moments in the movie but ultimately it's only a qualified success.

***

THE INNKEEPERS

2011-09-02T17:58:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SOME MINOR SPOILERS AND CREEPY CREEPY

Hurrah! Easily the best film on show at this year's Frightfest, this is a lovingly fashioned horror movie made in the traditional manner - subtle, intelligent, leisurely based, impeccably crafted and very creepy - rather than the frenetic noise and stupidity of the last four hundred teensplat offerings. And another winner from Ti West: it's not quite up there with the wonderfully retro House Of The Devil but it's still a thoroughly involving and genuinely spooky piece of work. (Admittedly I didn't care for The Roost at all and I think we can all agree that Cabin Fever 2 was just a mess.)

The Innkeepers are actually the two bored staff members at the long-standing Yankee Pedlar Inn, about to close permanently. Over the hotel's last weekend, in between playing idiot pranks on each other, surfing the web for porn and generally goofing around, they're slightly interested in solving the old mystery of the inn's ghost - whether the place is indeed haunted by the spirit of a former resident. Might there be something in the cellar? What's with the old man who's just checked in? Or the one-time TV star (Kelly McGillis)?

Really, the less you know the better about the specifics of the plot, the better: this is one of those films it's best to let sneak up on you. It also has a nice light touch - the two aren't really serious ghostbusters and spend as much time bickering and messing about as they do looking for the ghost. This doesn't put you through the wringer nearly as much as Insidious, but it's still yet another depressing instance of 1970s pastiche cinema's ability to be better, more enjoyable and more effective than today's technically shiny but soulless genre movies.

Slowburning chillers are usually more rewarding as horror movies than hyperactive orgies of just flinging horrible stuff at the lens. The Innkeepers takes its time, it's not interested in lobbing shocks and gore at you simply because it's been twelve minutes since the last one - it'll scare you in its own good time. But when it does, it does it very well. My favourite Frightfest screening of the year and, while it's not the best movie of the year, it's certainly one of the top horror films.

****

THE DIVIDE

2011-09-02T12:06:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS NOT VERY MUCH IN THE WAY OF SPOILERS AFTER THE OPENING SEQUENCE

I guess it's always dangerous beginning your movie with a nuclear apocalypse and the sudden violent destruction of Western civilisation: you run the risk of peaking too early dramatically. Xavier Gans' film opens with the bombs going off and the city being obliterated - where do you go from there? It's a bit like Face/Off which has an opening action sequence that most directors would be happy to have as the climax of the film, but Woo puts it in the opening reels (although he still manages to pump the excitement later on).

The Divide isn't concerned with Armageddon itself, though - that's literally something that happens outside. Instead the film focuses on the handful of residents of an apartment block who manage to get into the basement before the building collapses on their head. Inevitably, all that anger, fear and aggression in a confined space with no immediate escape route leads to higher tension and factions forming as to who's in charge, how long the rations will last, how long they need to stay down there. And how long before they turn on each other and kill each other to further their own prospects for survival? Or, how long before they just go insane?

It's a beautifully shot and lit film - all but a few minutes of the film take place in the extensive basement and storage space of a large apartment block - and it's a compelling and sometimes uncomfortable picture of just how far people will go under . It's got a strong cast: Michael Biehn, Rosanna Arquette, Courtney B Vance and an almost theatrical feel to it - could it be adapted for the stage? The principal flaw is that it does frequently descend into scenes of unlikeable alpha males squaring off by bellowing obscenities at each other in a confined space, and after a while that's neither entertaining nor dramatically interesting. And it is too long at 110 minutes in the company of increasingly unpleasant individuals. Nice ending though.

***

A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE

2011-09-01T22:57:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND A DESPERATE ATTEMPT NOT TO SWEAR

Do you remember when you got your first camcorder? On those first few tapes you tend to have a usable shooting ratio of about twenty thousand to one - you end up with endless hours of blurs and blobs and static shots of sod all, playing with the autofocus, zooming in and out of faces. You realise you can stand 500 feet away from people and still film them in merciless closeup, you discover nice little visuals like street lights out of focus. And out of those endless hours there'll be a few nice shots, arrived at purely by chance, that are worth keeping. Well, as far as a visual aesthetic is concerned, Adam Wingard's film is like that.

A Horrible Way To Die is unremittingly terrible and so incompetently put together that I genuinely needed to check the synopsis in the programme to be clear what the hell was going on. A serial killer - one of those absurdly charismatic types who inspire cults of pathetic devotees in spite of the fact that he's a mass murderer - escapes from jail and heads straight for his ex whose testimony put him away in the first place. She's a recovering alcoholic who's finally met a new man with whom there's a chance of a fresh start, but can it be that simple?

There's nothing particularly wrong with that setup: it covers the basics perfectly well. Good guy, homicidal maniac on the run, pretty girl oblivious to her impending doom, some sort of twist at the end. It's the execution that's so wretched. Much of the camerawork is hopelessly amateurish - light blobs all over the place for swathes of time, the poor focus frequently reducing the underlit image to an indiscernible brown murk. Is that the girl? Is it a horse? The south side of Kilimanjaro? What the hell am I supposed to be looking at here? Nor, frankly, could I raise any interest in the characters - the apparently intended victim and her new boyfriend especially are monumentally tiresome and endless scenes of bleatings at AA meetings do not make compelling drama. It's a dull film, it's visually abominable and 95 minutes have rarely felt so much like a fortnight.

*

(The worst part is, I chose this film over the Adam Green / Joe Lynch portmanteau Chillerama in the other screen, which would have at least had a couple of decent bum jokes and maybe some tits.)

THE DEVIL'S BUSINESS

2011-09-01T22:12:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SOME MINOR SPOILERS

An extremely lower-than-lower-than-microbudget horror drama, this is an ideal lesson in making a genre film on almost no money. One location, four speaking roles, no stunts, no effects, no chase sequences, no exploding helicopters, no big stars. Keep it tight, keep it taut, keep it simmering. In this instance the end result doesn't work perfectly - in the absence of action there's a lot of talk, particularly in the first third - but it still must surely be an invaluable How-To guide for serious aspiring film makers (rather than fanboy idiots) with limited resources.

The Devil's Business has a simple setup: two hit men waiting for their target to return home. One older, more experienced, cynical and controlled, the other younger, fidgety and impatient for some action. After a lengthy monologue about the spookiest thing the older killer has ever seen, the intended victim has still not arrived but things start to go wrong, specifically the discovery of something very nasty in the outhouse.... Who exactly is this man they've been sent to kill?

It's a very talky film, very dialogue heavy in the opening act, particularly the monologue which cheerfully ignores the "show, don't tell" maxim and just has a single take of Billy Clarke relating the story. But two men in a room talking isn't particularly cinematic - it's radio or theatre - and they only manage to pull it off because it's well written and compelling. But I really do believe they needed some more oomph: they needed to raise the level at the climax as it is a touch underwhelming, and that's a pity as the characters are nicely drawn. I just wanted to like it more than I ultimately did.

***

FRIGHT NIGHT

2011-09-01T11:49:00.000+02:00

CONTAINS SPOILERS, UNLESS YOU'VE SEEN THE ORIGINAL

Again, as with Conan, why bother? What are the new boys bringing to the table? And the answer, yet again, appears to be not very much beyond a few bigger star names, four-letter words and shiny happy 3D. They haven't improved the story, the characters or the vampire effects, all of which were fine in Tom Holland's original which didn't have the questionable benefits of whizzy CGI or shiny glasses. Far from it: it's a watchable enough and just about tolerable ride but it does nothing that hadn't been done better 26 years ago. As a remake it has the validity of Rupert Wainwright's The Fog.

The plot of Fright Night is pretty much unchanged: ordinary kid Charley (Anton Yelchin) comes to realise his new neighbour Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a vampire. Once his best friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) has been turned it's up to him to save his girlfriend (Imogen Poots) and mum (Toni Colette). And his only ally is louche Vegas magician and alleged vampire expert Peter Vincent (David Tennant blatantly channeling Russell Brand) whose first instincts are to drink heavily and run away....

That the film even manages to reach the level of "okay" is some kind of achievement. It has none of the charm or style of the original: the main characters are dull, colourless and provide no reason why we should be interested in them. And Tennant's Peter Vincent is, for most of the time, an arrogant, foul-mouthed and egotistical knob. The 3D is entirely redundant and scenes shot in unlit houses at dusk might as well be audio only because even without the glasses you can barely make out what's on the screen. It's entirely unremarkable and a disappointment even given that expectations weren't high. Really, how difficult is it to muck up Fright Night?

**

PANIC BUTTON

2011-08-31T23:26:00.001+02:00

AAAARGH!!! CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! AAAAAAAARGH!!!

What is a panic button anyway? It's never raised in the movie (except for one solitary mention in one garbled bit of shouting towards the end) and there isn't actually a physical button to be seen, panic or otherwise. Googling the phrase indicates that it's a Facebook thing that children and teenagers can use to report inappropriate behaviour, but it's scarcely applicable in the case of the film of the same name as all the inappropriate online behaviour is down to the potential victims.

Panic Button has four eminently disposable idiots winning a luxury flight to New York competition on the social networking site All2gether which, at least for the lawyers, is absolutely not Facebook or anything like it, not even a tiny little bit, look, it's even got a completely different name to go along with Friend Lists and Like This and online chats and everything, obviously completely different. After establishing the two girls as pretty but thick as pigswill and the two blokes as sub-Neanderthal bellends with the personality of amoebic dysentery, they suddenly have to play games on the flight which reveal precisely what they've been doing online - every porn video they've watched, the comments they've left, the stupid and callous things they've said in chatrooms. And if they refuse to play these increasingly sinister games, one of their online friends will be randomly selected and executed....

Despite basically being Saw in an aeroplane, this is actually a reasonably entertaining if nonsensical thriller if you can get past the thoroughly unpleasant characters and find it in yourself to actually root for any of them. One confined set, a small number of speaking parts and almost nothing in the way of special effects; the villain is a voiceover for almost the entire running time (represented on the video screens by a cartoon alligator), so it's not an expensive film although it looks terrific. Once the true nature of the flight is revealed and the villain's rationale it gets into the usual shouting and stabbing and sobbing, and racks up a reasonable degree of tension and is generally quite effective. A cautionary tale about exactly what you say and do online, it's pretty undistinguished (it's certainly no Red Eye) but rather good fun. Made in Cardiff.

***