THE EQUALIZER

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND OUCH

Without wanting to sound like a broken record, but this is yet another example of the BBFC showing grotesque leniency to a distributor who's asked for a lower certificate, and who's got it after frankly insignificant trims to a couple of moments from a film that's positively awash with blood and slaughter. There is no way on Earth that this spectacularly violent action thriller, far more graphic and sweary than the still-18 rated Die Hard, should have got away with a 15 since the minimal cuts have by definition placed it right on the dividing line between 15 and 18. Distributors should grow some balls and accept the adults-only rating that comes with an adults-only film, and the BBFC should remember that their job is not to issue meaningless certificates just to make the studios richer. It's not really an issue that the cuts have neutered the film - if you can spot the edits in amidst the remaining carnage you've a better eye than mine - but there does seem to be a growing obsession with getting audiences into films which are patently unsuitable for them.

Nominally it's based on the 1980s TV show with Edward Woodward: here The Equalizer is Denzel Washington, apparently an ordinary guy working in the US equivalent of Homebase. He's friendly, helpful, but keeps to himself....until a teenage girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) he occasionally chats to in an all-night diner gets beaten up and, as a "knight in a world without knights" (his literature choices aren't the subtlest signposts of the way the film's going), he feels a growing need to intervene. This ultimately means taking on, and taking down, most of the Russian Mafia, with the final showdown in Homebase amidst its shelves of barbed wire, drills and blowtorches....

All this is good nasty fun with a healthy dose of the kind of graphic violence we don't tend to get in movies any more, and I enjoyed it immensely. Sometimes you get a Denzel Washington badass action movie that's really bloody and not very good - Man On Fire for one - but even though this one takes a while to get going, preferring to spend its time establishing character (to the extent that one of his revenge missions takes place entirely offscreen; we just see him put the hammer back on the shelf afterwards), it's well put together, and nicely shot with an old-fashioned feel about it. Sure, it's not much of an intellectual piece: the villains are all nasty evil hateful murderous boo-hiss scum with not a likable corpuscle between them, and there's no surprise twist in the plot because there's barely a plot to start with.

Perhaps, if you're a bit of a beard-stroking Guardianista, you could also take issue with the film's gender representation. Of the five female speaking roles, two are hookers for whom things go extremely badly (one is played by Chloe Grace Moretz who, let's remember, is only seventeen), two of the others are supporting non-hooker victims, and the fifth merely provides a chunk of exposition. But this isn't a film for wet liberal sensibilities: it's a film for people who want to watch Denzel Washington hurt a lot of people with DIY implements, and marking it down for its attitude to the ladies is like knocking a star off Four Weddings And A Funeral for its lack of running chainsaws. As a grim, needlessly violent exploitation movie with lots of dead people and kill shots that would have made it a video nasty a generation ago, I enjoyed it far more than I suppose I should have.

****

MAPS TO THE STARS

CONTAINS POSSIBLE SPOILERS

I know this has the whiff of heresy about it, but to my mind David Cronenberg hasn't done a really interesting film in a very long time, and a genuinely great one in even longer. There are two bona fide masterpieces in his back catalogue: The Fly and Videodrome, but since then his films have been getting more cerebral and more intellectual but far less emotionally rewarding. Oh, I know a lot of people raved about A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises (neither of which I thought were the classics everyone claimed), but Cosmopolis was tedious, wilfully obtuse drivel and A Dangerous Method needed far more in the way of of Keira Knightley shrieking and pulling grotesque faces and far less in the way of middle-aged blokes talking earnestly about the human mind. So, given that I've generally lost interest in Cronenberg since he forsook his gloopy horrors (Shivers is probably my favourite of those early films) in favour of dreary conversation pieces, the arrival of a new David Cronenberg film no longer appeals. And sadly that extends even to a David Cronenberg film set in Hollywood and boasting a dreaded 18 certificate.

Maps To The Stars is really two movies conjoined. One is an uncomfortable satire of insecure and neurotic movie types, most of whom could frankly do with being hit by a bus: ageing and fading star Julianne Moore haunted by her more famous mother, repulsive child star Evan Bird just out of rehab, pushy star mom Olivia Williams, nonsense-spouting shrink John Cusack. The last three of these are parents and child; into their lives comes long-estranged Mia Wasikowska, who proceeds to exact a psychological revenge on everyone....

With a narrative that includes drugs (medical and other), incest, child abuse, frank sex scenes and murder, Maps To The Stars doesn't lack for incident. But the trouble is that Cronenberg is so cold and remote that the whole film can't come to life. If the portrait of Hollywood as a sewer full of shallow basket cases and babbling infants is supposed to be comedic (which I'm not entirely sure about), it doesn't work: either this is normal SOP for movie people or they're beyond parody anyway. And then there's stuff which I just don't want to see: specifically Julianne Moore on the lavatory straining to poo. It's not exactly a plot point or a moment of character delineation, and has no business being there unless you're really interested in fart sounds.

Some might argue, of course, that Julianne Moore doing lavatory scenes, hands-on massage therapy in her underwear or nude FFM threesome scenes is "brave" and "fearless" acting. Me, I just think these are things I really don't want to see - and it's not that Moore is 53 years old: I don't want to look at, say, Juno Temple or the Olsen twins on the toilet either. Such images are not even best left to the imagination, but blanked completely, and Cronenberg (or anyone else) taking me there makes me very uncomfortable. Maps To The Stars is a better film than Cosmopolis, on the grounds that [1] Scooby-Doo: The Movie is a better film than Cosmopolis and [2] there is at least a narrative thread to events, even if it gets absurd towards the end, with one character in particular removed from proceedings in the most ludicrous manner. Again, as with Woody Allen and the "early funny ones", Cronenberg's "early nasty ones" are much more watchable, much more interesting and - again assuming Maps To The Stars is at heart a comedy - much more enjoyable.

**

POMPEII

INCLUDIT COPIOSAS TURPIS FABULA [THIS REVIEW INCLUDES DETAILS OF THE STORY]

Well, it's not the worst thing Paul WS Anderson, aka The One Who Isn't Paul Thomas Anderson, has made (that would be Mortal Kombat, of course), but it's still a long way off his best work. It's no Event Horizon, it's certainly no Death Race, and it's not even up there with his instalments of the increasingly deranged Resident Evil series. In the silliness stakes we're more in the ballpark of The Three Musketeers: a handsomely enough done historical, but nothing more than a breathtakingly silly romp. This is piffle, tosh and tommyrot on a colossal scale that follows the dreaded template of Titanic and Pearl Harbour: an opening stretch of blubbery schoolgirl mush and boo-hiss villainy followed by an orgy of spectacular CGI carnage and destruction.

Pompeii starts somewhere in the wilds of Northern Britain, with evil boo-hiss Roman centurion Kiefer Sutherland wiping out the Celtic Horse Tribes because they're blocking his trade routes. The sole survivor grows up to be top fighter Kit Harington, known only as The Celt and possessed of a six-pack you could bounce a grapefruit off. En route from Rome to Pompeii, his horse whispering skills and rippling muscles catch the eye of landed gentry Emily Browning, but he's condemned to gladiatorial combat in the Arena, and she has already snared the unwelcome attentions of Kiefer Sutherland, now an evil boo-hiss Roman senator who may invest in Pompeii's civic refurbishments - at a price. And occasionally, Vesuvius has a bit of a rumble.

It's almost exactly an hour before she finally blows, and we get the earth tremors, the flaming boulders, the burning rocks, the tidal waves, the clouds of ash and so on that we've been hoping would turn up and stop the Mills And Boon blither, and that's the point when it kicks in to life and we get half an hour or so of burning death and pyroclastic mayhem (perfectly acceptable in 2D, and it doesn't look like 3D would have added significantly). Terrible dialogue in English accents, Sutherland clearly having fun as a monumental bastard in a toga, plenty of demented slaughter in the Arena: it's too much I'm Spartacus and not enough I'm On Fire. It's a stupid film and it's not a very good one, but it is kind of fun.

**

Kaboom:

THE LAST SHOWING

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

For some reason I didn't see this new thriller at this year's FrightFest. It may well have been something to do with the trailer, which gave the impression that it was heavy on the found-footage style (which of course I loathe), much of the imagery apparently coming from lo-def security cameras. In the event, of course, it was nothing of the kind: it does incorporate surveillance and camcorder material but it's all within a "regular" movie context. However, the film has arrived on the home video market with some speed, whereas the films it clashed with in the festival's Discovery screens have sadly yet to obtain any kind of UK release.

The Last Showing is a pretty generic horror movie title for a frankly pretty generic movie, but it does give the legendary Robert Englund another stab at horror movie maniachood that's as radically different from Freddy Krueger as Freddy was from harmless alien Willie from V. He's Stuart Lloyd, a buttoned-up British projectionist in a soulless multiplex facing the switchover to digital and the end of celluloid: on his last night he uses the cinema's surveillance camera network, manipulating his last couple of cinemagoers with onscreen messages, to put together a "horror film" of his own....

Sadly, the plot doesn't hang together as there are too many factors beyond the maniac's control, not the least of which is that everything hinges on the girl wanting snacks that can be easily drugged. It also hinges on the cinema manager being unable to convince the hero he isn't the villain, and the hero (who has presumably never even held a handgun in his life) managing a clean kill with one shot, More crucially, it requires that a town the size of Ellesmere Port (the film was shot in their 12-screen Vue Cheshire Oaks) can only muster up two customers interested in a midnight screening of, of all things, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes Part 2; one more ticket sold and the villain's plan won't work.

I generally like movies set in cinemas - Demons, Midnight Movie, even The Majestic - and this one uses its setting well. Taking place in one location with five speaking parts (one doesn't turn up until the last reel and another two are taken out of the action for some time) it's a decent example of getting the maximum out of very limited resources. It's also nice to see a film willing to acknowledge the projection problems that come with digital, as no-one seems willing (or qualified) to fix things like incorrect aspect ratios on electronic projectors. Against that, casual mention in the dialogue of the very real tragedies on the sets of The Crow and especially Twilight Zone: The Movie as villainous motivation strikes a sour note in what is basically a disposable Saturday night rental starring that guy from A Nightmare On Elm Street. Not awful, and fun enough while it's on, but once you start thinking about it afterwards it does unfortunately fall apart.

***

Focus!

ASSAULT ON WALL STREET

CONTAIN$ $OM£ $POIL£R$

Say what you like about fighty German trash auteur Uwe Boll, he likes to cast an unflinching eye on a wide range of important social issues. In Seed, for example, he looks at the darkness of the immortal and unstoppable serial killer, while in Postal he looks at 9/11, Nazi death camps and comedy dwarfs. In Rampage, he looks at shooting sprees and the laxity of the gun laws in modern America, in Darfur he looks at the African genocide phenomenon, and in Blubberella he looks at the concept of a Nazi-killing female superhero with an eating disorder. Whatever it is, Boll looks.

This time around, Boll turns his attention to the banking crisis and the rich-poor divide. Everyman security guard Jim (Dominic Purcell) suddenly sees his life falling apart as the financial collapse that not only wipes out all his investments but leaves him with impossible debts: he loses his terminally ill wife (in the most absurdly melodramatic of circumstances), his job and his house, leaving him with nothing. Except a high powered sniper rifle and a righteous fury within him...

There is obviously room for a caustic commentary on America's financial institutions: how billionaire bankers lost everybody's money but they still get to keep their yachts and expensive mansions while the small investors end up losing their life savings, their pensions, and everything they've worked for. But Assault On Wall Street isn't it. Uwe Boll is not interested in dissecting Wall Street in a coolly analytical manner, he's interested in a childish revenge fantasy of violent wish fulfilment in which all the bankers are brutally murdered at their desks.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that as a concept for a film. The trouble is that it takes over an hour before our hero finally starts fighting back, and the inevitable rampage of bloody violence is confined to the last reel of the film. It's a satisfying payoff, it just takes far too long to get there. However, there is a suggestion this could lead to a sequel, which means this functions more as an extended origins story for a vigilante superhero, and Assault On Wall Street 2 can start murdering investment bankers and hedge fund managers pretty much from the opening credits.

Which is no less stupid than this film, but it might be more fun. This is typical Uwe Boll: guest appearances by familiar faces slumming it (Eric Roberts, Keith David, the inevitable Michael Pare), a hardon for senseless violence, and the whole thing really not being very good. Boll isn't actually a particularly terrible film maker (go watch some Al Adamson films and then come back and tell me Uwe Boll is the worst director in the world), but he's no Oliver Stone or Martin Scorsese in the Wall Street movie stakes.

**

THE EXPENDABLES III

CONTAINS MINIMAL SPOILERING AND MOANING ABOUT THE 12A

Here is yet another example of a film distributor colluding with the BBFC in order to obtain a certificate which is grossly and grotesquely inappropriate for the content and context of the film. There is no way that an Expendables movie should be anything other than a 15 certificate at the very outside; indeed, given the sheer amount of carnage, as well as its casual throwaway nature, one really feels it should be worthy of an 18. But they want the teenie dollar and if that means artistic compromise (inasmuch as an Expendables film has any significant artistry in the first place), then what the hell? At this rate it wouldn’t surprise me if the guest star in The Expendables 4 was Buzz Lightyear.

In addition to turning the violence down to a point where unaccompanied eight year olds can watch it, Sylvester Stallone and the producers have also sought to capture the youth market by reducing the average age of the cast up to somewhere below ninety. Granted, they’ve brought in a shaky-looking 72-year-old Harrison Ford to replace Bruce Willis, who’s only 59 but apparently wanted too much money, but the other regulars (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Albert Steptoe) are sidelined for much of the time. Initially the oldsters are on what looks like a routine interception mission, but once it turns out that the chief villain is Mel Gibson, Stallone fires his crew and hires fresher, younger blood. Inevitably it doesn’t go according to plan and the oldsters have to get back together and rescue them...

All of this is perfectly enjoyable as these things go: lots of explosions, lots of anonymous, faceless henchmen cheerily thought bloodlessly mown down, elderly men beating the tar out of each other and the occasional funny line. In terms of mayhem and destruction The Expendables III is good crash bang wallop popcorn knockabout. But the issue of the 12A will not go away and the knowledge that this film is available to children sits very uncomfortably. Surely it's better that impressionable children are taught the true horrific consequences of violence, and not sold it as a family friendly entertainment in which most of the people indiscriminately murdered are not even given the courtesy of a close-up to suggest they might actually be real human beings rather than a collection of pixels from Call Of Duty? I really do feel the BBFC have their hat on backwards on this issue.

***

A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

One of the things we appear to have lost in recent years, as studios apparently concentrate exclusively on massive quarter of a billion dollar superhero behemoths, is the old fashioned midrange crime thriller, the film aimed at adults (as in grown-ups rather than dirty old men) rather than clueless and easily distracted teenagers. Once upon a time of movies were principally made for mature audiences rather than families and children; now it's the other way round and in all honesty the industry is worse for the switch. Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favour of the mindless 12A blockbuster if it's done well enough; but it's nice to find that once in a while they still make films aimed slightly higher than whizzbang eye candy.

A Walk Among The Tombstones turns out to be just such a film: a grim, serious lowlife crime thriller which has no interest in easy popcorn thrills, instead of choosing to explore the seamy, grimy side of pre-millennial New York. Liam Neeson is the hard boiled world weary former cop turned unofficial private eye, called in by sleazy trafficker Dan Stevens to track down the hideous psychopaths who kidnapped, and then murdered, his wife. As he digs through the tenuous leads, he discovers that it's happened before - and will probably happen again...

It's not a great film: for one thing Neeson ends up as a reluctant mentor to a street kid (Brian 'Astro' Bradley - best known for being an X factor contestant), and for another pretty much everyone in the movie is an unsympathetic individual for whom it's difficult to raise much empathy. (The female roles are almost exclusively victims.) But I liked the downbeat feel of the film, the washed out colours, the fact that the plot is perfectly happy to place young children in mortal danger, and the sometimes vicious level of violence.

Having said that, it's a pity that the distributors elected to try and water down the film by making a few trims (for very strong language and a scene of sexualised threat) in order to obtain a 15 certificate. Quite apart from the fact that this is quite clearly an adult film for adult audiences and should be rated as such, this means it's a very strong 15: as close as possible to an 18 without actually being burdened with one. Personally I feel the released version is still worthy of an 18, just as the sanitised A Good Day To Die Hard still warranted a restrictive 15 rather than a cuddly 12A. No matter: those small excisions don't get in the way of a grim, sordid but still darkly enjoyable thriller. Worth seeing.

****

HOW I LIVE NOW

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

First off, I'm probably not the principal target audience for this. The novel appears to be classified as Young Adult, and I'm neither, and the central character is yet again a teenage girl. But on the other hand I'm a fan of apocalypse movies and "empty world" stories (The Day Of The Triffids, The Omega Man), so anything in which The Bomb goes off or 99% of the population are otherwise disposed of pretty swiftly is usually okay with me. However, in this case there's a struggle to find the right tone between the teenie romance and the horrors of post-nuke Britain, and I don't think they've entirely found it.

Essentially How I Live Now is a cross between The Famous Five and Threads: Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) has been reluctantly shipped off to cousins somewhere in Norfolk and is having a generally rotten time until she sees her strapping neighbour: sensitive, kind, good with animals. But then the endless games in the hazy summer countryside are brought rudely to a halt by unidentified extremists exploding a nuclear weapon in London. Rather than face evacuation, they decide to stay where they are, until the Army turn up and take them away to farms and military training camps. Daisy and her youngest cousin plan their escape back to the farmhouse, through the woods and the horrors of war....

It's difficult to reconcile the idyllic rural larking about (there is very little adult presence in the film) and hesitant relationship of the first half hour with scenes such as Daisy working through a courtyard full of corpses to see if her cousins are there. There's enough horrific imagery in the film to guarantee the 15 certificate that cuts out that YA/"tweenie" demographic (there's also a smattering of F-words, and a curious, very brief and entirely unnecessary nude dream sequence). It's also a very quick series of about-changes for her character: from her sullen, unsocial arrival when she's actually more interesting, through love-struck teen (a change apparently brought about by nothing more than being pushed into the river) to gritty survivalist prepared to kill.

Still, in spite of it never quite getting the tone right, I rather enjoyed How I Live Now: it conveys enough of the possible chaos and massive disruption to everyday English life to make it plausibly chilling, and frankly to keep a 50-year-old bloke like me interested when the drippy teen stuff kicks in. I can't remember why I didn't catch it on its cinema release, though, as it's generally the sort of thing I go for. I'd be surprised if I come back to it any time soon, but I liked it well enough.

***

Kaboom:

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, YOU MORONS

They say the essence of drama is conflict. Maybe it's a conflict of interests, a clash of loyalties, a battle of wills between opposing personalities or philosophies, or just a straight up fight between the good guys and the bad guys. Whichever, a movie in which everybody gets along quite happily and nobody gets into an argument or starts a fight is liable to be pretty boring and uninteresting. So there has to be something: a difference of opinion, rivalry, simmering secrets, long suppressed emotions.... Fine. But there are worlds between human emotional conflict and simply bellowing insults and abuse at one another.

August: Osage County is quite definitely the latter: a film in which a family get together and shout bile and vitriol across the dinner table because hatred and cruelty is the only way these people know how to communicate. Here we have Meryl Streep as an alcoholic, pill popping old bat, fast approaching senility, whose three feisty/tiresome (delete as appropriate) daughters and assorted partners and children all descend on the house when granddad Sam Shepard disappears. It then turns out he's dead, so they all have to hang around a few more days for the funeral, and it's during this period that Meryl and eldest daughter Julia Roberts go for each other and in the process rip the whole family to pieces...

None of the targets of the rancid viciousness ever do the sensible thing and simply walk away, nor did anyone think to bring a firearm which would have stopped the infantile squabbling immediately. Frankly, if this was my house the people responsible would be shown the door in zero seconds flat, quashing the atrocious behaviour the moment it starts, but not here. These are horrible, horrible people: cruel, nasty, mean-spirited, profoundly unlovable even if they're family, and no reason is given as to why an audience should be expected to pay good money to spend any time with them at all.

It is impossible to deny that the film is well written and well played, with meaty roles for the cast to work with. In addition to Roberts and Streep, you get Juliette Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch and Chris Cooper: performers it's always good to see evening movies which aren't necessarily very good. Maybe it would have worked in the theatre where it originated: theatre has often been described as "shouting of an evening" and there is a lot of shouting at the back of the stalls going on here. There's also incest, drug addiction, broken marriages, infidelity, racism, even a soupcon of paedophilia: in short an amalgam of the kind of subjects that win Oscars. Because this is one of those films that comes along every year when the studios think they should seen as Serious Artists examining and exploring the human condition, rather than just a bunch of money grubbing charlatans putting some shiny hunks in silly superhero costumes and having them beat each other around the head in 3D for a quarter of a billion dollars a time. Frankly, give me Captain America or The Mighty Thor, because those guys are at least fun to be around and that beats a shiny statuette on the mantelpiece any day of the week.

**

Shut up! No, you shut up! No, YOU shut up!!!

BLOOD SUCKING FREAKS

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND CAN WE ALL GROW UP, PLEASE?

Well, it's a horrible film. Will that do? No? Right then, deep breath: it's a crass, charmless, vile, tedious and depressing parade of cheery misogynist sleaze aimed squarely at the kind of pathetic maladjusted wanker who gets off on watching naked women being (in no particular order) tortured, slapped, starved, chained up, humiliated, dismembered, brutalised, and decapitated (or otherwise killed), pass the popcorn. It's one of the most famous grindhouse splatter titles of the 1970s: a straight tits and gore offering with absolutely no artistic or aesthetic merit whatsoever, that's somehow survived on the strength of its titles (it's also known as The Incredible Torture Show, a hilarious joke for acronym buffs) and its balls-out refusal to balk at anything on the grounds of questionable taste.

Moralistic? Censorious? Try bored to tears. In as much as Blood Sucking Freaks (yes, it is three words) has a plot, it concerns a grotty New York Grand Guignol show in which naked women are tortured and killed: third-rate MC and white slavery tycoon "The Great Sardu" takes issue with a theatre critic unimpressed with the show, so abducts him to appear in his forthcoming self-composed ballet that will climax with his onstage murder. He also kidnaps a ballerina to take the lead role, whether she wants to or not. In between all this, he and his dwarf sidekick abuse and maim some of the naked women he keeps locked up in the basement.

Look, I enjoy the occasional torture movie. I love the Saw movies and the first two Hostels. And I know that you couldn't make a grindhouse exploitation movie in the 1970s without boobs and pubes because that's what they were for. It was a different time; we don't do that sort of thing now but we did then. But that's only a historical justification: we stopped it and that's a change for the better, the way we stopped burning witches and sending children up chimneys. To see something as tiresome as Blood Sucking Freaks dug up after nearly forty years and presented to us now as an entertainment frankly feels as wrong as a DVD boxset of The Black And White Minstrel Show. It's a product of its time and that time has gone. Quentin Tarantino and Frank Henenlotter can wax nostalgic over 42nd Street fleapits and inner-city triple bills of cheap garbage as much as they like, but the sad fact is that watching these films a generation later is just not a rewarding experience: later grindhouse movies like Henenlotter's Basket Case and Abel Ferrara's Fear City are far better glimpses of that world.

Given the amount of violence dished merrily out to - let us not forget - naked women, it's surprising the film has been waved through the BBFC without so much as a trim. They're obviously going through a lenient patch right now, as the deeply upsetting Nekromantik sailed through as well. (Yet at the same time, a film as generally restrained, and substantially better, as Axelle Carolyn's Soulmate gets pulled up!) It's almost beside the point that the performances in Blood Sucking Freaks are uniformly terrible, the plot is stupid and the music score is an abomination; indeed, it wouldn't be an authentic grindhouse film without them. That's no defence: it's a thoroughly horrible, mean-spirited and technically shoddy piece of sadistic softcore with no redeeming features. Despicable.

*

NYMPHOMANIAC VOL 1 / NYMPHOMANIAC VOL 2

C()NTAINS SP()ILERS AND TYP()GRAPHY

Let's get the technicalities out of the way first, shall we? Firstly, and ungrammatically, this is two films. It/they has/have two separate entries on the IMDb, two separate BBFC certificates, and separate credit rolls on each of the two discs. That they come packaged together on BluRay makes no difference. Like Kill Bill, this may be two parts of a larger whole, but the only real difference is that they were made and released at the same time rather than two or three years apart.

Secondly: the onscreen title does indeed replace the letter O in Nymphomaniac with open and close brackets, because, you know, it then looks a bit like a vagina and that's pretty much what the film is all about. Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) finds Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) lying in a back alley after a savage beating: he takes her home and looks after her, in return for which she tells him her entire life story which we see in merciless gynaecological detail. From her early years seducing random men into railway lavatories through her literally countless physical relationships, her post-natal inability to be sexually satisfied and her experiments with bondage, punishment and interracial threesomes, we are spared nothing over the four hour running time.

In addition to the unflinching nudity and explicit sex sequences, we also get a surprisingly big name cast indulging in what would ordinarily be described as absolute filth were the film not from one of the major names in arthouse cinema. Though some of the actual hardcore footage is achieved by a combination of digital trickery and porn performers, we still get Shia LaBoeuf and Jamie Bell appearing in particularly graphic scenes of sexual activity, while Uma Thurman, Willem Dafoe, Connie Nielsen and Christian Slater show up in non-bonking sequences.

All very well, but is it actually any good? Well, I actually quite enjoyed it, which certainly makes a change from the last two Lars Von Trier films I sat through: Melancholia was occasionally beautiful but mostly highly annoying, while Antichrist was just bunk. This is the third and final part of Von Trier's so-called Trilogy Of Depression and it's the lightest and least offputting. One particular scene has Uma Thurman's freshly spurned wife turning up at Joe's apartment to show her children around her errant husband's new love nest, which frankly feels as though it's from a different film entirely. Maybe he'll do a nice uplifting comedy or superhero epic now? Elsewhere, Seligman's intellectual responses to Joe's stories seem to be attempting to link sex to everything from Bach fugues to fly fishing, which all lead to a nice character reveal towards the end before a final payoff which I frankly didn't buy at all.

To be honest I don't think Nymphomaniac needs to be four hours long - at least 30 minutes could have been cut out of the final stretch without any great loss to the film - and whilst Stacy Martin as the young Joe certainly looks exceedingly nice naked, I can't help feeling that the line into pornography is not just been stepped over but merrily somersaulted over in zero gravity. Really, the characters should be more interesting with their clothes on than off, and if they're not then you're just watching Debbie Does Dallas or Girls Gone Wild or similar. For all that's wrong with Nymphomaniac - grotesque overlength, a needless and occasionally wearing interest in genitals, Shia LaBoeuf's dubious English accent, and one horrible moment where it looks like it's going to reprise the opening to Antichrist - I found it to be surprisingly enjoyable, and enjoyably surprising. Worth seeing, but wait till your mum's gone out for the evening.

***
***

Phwoooar:

THE CANAL / THE SLEEPING ROOM

........BOO! CONTAINS SPOILERS

For many years it appeared as though the secret of the genuinely scary film had been lost. Instead of subtle, understated creepiness we got sudden loud bangs; instead of a steadily building atmosphere of terror we got grossout gore. Which I don't mind at all: I'm more than happy with any combination of well timed jump scares and explicit splatter. But I'm also just as happy that in recent years there has been a trend in horror cinema for the creepy and scary rather than simply shouting Boo! and waving offal at the camera. Sinister, Insidious and The Conjuring are probably the most high profile examples in recent years, but there have been a few direct to video examples such as The Last Will And Testament Of Rosalind Leigh and Lake Mungo.

Two brand new films, not yet available in the UK (in fact, not even on the release schedules) exemplify this modern trend. The Canal (Irish, although the police are never referred to as the Garda) and the British The Sleeping Room are both low-budget films with very small casts, but there is unsettling creepiness to spare. In both films, hideous murders from the past reverberate down through the years: The Sleeping Room centres on the relationship between a young prostitute and her client who is renovating a former Brighton brothel in which unspeakable crimes were committed, while in The Canal a young family move into a house where - surprise surprise - unspeakable crimes were committed. In both cases, those crimes are set to be re-enacted....

By chance, both films also feature the use of now obsolete media: 35mm film stock in The Canal, and a What The Butler Saw mutoscope in The Sleeping Room. I'm always creeped out in a horror film when something shows up on film that wasn't there before, and it's nicely done in The Canal. Of the two, I think The Sleeping Room is the slightly better film: I enjoyed it more and found the characters deeper and more interesting. This is not to suggest The Canal isn't any good; I still found it pleasurably creepy in a way which, as mentioned, we don't tend to see very often. Both movies are worth tracking down if and when they ever turn up (I understand The Canal is scheduled for an American release), but for me The Sleeping Room has the edge.

***

***

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

It's been nine years since the original Sin city: the unashamedly violent and visually stunning pulp noir anthology which put comic strip imagery onto the screen in an innovative and stylish way. Directors Frank Miller (who wrote the original graphic novel) and Robert Rodriguez have now returned, though without the original's guest director Quentin Tarantino, for this more-of-the-same follow-up mixing new and returning characters in that same terrific visual palette of harsh black and white with stabs of occasional colour.

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For flips between two principal stories: firstly the treacherous and frequently naked femme fatale Eva Green's plot to bump off her husband and let her hapless ex Josh Brolin take the fall, and secondly evil senator Powers Boothe's merciless retaliation after being thoroughly routed in a high stakes poker game by God Of Gamblers Joseph Gordon Levitt. Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba and Bruce Willis all return (the last as a ghost since he died at the end of the first film, although so did Rourke, thereby completely messing up the timeline of both movies).

Whilst I certainly wouldn't want the films' signature look to become a mainstream technique every other week, I still like it enough to be more than perfectly happy to see it come around once a decade. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For isn't anything new and it isn't anything radically different from the first film; it is very much more of the same. Which is fine by me, but that's probably enough now.

***

I SURVIVED A ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST

CONTAINS SPOILERS, ISH

Nothing to do with Marino Girolami's silly but passably entertaining Zombie Holocaust, this gory New Zealand splatter comedy plays strictly for laughs throughout, echoing early Peter Jackson and the less morally offensive output from Troma rather than serious horror films. It has a few digs at the genre movie industry, a sweetly clumsy romance, the occasional bit of genuinely gruesome bad taste horror (specifically a penis visual), and it is obviously trying. Sadly it doesn't entirely work.

Fresh out of film school, hapless but enthusiastic nerd Wesley is hired as a runner and general whipping boy on the set of a clearly terrible low-budget zombie movie. He is, of course, bullied and humiliated, falling in love with the catering girl in the process, while trying to get his own zombie movie script read by the tyrannical director. But all the low-budget movie fakery suddenly turns very real as genuine zombies turn up for unspecified reasons, surrounding the film crew with the actual walking dead....

The characters are all very broadly drawn, from the ridiculously muscular idiot lead and the ridiculously shouty director through to the ridiculously horrible prima donna actress. Except for Wesley himself, that is: his nerd-lite hero is closer to the bumbling innocent of Peter Jackson's Braindead than a frankly offensive depiction such as, say, The Toxic Avenger's Melvin (a characterisation of nerdiness that comes dangerously close to mocking the mentally handicapped).

It is intermittently amusing, and some of the gory highlights are suitably horrible. But just being intermittently amusing really isn't enough these days and making gags about horror movies is something you can only get away with in the context of a really good horror movie. Wes Craven's Scream can pull it off, while a piece of injoke laden hackwork like Hack! really cannot. Sadly, I Survived A Zombie Holocaust is a long way behind Scream: not completely at the other end of the scale, but too far away to really be able to get away with it. Not entirely terrible, but not really good enough.

**