LIST: THE WORST FILMS OF 2017

It wasn't all chocolate and unicorns in 2017: there were some puddles of sick as well. These were the worst of the bullets I failed to dodge.

10. THE HIPPOPOTAMUS
Like a weak Jonathan Creek with endless vulgarity and sex references that got very tedious very quickly, and I badly needed someone to set about the lead character with a chair leg.

9. MINDHORN
Supposed to be funny? Another tiresome full-of-himself lead in a charmless, nonsensical non-action non-comedy.

8. UNLOCKED
Not even fun in a dumbo rubbish way: yet another clunky thriller about Islamic terror in London, full of people who should, and do, know better (and Orlando Bloom).

7. WOLVES AT THE DOOR
Would have been a perfectly passable home invasion thriller with glossy 60s period detail, were it not a cheery re-enactment of the Manson Family's murderous attack on Sharon Tate and her friends. Pass the popcorn. Actual video footage of Charlie Scumbag turns up at the end.

6. THE PARTY
Supposed to be funny? An assortment of colossal bores throw surprise revelations - adultery, terminal illness, pregnancy - at each other for a slim yet nonetheless punishing 71 minutes including credits. Everyone please shut up and go away.

5. MOTHER!

It's clearly not a bad film (which is way it's not #1 on this list) but it's easily the least enjoyable, most thoroughly unrewarding and increasingly annoying time I had in a cinema this year. Accurately described on Twitter as the film equivalent of an anxiety attack, and not in a good way.

4. CHIPS
Remember that innocuous Saturday evening American import on ITV from decades ago? Let's do it again but with violence and swearing and crass vulgarity. Rubbish.

3. BAYWATCH
See above. Marginally worse because I expect better of Dwayne Johnson.

2. FIST FIGHT
Supposed to be funny? This year really doesn't appear to have been good for comedy.

1. BETTER WATCH OUT
Absolutely hated this cheery Christmas offering featuring a pre-pubescent sexual predator. Came close a couple of times to walking out.


Dishonourable mentions (in no particular order) to Power Rangers, The Untamed, Transformers 5 and idiotic Pierce Brosnan tech thriller I.T.

LIST: THE BEST FILMS OF 2017

It's that time again.... As usual, everything on this list had a first-time cinema release in the UK at some point in 2017, using Launching Films' site as reference. I missed a lot of films, either through choice (they looked horrible), minimal distribution, and/or assorted other personal circumstances. It's a mixture of which ones I think were the "best" and which ones I would acknowledge weren't actually the "best" but the ones I enjoyed most. In ascending order:

10. LOGAN
I'm still pretty meh on the subject of comic-book movies: they're either shiny happy Marvel or miserable joyless DC. This is actually fairly glum, much darker, much more serious than the usual X-Men fare: an actual superhero movie for actual grown-ups.

9. WONDER WOMAN
Still on the superheroes: easily the best film from the DC stable.

8. A GHOST STORY
Melancholy drama about the haunter rather than the haunted: what does the ghost do when the house is empty? Oddly moving, leisurely, unusual, liked it a lot.

7. MOONLIGHT
The Academy Awards got it right for once (eventually): infinitely better than the unsatisfying La La Land (terrific for the first five minutes, utterly unremarkable the rest of the time). Intelligent, grown-up cinema; if only we could have one of these every few months instead of yet another superhero whizzbang.

6. VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS
Eye-popping fantasy from Luc Besson, even topping the bonkers The Fifth Element. Okay, the mystery villain is no mystery and the leads are cardboard, but the visuals are dazzling.

5. DETROIT
Angry, thrilling and timely drama of violent racism; incredibly powerful and utterly essential viewing.

4. SILENCE
A superb Martin Scorsese religious drama: 160 minutes long but never feels it, completely absorbing, visually beautiful.

3. THE HANDMAIDEN
I actually saw the Director's Cut which is a full half-hour longer: personally I could have done with less of the explicit sex but even so it's easily my favourite foreign-language film of the year.

2. BLADE RUNNER 2049
Granted, it didn't have Vangelis on the soundtrack (and Hans Zimmer is no substitute), but the expanded world of Ridley Scott's classic original is pixel perfect, and Ryan Gosling's usual blankness is for once a plus factor. Mainstream blockbuster of the year and a more than worthy follow-up.

1. HOUNDS OF LOVE
I don't think I breathed for the last twenty minutes.

Honourable mentions (in no particular order) to Get Out, Hacksaw Ridge, A Cure For Wellness (shut up, I enjoyed it), The Limehouse Golem, Life and Denial.

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

CONTAINS SPOILERS

In a year that historical hindsight will not acknowledge as particularly hilarious, one of the funniest things to hit 2017 was fandom. First it was the bellowing idiocy of "Doctor Who CANNOT BE A WOMAN!!!" (well, she is, so stop whining and get over it), at which even Davros would have found it hard to breathe through the laughter, and he's a genocidal maniac who created the Daleks and has never been noted for a riotous sense of humour. Then it was the Official Fan Demand for Justice League to be rereleased properly in accordance with the mighty Zack Snyder's artistic vision, complete with a new score by his regular composer Junkie XL, and the removal of Joss Whedon's reshoots. Now it's the shrieking petulance of an actual petition to the Disney Corporation demanding that the new Star Wars film be removed from the canon because it didn't pan out exactly the way they wanted and it didn't explain who he is and where she came from and why that guy did these things. Seriously, guys (and they tend to be guys), have a bathroom break and calm the hell down: you're giving us regular fans a bad name here.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Episode VIII in the overarching saga) is fine. It's not great, it's not terrible, it's somewhere in the middle but it's really nothing to get worked up about in either direction. It does some lovely things and it has some serious problems, but waaaaahing like a four-year-old in Tescos, stamping your feet because Mummy won't buy you any sweeties, isn't a particularly dignified look. At the end of The Force Awakens, Rey (Daisy Ridley, surprisingly not very good this time around) has found Luke Skywalker, now living as a miserable, grumpy hermit on a remote island and absolutely refusing to help the Resistance in their darkest moment. Meanwhile General Leia and her dwindling band of rebels are being pursued through hyperspace by a Dreadnought of the evil First Order (captained by Adrian Edmondson, whom I constantly expected to start smacking his fellow officers round the head with a frying pan), and maybe only a hastily cobbled together plan to abduct a codebreaker from a casino planet and smuggle him onto the Dreadnought to disable the tracking system for long enough to make one last light-speed jump can save them, whether hothead/idiot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) gets permission or not...

As a zippy blockbuster that alternates frenetic action sequences with moody, serious character drama, nodding back to the earlier films (the horse-like Fathiers race feels like the dreaded Pod Race all over again), The Last Jedi does more right than wrong. On the plus side, it's mostly hugely enjoyable, John Williams' score is great as ever (though the piano rendition of Leia's Theme in the end credits against the dedication to Carrie Fisher feels very awkward, as though it's been shoved in at the last minute) with many of the familiar and recognisable themes well to the fore. The best single sequence is the Battle Of Crait, on a salt planet where the crystal white turns blood red when it's disturbed. Snoke's throne room is a visual treat as well. Bad moments include an absolute clunk of comedy when Poe pretends to put the Dreadnought on hold, and a jaw-droppingly stupid scene saving Leia from certain death.

I could also have done without the return, albeit briefly, of one character from both preceding trilogies, and the less said about the tribblesome Porgs the better. As the middle part of a trilogy it's not as good as The Empire Strikes Back - it should go without saying that it's better than Attack Of The Clones, because most things are - but the main (new) hope is that Rian Johnson is setting everything up for Episode IX's grand finale in 2019. At 152 minutes it's comfortably the longest Star Wars movie so far, and there are moments when it feels like it, but there's more than enough popcorn fun to be had as well as material for scholarly analysis. (There's also a great visual gag involving a steam iron, of all things.) Personally I can't take it as seriously as others have: it's enjoyable and entertaining but not without faults: on balance it's a win but not a walkover.

***

VHS FOREVER? PSYCHOTRONIC PEOPLE

CONTAINS? SPOILERS

Remember VHS? I always get the sense that I came to the party slightly too late: by the time I got to rent my own movies the dreaded Video Recordings Act had already consigned a load of the most interesting movies to the furnaces and James "Scissorhands" Ferman and the BBFC (make up your own acronym) had embarked on the entirely irrational campaign of hacking junk movies to ribbons, ostensibly to make them suitable for adults but actually rendering them even less watchable than they already were by taking all the best bits out. By then the DPP had done their work and - sarcastic hurrah - removed Night Of The Bloody Apes, Alien Contamination and Unhinged from rental shops and off-licenses across the UK so we could all sleep easier.

The foaming-at-the-mouth insanity of the pre-cert days has already been covered, particularly in Jake West's marvellous Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship And Videotape; this is more of a disorganised grab-bag of reminiscences from critics, journalists, tape dealers, distributors and the occasional stars and directors. Covering everything from first rentals, the Video Nasty list of 39 formally banned titles, the back room of the Psychotronic Video shop in a Camden basement (I remember buying a few titles there) and police raids on video collectors' homes through to the lousy picture quality, the collectible tapes under the tables at film fairs and lucky finds at car boot sales, it does at least recapture the spirit of the age and almost makes me want to dig out the VHS player from the spare room and put on one of my few remaining tapes on.

The bafflingly-titled VHS Forever? Psychotronic People also allows Caroline Munro to reminisce about the guerrilla film-making of The Last Horror Film at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival: always interesting, but out of place in a documentary that's nominally about the early days of VHS. No other film gets specifically discussed to that extent, not even the far more controversial Maniac. Sadly, it also allows sewage merchant Lloyd Kaufman to ramble nonsensically to camera as though he's on Just A Minute with the topic Incoherent Bullshit, throwing together the MPAA, the McCarthy blacklists and Mary Whitehouse (referred to as Mary Blowjob, presumably for reasons of comedy) in one facepalming rant. Incidentally: say what you like about Mary Whitehouse: she may have been as comprehensively wrong-headed as it's possible for a human to be, but at least she believed absolutely in what she was doing, which is more than you can say for any of Troma's artless sludge.

It's an interesting topic and an interesting era, on which I was on the distant fringes: I had boxes of pre-cert tapes but eventually gave them away when reality intruded and I realised I was probably never going to watch them ever again. Many of them are available on DVD or BluRay, in better quality, uncut and in the correct ratio, and I'm not nostalgic enough for the Vertical Helical Scan format to fire up my old mint condition cassette of The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue even though I have the Anchor Bay disc on the shelf. But the technical quality isn't that great: for a film that's shot (or at least copyrighted) in 2014, the 4:3 ratio suggests an attempt to emulate the look of full-screen video, and some external scenes are plagued by wind noise into the camera microphone. It's a pity, because I could listen to some of these guys (and it is mostly guys) talking about old trash movies for hours: Norman J Warren, Allan Bryce, David McGillivray, Graham Humphreys, Marc Morris, David Kerekes....Incredibly, Kim Newman is only in it for maybe two minutes cumulatively! Overall it's a fascinating subject in which I would normally immerse myself for days at a time - nerding about movies is What I Do given half a chance - but sadly it doesn't really come off.

**

JUSTICE LEAGUE

CONTAINS BAT-[S]POILERS

The whole Marvel/DC light/dark fun/misery debate has already been flogged well past the point of ever achieving a resolution: do you want it flip, comedic and colourful or do you want it bleak, gritty and nihilistic? Personally I'm happy with the crowd-pleasing antics of the Avengers gang and, while I'm not about to suggest that gibberish like Joel Schumacher's two Batflicks are better in any way to the Nolan films, I've never understood the appeal of grim, joyless films like Man Of Steel and Batman Vs Superman. Wonder Woman perked things up enormously, possibly because the grimy claws of Zack Snyder were nowhere in evidence, and possibly because, unlike endless reboots of Batman and Spider-Man, this was an origins story we'd not encountered before in cinema (did the Lynda Carter TV series include it?) so there was an element of freshness to it.

But the debate has been shunted back into life with Justice League, the fifth instalment of the DC glumpocalypse, because whatever the original intentions, it's actually ended up with its boots in both camps thanks to reshoots from Joss Whedon, director of two Marvel entries and a spin-off TV show. Despite the claim that he'd write/direct in the same style as Snyder so there wouldn't be any obvious shifts in tone, there are scenes (particularly those featuring The Flash) which seem to be typed in a completely different font to the rest of the film. And it works. A bit. Some of the time, anyway. Not brilliantly: Superman is as thoroughly uninteresting as ever (at least since the first two Christopher Reeve movies) and the plot is the usual old CGI Armageddon nonsense, but it's almost entertaining enough in places to get by and most likely far more than Snyder's film would have been, had he not withdrawn for personal/family reasons.

An ancient world-destroying demon thing called Steppenwolf (no, really) is after three ancient boxes which, when brought together, will bring about the end of humanity and turn the planet into the Hellscape of his (its?) homeworld. One of these Mother Boxes (no, really) is guarded by the Amazons, another by the Atlanteans in Atlantis (no, really). Fortunately, Batman is putting a team together, with Wonder Woman, The Flash (who can move at incredibly high speed), Aquaman (water skills) and Cyborg (computers, electronics, data). But will they be enough? Or do they need to exhume Superman and jolt him back to life with the power of the third Mother Box?

It all ends, as these things must, with a welter of green-screen whizzbang in which various members of the gang take it in turns to punch Steppenwolf and his flying demon minion things while the surrounding landscape is terraformed around them. Which is all perfectly well done, if you like your retinas scorched and if you like not having half a clue what the hell's going on. But mass destruction and/or the imminent end of the world aren't a new thing any more: we saw all this in Man Of Steel and half the Avengers movies and the Transformers films and most Roland Emmerich films and Geostorm and it's all frankly getting a bit been there, done that, got the ticket stubs to prove it. I'm not enough of a comic-book aficionado to spot any significant narrative difference between the Mother Boxes and Marvel's Infinity Stones anyway, like the satellite weapons from assorted Bonds and XXX 3 and so on, it's the same tune played on a slightly different guitar. And raising the stakes to a global level means nothing if we don't care about anything except the gosh-wow visuals, and even with Whedon's friendlier, less doomladen input there's little in the way of Real Human Beings with whom we can find some shred of empathy and even less for the superheroes who are all invincible and can fly.

If this all sounds like I'm trying to work out exactly how I feel about the movie...well, I suppose I am. It's not Dawn Of Justice-level terrible, and it's not Suicide Squad-level pointless. It's not Man Of Steel-level glum and it's not Thor: Ragnarok-level bonkers. I've never been a fan of Superman anyway and here, saddled additionally with having Henry Cavill's moustache CGId out in the reshoots, he seems peculiarly comfortable with having brought back from death. This Batman is at least more engaging than the Christian Bale incarnation, but Wonder Woman and The Flash are still the most enjoyable and watchable of the squad.

At some point next year we're getting a solo Aquaman movie (though probably not one for Cyborg), as well as at least one more Justice League (set up in the inevitable post-credits teaser) because there's no point in the next five or ten years when these ongoing superhero smash-em-ups are going to stop. That's not necessarily a bad thing (though I still blanch at the idea of spending as obscene an amount of money as three hundred million dollars on one movie), but I just wish they were better. Instead they're okay. And okay at that price tag just isn't enough for some incidental pleasures and only two of the six lead characters. I wanted to like it (obviously: the idea of wanting to hate a movie is clearly insanity) but in the end it's a two- or three-star movie at very, very best, depending on how charitable you feel.

***