SKIN COLLECTOR

MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS, IF IT MATTERS

This fifth-rate slasher has actually been sitting on a shelf somewhere for a full ten years waiting for someone to bother releasing it in the UK. Frankly, even at the height of an ongoing global pandemic we're not so desperate for genre entertainment that we'll settle for films as depressingly poor as this. Meaninglessly retitled (nobody's skin is collected) from the generic and equally inappropriate Shiver, Skin Collector has a surprisingly good cast of familiar names but wastes them all in a bog-standard psycho non-thriller that almost seems to be harking back to the likes of The Toolbox Murders: the first half consisting of nasty kill scenes, the second consisting of the maniac ranting and whining to his captive.

John Jarratt (from Wolf Creek) is a pathetic loser who can't pick up girls, so he murders them with a garrotte and decapitates the bodies, keeping the heads in jars in a shack. Danielle Harris (from Halloween 4 amongst others) is the shy secretary who becomes his latest obsession when she fights back. Valerie Harper (from The Mary Tyler Moore Show!!!) is her unreasoning mother. Caspar Van Dien (from Starship Troopers!) and Rae Dawn Chong (from Commando) are the cops on the case, which is all very well until her given name is revealed to be Mavis; can they track the mad killer down in time to save his latest prey?

How ever much we might like some of the people involved, this is the kind of gutter-level dross that wasn't a good idea ten years ago and still isn't: it includes not only an entirely unnecessary scene of attempted rape but a workplace shotgun massacre littered with bad CG blood spurts. It's crass, it's ugly, it's absolutely nobody's idea of a good time, and it's not even particularly well done or, as a last resort, just visually interesting. Well worth the time and effort to avoid it.

*

ETERNALS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS. AGAIN.

Again, again, again. Are there not enough of these yet? Have we not reached the saturation point? Even more superheroes, even more superpowers, even more supermonsters to be ripped into a billion pixels in an orgasmic frenzy of CGI whizzbang. Sometimes it feels as if this is all cinema is interested in these days. This is the latest addition to the roster of squarejaws in skintights: the Eternals, another team of magically endowed Human Plus warriors who are absolutely not the Avengers (despite them getting a mention here and there) but who are apparently hoping to at least get into the third-place playoffs along with the Justice League, the X-Men and Paw Patrol.

Thousands of years ago a squad of immortal warriors was despatched to Earth to combat an outbreak of soul-sucking space monsters known as Deviants, and then to hang around for eternity in case they were ever required again; otherwise, like Time Lords, they were not to interfere in humanity's often bloody progress. Now, having either blended into society with a string of false identities or hidden away in the remotest corners of the world, they are compelled to break cover and get back together as Deviants resurface and rampage through, er, Camden. Inevitably the team gets split by internal division just before the massive final confrontation with the Great Emergence...

As you'd imagine, their superpowers vary, from Superspeed to Superstrength and Superflying (the last also including firing laser beams from his eyes), so not remotely like The Flash and The Hulk and Superman then. This is the trouble with Eternals: the names and actors might be different but we really have been down this road many times already. There's a shapeshifter (who isn't Mystique) and one who does tricks with metal bracelets but isn't really Shang-Chi (which only came out a few months ago, for goodness' sake). Maybe it would have been better if they'd dropped a few of them instead of trying to cram in quite so many new characters at once (at least with Justice League we'd heard of some of them already outside the Inner Circles of Comicbook Nerdery), and this would also have allowed them to trim the running time down from an unwieldy 157 minutes.

It's not all bad by any means: it's visually arresting sometimes and the CG is perfectly well rendered though it strays into overkill on several occasions: it's just too much for the eye to take in to the extent that they might as well just do it as a cartoon. It's also a lot less fun than the average Marvel shenanigans: weirdly it feels more like their attempt to make a DC film, like it's Zack Snyder's X-Men or something (though it is nowhere near as dull as his spandex thudfests); there's much less snarky comedy to be had except for Kumail Nanjiani's Bollywood star (for four generations) and instead has extended scenes of indestructible, invincible superheroes pounding the daylights out of each other, which isn't anywhere near as interesting as it should be.

So it's kind of an unenthusiastic "meh, it's okay", but again that's really not enough for a film with this high a budget (reportedly $200,000,000 before marketing, which is frankly an obscene amount of money). The film ends with two extra sequences mid- and post-credits teasing new instalments and a closing caption "The Eternals Will Return", just in case you were in any doubt that these things are going to go on and on and on until the audience just gets fed up of them and gives up, or until the world ends. My money's on the latter, and clearly so is Marvel's. I just wish Eternals had showed me something genuinely arresting, or was at least a lot more fun. Instead I'm just lukewarm about it, very much in the middle. It's fine but that's all.

***

SPENCER

VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION! CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

I occasionally wonder what side I'd be on come a revolution. The Monarch or the people? The aristos or the peasantry? Tradition and heritage or fairness and, if not actual equality, at least a little less inequality? Usually I've never come to any conclusion, but this week I went in my local Cineworld to see Spencer and emerged two hours later as Robespierre. Hand me my pitchfork. (Pleasingly, our family Christmas tradition is a screening of Don't Lose Your Head, which I shall watch with extra enjoyment this particular annus horribilis.)

This would basically be one of those cheery, cheesy festive romcoms in which a naive innocent is thrown like raw meat into a family of eccentrics, trapped in a house full of whackos over the Christmas holiday, except that there aren't any laughs in it. Diana (Kristen Stewart, with all the headtilts and breathy voice) treks up to Sandringham to join Charles, Harry, Wills, HMQ and the rest of the gang for three days of stifling rules and suffocating ritual. This is the dress you wear for Christmas Eve snacks, this is the hat you wear for Church, you have to weigh yourself when you arrive and leave to prove how much you've enjoyed Christmas. Or, think of it like The Sandringham Redemption, in which Diana Dufresne spends ages putting up with all the cruelties, hostilities and injustices of the established regime and finally escapes to her own normal life (in this case, sitting on a riverside bench with the kids and a Bucket O'Chicken) in the last reel.

Here's the problem with Spencer: I just plain don't believe it. Even if it's actually a true and accurate portrait of the Royals and/or whatever happened that weekend, I don't believe it (and if it isn't true and accurate, they should sue because these Royals are full-on Ghastly People). Part of it is that the Royals, so distantly removed from the rest of us "real people" that they might as well be space aliens like the House Harkonnen from Dune, don't like uppity newcomers turning up and not playing by the centuries-old rules of a game that's rigged against them anyway. (And it's not as if Diana hails from "real people" in the first place - she literally grew up next door.) Dramatically I just don't buy into any of this, and matters aren't helped by repeated references to Anne Boleyn, including occasional appearances of her ghost, and a Jonny Greenwood hard jazz score that could scarcely be less dramatically appropriate if it had included a Stylophone, massed kazoos and a monkey hitting a bucket with a stick. There are also a few lookalikes in the background (Fergie and Camilla - there's also a Prince Andrew in the end credits but I didn't spot him).

Diana's yearning for some kind of normality in the real world, her rejection of the isolation and imprisonment in the absurdly vast, cold palace and grounds (the police perimeter works both ways), in addition to her own psychological demons and eating disorders: that's all there, along with the sheer grotesquerie of having endless crates of Cordon Bleu food delivered under military escort (did anyone join the Army hoping their duties would involve ensuring that there were enough Duchy Original biscuits to last until Tuesday and that no-one hijacked the van full of apricots?) and the enthusiasm for meaningless blood sports (Diana's futile attempts to persuade Charles not to force Wills into the traditional Boxing Day grouse shoot). It's too much of a jazzhonk-drenched slog to get to the final moments of freedom, and by that point I'd long since given up on it. Not even as good a film as the much-derided Diana. Amusingly, it's shot in Germany.

*

HALLOWEEN KILLS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Halloween Overkills, more like. This new randomly titled sequel to the confusingly titled reboot that acted as an actual sequel to the 1978 original (while erasing the rest of the franchise from Rick Rosenthal's okay Halloween II to the same director's atrocious Halloween: Resurrection, and ignoring Rob Zombie's worthless brace entirely) is a disaster: whatever it thinks it might have to say about vigilantism and mob rule is just lost in all the senseless slaughter that betrays everything the original Halloween was. There's no subtlety, no restraint, no art and no craft; in other words, there's no John Carpenter, just a mindless succession of graphic kills that's never scary and quickly becomes dull. Halloween Bores, more like.

Picking up straight after the 2018 Halloween, in which three generations of Strode had trapped Michael Myers in the basement and set the building ablaze, its first "really?" contrivance is to have the fire brigade turn up immediately and put it out again, only to discover (very briefly) that Myers had survived the inferno by hiding in a cupboard and is now ready to kill literally everyone he encounters, including all the firefighters. Grandmother Laurie was badly wounded and ends up in the hospital while Mom Karen frets and worries and daughter Allyson goes off on the Haddonfield citizens' hunt for Myers with the rallying cry "Evil Dies Tonight!!!".

The 2018 film was mainly about Laurie Strode forty years on; Halloween Kills concerns itself with a stack of other characters including the former Sheriff Brackett (now head of security at the hospital) and Tommy Doyle, the kid Laurie was babysitting in 1978 who now becomes the head of the angry and out-of-control lynch mob that simply places innocent people in Myers' path and inevitably gets them killed. Having started with a bloody massacre (of the firefighters), it climaxes with another one before bumping off a significant character in a meaningless and nonsensical way, making you wonder who's left to face off with him in next year's Halloween Ends, a film which is less eagerly awaited than it was before I watched this one.

As much fun as it might be to watch a bloody and violent slasher film, merely slashing, stabbing and impaling about thirty people isn't interesting if it isn't remotely plausible or beliveable and this absolutely isn't. Myers was always a remorseless, unstoppable boogeyman but he was still a biological human being; now he's a completely indestructible force of nature and could take on two Terminators and a Tyrannosaurus Rex without breaking a sweat. A mob of middle-aged normal people, armed with handguns, kitchen knives and baseball bats, have no more chance against him than they do against a tornado. And even when they've found him and soundly clobbered him, no-one thinks to dismember him, decapitate him, or at the very very least PICK THE BIG KNIFE UP THAT'S LYING RIGHT BY HIS HAND, YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOTS. The resultant carnage is hardly surprising to the extent that it's practically self-inflicted.

Moments please, but not enough of them. It's nice to hear that famous 5/4 theme again, it's nice to see Will Patton in anything, and it's nice to see Jamie Lee Curtis again, but this is unworthy of her and of John Carpenter who was always a mood and atmosphere director rather than a mere body count man. This has little mood, it has little atmosphere and very little to commend it to anyone.

*

WILLY'S WONDERLAND

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND BAFFLEMENT

There's really not much to say about this bizarro nonsense in which Nicolas Cage fights a bunch of animatronic robots in an abandoned family fun arcade - especially given than Cage himself doesn't have anything to say as he has precisely zero lines of dialogue. It's an odd gimmick: to take one of the most verbally unusual actors of our time and then not have him speak beyond the occasional grunt, and it doesn't really come off as they don't give any reason for it, and it deprives the audience of one of Cage's trademarked Bug-Eyed Shouty Freakout scenes which in some of Cage's lesser movies can be the sole redeeming feature: it's rubbish but at least he did some wild gesticulating and bellowing nonsense in a funny voice. Unfortunately there's none of that here.

Instead it's an occasionally meanspirited but 15-rated splatter movie in which Cage's unnamed drifter ends up having to clean out the abandoned Willy's Wonderland arcade, which the owner is hoping to reopen after a history of bloody carnage. On the same night, a gang of local youths plan to finally burn the place to the ground, not knowing that the cute singing robots (Willy The Weasel, Tina The Turtle, Ozzy The Ostrich etc) are possessed by the spirits of serial killers, fed  unwilling victims by the townspeople after a deal to stop them murdering all the families...

It's not very good: not even up there with the film of The Banana Splits a few years ago which was scarcely a masterpiece, and Cage is hardly a sympathetic presence when he casually abandons a fight halfway through to go and have a fizzy drink and another go on the pinball machine, leaving a teenage girl at the mercy of an eight-foot murderous puppet. Also it feels unnecessarily callous to merrily kill children in what is ostensibly a silly horror-comedy. Sure, it's not the worst thing you'll ever see, but there are so many films that aren't the worst things you'll ever see that merely not being the worst thing you'll ever see isn't enough. Some amusement, but it's not really worth it.

**