TERRIFIER 2

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND A GROWING SENSE OF DESPAIR

Specifically it's the kind of despair that makes me wonder if I want to watch slasher movies any more. It's a horror subgenre I've always had a soft spot for, which may be partly down to nostalgia for the highlights of the golden years as well as honest appreciation for the unkillable bogeyman form when it's done well. The early classics, the first few Michaels and Jasons and a handful of decent imitators like Rosemary's Killer and My Bloody Valentine, have withstood the decades and I'm happy to have the DVDs and Blus on my shelf. But it has to be said that the slasher movies of today simply aren't in their craftsmanship league: I wouldn't give house room to the likes of David Gordon Green's recent trilogy of callous Halloween reboots and the mostly terrible works of Rob Zombie. Now comes Terrifier 2 and I'm wondering if the slasher movie might now be defunct because Damien Leone might just have broken it.

I wasn't much of a fan of the first Terrifier: a grubby, nasty little number in which people were bloodily murdered by Art The Clown and as far as a plot goes, that was it. It had no charm and no class and was basically just about the blood and gore for about 80 minutes and then it stopped. For no reason beyond Leone not knowing where to stop, Terrifier 2 is almost a full hour longer and ups the splatter to insane grossout levels as Art targets high school girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera, who spends the last half of the film dressed as a winged Valkyrie in Wonder Woman armour) and her 12-year-old brother, brutally murdering anyone else in the vicinity as he goes. None of this happens for any adequately explored reasons, despite the film running for one hundred and thirty eight minutes yet having no room amidst the carnage for any kind of explanations, either for character motivations or the increasing supernatural elements.

Miserable and mean-spirited, charmless and heartless, Terrifier 2 just drags on with endless extended scenes of blood and entrails, lovingly rendered with (mostly) old-school practical and physical gore effects. Eyes are gouged, limbs are lopped, genitals are ripped off, heads are scalped and entrails are rent asunder, again and again (presumably it got through the BBFC unscathed because none of the violence is actively sexual). I'm not averse to a good unhealthy slice of sickbag cinema every so often but usually there's something else going on underneath the grue. If all you want is the splatter and mutilations then fill your boots because that's all there is: there's nothing beyond the vom factor. Or watch the Saw movies instead: at least they're funny and at least there's some narrative context for the bloodshed, albeit a bonkers one. By contrast and in comparison, Terrifier 2 is just offal.

It does however raise the question of where it can go from here: not just the Terrifier saga but slasher movies in general. Just piling on even more gore isn't enough: mere viscera by itself is a cul-de-sac and we've now reached the brick wall at the end of it. How about something that's actually interesting, well made and emotionally involving on some level? Or even, dare I say it, something scary? There's no chance of that as Leone has already said that Art The Clown is going to come back for Terrifier 3. Whether I'll come back for Terrifier 3 is far more open to question.

*

HALLOWEEN ENDS

CONTAINS SOME MAJOR SPOILERS

Well, it's better than Halloween Kills, but that's not saying much. That second instalment of one of the most iconic slasher series wasn't just a depressing and senseless bloodbath that existed solely to slaughter as many innocent people as possible, it was a betrayal of everything Halloween started out as. John Carpenter's original was a horror movie you could show your children (or your parents) because it didn't have any swearing or graphic gore, but successive sequels, reboots, remakes and alternate timelines have amped up the body count and the blood spurts culminating in Halloween Kills' tedious massacre of anyone and everyone, whether a significant character, a firefighter, or a random passerby who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The first big surprise of Halloween Ends is that Michael Myers isn't actually in it that much, probably in recognition of the fact that he's 65 years old. Instead, the focus is on Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a previously unknown character who accidentally killed a child on Halloween Night three years ago (this opening scene is actually pretty good, but after that it just sinks) and is still deeply troubled by it. Tormented and bullied by the locals, tonight might just be when Corey finally snaps, unless something comes of a tenuous romance with Allyson (Andi Matichak), Laurie Strode's granddaughter... Laurie herself (Jamie Lee Curtis for the last time, no, really, honest) has adjusted surprisingly well to the carnage: living a normal domestic life without the electric fences and the bunker and the shotguns, embracing the spirit of the Halloween festival, and almost entering into a tenuous romance of her own with Frank (Will Patton), who I actually thought was killed at least one film ago...

The second big surprise about Halloween Ends (With Any Luck) is that it's actually more reminiscent of Christine, John Carpenter's weakest and least interesting film (with the exception of Dark Star), than it is of Halloween itself. Our lead character is a loner named Cunningham, routinely bullied, miserably treated by his family, who spends a lot of time at the local junkyard. Why didn't they go the whole hog and have him drive around in a red Plymouth Fury? But all this does is to distract, to shift focus from what Halloween movies are about at heart: Laurie and Michael, Michael and Loomis, and now Laurie and Allyson. And why they've suddenly decided to riff on Christine, of all things, is as big a mystery as why Haddonfield still does the whole Halloween thing every year after all the misery and slaughter it brings them on a regular basis, or why Laurie Strode (or anyone else) still lives there after everything that's happened, rather than moving a thousand miles across the country.

On a technical level it's perfectly alright, well enough shot and decently put together, and effectively nasty when it wants to be, though Carpenter's score (with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies again) doesn't make any impression. It is undeniably better than the last instalment, and it's better than Rob Zombie's Halloween II, the terrible Halloween 4, and the one with Busta Rhymes, but is that really enough? Personally I am just hoping this is actually the end, and Michael Myers is left in the past along with Jason (there hasn't been a Friday The 13th movie for 13 years now and there's no sign of one on the horizon), though the presence of Myers in the extended Blumhouse logo might suggest they're not going to drop him just yet and will instead milk him for every last dollar. Let him go.

**

DON'T WORRY DARLING

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

There's something rotten at the heart of Victory, a small too-picture-perfect-to-be-true desert township that's home to all the workers and their families. It's some unspecified point between the mid-50s and early-60s: everyone looks fabulous, lives in fabulous houses and drives fabulous cars. In this patriarchal paradise, the wives dutifully do all the domestic work while the men go off to their unspecified work on the top secret Victory Project, about which no-one asks and no-one speaks beyond the meaningless phrase "progressive materials". Alice (Florence Pugh) is starting to have hallucinations or strange visions - including a chorus line from a Golden Age musical - and becomes convinced that there's something badly wrong with the world, especially when one of her best friends suddenly kills herself in front of her and she's repeatedly told by her husband Jack (Harry Styles) that no, darling, it was all just an accident and you're imagining things.

So is it something like The Stepford Wives, with all the perfect and loyal wives happily subservient to their husbands and the Project? Is it something like Jacob's Ladder where it's all taking place in the mind of someone on the point of death? Or is it all just a dream? My guess at the film's Big Secret was wrong, but it was pretty much just as valid as the Big Reveal they went with. The key to Don't Worry Darling, really, is that payoff: whether you feel the What's Really Going On destination is worth the journey. Personally I'm not entirely sure, though their chosen solution has a particular cruelty and horror about it. To be honest I found myself wallowing in the wonderful period detail and interior design a lot more than the paranoid thriller plot, and I suspect the film was as well: it's a scratch over two hours and it really doesn't need to be.

Musically it's quite interesting, with John Powell's score mixing a conventional soundtrack with distorted and processed voices, though it's all shot through with numerous pop songs of the period and I could quite happily never hear Sh-Boom ever again! Pugh and Chris Pine (as Frank, the Victory visionary in charge of everything) are perfectly good, Styles less so. If you can ignore the controversy about why and whether Shia La Boeuf quit or was fired before filming (and director Olivia Wilde, who also has a supporting role, is/was in a relationship with Styles, who replaced him), and the unanswered questions such as where the biplane came from, it's a solid three-star film and I enjoyed it enough. But I did leave the cinema feeling slightly short-changed as that Big Reveal provoked "oh, okay" rather than "oh, wow!".

***

THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF EXTREME BAD TASTE

It used to take a lot for a film director to get on my blacklist: for them to make movies so awful that I eventually didn't want to see any more from them because life's too short to put up with this rubbish. Peter Greenaway managed three before I said "enough", and Al Adamson and Ted V Mikels managed a mere two each, while the dreaded Lloyd Kaufman scored an astonishing seven before I finally gave up on him. Because of all those years wasted trying to watch every piece of hopeless junk available I waded through no less than 42 films by the legendarily abysmal Jess Franco (of which maybe three were actually worth the effort) before drawing a line in the sand for the sake of my sanity. The only director I can think of who I abandoned after just one is Ray Dennis Steckler, and that's because most of his "works" aren't available in the UK anyway. And now I can add Dasha Nekrasova to that very short roll of honour.

The Scary Of Sixty-First is a godawful little drama yoking in Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew for tedious and tiresome shock effect that thinks it's pushing boundaries and being cutting edge but is actually just crass and exploitative. Two young women (who are supposed to be long-term friends, which is the first thing I just don't believe) seem to have got lucky with a suspiciously good deal on a prime Manhattan apartment, until a mysterious unnamed woman (co-writer and director Nekrasova) turns up and reveals that it used to belong to Epstein. Before you know it, Addie (Betsey Brown) seems to be possessed by the spirit of a child who may have been killed there, and her roommate Noelle (co-writer Madeline Quinn) and the stranger start taking drugs and wandering around New York investigating the Big Conspiracy...

The anonymous stranger actually says "I'm not a conspiracy theorist" before launching into a stream of tinfoil-hat gibberish centred around Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, the Royals and the Clintons, taking in MKUltra mind-control, tarot cards, pentagrams and Pizzagate. There is probably a great film to be made about Epstein, but it's a serious subject for a serious project, and this absolutely isn't it. Addie masturbating frantically over pictures of Prince Andrew and begging her boyfriend to "f*** her like she's thirteen", and a crass four-letter reference to the Queen which wouldn't get a laugh on Mock The Week even if she hadn't died a few weeks ago, feel misplaced, like they're mainly there for pearl-clutching shock effect. But you can't be shocked if you don't believe in what you're watching, and I absolutely didn't buy into a single frame of it. Certainly not the last act, when it just resorts to "strong bloody violence" and throws in an Eyes Wide Shut reference for the sake of it.

The Scary Of Sixty-First doesn't work as either shock or drama because it's completely unbelievable (why is the unnamed stranger so obsessed with Epstein and his legacy anyway?), and the bad taste material just feels like it's trying too hard to be offensive, like a casual 9/11 joke without a punchline. The result is a film that's uncomfortable in its use of genuine evil as the backbone for a thoroughly uninteresting film that gets steadily stupider and more unhinged as it goes along. Also, despite the title, it's not remotely scary: to be honest I was bored and irritated throughout. The real victims of those ghastly, despicable people deserve a lot better than this nonsense. Streaming on Shudder.

*

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS?

Aside from Dario Argento, David Cronenberg is probably the last giant of horror cinema's Golden Age still working. John Carpenter has effectively retired except for occasional scoring duties, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper and George Romero have gone, and Sam Raimi has decamped to major league superhero movies. And since Existenz back in 1999, Cronenberg himself has largely abandoned the gloopy body horror genre he practically created, in favour of cerebral dramas such as Spider and A Dangerous Method and odd, uncategorisable films like Cosmopolis and Maps To The Stars. Crimes Of The Future is certainly back in his trademark territory: graphic but strangely bloodless gore, twisted flesh, impenetrable and inaccessible characters, musings on humanity and what it will become.

In an unspecified place (some signs are in English, some in Greek), and an unspecified future in which there are no computers and mobile phones are the size of walkie-talkies, pain no longer exists and some people are able to grow new organs inside themselves. Saul and Caprice Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux) are performance artists whose show consists of him lying in a modified biomechanical autopsy machine removing strange new organs. (Even as a highly niche novelty act, public surgery is not going to make it past the first round of Britain's Got Talent or any Saturday night game show.) Meanwhile, a woman has killed her young son because of his ability - inherited rather than engineered - to consume otherwise non-biodegradable plastic, and a public autopsy might reveal what this could mean for the environmental future of the human race...

The trouble with Crimes Of The Future (which has nothing to do with his own 1970 film of the same name) is that it's too slow. It's not a long film by any stretch, at 107 minutes, but it's oddly lifeless, it has no pace and no urgency about it, leaving you feeling frustrated. It's also grim and humourless, even by Cronenberg's standards: he's never been the man you go to for laughs but the film has such a sombre and oppressive tone to it that it really needed some hint of levity or lightness, and Kristen Stewart's flighty secretary from the New Organ Registry wasn't enough. Granted, it has its moments of graphic physical gore, as well as frank nudity and sex scenes (left untouched in the UK for an 18 certificate), but it's all weirdly inert and has none of the visceral punch you'd expect, to the extent that Crimes Of The Future actually ends up on screen as boring, believe it or not. Hard to imagine why people allegedly walked out of the film at Cannes, unless they remembered they'd got some ironing to do.

Cronenberg is nearly 80 years old now, so it's perhaps unreasonable to expect the same impact as the full-on grue of The Fly, Videodrome or Rabid, any more than you'd expect the latest Dario Argento to operate on the same level as Suspiria or Deep Red. But I was surprised how little energy there was to it. It has its fascinating ideas, and some strikingly peculiar imagery (such as Mortensen's bed, like a giant insect from Naked Lunch or something, that's designed to move him around to ease his pain), but they can barely survive a film that makes you wonder if you didn't nod off half way through and miss a crucial scene or two. I don't think I did, but I shouldn't even be wondering that, certainly not in a David Cronenberg film. I did struggle with it, and for all that the King Of Venereal Horror has finally returned to the scene of his early, yukky triumphs, it's to surprisingly little effect. A massive disappointment.

*

DARK GLASSES

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

There aren't many directors around these days for whom the prospect of a brand new work is one to be greeted with some excitement. Many times the thought of a new film by a major film-maker has to be tempered with the knowledge that their days of legend and glory are a long way behind them and their recent efforts have been, shall we say, disappointing. (One thinks of Brian De Palma: no matter what happens, we're never getting another Dressed To Kill or Blow Out.) Perhaps the most frustrating case has been that of the mighty Dario Argento: so many highlights (Terror At The Opera, Deep Red, Tenebrae) but the second half of his filmography has been patchy, with little of the expected delirious visual flair and overdirection. Sleepless was decent enough, and I still like Do You Like Hitchcock? as a light, throwaway diversion, but with the best will in the world Dracula and Mother Of Tears were not good at all.

Dark Glasses (Occhiali Neri) sees Argento move back not wholly to the giallo, but at least to the contemporary serial killer thriller territory he's most famous for (and possibly most comfortable with). In this instance it's an unseen killer murdering sex workers with thin steel wire. His latest target Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) escapes but is blinded in the subsequent pursuit which also leaves a young Chinese boy orphaned; the two team up unaware that the killer is still after her...

Despite the lack of blimey! plot twists, the narrative is as wonky as you'd expect: for one thing the plot hinges on the idea that there's only one white van in the whole of Rome, and for another it begins with a solar eclipse that's actually got nothing to do with the main action and is only there as a nod to Antonioni's L'Eclisse (it's not even there as a nod to Inferno!). The murder plot is also pretty much put on hold for a reel or two while we focus on the relationship between Diana and the young boy. And aside from the first killing and the maniac's gory demise (a bloodier version of a death scene from Suspiria), the violence is mostly far less graphic than usual. We don't even see the first two murders: we're merely informed by the police that this one is the third, and while there's no mystery as to the killer's identity, which is revealed in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable, there's absolutely no clue as to why he's doing it.

The thing about Argento is that the heights are so high they're practically impossible to match, but the same goes for the lows. Dark Glasses doesn't come anywhere close to Argento's wildest and greatest works, inevitably, but it never sinks to the bottom either. It won't win over any converts but it won't anger the diehard Tenebrites either. It looks absolutely wonderful, magnificently photographed by Mattheo Cocco, though one misses the sounds of Goblin on the soundtrack (the score by Arnaud Rebotini, whose work I'm not familiar with, might grow on me with subsequent listens). In the end Dark Glasses is a solid three-star movie, neither masterpiece nor disaster, and not even close to either, but comfortably in the middle. I liked it enough and wouldn't balk at the idea of having the film on my BluRay shelf.

***

MEN

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND EUUUURGH

I am indebted to my sister for alerting me to an online article declaring this new British horror film to be "so disturbing" that viewers "storm out of the cinema". Granted, the "article" in question comes from no less a bastion of analytical journalism than the Daily Star and, if you can make it through their ghastly howling intellectual abyss of a website, you'll discover that the reporter has done very little more than click on a couple of Twitter hashtags and breathlessly report the findings. Like the stories about Saw III audiences requiring people from St John's Ambulance because they couldn't take the blood and gore, it sounds more like a publicity gimmick than anything else. Those tweets actually hailed from America last month and, if you follow them up a little, were more bewildered than upset. Here in Britain, nobody threw up, fainted or stormed out when I saw it on Sunday night - all six of us were still there at the end and walked away perfectly steadily. 

Bewilderment, though, is absolutely the right response. Men starts out as a fairly ordinary, almost generic-looking movie in which a woman arrives in a remote village and finds herself surrounded by a variety of creepy weirdos, some openly aggressive, some unsettlingly creepy, but all representing different shades of unattractive masculinity. Following the death of her abusive soon-to-be ex-husband, Harper (Jessie Buckley) rents a country pile in a distant Gloucestershire village. The landlord is chummy but a bit too chummy. When she goes for a walk in the woods, she's stalked and followed home by a naked stranger. The vicar suggests to her that she might have actually driven her husband to his death, and a schoolboy calls her a stupid bitch to her face. Yes, men are horrible.

But halfway through Men stops being about how horrible men are and veers off into full-on gloopy gore that makes you wonder how it got away with a 15 certificate. Like Darren Aronofsky's Mother! (and even after all these years I'm still refusing to put that title in lower case), it initially seems quite rational but transforms into something far more uncomfortable, maybe symbolic, maybe allegorical, but far less interesting. There's any amount of mileage to be had from casting Rory Kinnear in all the male roles (except the late husband), as all the different aspects of sexism and misogyny. It's a theatrical device that makes for a nice statement: Men, they're all the same. (On a literal level, though, the fact that every man in the village looks like Rory Kinnear also suggests centuries of inbreeding and incest.) But merging it with ye olde legend of The Green Man (for no immediately obvious reason) and a final reel swerve into slimy body horror territory that includes not one, not two, but three scenes of Kinnear giving bloody flesh-stretching birth to himself diffuses any commentary as we're trying to work out what the hell we're watching and what the film has suddenly become, as though someone's suddenly switched over from the ITV Drama Premiere to a screening of Brian Yuzna's Society.

In fact the most shocking and horrific moment in the movie has nothing to do with surreal gore, but is a sudden explosion of domestic violence. Why? Because that kind of thing happens in the real world: in the same way that the big that's-got-to-hurt moment of Hellraiser doesn't involve resurrected corpses under the floorboards or getting ripped apart with metal hooks by evil bondage demons, but Andrew Robinson gashing his hand on a nail. Worse still, not only do Men's icky gore highlights not occur in the real world, it becomes increasingly apparent that they're not happening in the world of the film either: the fact that most of the film is either symbolic or imaginary means great chunks of it may all be taking place in her head, which leads to yet another terrible aspect of men belittling women: "oh, she's just seeing things, poor dear, she's getting hysterical."

I struggled with Men. Not as much as I did with Mother!, perhaps, but as it wandered away from any kind of comprehensible narrative and reality, I found it more and more insufferable and annoying, and I found myself losing patience with it and wondering how much longer it had to run. It's a pity: I liked Ex Machina and sort-of enjoyed Annihilation but this is by some distance the least of Alex Garland's films thus far: no matter how good the performances are (and they are good, no question) and no matter how serious the content, too much of it is lost in the "so disturbing you'll storm out" third act because when you leave the cinema that's pretty much all you remember. It's not a bad film, but it's a very bad time, and for all that's good about it it's still one of the year's major lowlights so far and impossible to recommend. Men are horrible and so is Men.

*

TOP GUN: MAVERICK

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Top Gun was THE cool blockbuster of the 1986. Never mind Crocodile Dundee, never mind Highlander or Cobra or 9½ Weeks, never mind Police Academy 3. Top Gun was the one. Sure, it was dramatically pretty thin, and it really wasn't much more than an advert for the US Navy and their massive penises fighter jets, with ranks of impossibly ripped, indeed sculpted, buff young guys hanging around shirtless in the locker rooms or on the beach playing volleyball, each with a cool nickname like Viper, Iceman, Cougar or Maverick. This time around it's almost a joke that one of the guys answers to the callsign Bob because that's his actual name, but back in 1986 no-one flew with a callsign like Cystitis, Average, or Potato, and none of them looked like a plumber or a traffic warden or Ron Jeremy. They looked like the elite of the elite of the elite, because that's what they were.

Top Gun: Maverick starts in exactly the same way as the 1986 film, pretty much shot for shot (possibly even the same footage), complete with a reprise of the Harold Faltermeyer anthem on the soundtrack, and if it weren't for the new names in the credits I'd have wondered if my local Vue hadn't put the wrong film on by mistake. (I'm also fairly sure the BBFC black card at the start just said Top Gun.) Tom Cruise may now be 59 years old, but Pete "Maverick" Mitchell never climbed the promotional ranks because that would have taken him away from flying. Then he gets the summons to return to the Top Gun Academy as an instructor, because there's an underground nuclear facility in an unnamed rogue state that's about to start processing uranium and Maverick's mission, should he choose to accept it, is to train the youngsters, as arrogant and cocky as he was thirty-odd years ago, for a ludicrously dangerous one-shot-only action setpiece to take the bunker out...

It is another Mission Impossible, albeit without Simon Pegg, and it's basically the trench run from the last reel of Star Wars all over again. En route there's time for romance with an old flame (Jennifer Connelly, who I shamefully didn't recognise, rather than Kelly McGillis) and more shirtless guys in the locker room and on the beach playing volleyball, with more cool nicknames like Hangman, Warlock and Coyote, like they're third-tier X-Men or something. (Which would be appropriate because there's also a Phoenix, the first female Top Gun pilot.) The only serious note in this is the presence of the slightly less coolly-named Rooster (Miles Teller), son of Maverick's best friend and co-pilot Goose, who I'd completely forgotten had bought the farm until rewatching the first film the night before this one: not just a question of whether Rooster can forgive Maverick, but whether Maverick can finally forgive himself.

So, just like the first film, it's dramatically pretty thin. But who cares? The aerial training and combat sequences, which are the core of the movie, are adrenalin-pumping thrilling in a way that surpasses the late Tony Scott's work, and are predominantly done with real planes rather than with boring CGI and greenscreen. That's where Top Gun: Maverick scores highest. Not the cardboard emotional stuff, not the callbacks to 1986 (was Jennifer Connelly living in Kelly McGillis' old house?), not the brief return of ailing Admiral Val "Iceman" Kilmer, not even the thoroughly welcome absence of Berlin's ghastly Take My Breath Away dirge cluttering up the soundtrack. It's the grab-your-armrest don't-spill-the-cola scenes of flying upside down, dodging enemy missiles, nosediving to the desert floor, whizzing sideways through bridges, dogfighting through canyons and seeing off the pesky unidentified bad guys.

It's a lot of fun and I enjoyed it enormously, certainly more than I expected. Maybe there's not a huge amount a substance underneath it all, but I don't really think there's supposed to be. I was never that much of a fan of Top Gun anyway: I guess I enjoyed it enough back in 1986 but I've never felt the urge to rewatch it until now. Top Gun: Maverick is dedicated to Tony Scott and certainly new director Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) has cut it from the same star-spangled cloth, with a similar feel and look to it (for example, the glorious bright orange sunsets). See it in a cinema because it's not going to look a fraction as good streamed through a Firestick.

****

FIRESTARTER

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND A QUESTION

Here's the question: is this a remake of the 1984 film, or a new adaptation of the Stephen King novel? Presumably the makers would claim it as the latter, seeking to disassociate this shiny new Blumhouse incarnation from the original's flaws and claiming that this time they were doing it right, but the incorporation of a retro-style synth score (co-composed by John Carpenter, who was all set to direct that original before the box-office failure of The Thing) rather than the preferred atonal dischords and Boo! stingers of so many modern horror movie soundtracks would suggest otherwise. They even use a near-identical typeface for the credits and run them at the start, again in contrast to the modern manner.

I've never read the book and never will, so I couldn't say which is closer to King and I don't think it matters anyway as I'd sooner take the film on its own terms rather than fidelity to the original text, which I don't regard as Holy Writ. The basic line of the new Firestarter is still the same as the old: Charlie McGee (Ryan Kiera Armstrong in the Drew Barrymore role), a young girl with pyrokinetic powers, along with her telepathic father (Zac Efron), is being tracked by sinister definitely-not Government agents seeking to either exploit her powers for evil military purposes or at least teach her to control them so she doesn't set off a nuclear apocalypse with the power of her mind. Inevitably things don't work out for them, leading to the expected climactic fiery carnage and a muted and unexpected resolution that frankly makes no character sense....

About a third of the way through, one word is spoken which actually redefines what the film is. The original Firestarter has always been classed as horror, albeit a respectable one from a respectable source, which star names like Martin Sheen and George C Scott wouldn't be ashamed of appearing in. (It's also a close cousin of Brian De Palma's The Fury.) The word is "superhero", this is actually an X-Men movie and she should have been taken in by Dr Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters rather than Bastards Incorporated. It's ironic that this new Firestarter appears unheralded in cinemas one week after Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, because it literally feels like Patrick Stewart wheeled himself onto the wrong set.

On its own terms as a popcorn B-movie, it's watchable enough: enough people get set on fire to keep it entertaining and it's short and to the point (twenty minutes shorter than the 1984 version). And either CGI fire has improved drastically in the last few years or they've gone back to the old method of showing people on fire by simply...setting people on fire. But if you do want to play comparison, then the 1984 version, perfect though it certainly isn't, has it. Firestarter 2022 is somehow unremarkable, somehow not very interesting: there's just not enough there. It feels like they've exercised too much control and they can't, or won't, do what you, me and Charlie McGee really want, which is to finally let rip with the firepower and burn it all. Instead this one can be blown out in a light breeze.

**

MORBIUS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Here we go again. Yet another origins story from the Marvel stable given the whizzbang blockbuster treatment, this time one whose extensive Wikipedia page (I've never heard of any of these characters so I have to look all of them up afterwards) suggests is actually a long-standing Spider-man villain who occasionally swaps sides to join forces against an even bigger evil. As a standalone movie, this one seems to recast him as a reluctant hero rather than an outright bad guy: a scientific genius transformed into a monster by his own experiments and now struggling to retain his essential humanity and morality and conquer his need for fresh human blood.

Morbius (sadly nothing to do with the medical horrors of Doctor Who's 1976 story The Brain Of Morbius) is actually Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), victim of a rare blood disease since childhood and creator of an artificial blood which has helped with countless battlefield injuries. Experimenting on himself with a serum derived from South American vampire bats, he turns himself into a vampiric monster who cannot control his thirst for blood and his need to kill. But his only friend Milo (Matt Smith), suffering from the same illness, steals the serum for himself and embraces his new powers and freedoms...

Eventually it comes to a head, as these things always do, with the two beating the hell out of each other and flinging one another through buildings and walls and pavements in what is frankly the most boring manner possible. It's the dullest and least enjoyable Marvel movie thus far and frankly gives the glummest of the DC franchise a run for its misery money. There's no fun to be had and it's difficult to care who wins, so all you're left with is the whizzy CGI. Worse, it ends in the usual way with teasers for the next film (maybe), dragging in Michael Keaton's The Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming and possibly setting up something that Wikipedia suggests is a supervillain group called The Sinister Six, because they're going to keep milking this damned thing until the heat death of the Universe at least.

While it's nice to find a comicbook movie that doesn't climax with cities, planets or whole Universes up for casual and meaningless destruction, and settles for a body count of maybe twenty rather than Thanos' billions, Morbius is still thoroughly uninteresting stuff. Yes, the CGI and monster effects are perfectly good, but we're now in an era where good CGI is as much a standard as the film being in focus and there's no excuse for anything less than pixel perfection. You could wonder what dimension this is happening in if The Vulture has suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and/or whether it's part of the Multiverse which may or may not be explained in the next film, or the one after that. Or you might just wondering why they're still bothering with this nonsense (apart from the money, obviously) and, by extension, why the audience is still bothering.

**

AMBULANCE

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

Michael Bay is back, and in a change from our usual programming this is suddenly something to be welcomed. Shorn of the rubbish "humour" and grubby sexualised leering at "college girls" and underwear models from the tiresome Transformers movies and their increasing idiocy, and with the action and screeching tyres cranked up beyond all human reason, Ambulance is two parts Michael Mann's Heat, three parts Speed, and seventy-three parts Shouting Like A Maniac - and I loved it. It has no subtlety, it has no nuance, it has no restraint, it has no depth. It's all storm and no calm, all orgasm and no foreplay.

To be strictly fair, it does have an opening bit that sets up the three main characters: military veteran Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) needs fast money for family medical costs, so hooks up with his not entirely unprincipled criminal not-really brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a couldn't-be-simpler bank heist that very morning. But then everything obviously goes spectacularly wrong, bullets fly and Danny has the brainwave of taking over the ambulance sent to get the seriously wounded cop out of the building. They also take the paramedic Cam (Eiza Gonzalez) hostage to look after the patient because if the cop dies they'll likely be facing the electric chair. What else can they do but run for it?

Screaming through traffic on the opposite carriageway, formulating plans on the fly, trying to keep the injured cop from bleeding to death and performing emergency surgery on him via Zoom: Ambulance keeps raising the stakes until it's forced to come to a kind of ending after another endless gunfight with even more trigger-happy gangsters. Who these guys were and what their significance was supposed to be remained unclear: much of the dialogue is bellowed over the din of blaring sirens and cars smashing into one another, so those minor little details will probably have to wait until the subtitles on the Blu-Ray. Meanwhile, just sit back and watch two hours of mayhem and destruction and explosions and shouting, much of it captured with magnificent if slightly vertigo-inducing camera drones. Michael Bay directs all this with his boner as usual and who cares if he's still got no idea about character or coherent narrative? He is primarily a crash bang kaboom action director (Bad Boys, The Rock) and no other filmmaker can shoot a family saloon corkscrewing across the screen in slow-motion in an orgasmic shower of sparks and fire quite like him.

It's based on a Danish thriller of the same name that doesn't seem to have got a release over here (and is an entire hour shorter, because Michael Bay clearly doesn't think a mere eighty minutes is anything like enough). I enjoyed the hell out of Ambulance far more than I was expecting given some of the terrible films he's made (Pain And Gain is a particular offender) and whilst I'm not going to suggest that it's a gem deserving of a whole mantelpiece of awards, it's great slambang fun and dizzyingly put together. I left the cinema exhausted. And the Fast And Furious series now needs to seriously up its game.

****

STUDIO 666

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND MINOR CONFESSIONS OF IGNORANCE OF SOME ASPECTS OF MODERN POPULAR CULTURE

I'll admit it, I'm not huge on modern music. On a good day if I'm listening closely I can just about tell the difference between The Spinners and The Sex Pistols, Kraftwerk and The Kings Singers, Nirvana and The Nolans. Most of what I listen to is film scores - which is a narrow niche on one level but actually covers a wide spectrum of styles - and I generally like an orchestra rather than what I understand is known amongst the young people as a "popular beat combo". I don't necessarily knock it, but it's not really for me. Not all of it - I have an inexplicable liking for some disco music, and some isolated songs from the 1980s have made their way onto my Spotify playlists (currently playing: Separate Lives by Phil Collins; don't judge me), but you can't listen to every band any more than you can watch every movie or read every book: you try a few things and filter out what doesn't appeal to you. Pop and rock generally doesn't, any more than cutesy romcoms or gothic bodice-rippers.

Given their name, you'd have expected a horror movie in which The Foo Fighters play themselves to be about alien spacecraft, but Studio 666 is actually a surprisingly gory splatter movie in which the Foos have to record a new album in an old mansion that was once the site of violent deaths and which may still be home to demons and evil spirits. More deaths occur almost immediately they move in, there's a raccoon crucified in the cellar, and shadowy red eyed silhouette monsters hover around as frontman Dave Grohl is compelled by a creepy gardener to record an absolutely terrible 44-minute song that will open the demonic portals. And what's with the weird rock chick next door?

It's from the director of Hatchet 3 and the gore (which looks mostly practical) is upfront and plentiful, but it's never meanspirited or sadistic. Even the double chainsawing highlight is more comedic in its excess rather than nasty, and it's really too silly to be taken seriously. Rather, it feels like a throwback to late 80s and 90s rubbish hardrock/gore movies like Trick Or Treat or Black Roses. There's also a priceless cameo from a pop music legend that even I recognised immediately and mercifully it hadn't been spoiled for me in advance.

Studio 666 goes on too long by at least fifteen minutes, and the acting (from people who aren't actors) isn't great by any stretch, though Grohl himself is kind of fun. And I can't tell if the big terrible rock song is terrible because it's supposed to be deliberately terrible for comic effect, or it's just terrible. But in an era of wimpy 15-certificate jumpers it's nice to see a full-on gore movie that boasts a blood-red 18 at the start and harks back to the schlock we were watching thirty years ago; no less than John Carpenter did part of the soundtrack (and also shows up briefly) and the main credits are even in Carpenter's usual font. Gorehounds nostalgic for the Golden Age of Fangoria-approved splatter should love it; personally I had way more fun than I was expecting, and maybe if I was more into the music and the Foos themselves then I might have enjoyed it even more.

***

MOONFALL

UG UG. ME GO UG UG. SPOILERS. UG.

Every so often, about every six or seven years, Roland Emmerich gets it into his head to absolutely trash the world. A mere city being stomped on by Godzilla isn't enough: a dozen cities obliterated by giant alien warships on Independence Day isn't enough, the entire planet's climate systems being upended in The Day After Tomorrow isn't enough, absolutely everything getting smashed in 2012 isn't enough, the giant alien warships turning up again and dropping whole cities onto other whole cities in Independence Day: Resurgence isn't enough. (Let's not forget his onetime creative partner Dean Devlin's go with the almighty Geostorm.) Between planetary annihilations he'll trash smaller things: the White House, the island of Midway or William Shakespeare. But right now he's blowing up absolutely everything yet again in Moonfall, the stupidest thing you ever saw that didn't have Mr Blobby in it.

Ten years ago a routine satellite repair mission went horribly wrong when a space globule thing smashed into their shuttle, killing one of the three astronauts. Halle Berry (who was unconscious at the time) gets promoted while the only actual eyewitness Patrick Wilson is thrown out of NASA. Now his life's a complete wreck: behind on the rent, out of work and estranged from his family, because the higher the stakes the sharper the redemptive arc. Then passing janitor, conspiracy wacko and IBS sufferer John Bradley suddenly discovers that the moon is out of orbit and will smash into Earth in less than three weeks. The military want to nuke the moon (even though the fallout would kill everybody) but Berry comes up with a crazy scheme that Just Might Work, until they get to the moon and discover the amazing/ludicrous truth about what's inside the moon and where it came from. Meanwhile the families and exes are trekking through mountains and wastelands in order to reach some hope of safety...

It's a bit like Gravity, a bit like Contact, a bit like Mission To Mars, a bit like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a bit like Armageddon (or Deep Impact), and a bit like Kill The Moon, the episode of Doctor Who in which the moon is revealed to be an egg (an episode so dumb that I walked away from Who until showrunner Steven Moffatt and godawful companion Clara Oswald had gone - my younger self had happily accepted the idiocies of Old Who when Sylvester McCoy was being chased round Studio Three by a nine-foot liquorice allsort but as a grown adult This Has Gone Too Far). Everything is CGId into absolute pixel-perfect oblivion, with earthquakes and volcanoes and gravity reversals (the Earth gets shaken about more than the snowglobe that keeps appearing, doubtless symbolically) and demented car chases featuring impossible stunts that would get you 250 bonus points in Grand Theft Auto. None of it's real and none of it's plausible, the dialogue is terrible, and I don't care whether NASA approved it or not.

Moonfall makes that episode of Doctor Who look like Woody Allen, and not the early funny ones either. It is the apex of stupidity, the apotheosis of dumb, the ne plus ultra of knuckleheaded WTFery. It is a film about artificial intelligence that is certainly artificial but that's as far as it goes. It is a film of literal lunacy. And yet it is still terrific popcorn fun in a park-your-brain-at-the-door kind of way: gosh-wow wham-bam whizz-bang destructoporn of the highest (?) order. It's not mean-spirited or offensive, it's not banging any political drum, it has no message beyond "better the weirdos than the nuke-happy military", and most importantly it is not about anything but battering your retinas and your cerebral cortex to a pulp for two hours, an aim in which it succeeded. I think I quite enjoyed it.

***

SCREAM

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

Following the slasher movie about slasher movies, the sequel about sequels, the third part of a trilogy about third parts of trilogies and the here-we-go-again reunion about here-we-go-again reunions, we now have the requel about requels. Yes, that's a new term (to me, at least): a part-reboot, part-sequel whose insistence on not really being Scream 5, even though that's clearly what it is, extends to its title. (Following Scre4m, what was wrong with 5cream? And if there's another one, what are they going to call that because Scream 2 has already been taken?). 

We're back in Woodsboro, of course, because the requel demands that you keep moving forward while simultaneously going back to the beginning. Ten years on and a new Ghostface is launching a new series of attacks, with the aim of manoeuvring all the key players back into position: Dewey (David Arquette), now the ex-sheriff and the town drunk, Gale (Courteney Cox), now a breakfast TV anchor, and Sidney (Neve Campbell), now with kids of her own. Why? What does it have to do with the Stab movies (the in-universe equivalent of the Scream movies) which have now reached Part 8, an instalment which has generated such hostile online fan fury? Also back are Randy's sister from Scream 3 (Heather Matarazzo), also now with her own teenagers and the now promoted deputy Judy Hicks (Marley Shelton), again with a teenage son of her own. (Small wonder that the first Favourite Scary Movie cited is The Babadook, an "elevated horror" film about motherhood.)

The Scream movies have always functioned as their own director commentaries and sometimes they've been winking at the audience so much it's a wonder they can walk in a straight line, but that's always been their USP and part of their charm: unlike the casts of unironic non-metaslashers whose characters had never seen a horror movie in their lives and thus blundered idiotically into death scenes, the Screams had characters who knew and intimately understood the finest points of slasher iconography, and still blundered idiotically into death scenes. Knowing the rules may get you a wry chuckle from the gorehound community, but breaking those rules (Stab 5 involved time travel, Stab 8 gave its Ghostface character a flamethrower) gets you foaming rage and derision from This Movie Sucks!!! YouTubers of the wacko "this movie raped my childhood" end of the splatter fan spectrum.

As a standalone slasher movie it doesn't work because there's so much callback to the previous films that you need to do the homework first: if I hadn't marathonned the first four Screams the previous day I wouldn't have had a clue who half these people were. (This is the second batch of revision I've had to do recently, after binging the first three Matrix movies as prep for Resurrections.) But as a Scream movie, as a Scream 5 it's good nasty fun and bloody enough to earn its 18 certificate, the motive does make sense in terms of current movie trends and hashtag issues, even if (as usual) the plot demands all the characters obligingly behave exactly as they're supposed to and exactly as they have to for the thing to work. It's also faintly absurd that people would sit around watching dramatised reconstructions of attempted murders of their own family in the same house (and on the same sofa!) where those original events took place, but it does provide a neat mirrors-within-mirrors gag. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's not scary, though it is jumpy and full of shock stinger moments. Plus it's a twisty whodunnit as well (which I typically failed to solve correctly).

It's actually directed by the Ready Or Not duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, but it feels very much in the late Wes Craven's mould. The other principal newcomer is Brian Tyler, replacing Craven's regular composer Marco Beltrami but again working very much in his style (having relistened to the score online, I honestly couldn't tell that much difference between them) so the film does play like a proper official Scream movie and not a Ten Years Later add-on by other, less talented hands, and I really enjoyed it. My one reservation: there are certain rules that one must abide by in a horror franchise, and the main one is that they invariably go on for at least two films more than strictly necessary. The Scream team would be advised to walk away now before Ghostface In Space or Ghostface Vs Jason.

****

TITANE

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, AND THAT'S NOT A CAR-BASED PUN

As extreme French arthouse cinema that mixes body horror with psychological drama, serial killings, frank sexuality and absurd (and laughless) comedy goes, Titane is, probably mercifully, a one-off. I can't imagine a Titane 2, and I can't imagine the suits at Paramount or Platinum Dunes feverishly outbidding each other for the English language remake rights. I was ambivalent about Julia Ducournau's earlier horror/art Raw and, for all the graphic violence and sundry weirdness, I'm not won over by this new one either. Yet again everyone seems to love it far more than I do: is it just me?

Titane is either a rambling story that wanders all over the place with no clear idea where it's going, or (at least) three very strange stories jostling for space in the same film. When she was a child she was severely injured in a car smash and had to have a titanium plate embedded in her skull. Now Alexia (Agatha Rousselle, astonishing) is an exotic dancer at a car-themed nightclub who finds herself inexplicably pregnant after a sexual encounter with a Cadillac. Yes, really. She is also a serial killer who goes on the run and adopts the identity of a missing teenage boy named Adrien, shaving her head and binding her body and being taken in by the boy's distraught fire chief father...

Everyone else, including proper critics and international film festivals (including Cannes, where it got the Palme D'Or!) seems to have embraced Titane as a masterpiece but I just don't get it. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned and I'd just prefer a simpler, more coherent and straightforward narrative that focussed on just one of those strands; as it is the human/mechanical sex and pregnancy that mixes Demon Seed with Cronenberg's Crash, the odd comedy angles with the fire crew and the bloodstrewn serial killer nastiness never came together for me. Maybe that says more about me than it does about the film. But I can't apologise for not responding as enthusiastically as so many others whose recommendations I can usually trust. It is interesting and odd and sometimes shocking, certainly, but I just don't get it.

**

THE 355

CONTAINS SOME MINOR SPOILERS

There's actually nothing drastically wrong with The 355, the first major studio action release of 2022 which is pretty much as silly and implausible as we really need movies to be right now. In the current miserable climate we could use as much flashy and ridiculous nonsense as Universal, Warners at al can throw at us and Simon Kinberg's arbitrarily titled film (355 is briefly mentioned in dialogue in the last four minutes) certainly delivers on that score. It's a pity perhaps that the McGuffin at the centre of it is yet another electronic gizmo that allows the owner to break into every computer system on the planet - haven't we had this device in at least one Fast And Furious and Mission Impossible film yet?

The gimmick here is that it's an all-female crew with an international flavour. Top agents Jessica Chastain (USA), Diane Kruger (Germany) and Bingbing Fan (China), ex-MI5 techie Lupita Nyong'o (UK) and psychotherapist Penelope Cruz (Colombia) have to team up and gallivant around the world after the superchip and Chastain's of-course-he-wasn't-killed-in-the-opening-reel love interest gone rogue Sebastian Stan; Jason Flemyng pops up occasionally as the villain.

It is tosh and twaddle and incredibly undemanding, but it's perfectly well done and agreeably crunchy knockabout fun with a good rapport between the five heroes. It's certainly better than the first two Charlie's Angels movies (I actually liked its most recent incarnation) and maybe, if the audience is there, it might make it to a sequel (The 356?) or two. Not a classic but fun while it's on; if you don't think about it too much and if you don't take it too seriously you should have a decent enough time with it.

***