FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Not that there's much to spoil in this nothing horror-comedy: beyond the specific rationale there's very little here that we didn't see in Willy's Wonderland, which was no masterpiece, or the Banana Splits movie, which was no better. Whereas the former at least had Nicolas Cage (but mysteriously it gave him no opportunity to do his signature routine of Bug-Eyed Shouty Freakout), and the latter tried to combine cuddly kid-friendly shenanigans with mean-spirited blood and gore, there's really nothing left for Five Nights At Freddy's to do. Which is exactly what it does.

Based on an apparently huge videogame phenomenon that I'd never heard of until this film's opening credits, Five Nights At Freddy's has schlubby loser Mike (Josh Hutcherson) compelled to accept a job as night security guard at a tacky pizza parlour (abandoned since the 1980s after several children vanished) whose main attraction was a string of animatronic robot animals that sang and danced. Mike is also haunted by the disappearance of his own brother when they were children and uses dream therapies to try and relive the abduction in order to remember a clue, AND is fighting to stop his evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) from seizing custody of his young sister.

So there's a lot of character stuff to fill in - and that's before we get to the attractive cop who spends far too much of her nightshift time at Freddy's and who has a Big Secret. You'd perhaps expect that would make a striking contrast with the splattery gore as the animatronic animals bump people off, but strangely the horror element is half-hearted and very low on the grue (it's a PG-13 in the States and an arguably too-strict 15 here) and there really isn't much in the way of comedy either. But it's far too light and safe, far too devoid of actual nastiness, and so ends up more as a drama with occasional horror elements than an actual horror film (released for the Halloween weekend).

On the other hand, if it is really a kids' film then there's too much backstory about abducted children and psychological trauma: on some level these things are supposed to be fun and Five Nights At Freddy's really isn't. It isn't fun, or scary, or horrific, or very much of anything. There are a few moments where the potential horror is nicely staged but it doesn't deliver because deep down it's really not sure what kind of film it wants to be and what kind of audience it's pitching for. The result is a film that doesn't do very much and doesn't do it very well, leaving you wondering just what the point was. The second star is purely an indication of how charitable I'm feeling right now.

**

THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER

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Another in this year's list of horror sequels that we really didn't need and aren't much good: after Saw X, Scream VI and whatever number the new Evil Dead was, here's an even more inexplicable exhumation of a scenario that absolutely should have been left alone. David Gordon Green's track record with his recent trilogy of Halloween sequels did not inspire confidence, and those low expectations have been barely scraped by this baffling revival of The Exorcist, which pretty much no-one has been crying out for since the last theatrical attempt back in 2005. The notorious Exorcist II: The Heretic is generally reckoned a disaster even though they were trying, possibly unsuccessfully, to do something different with the ideas and characters rather than merely rehashing the previous one; The Exorcist III was wonderfully dark and atmospheric with one perfect and unforgettable jump scare, while of the two parallel fourth instalments Renny Harlin's Beginning was the more multiplex scary and Paul Schrader's Dominion was the more arthouse unsettling. (I haven't seen the stage show or the TV series and I'm not going to.)

The Exorcist: Believer seems to be going out of its way to not be an Exorcist movie to the extent that for the first half hour or more I wasn't sure if the cinema had put the right film on. Two young girls, one of whom comes from a hard Christian family and the other lost her mother in childbirth after a Haitian earthquake, disappear for three days but when they return there's something badly wrong with both of them. Are they possessed? Eventually - eventually! - they call in Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) who has experience of this sort of thing...

Aside from several uses of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, Chris MacNeil is really the only connection to The Exorcist and if they hadn't dragged her into it this could, and would, have been a regular standalone teen possession movie that would have passed largely unnoticed in the runup to Halloween. Making it part of the Exorcist legacy puts a burden on it that it simply cannot support, even if you're not a massive fan of the original film (and I'm not). Granted, the film accelerates mightily when it finally gets down to some actual exorcising, with an extended all-stops-out bonkers confrontation with much shouting and silly visual effects, but with almost no impact. There are a couple of nice, spooky little something-in-the-background moments early on that do raise a brief frisson, but that's all. And the very last shot, which feels like an end-of-season twist cliffhanger (presumably setting up Deceiver for 2025), just falls stone dead.

The sensible thing to do would be to just abandon the rest of the planned series and just walk away and let it rest now. The Exorcist was never really franchise material anyway; it wasn't something that warranted expansion into a Cinematic Universe. It was a one-off half a century ago that shattered the boundaries of acceptability and shock, and this latest one, which has a 15 certificate, doesn't get anywhere near those boundaries, let alone push at any new ones. The Exorcist: Believer is entirely unnecessary, entirely redundant and entirely not frightening, scary or shocking. This might not be the worst teen possession movie ever made, but it is easily the worst and least interesting Exorcist movie ever made.

*

SAW X

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND OUCH, THAT'S GOT TO HURT

Of all the major Hollywood horror series, the Saw saga has always been my favourite. Right from the start we had a central monster educating ne'er-do-wells of the value of human life and humanity rather than another indestructible bogeyman hacking up horny teenagers: if there wasn't a huge amount of profundity there, at least there was a convincing illusion that they were trying to do something a little bit more interesting. Forget Michael and Jason and Freddy. I loved the ingeniously devised torture machines, and I loved that they never shied away from the bloodshed: no quick cutaways, you saw the knife going in and the bones snapping out. (Even after multiple viewings over the years, I still wince at the ankle-smashing in Saw IV.) I loved the audacious back-and-forth timeline and constantly flipping narrative structure that actually felt like it was the plan all along rather than a nonsensical retconning to squeeze another movie out, and allowed Tobin Bell's John Kramer/Jigsaw to still feature in most of the sequels, even when they killed him at the end of Saw III and autopsied him at the start of Saw IV. Even making the seventh one in 3D didn't hurt it.

I loved the frantic editing, particularly in every movie's final sequence that showed you everything with the added twists, with Bell's menacing voiceover explaining everything and Charlie Clouser's iconic industrial theme music - as much of a series signature as John Carpenter's 5/4 Halloween theme or Harry Manfredini's shrieky violins for the Friday The 13th series. More importantly, I loved that none of it was sexual. I didn't count while I was rewatching all the previous instalments, but I'm pretty sure that most of Jigsaw's victims (or pupils) were male, and when the women were targeted, it wasn't because they were women. 

Saw X fits in somewhere between Saw and Saw II, when Kramer signs up for a revolutionary new treatment (the one he was explaining at the start of Saw VI) for his cancer, and discovers too late that they've actually done nothing: he's been conned. With surprising speed, he brings in Amanda (Shawnee Smith) and they've soon converted the now-abandoned Mexico lair into a torture factory where retribution, like a poised hawk, comes swooping down upon the wrongdoers and the four grifters inevitably have to hurt, slash and mutilate themselves in order to stay alive. But there are, equally inevitably, plot twists fast approaching...

This is a jigsaw with fewer pieces than usual. Though he still abides by his philosophies of rebirth and redemption through (extreme) suffering, Kramer is more of a vigilante out for justice this time out. It doesn't have the dizzying flips in the timeline (previous movies sometimes leapt to flashback within the same shot) and it doesn't have any big reveals about the characters (except for one which I figured quite early). The first act, showing Kramer's apparent treatment, is almost idyllic but feels way too long, though it's probably necessary, and there's almost a sense that the first trap is only really there because otherwise no blood gets splattered for what feels like the first half of the film. Having said that: when it does finally go for the jugular and teaches these heartless scumbags the lessons they so urgently need and deserve, it genuinely doesn't stint on the crowd-pleasing grue and the screaming and it more than earns its 18 certificate: it almost doesn't know (or care) when and where to stop. (Can you imagine what these films would have looked like back in the James Ferman days?)

Maybe it's my fault for not really wanting them to try and do something more: going for depth and character, going for emotion and seriousness, is fine but I missed the wild, giddy when-are-we timejumps and the oh-it's-that-guy callbacks and the hilariously convoluted structure, I missed so many of the familiar characters. I love that they've retained many of the essential ingredients including the music and editing, and aimed for a consistency of tone, style and technique.

But it still feels like an unnecessary postscript to a series which had already reached its natural endpoint: the first seven movies, whether by accident or design, work as one single entity that never went for comedy (there are no jokes in any of them) and never wimped out. I adore those first seven films but they really should have gone out on a high and stopped there. All horror franchises seem to go on for at least two films more than necessary and sadly Saw has fallen into that same trap. Jigsaw had moments, as did Spiral: From The Book Of Saw (even though it was more a cop procedural with weird standup comedy asides than a Saw film) but they really didn't need to be there. And, sadly, neither does this one. Don't misunderstand: there are absolute bucketloads of disgustingly yukky fun to be had, there's certainly the sense that these people certainly deserve what they get, and there's a satisfying mid-credits coda, but in the end Saw X only feels like half of a Saw film and only scores a V out of X from me.

***

EXPEND4BLES

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Another entry in the annoying trend of alphanumeric movie titles: what's wrong with The Expendables 4? Or Part IV if you want to look a bit more intellectual? Expend4bles is a ridiculous title: you can't say it, most people are just going to ask for Expendables (as with whatever Fast And Furious, Mission Impossible or Scream is out that week) anyway, and it looks stupid written in lower case since the 4 only looks (vaguely) like a capital A. Sadly the dumb password-style title is far from the worst thing about this plodding, uninteresting shoot-em-up that's got not one but two ridiculously obvious plot twists that a blind man on a galloping horse could spot within three frames without even trying.

We start in Libya, where Stallone, Statham, Lundgren and a couple of other Surnames have been assigned to retrieve some nuclear detonators that must not fall into the hands of a mysterious supervillain codenamed Ocelot. (Presumably Tiger, Puma and Snow Leopard were already taken and no-one wanted to be codenamed Colocolo or Margay.) Things go bad, everyone fires machine guns and missiles at each other and Stallone's plane explodes and crashes. Time for what's left of the Expendables to saddle up, retrieve the detonators, unmask Ocelot and get revenge for kabooming their friend and leader out of the sky...

And with Statham kicked out of the squad for disobeying orders, they need some new blood in there. Step forward Megan Fox, still probably best known as the nice-girl-next-door/hot chick bending over a motorcycle in slow motion in the first two Transformers movies. It's perhaps a sign of the times that Stallone is 77 and is allowed, indeed expected, to look it, while Megan Fox is a full forty years younger and is forbidden from looking it because what kind of audience would ever want to watch a 37-year-old woman in an action movie? Eww. One hesitates to sound ungallant, but she used to be perfectly pretty and what the hell happened? Was there a fire? In her defence, however, it's impossible to believe anything that she says or does as it's so clunkily written and no-one on Earth could get away with the hardass bantz they're all lumbered with this time out. Previous instalments have at least been kind of funny with this, and Statham's and Dwayne Johnson's alpha male bickering in Fast And Furious: Hobbs And Shaw was hilarious, but it absolutely falls stone dead here.

More serious, however, is the appalling CGI slathered over too much of the film, rendering a lot of the action as little more than a cartoon. How many more times: I'll be far happier with one exploding helicopter done for real than a hundred exploding helicopters rendered on an Xbox. It's a pity because when it gets down to people kicking and punching each other in the head, old-school, The Expendables 4 is perfectly acceptable popcorn knockabout and The Stath is always good value when knocking bad guys into next week. But then everything's suddenly CGId into cartoon nonsense again and it loses what little substance it had; you might as well be watching Shrek. Armies of anonymous goons get mown down with machine guns, tanks and jeeps and planes get blown up: none of it is even slightly interesting because clearly none of it is real and none of it exists, and none of it means anything. Expend4bles has four producers, three co-producers, six co-executive producers and twenty-one executive producers, and one has to wonder what the hell they did all day. Because outside of a couple of nicely crunchy fight scenes, this is 4bsolutely 4wful.

*

A HAUNTING IN VENICE

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS AND A SENSE OF RELIEF

The first thing to say about this third outing for Kenneth Branagh's incarnation of Hercule Poirot is that it's easily the best of them so far. Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile were both saddled with, and suffered from, the inevitable comparisons with the earlier Brabourne-Goodwin film versions, which have since become much-loved classics along with Evil Under The Sun and, to a lesser extent, The Mirror Crack'd, thanks to the sense of fun, glamour, crafty plotting and casts heaving with Hollywood legends from Bette Davis to Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor to James Mason. (Let's draw a discreet veil over Michael Winner's later Appointment With Death.) I was massively relieved when, having done two of the Brabourne-Goodwins, Branagh elected not to tackle Evil Under The Sun as I have a lot of love for that film: the first VHS tape we rented and a long-standing family favourite (and the Cole Porter-adapted soundtrack is glorious).

A Haunting In Venice, nominally based on Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party, is more able to stand on its own terms, partly because the only other adaptation is the ITV version with David Suchet, and partly because it has very little to do with the book anyway. In a sense they've Moonrakered it: kept some of the character names, thrown the rest of the source novel away and fashioned an entirely new story (Hallowe'en Party is another English village mystery). Poirot is now a retired recluse living in Venice, weary of death and murder and refusing to take any more cases. Until his old friend, mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), turns up and convinces him to attend a Hallowe'en seance at an enormous palazzo rumoured to be haunted... Murder, obviously, ensues.

With its ominous, dimly-lit, creepy old house, its array of shifty and secretive characters, its jump moments, and occasional hints towards the supernatural, plus a vivid thunderstorm, much of A Haunting In Venice plays less as elegant whodunnit and more as full-blooded gothic horror (a genre in which Branagh has form, with his Frankenstein, and the much underappreciated Dead Again), possibly even bordering on giallo. Ultimately, though, it is a whodunnit and it requires the traditional unmasking which, as usual, fooled me completely: I had no idea who the killer was though to be honest I was having too much macabre fun to sift through the clues and work it out for myself.

Perversely perhaps, the relative absence of an Oscar-laden megastar cast of familiar faces worked to its advantage. But it wouldn't be a Poirot without an unmasking and the villain here is Hildur Gundadottir, who has given the film an inexplicably miserable sawing-a-cello-in-half score that absolutely fails to enhance the film (and is a frankly dreary listen on its own). Branagh's regular composer Patrick Doyle would have given it some full-blooded energy, but he had to pass as he was working on a Coronation March at the time. But given that they were in Venice anyway, why didn't they just go round to Pino Donaggio's place? At least that would have made up for his Ordeal By Innocence score being rejected back in 1984 in favour of Dave Brubeck honkings! Gudnadottir's joyless dirges do nothing to assist in the drama, the mystery or the horror and form the one major flaw in an otherwise mostly successful movie. While it's never going to supplant the colourful romp of Evil Under The Sun as a favourite Christie adaptation, it's the best of Branagh's - even the moustache isn't a distraction this time out - and a fourth or even fifth trip to the Poirot well would be most welcome.

****

THE EXORCIST

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY SEEN IT BY NOW

Is this, as Dr Mark Kermode would have you believe, The Greatest Film Ever Made? Certainly it's a film that's earned its legendary, even iconic status, certainly it's a film that has the power to shock, upset and disturb in a way that few others have achieved, certainly it's a film that pushed the limits then and still pushes them now. Books and documentaries have been written and made about it (not least by Dr K himself), we've had sequels of varying quality, a stage adaptation, a TV series and an upcoming addition to the series later this year. Its impact and reputation are undenied. But is it The Greatest Film Ever Made? No, I really don't think it is.

I first saw The Exorcist sometime in the mid 1980s on its pre-cert VHS release (though after the film had been officially withdrawn, and thus unofficially banned, under the Video Recordings Act) and I do recall that I was shocked, upset and disturbed as intended. Oddly, I was far more disturbed by the book, which I couldn't finish and eventually had to throw away, possibly putting on rubber gloves to pick it up and carry it out, at arm's length, to the wheelie bin. Years later I finally worked up the courage to see it again, this time at the Cannon Cinema in Portsmouth on  November 10, 1990, on a late double-bill with Exorcist II: The Heretic. The experience was marred by a very battered and scratched print, and by a large number of hooting idiots just out of the pubs, but the scares and primal unsettling power still shone through. (At least until they were substantially dissipated by the Still A Bit Rubbish But Really Not As Bad As You've Heard Exorcist II.) And since then I've managed to avoid it... until FrightFest commemorated the fiftieth (!) anniversary by showing The Version You've Never Seen on the IMAX screen, prior to a theatrical re-issue and a 4K home release.

It's still good, sure. But it didn't leave me as shaken this time: that which upset and unsettled me back in the 80s and 90s just didn't upset and unsettle me to that extent in 2023. I didn't need a light left on all night, and I didn't have any trouble sleeping. Maybe that's because in the myriad possession and exorcism movies since then we've become much more used to the levitating and the shaking beds, the grisly make-up effects and growled obscenities, that what was once the ultimate in unimaginable and unspeakable horror simply doesn't feel that raw and shocking any more. Just as a rewatch of the original Star Wars, after forty years of sequels, spinoffs and countless other space adventures, doesn't have the gosh-wow sense of wonder it did back then, so it's perhaps hard to see The Exorcist with fresh eyes in the wake of however many demons, succubi and vomiting innocents we've waded through, from the video shop shelves to the lower tiers of Amazon Prime.

That's not to suggest the visceral horror of Dick Smith's alarming effects doesn't still punch you in the gut, or the sight and sound of a pre-teen girl contorting and blaspheming isn't still deeply uncomfortable. As a horror movie it is still of the top confrontational rank, though it probably plays better and more frighteningly in The Version You've Seen Loads Of Times, substantially shorter and missing several scenes more concerned with character-based drama. In this extended cut, the horror feels less relentless, with those additional scenes spacing out the shock moments and giving the audience time to calm down before the next onslaught. Maybe I need to rewatch the shorter version to compare for sure, but frankly I'm too scared to try it as I live on my own. It's still good, but it's not as scary as it was and it's absolutely not, not, not the Greatest Film Ever Made.

***

THAT'S A WRAP

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

There's little to say, and even less that's positive, about this cheap, ugly slasher movie about cheap, ugly slasher movies. Who is hacking their way through the cast of a Z-grade horror movie at the miserable wrap party, dressed up as their own film's masked and bewigged killer? You won't care even before the entirely gratuitous nude shower scene that's only there out of sheer desperation, nostalgia for the days when you could do that kind of thing unironically, and the brainwave that it's somehow still a great idea to "hommage" Psycho yet again (and believe me, the quotation marks around the word "hommage" are doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting). You won't care even when they wheel on an equally gratuitous gay sex scene that really is only there because someone thought they're really pushing the boundaries and being incredibly progressive. (Hint: they're not.) And you certainly won't care at the big reveal and villainous monologue which, even by rubbish slasher movie standards, wouldn't be remotely plausible even if it made any sense at all. Minor trivialities like halfway decent acting and a halfway decent script aren't so much absent without leave as heading for the border in a stolen car as fast as they can, and it's impossible to tell whether it's a genuinely rubbish slasher or a failed spoof of same. Not even acceptable as a six-pack Friday night quickie.

*

THE BLACK MASS

CONTAINS NO REAL SPOILERS

Maybe I'm just weird, but I genuinely don't understand the fascination with true crime. There seems to be something ghoulish about forensically poring over the tiniest details of brutal, pointless murders carried out by brutal, pointless men, as if there's still something to be gleaned from exhuming these horrors yet again. If you were law enforcement, if you were personally connected to the case, if you were a specialist in that kind of psychopathic or sociopathic behaviour, then possibly there's some legitimate justification for diving deep into the ghastly stories of these ghastly people. But for a film?

The Black Mass is yet another Ted Bundy movie, focussing on one single period in 1978 in Florida as he stakes out a sorority house, eventually succeeding in getting in and savagely attacking the young women living there. Though the names (except for his) have been changed, it's still hewing uncomfortably close to known fact - at least according to his extensive Wikipedia page - with date and time captions coming up at every scene change in an authoritative typewriter font. 

On a technical level it's perfectly well done: a misty late 70s ambience, with all the right hairstyles and costumes and no massive anachronisms, and a few familiar genre names in the cast (Lisa Wilcox from a couple of Elm Street sequels, Kathleen Kinmont from Bride Of ReAnimator, Eileen Dietz from The Exorcist). Bundy himself is almost never offscreen, with the camera giving us a scumbag's-eye-view, hovering over his shoulder pretty much the entire time (very rarely is he actually seen in full focus) as he plans and schemes and tries to pick up women in what must, even then, have been an appallingly red-flag creepy manner.

But the problem isn't that The Black Mass is yet another Ted Bundy movie, it's that it's just another Ted Bundy movie. It's not that it's raking over the real deaths and real suffering of real people, it's that that's all the film is doing. No new information is available, no new insight is forthcoming. This is just restaging the cold-blooded assaults on young women: pass the popcorn. The Black Mass could have bypassed all that by simply making everything up and inventing their own fictional serial killer: it's not as if audiences won't enjoy a Hannibal Lecter or a Michael Myers, and personally I'm rarely happier than during a Saw marathon because They're Not Real. But, as with Mansonsploitation movies like Wolves At The Door, if you're telling a true story you have a responsibility to the victims and on that level, this film doesn't make it. And I hated it for that.

*

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

The summer season of New Instalments You Didn't Need continues: after Transformers 7 and DC Comics 13/Keaton Batman 3/Affleck Batman 6 (?) comes Raiders 5, an entirely unnecessary mess of a dead horse that yet again feels the inexplicable urge to wink to the fans with recurring characters that don't need to be there, and to try and crank up the action by making the chases and fights longer and noisier and more chaotic than ever before. Gone are the simple, linear, easy to follow but no less exciting setpieces like the truck chase from Raiders, the tank sequence from Crusade or even the dancefloor frenzy from Temple Of Doom: the template now is the jungle jeep chase from Crystal Skull, but more of it. Now, anything goes and the hell with wit, plausibility or basic physics. Like all the other blockbusters of the last few years, everything is CGId into pixelgasms of nonexistent nonsense, and this time it's thrown into your eyes at a hundred miles an hour because Dan (The Bourne Confusion) Bradley's doing the second unit.

Most series go on for two instalments more than strictly necessary, whether it's Star Trek, Die Hard or Saw and Indiana Jones has long passed its natural end point. Having capped everything nicely with the end of Last Crusade, they didn't need to do a fourth, especially as everyone was now twenty years older and frankly looked it. In fairness I quite liked Crystal Skull, but felt that they had pushed it as far as it could go and they just about got away with it: there was just about enough good stuff to mitigate the bad. Now they've taken it too far and it doesn't work.

The first section of Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny is the best, with Jones, as ever, trying to get artefacts away from the Nazis in 1944. The CGI de-aging is convincing enough that we could be watching a 35-year-old Harrison Ford, but the effect is dissipated by his 80-year-old voice. Intriguingly, this sequence sets up one mythical relic (the Lance Of Longinus, which pierced Christ on the cross) as the potential McGuffin before discarding it in favour of one half of the altogether less impressive-sounding Archimedes' Dial which, after a long and chaotic action sequence on a train, Jones and his colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) manage to snatch from the evil Voller (Mads Mikkelsen). In 1969, Voller is still searching for the dial, following Shaw's daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) as she tracks the Dial down so she can sell it to pay off gambling debts, and only the 80-year-old Jones knows where it is. Cue another loud and chaotic action chase sequence...

No sooner does Jones arrive in Tangiers in pursuit of Helena than we get yet another long and ever more chaotic chase sequence between two cars and two tuk-tuks, before we then all have to go off to Greece to meet Antonio Banderas and raid a shipwreck, and then we all have to shoot off to Sicily to find the other half of the dial and take off for Munich for Mikkelsen's big plan, except the plan goes wrong and the (finally) final act of the movie cannonballs through the credibility barrier even harder than any of the aforementioned nonsense, even harder than the last act of Crystal Skull. If the previous film felt as if they'd stopped making Bond films after Goldfinger, waited 20 years and then returned with Moonraker, then this feels like them waiting another fifteen years before giving us Die Another Day, all with an increasingly aged Sean Connery.

And it's no fun. For all the dizzying mayhem there's very little humour, either verbal or visual, surprisingly not even from Grumpy Old Fart Indy with his shirt off shouting at the hippies next door to turn the music down. (James Mangold isn't Spielberg and can't - or doesn't want to - put in those comedic touches like shooting the swordsman in Raiders or the gruff interplay between Jones and Jones in Last Crusade.) Helena is surprisingly unsympathetic (for much of the time) and I never really warmed to her either as a character in her own right or as a foil for Indiana; not even as much as the legendary Willie Scott from Temple. Toby Jones is engaging while he's on, of course, but that's not enough, and the mighty John Williams returns with a very John Williams Indiana Jones score, though curiously (given that this has to be the last one now) he elects not to conclude the final credits with a big rousing rendition of the Raiders March, in favour of a more muted presentation of lesser, and less memorable, cues.

So why, given the excessive budget (scratching on the door of $300 million, if you believe Wikipedia), the lack of any proper wit or humour, the preponderance of heavily CG-augmented nonsensical action and a third act that I just didn't buy, do I feel a tad less hostile to this than to the intolerable The Flash and the inexcusable Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts that came out in the last few weeks? Partly it might be that Harrison Ford can still make these things watchable even at eighty, and partly it might just be that for the first chunk at least I was kind of enjoying it and the de-aging worked well enough. But it may also be down to a nostalgic liking for the earlier Indiana Jones films which I certainly don't have for those other franchises. And that's the problem. Raiders was already infused with a nostalgic love for the old pulp adventure movies and Saturday matinee serials of decades past and the next two ran with that. But who in 2023 is still nostalgic for Charlton Heston in Secret Of The Incas or (picking at random) the 13-part Lost City Of The Jungle from 1946? Today's audience is too young to be nostalgic even for Indiana Jones movies: they've got other things to reminisce fondly about. 

Look, Dial Of Destiny isn't terrible. It's got some good players in it, the period settings are well evoked, the music is fine, the first section is properly Indiana Jones entertaining, and Indy is still more of an engaging hero than the current crop of cardboard cutouts from the Marvel, DC and Transformers films even if he is clearly way too old for all the international gallivanting. But it's still overlong and messy, the final act doesn't work, and the film sags badly in the middle with the underwater sequence. And beneath it all there seems little more than a desire to milk the intellectual property one more time rather than create another. As Jones Senior urged Junior at the end of Last Crusade: "Let it go".

**

TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Well, congratulations to The Flash. It took less than 24 hours for this month's superhero offering to be unseated as Worst Film So Far of 2023. Awful though The Flash is, the new Transformers instalment is probably worse: I'm just hoping the new record holder lasts a couple of weeks at least. Of course, the Transformers movies have never been the first choice for genuine quality cinema: they're excessively loud, they're excessively stupid, they're excessively long, they're excessively excessive. They're not movies about people, characters or ideas, they're movies about massive robots smashing the living sump oil out of each other and things exploding and city blocks being annihilated and massive great kaboom eruptions of fire and destruction.

To suggest that this seventh trip to the Autobot Cinematic Universe (a prequel - none of the La Boeufs and Wahlbergs have happened yet) isn't the worst of the saga so far is merely to suggest that a punch in the mouth isn't as bad as a kick in the balls: probably objectively true but hardly a recommendation. Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts may be substantially shorter than previous instalments (except for Bumblebee) but all that means is that it's over quicker. It doesn't wipe out the entirety of New York but it does still trash a goodly chunk of it with a massive robot battle and car chase. Its humans may not be Shia La Boeuf and Megan Fox but they're not of any greater depth, and you don't even get high-calibre reliables like Anthony Hopkins or John Malkovich in support. It all concerns another ancient alien artefact of incredible power (yawn) that's wanted by a planet-eating god called Unicron so he (it?) can open a dimensional portal to come through and eat the Earth. All that stands in the way of Unicron and his (its?) legions of evil Terrorcon robots is a couple of New Yorkers and a handful of Autobots and Maximals (robot animals).

Why is all this so dull? Because the last chunk of the movie is one mammoth battle sequence entirely dependent on so much CGI that the eye and the mind simply cannot process it. You're not excited, you're just battered into submission. There's nothing about it that's real, there's nothing about it that even vaguely resembles real; it might as well be a cartoon. You know, like the ink-and-paint TV show for children more than thirty years ago? But the film opts for kaboom kaboom kaboom because that's all it has in its arsenal: bigger, louder, longer. All it can do is try and top the previous movies in terms of jawdropping spectacle because the alternative would be to work on actual character, narrative and emotion and that's not in their skillset: there's none of that here beyond the bare minimum of soap opera backstories (he's desperate for cash, she's unappreciated at work). So you end up watching two hundred million dollars' worth of artificial fireworks because that's all there is on offer. And it's not enough.

*

THE FLASH

CONTAINS SOME LARGE SPOILERS

This is where we've come to, is it? This is the end result of however many years of bellends in spandex repeatedly punching space monsters, mythical demons and occasionally each other into ever more spectacular orgasms of CGI destruction? Coherent storytelling and involving characterisation have been sacrificed on the multiple altars of incoherent computer effects, gibberish writing and bowing and scraping to the hardcore comicbook nerd audience who frankly should have grown out of this thudding drivel by now. (I speak as a semi-hardcore horror movie nerd, but even I have long since wearied of nudge-wink references to An American Werewolf In London and movies that name their supporting characters Romero or Carpenter.)

The big thing now is the Multiverse, allowing alternate versions of characters to turn up in each other's universes. Star Trek, Doctor Who and Red Dwarf have all given their casts opportunities to encounter wildly different versions of themselves: young/old, good/evil, male/female. Marvel have been doing it for a while: the last live-action Spiderman did this, dragging Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire's versions into Tom Holland's world, along with their respective villains for a multi-dimensional supermegasmackdown, and the last Doctor Strange whizzed through a whole series of possible other realities. Then there are the two (so far) Spider-verse animations, which I haven't bothered with. And Everything Everywhere All At Once sought to bring the possibilities of interdimensional travel into some kind of comprehensible comedic focus, with some measure of success.

Let's ignore the numerous offscreen controversies surrounding star Ezra Miller: suffice to say that a brief skim through Wikipedia reveals way more than you ever want or need to know. The problems start with Barry Allen/The Flash: most superheroes are more interesting in their human guises than in their secret identity but he's profoundly annoying in both hats and if that wasn't enough there are two of him because he's tried to go back in time to prevent his mother's murder. Instead he's ended up in a parallel timeline where General Zod (the one from the Zack Snyder Superman movies) is about to attack Earth and The Flashes have to team up with Batman (the one from the Tim Burton movies) and Supergirl and they all go off and fight in the desert to save the world or something.

Multiverse logic also means we don't really care: why should we? It's all happening in an alternate reality where some things are slightly different (Eric Stoltz was the star of Back To The Future) and some things are radically different (there's no Superman) but crucially it isn't happening in ours. So what if that world gets destroyed? Ours doesn't: Zod's already been defeated in this one. The timeline crossover is a device for disregarding continuity completely while at the same time giving you more continuity than you know what to do with. So: walk-on cameos from Helen Slater's Supergirl and Adam West's Batman (among others) through the dubious miracle of CGI as multiple realities and unrealities collide and explode around them, while The Two Barries conspire to be four times as tiresome as when there's only one of them.

DC and Warners apparently coughed up somewhere in the region of Two Hundred Million Dollars for The Flash, which makes you wonder just how terrible Batgirl was that they wrote it off at half that price and put all their weight behind this rubbish. I refuse to believe it's worse, if only because I don't see how it could be. The end result of all the computer-generated whizzbang isn't excitement or exhilaration, it's just bludgeoning exhaustion as the plot strives ever more frantically to get back to where it started in as loud a fashion as possible. The opening action sequence feels like a nightmare that piles mayhem upon chaos upon disaster, but at no point are we invited or expected to care about the "drama" that follows. It's crushingly dull and part of me, not altogether mean-spiritedly, hopes that Warners and DC lose an absolute ton of money on this and maybe, just maybe, start making halfway decent films instead.  What happened to cinema that this tedious stodge is regarded as borderline acceptable even as a summer blockbuster entertainment?

*

CATS

SPOILERS, KIND OF...

Confession: I don't generally like musicals. There's something I've never really understood about people suddenly bursting into song, backed by a full orchestra, while simultaneously launching into intricate dance routines. Certainly there are a few exceptions, maybe four or five of them, where I've been able to either buy into the form or overlook it, but as a rule it's not a genre I seek out. But man cannot live by eighties slashers and whizzbang superheroes alone and it does one good to occasionally try something else, something different. Well, it's different all right. Say what you like: you've never seen anything like this before. And you'll most likely never see anything like it again. Fortunately.

There isn't a plot so much: a bunch of cats in London's glittering West End compete, through the medium of song and dance, to be granted a new life, and we get a series of showstopping (if only!) musical numbers in which the star cast (Rebel Wilson, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen) cavort about in digitally applied cat costumes in a motion capture hellscape. Which one will it be? The railway cat, the thieving cats, the old theatrical cat, the villainous cat, the magician cat, the Thames barge cat? Oh, the suspense... Except that there is no suspense because the lucky winner is blindingly obvious from first appearance so why are we wasting our time with all these others?

It's not just that Cats is unremittingly terrible: it's that there's no conceivable way that Cats could have ever been anything else but unremittingly terrible, and they knew that but went ahead and did it anyway. Every number goes on for at least one verse and chorus too long, and most of them aren't that great to start with, including the one major hit Memory. The whole thing is shot in mocap and slathered in CGI to the extent that it looks less like a live-action film augmented by computer effects, and more like a full-on Pixar nightmare that's got actual humans weirdly cut-and-pasted into it: even real things don't look real and it wouldn't have looked that much out of place if Buzz Lightyear had turned up.

But deep down, did I find a few tiny morsels of perverse pleasure lurking somewhere in this cataclysmic, catastrophic catalogue of wrong? No, no I didn't. It's an eye-opener, no matter how hard you struggle: you wonder what the hell possessed people you like and respect, proper A-list stars and James Corden to get involved (and then stay involved) in this high-budget monstrosity. Maybe it works on the stage in leotards and frightwigs: I haven't seen it and wouldn't care to guess but there are clips online to give you a clue, and they might well have got away with it if they'd done that here. But they didn't and the result is a rampagingly bad idea that so many people had the power to stop but failed to do so. This is on their conscience and I hope they can sleep at nights. And Andrew Lloyd Webber should have his lordhood taken away from him.

*

DER TODESKING

ACHTUNG SPOILERS

Now here's a name we don't seem to hear very much of these days: Jorg Buttgereit. Back in ye olde days of The Scala and videotape, JB was pushing the envelope of German shock cinema in uncomfortable and unpleasant ways: bleak, humourless, miserable films devoid of gloss or slickness. Nekromantik (which I won on VHS in a raffle at the Scala) is unflinching, remorselessly glum and as thoroughly life-draining a way of spending a wet Thursday evening as you'll find. Nekromantik 2: more of the same, yet somehow less. Schramm followed in 1993 and was no lighter. At the time, none of these went anywhere near the BBFC for painfully obvious reasons and were relegated to imported VHS tapes, club cinemas and underground film festivals.

Somewhere in the midst of this was Der Todesking (The King Of Death or The Death King): a 75-minute meditation on death in the form of an anthology of seven largely unconnected vignettes in which people either kill themselves or get killed, interspersed with time-lapse footage of a rotting corpse. A man with a fish fixation makes meticulous preparations for the end of his life, then commits suicide in the bath. Another man tells a stranger on a park bench about his marital problems and then shoots himself. (Hey, these are the jokes, folks.) The most eye-catching scene has another man rent a Nazisploitation video of the Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS variety (in which the director himself cameos as the victim of death camp atrocities culminating in the loss of his bratwurst with garden shears) and then shoots his girlfriend in the head. The most baffling is a long wander around a traffic bridge while names, ages and occupations flash up: it turns out these are the names of people who threw themselves to their deaths there. The sole point of interesting nerdery seems to be that the video shop in Story #2 has several UK releases, complete with BBFC 18 symbols, on the shelves (including Day Of The Dead which was heavily cut in Germany at the time.)

It's a whole bunch of no laughs: a stone-cold wallow in death that seems deliberately designed to be as offputting as possible, as though they're daring you to walk out or switch off. Mission not accomplished: I did make it to the end. But I kind of wish I hadn't. I'm really not sure what the point is: it's not like any of the segments (one would struggle to call them stories, and it's stretching to think of them even as anecdotes) have a gleefully dark twist in the tale, and there's no entertainment value whatsoever to be had from it. If, and it's a massive if, there's anything else of worth or interest in there, I didn't find it.

*

SCREAM VI

THE ONE WITH THE SPOILER WARNING

Here we go again... Following the slasher about slashers, the sequel about sequels, the third act of a trilogy about third acts of trilogies, the fourth one about fourth ones and the requel about requels, here's the continuation about continuations. And the thing about continuations is that they just continue: it's more of the same only moreso. Let's do it again. And again, and again. Repeat to fade. Scream VI really has nothing new in its knife drawer except more killing, more slashing, more preposterous motivations and more tiresome nerdery about horror movie franchises and Rules Of The Genre which frankly are wearing very thin.

Because there's nowhere else for it to go narratively, it can only move geographically and this time it's got the whole of New York to play with as a whole new bunch of hip young things, including the four core survivors of the last one, fall prey to one or more Ghostfaces. Other characters from previous entries also appear (including Courteney Cox, though crucially not Neve Campbell), references to the earlier films' killers abound, and the local cops and FBI each have their own secrets and any of them might be the new killer(s) as suspicion and red herrings flow as freely as blood. Is it him? Is he really dead? Is she who she says she is? Are we still supposed to care?

Scream VI is an episode of Friends: The One Where They All Get Stabbed. It may be bloody and callous and nasty but it's also flip and sarcastic and you know deep down that nothing terminal is going to happen to Rachel, Chandler and Ross (which is why killing off Dewey in the last movie did have an impact). This does toy briefly with the idea that maybe one of the surviving characters from Scream 5 was so traumatised that they've now picked up the blade themselves, but you know they're not taking that path. The motivations thus far might have been demented but they were generally rooted in (their) reality: jealousy, revenge, lust for fame, rather than mere indiscriminate slaughter of whoever's around. There's the traditional whodunnit aspect and the villain's big "it was me all along and here's why" speech at the end, but the trouble is that the reveal is less wow! and more oh... because any interest in who's actually doing it has long dissipated. And that's because it's clear that this is just another episode, just another spate of killings in the same mask around the same people and there'll be another one next year.

Despite the body count and the frequent bloody violence, this is easily the weakest Scream film so far and a strong indicator that they really should just stop it now before they start to embarrass themselves. After 27 years they've had a good run and the average quality has been higher than most horror series that made it to six entries (even the most devoted Michael Myers fan must surely admit there are way more bad Halloween movies than good ones), but the well is now bone dry. Oddly, the Jason equivalent Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, of which we see a brief clip, is a neat comparison: it was the worst, lamest and stupidest of a series that had run out of ideas and had nothing else to do but repeat its limited routine, just in New York (and substantially shot in Canada). It's not without its pleasures, and there are a few surprises, but that's not enough for a film that feels like they're only doing it because it's bankable and not because it's a good story worth telling.

**

DETECTIVE KNIGHT: ROGUE

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SADNESS

It's always sad when big stars and big names bow out on projects that aren't worthy of them: you always hate for a terrible movie to be the last one with your favourite actors or by your favourite directors and you always hope that they've one last decent movie left in them. In the case of this curtain call for Bruce Willis it's doubly affecting: not only is this DTV cops-and-robbers nonsense a poor career-closer for him, but it's patently and tragically clear that they're struggling to work around the aphasia that led Willis to announce his retirement last year. Much of the film is devoted to other characters, his cop partner does much of the legwork, and the dialogue scenes that Knight has are blatantly edited around him, leaving him as a half-presence, a near blank, a guest star role in his own film. Strictly speaking this isn't Willis' actual swansong: it's the first of a Knight trilogy and while the other instalments (Redemption and Independence) are on my rental queue, in all honesty I'm not sure I want to see them.

For a good chunk of the running time Detective Knight: Rogue is actually another take on Michael Mann's Heat. Edward Drake is not Michael Mann and this has none of the character, intrigue, excitement or suspense of Heat - it doesn't even have gorgeous cinematography or a terrific soundtrack. It has a ruthless gang of masked bank robbers whose latest heist ends in gunfire and leaves Knight's partner on life support. The robbery was at the behest of crime lord Winna (Michael Eklund) who has history with Knight; Knight and his new partner head for New York before Winna's next Big Job...

Like Heat, time is spent with the bad guys' crew but their personal issues and problems aren't anywhere near as interesting. Their leader Rhodes (Beau Mirchoff) is a former sports star and painkiller addict who's in it for the adrenaline rush more than anything but doesn't like the increased Heat that comes from shooting down police officers - yeah, whatever, you're a bank robber and my sympathy for you is minimal. And because you don't care and you're not interested the action sequences have no impact - even if they weren't blandly staged machine gun shootouts. The Winna/Knight backstory is gabbled off in exposition and flashback and none of it sticks. And if they think they're honouring the legacy and legend of Die Hard they're way off - the Next Big Job is the theft of a rare baseball card and wasn't that the McGuffin of Cop Out?!?

I always like Bruce Willis: even though he was in action hero mode for so many movies he always looked, sounded and behaved like a vaguely regular person rather than an Arnie or a Sly, who don't seem to actually belong to the real world, and he didn't have the martial arts skills of a Jean-Claude (or even Steven Seagal). I always liked him even in movies that didn't work or didn't succeed: I'm one of the nine people on Earth who thought Hudson Hawk was unfairly maligned. But those days are long gone and so, sadly, is Willis, and this just isn't worthy of what he was.

*

JEEPERS CREEPERS: REBORN

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Let's be honest: we didn't really need another trip to the Creeper well. Three was stretching it further than necessary: the ideas, such as they were, had run out in the first two films. They were efficient enough monster movies with a few novel twists and a healthy lashing of splatter, but there was nothing in them that warranted an extended franchise series. Indeed, given creator Victor Salva's history there was a strong argument for binning it altogether and walking away and pretending it never happened. But they couldn't leave it alone and now here's the fourth, least, weirdest and hopefully last of them. Salva isn't credited anywhere on the UK Blu and while new director Timo (Iron Sky) Vuorensola had stated that Salva "would not be involved or benefiting from the production", elsewhere on the film's IMDb trivia page it suggests he "received a monetary percentage for renting his license".

Jeepers Creepers: Reborn features a dumbass horror nerd and his long-suffering girlfriend on a road trip to a frankly tedious outdoor horror festival with people dressed up as Pennywise and Beetlejuice. They end up winning the big raffle and a trip to the legendary Creeper's house, unaware that the draw was rigged so the Creeper can get at her unborn child. Mysteriously the Creeper can't wait for them to get there and starts picking the festival's camera crew off while they're still unaccountably wandering through the spooky graveyard in the middle of the night...

It's even weirder than that: much of the second half of the film has a strange unreal feeling to it. That's because they've opted to shoot vast chunks of it in green screen and then pasted a CG house in around them, rather than find a location that actually exists, or build one. The result is a videogame atmosphere where half of the scenery looks like it isn't really there - because it isn't. Which wouldn't be such a bad thing if it looked better, but the unreality just leaps out at you. It's also confused about what it is: it's not a proper sequel because dialogue refers to the in-Universe existence of the three Jeepers Creepers movies Salva made about the Creeper, but the production design department has stuffed the Creeper's house with props and references to those films.

You don't even get a rendition of the Jeepers Creepers song (presumably they couldn't get the rights). You do get an opening bit with Dee Wallace, you get some grue and splatter, you get an impressive looking monster, but you get absolutely no reason to rustle up any interest beyond wondering why they went for the CG look and, maybe, whether they're going to milk this thing any further. I would hope not: there's nothing there to milk any more. A British-American-Finnish co-production and bizarrely shot in all of them.

**

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS

So it's been thirteen years since Avatar and let's be honest: a return to Pandora has not been in my thoughts. Indeed, until this new one was about to arrive in UK cinemas I had felt not the slightest urge to rewatch it. And occasionally I might see another of James Cameron's movies: I'd reach for Aliens or The Terminator from the DVD shelf or I'd stumble across True Lies or Titanic while button-punching through the Freeview channels, and idly wonder "what's Cameron been up to recently?" before getting immersed in the chosen movie or clicking away to something else. In fact, if you'd asked me to list Cameron's films I'd probably have forgotten about Avatar entirely; I'd have remembered Piranha 2: The Spawning quicker. So, thirteen years later: was it worth the wait?

The answer has to be no. It's not that I'm annoyed that I've waited this long for something this unremarkable, something that leaves you with such a feeling of "well, it's alright". (Frankly, I haven't waited; I've just got on with other stuff.) Avatar: The Way Of Water is just about okay but that's as far as it goes and for that long a gestation and that much money "well, it's alright" and "just about okay" simply isn't good enough. For a major event movie there's scarcely a ripple of interest. Why? Because as any schoolchild knows, the way of water is downstream and we weren't exactly starting from great dramatic heights. And while the technical look of Avatar 2 is astonishing, it's dramatically quite dull and it doesn't engage emotionally, so all that's left is a vast selection of pretty images and creature designs.

It's fifteen years later and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, who never appears as a human this time around) is now fully integrated into Na'vi society with wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and children Lo'ak, Tuk and Neteyam. Until Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the villain from the first film, returns in his Na'vi avatar to [1] gain his revenge, [2] harvest gloop from giant whale brains because it halts the human ageing process and [3] seek to turn Pandora into the next Earth colony (with no regard for the indigenous peoples). Jake and family flee for sanctuary with the Omaticaya tribe on the island of Metkayina, but Quaritch and the whalers are on their trail...

And I don't care. I can't care, it's practically impossible to care. And three hours and twelve is a long time to sit in a cinema not giving a toss what happens. There are clunkingly obvious Real World parallels in the tension between the blue forest people and the green water people, between the five-fingered human avatars and the four-fingered natives, between the abandoned human boy and the returned humans, between the avatar Quaritch (whose uploaded memories of real Quaritch don't include how he died from Neytiri's arrows) and Jake. The underwater scenes go on for ever, and the human colonisers are moustache-twirling caricatures of evil stopping just short of firing puppies out of cannons.

It's telling that Cameron's best films remain The Terminator (less than two hours and there's not an ounce of flab on it) and Aliens, which plays best in its shorter theatrical version; the longer they get, the less interesting they are. Avatar: The Way Of Water could probably stand to lose 20 minutes or so of pretty pictures and rack up the tensions instead; you kind of enjoy the action sequences because you've been waiting so damn long for them. Incidentally, there's not a single moment when I thought this would be any better in 3D: I saw the standard flat version and at no point did I wish I was in the other screen with the glasses on. Not even in the big final extended battle on a giant battleship which reminds you of Titanic (and briefly of The Poseidon Adventure), when the film finally, finally shifts out of first gear and starts moving. Up until that point it's just been an overly serious, ponderous plod. Yes, it's visually gosh-wow spectacular, but so what when so much of it is mocap and CGI? Superbly rendered on the finest, fastest hard drives known to man, maybe, but that's not what movies should be about.

We're at least not expected to wait another thirteen years for Avatar 3, which is apparently coming at the end of 2024 and every two years after that. I did spend much of Avatar 2 wondering what they're going to do in Avatar 3: maybe they'll hide out in the volcanoes with the red-skinned fire people or the deserts with the beige-skinned sand people, and the humans and bad avatars will turn up again and again blowing everything up with superbadass helicopter gunships and being ever more cartoonishly evil. And still I probably won't care. Avatar: The Way Of Water isn't awful, but it is very dull and way overlong, there's little humour, there's no subtlety, there's really nothing to get that excited about. It was on, and then it stopped, but not much happened in between.

**