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Welcome to our Movies and Visual Media area. We shall try to keep up with the latest big screen and little screen antics, especially any related to games and stuff that is just... cool! WARNING! May not be suitable for under 16's

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Panic Attack!


Here's a fairy tale that could only happen in the movies. Man makes YouTube video. Goes to Hollywood. Gets pots of money and a movie deal. Except this story is true.

A relatively unknown producer (and most likely Visual Effects Artist) from Uruguay, Fede Alvarez, shelled out about $300 to create a video of a robot invasion in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. The four-minute short, "Ataque de Panico!" (Panic Attack) features ginormous weapon-wielding robots that blow stuff up (a lá The Iron Giant crossed with War of the Worlds).

He could follow in the footsteps of Neill Blomkamp, who made the South African-based alien mockumentary 'Alive In Joburg', and later went on to develop it into the full length feature that is "District 9".

Well, Alvarez' short film has already been viewed on YouTube over 3 million times. and hasn't gone unnoticed by Hollywood. He told BBC, "I uploaded 'Ataque de Panico!' on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of emails from Hollywood studios." In the end he agreed to $30 million deal with Sam "Spiderman" Raimi's Ghost House Pictures.

The picture will be a sci-fi thriller set in Argentina and Uruguay, although it won't be a high budget remake of 'Panic Attack'. Alvarez says he will start from scratch.

Here's the amazing video that made him rich.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Collapse - its all going to go f*kin pear shaped lads




Well in fairness I, er, "acquired" this strange thing by mistake....had a creepy cover and lots of quotes by people I've never heard of saying things like "THE MOST TERRIFYING FILM OF THE YEAR!!" and "I QUITE LITERALLY SH*T MY PANTS WHILE WATCHING THIS MOVIE" Well...don't make the same mistake i did if you are looking for a scary horror flick( Unless you find old men with mustaches terrifying - and there's probably a term for that...for example, Coulrophobia - Fear of Clowns. And you thought you werent going to learn anything on the internet today!) So yeah, the movie is an hour of an old man with a moustache telling an interviewer that we're all pretty much doomed because of peak oil and natural resource depletion, and a load of other vaguely connected conspiracy theories with chucked in mysterious deaths and that to give it a proper x-files paranoid feel.


picture of an old man with weary expression cigarette and moustache here


But I'll check my cynicism...Once i got beyond the fact that I was staring at a chainsmoking old man with a moustache for an hour, some of what he says - tenous, melodramatic and slightly mental though it may seem - is f**king scary. It's just a shame that a lot of the apparent savvy he claims he possesses is not materially backed up re: ability to read market trends and such, as he lives alone with a dog and a guitar and is, according to the end credits, about to be evicted for non-payment of rent. But if only 10% of what he posits is true, then you'd better get yourself some arable farming skills and a shitload of organic seeds. Because Mad Max times are a-comin....and I've got my Humongous costume ready.




Thursday, December 10, 2009

Halloween 2 - Taking the f**king michael






Where's John Carpenter when the industry needs him more than ever? Here we get Rob Zombie instead, continuing on from his unnecessary and crap 2007 "reboot" of JC's original classic. It appears to carry on directly after the conclusion of part 1....except hang on, no, it's a dream sequence, remarkably from multiple characters perpectives at once in a way that actually resembles an actual movie opening but isnt! So after about 20 minutes of this fiction-within-a-f**king-fiction we carry on with the actual story. Laurie, the main protagonist from the first movie (boot-faced raging harridan who will have you praying for her imminent demise via blunt force trauma to the head within minutes) is moping about a year after the original killings. Michael himself seems to have survived and is living as the world's biggest homeless man in redneck country. Even Dr Loomis has managed to uncrush his skull after his death in the first movie and is touring the states selling his book about the events and having no effect whatsoever on the story apart from apparently upping the movie's c**t level (which is extraordinarily high already...so many horrible, irritating characters)




Zombie continues with his process of trying to give some depth to a character whose whole point of being was that he was a machine-like void in the first place. Watching Michael Myers getting a backstory is like trying to give the shark in Jaws some kind of psycho motive involving flashbacks to its youth showing it being punched repeatedly by fishermen or being bullied by squid. Instead of the silent, lethal golem from the first franchise the boy Zombie apparently thinks a growling 7-foot WWF wrestler channeling Jeffry Dahmer is scarier. . It's really not. Now f**k off and go back to doing sub-ministry metal for kids in hoodies.


Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Thirst - "let us prey"




Vampire priests...? As someone who grew up avoiding the clammy hands and bulging pants of a whole army of boy-hungry christian brother paedophiles in 80s Dublin the idea of a priest that only wanted to suck my neck would seem to be fairly tame stuff in comparison. Guilt-ridden korean catholic bloodsuckers? Bah, make a movie about my old principal, Brother Kelly, that'd really s**t people up! But like a priest I believe in buggery charity and charitably...this movie...it's a mixed bag....like what you'd get if a chimp did your weekly shop in tesco (probably lots of mouldering fruit, and sweets. So you'd end up with a tooth decay-maddened ape with leaking bowels. And that's why I sleep with a mirror and a baseball bat under my bed...the mirror to temporarily confuse the mardy primate, the bat to beat it into submission) So, Thirst. Pious priest goes off to africa to volunteer for some weird medical experiment where he gets transfected by vamp blood. So he comes home, and in-between endless bouts of mahjong, starts to turn into a hedonistic bloodsucking guilt-ridden ballbag. Who seems to spend as much time getting his end away as actually procuring blood for his infernal plasma-lust.



There is some very squishy and wince-inducing blood-letting here but by hell it's long. Weird. And frequently very dull indeed. Director Park Chan-wook is highly overrated in my opinion...liked Oldboy, bored by JSA, thought the "Sympathy" movies were just odd and if you haven't seen "I'm an android but that's ok" you have by default lived a better life than me. But if its this or some teeny emo vampire bollix then for f**ks sake watch this. It's an easy movie to admire for its style and sheer balls but very, very hard to like.



Tuesday, December 8, 2009

'Gears of War' movie to be like 'Cloverfield'


So apparently, film producer Wyck Godfrey has been revealing details on the upcoming "Gears of War" movie. In an interview with 'MakingOf', he says the following:

"The hard part is to make it into something that doesn't feel like a world torn asunder and people just in battle. I think we really want to focus on the idea of a world that's running well and then it's Emergence Day. Kind of make it impactful and immediate and like what those 48 hours are as people survive Emergence Day," said Godfrey. "It's more like Cloverfield or something like that because trying to tell the epic story of an alien planet that's living in a horrific environment just feels like the wrong mood right now."
Godfrey confirmed that he's working on it with Underworld and Die Hard 4.0 director Len Wiseman for Legendary Pictures (300, The Dark Knight) and New Line Cinema. And Billy Ray (Breach, Shattered Glass) is currently rewriting the GoW script originally penned by Chris Morgan (Wanted).

So there is the slightest, tiniest chance that it might not completely stink up the place like a rotten foetus... but only slightly. After all, it is another videogame-to-movie adaptation, and we all know how they go. 'Super Mario Bros. The Movie' anyone? *shudders*

Tentative release date is 2010. Can't wait for those clips of beautiful families enjoying idyllic lives only to be put out by a mass uprising of ugly creatures.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs




Watching the bad movies I watch is like being some kind of cinematic proctologist. You end up rummaging around in the arse end of cinema itself,  holding your breath and hoping to get out clean and educated but usually end up elbow deep in something horrible, feeling a bit sick and soberly delivering a pessimistic diagnosis. So let's run with that tenuous anal-ogy (!), glove up and part the hairless buttocks of the latest cinematic victim  patient to end up on Dr Gi-bag's table. But what's this? A clean, intelligent sphincter? Shiny, fat-free colon? And most importantly, a computer-generated prostate just throbbing with wit, good humour and wondrous animation? Er. Anyway...so "Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs". No it's not a kids movie! Well it is, but what a nice surprise it is, like climbing into bed expecting a man and finding a woman with a lovely bottom instead.



Flint the hero lives on a rather bleak grey island in the atlantic where everyone lives off sardines, the worst of all fish. Except crabs. So he, "helped" by Steve the gay monkey (who is the best thing in the movie and deserves his own trilogy) invents a machine which can transform rainwater into food...any food. It's a fairly simple "be careful what you wish for" parable with a bit of parental unit tension/reconciliation thrown in, but unlike the numerous other written-by-commitee pixar knock-offs by lesser soulless studios this one really works...it's genuinely funny and mental, the visuals are stunning (the giant computerised food actually made me extremely hungry) and after a streak of really bad movies this one gets a big fat ky-lubed thumb up.



Monday, November 30, 2009

Aftermath - get a "lobe" of this corpse-related tomfoolery




"Nacho, nacho man, I want to be...a nacho man" Well in fact I don't, not if I end up anything like the Spanish writer and director of this pleasant little necro f**k-flick, Nacho Cera. This is a 34 minute script-free piece showing a number of very realistic autopsies and then a corpse-randy coronor jumping up onto a table and knocking boots with a partially eviscerated and flayed cadaver. Then he goes home with a piece of the corpse and feeds it to his dog. "Tell me more!" you (probably don't) say. Well this dark little movie has been knocking around for quite a while now , has assumed a legendary status and gathered quite a few people who claim it's a work of thought-provoking and challenging art.



Now everyone has their own opinion of who constitutes art, and that in my mind is art's greatest strength and it's greatest failing. In this case I fail to see what "message" or intelligent discourse this movie is meant to generate. Is it conveying the futility of existence and the grim reality that once we're dead all we leave behind is a helpless bag of clammy meat? Thanks for that, and there was me thinking that upon my heroic demise my body was going to mutate into a enormous bejewelled faberge egg floating in a giant pool of rainbow juice. What's that Nacho? Your next movie is going to be a 30 minute arse-cam closeup of a bear evacuating it's bowels in a densely forested area? In it's defence the movie looks great, but then again so does Kelly Brooke and you just know that within that exquisite skull there's nothing but a few lonely isolated brains cells jumping around trying to keep warm. Perhaps the fact that the soundtrack consists of classical music has subconsciously triggered the art label in some viewers minds. It's unsavoury stuff. I'm an open minded man, in a very rigid and inflexible way, but this definitely triggered the This-is-a-bit-wrong-o-meter. Recommended only to cellar dwelling german weirdos and future serial killers still living with their parents.




Sunday, November 29, 2009

Mother of Tears - one bad mutha




DARIO ARGENTO YOU TWAT. Don't know where to start here. I've never been a huge fan of the mans work but iconic movies like Suspiria and Inferno are so highly regarded that I'm willing to admit there is something of substance there that I've just not picked up on. But after this, I'm tempted to say that not only is the emperor in the nude, but he's got a micropenis and strange balls. The story...Asia argento (director's daughter, hopeless actress, looks like uma thurman after a month of hard nights) discovers a magic red t-shirt which unleashes a wave of violence and anarchy across Rome (this breakdown of society is portrayed by about ten extras running around breaking car windscreens and flinging babies off bridges) as an ancient (and extremely foxy and mostly naked) witch is resurrected, and, armed with her magic red t-shirt and a gaggle of special-needs followers, plans to unleash a new dark age upon the earth. That was quite a long sentence. The movie itself is incredibly gruesome and mind-blowingly awful.



After the first ludicrously OTT on-screen killing - museum worker is mutilated, stabbed and gut-strangled by a mob of monkey-controlled mentalists - you are not sure whether you are watching some kind of bizarre satire or simply a horror maestro willfully shoving his movie credibility so far up his sphincter than a oral hygienist would be required to retrieve it. Good gore fx. Acting so bad it "transcends" bad acting and enters a weird and unique void also populated by the "cast" of the video sequences of the original resident evil, soft porn and Keanu Reeves. And a final shot that will have you staring in disbelief at its sheer unbelievable cackitude-ishness. All that said...I wasn't bored. The excessive violence and nudity kept my inner serial killer watching. But it's not so bad it's good, it's so bad it's f**king c**ting s**t.


Triangle - warning....could seriously brain your damage




Here's a cheery tale about a group of annoying middle class people who get caught in a storm at sea and end up on a creepy CGI liner that appears to have nobody aboard, marie celeste style. Or is that actually what it's about? Main protagonist is unstable single mum Melissa George...the best thing to come out of australian 90's soap operas since Guy Pearce and Natalie imbur embarg umbergl the brunette who sang that song about being "naked on du floah") Without giving too much away...I'm confused. I'm not sure if this movie is about timetravel ala excellent spanish thriller Chronocrimes, some kind of weird afterlife...thing...or merely the nightmares of a damaged brain and I'm not sure the writers know either. My head hurt after watching it, and not just because I'd trapped my head in the fridge door earlier.



There are parts of the movie that will make you go "eh?" some other bits that will have you muttering "I don't understand" and still other parts where you will go "Oh, I get it! Oh no wait....I don't," but I am a stupid man in many ways and if you can figure out what exactly is going the f**k on then fair play to you and your brain. (I thought I -nearly- had it...until the "dead birds on the beach" scene"...cue schizoid embolism) Melissa George is an attractive and talented actress (although for the entire movie she looks like she's trying to mentally negotiate advanced trigonometry while in the grip of severe PMS) and until your cerebellum starts to swell it's good-looking and gripping enough with some bursts of graphic violence. But I was waiting for a big kicker of a finale, I didnt get it and triangles are worst of all shapes anyway. Look at toblerones. Shite.


The Final Destination - is it though? Probably.



I AM SICK OF COMPUTER GENERATED EFFECTS. There. That's what you'll be thinking while you're watching this latest installment in the franchise. I quite like the final destination movies to be honest...attractive people escaping a intro setpiece of extreme carnage only to be killed off later in hilariously outlandish and often very bloody ways while generic rock bands get their 20 seconds of glory on the soundtrack. But by Death's hairy balls this latest one tested my childlike patience. You know exactly what to expect here but WHAT is going on with the ropy After Effects deaths?



If my absolute suspension of disbelief is being sorely tested by bad acting and witless dialogue and a loopy plot then give me good effects and the realistic demise of cardboard characters! Meh. There is a good homage to Chuck Palaniuks infamous short story "Guts" with a pool-related arse-vaccuum sequence but maybe I'm giving the screenwriters a little too much literary credit there.



Tuesday, November 24, 2009

WEIRD JAPANESE...THING - just for Reaper

I say again...whats wrong with the japs?
I have watched this about 14 times now.

Help me.

Help me understand.






Monday, November 23, 2009

SAW 6




Jigsaw wants to play a game. Despite his name, he can't play with himself so as usual a number of non-entities are lined up to get fed into a kind of krypton-factor-with-acid-and-blades dungeon gameshow. Hang on, isn't jigsaw dead? Yes he is, and the producers must really regret that now....the last three movies have been comprised mostly of flashbacks and feeble plot devices that attempt to pull in elements from earlier movies in the franchise to try to create a neat, overall plot arc where none actually existed in the first place.


.
These movies are cheap..they are filmed like tv shows, the cast drop further and further down the food chain with each movie and it beggars belief that these actually get cinema releases. I like my ultraviolence a lot but who the F**K is watching these? As usual there are two simultaneous plots running throughout...the "cops and killer" bit and the "victims" bit. Ther first part is mind-bendingly dull, the "victims" part pretty standard, involves some health insurance guy forced to kill or save members of his staff.

Gore wise the movie blows its beans in the first five minutes and the rest of the kills are quite meh.(and certainly nothing to compare to the "key lodged behind the eye" bit at the start of Saw 2. Argh!) They don't even bother with a big dramatic reveal at the end as they normally do, simply because there -is- nothing more. This dead horse has not just been flogged, someone's been sick on it. All the scenarios have been played, but all the signs point to a Saw 7. And if you go see it, I'm going to come around to your house and force you to play Boggle with a f**king beartrap around your head.




Sunday, November 22, 2009

JENNIFER'S BODY - Too much Jennifer, not enough body




Well we might as well deal with the sexy elephant in the room first....so let's lube that trunk and get on with it. Megan Fox. Eh? Eh? Has ever a movie star been so aptly named, so....well, meganey? We'd all hit it. Just like we'd all hit the mysterious button to kill a stranger for a million quid, we'd all - men, women, gays, lesbecians, children, animals, minerals, vegetables, all - rattle her fillings all night long and what's more secretly video it on a craftily concealed cameraphone for generations of future, er, "study". It's the kind of legacy you could leave to your grandchildren. Whether or not they'll want to watch an ancient sex video of their dead grandfather and his frantically thrusting balls is another matter entirely. So now I've asserted my hetrosexuality so casually, lets now move onto Jennifer's Body, and the main burning question....does she get her bum out?



No she f**king doesn't is the answer, as usual I don't know much about this movie, it's written by Diablo Cody, ex-stripper and writer of smartarse but amiable Juno. Anyway Ms Fox gets possessed by a demon and, developing a voracious taste for man-meat(!) starts to pick off the local lads in a pretty un-graphic manner while her geeky mate tries to sort everything out. The result is a nondescript teen-horror with nowhere near enough gore or feminudity for anyone other than perhaps teenage girls, who will probably appreciate it's sarky tone and restrained bloodshed.


PLAGUE TOWN - Dere's more to oirland dan dis





Jaysus! As an irish ex-pat I'm often asked the same questions by the natives of whatever land I am currently residing..."Can you put that away please" "What are you doing in my house""Is it in yet" etc. No one however has ever asked me why irish horror movies are so rubbish, and why would they, it's a retardedly random question that no normal person would concievably ask. But is it as retarded as such cinematic cowpats as Rawhead Rex, Dead Meat, Shrooms, Boy Eats Girl etc? Bail o dhia ar an obair, but they are all f**king awful. Does Plague Town buck this bog-trotting trend, or does it suck as badly as its predecessors? Well....yes and no. Yes it does suck, and no, it doesn't not suck.



There is definitely a rich seam of irish mythological lord of the rings-esque fantasy that is begging to be mined cinematically, but horror wise, well there only so much you can do with banshees, pookas and leprechauns. So in this case it's fairly bog standard mutant inbreds who pick off an cliched american family and a cheeky english lad who get stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere.



Eyeless babies, grisly gore sequences and a bizarre soundtrack keep the interest well enough, but the dialogue is cringworthy, the acting perfunctory at best and it's all a little crude and clumsy. At least at a mere 80 minutes it doesn't outstay its welcome. Begorrah!



PANDORUM - Throw this space turkey out the airlock




Another film with minor genre potential falling flat on it's fat f**king face. The unholy progeny of Event Horizon, Aliens and The Descent, although nowhere near as good as that might suggest. In fact, what it really reminds me of is a generic first person sci-fi shooter. You know the kind...where you are wandering around dimly-lit beige spaceship corridors replacing battery coils and hitting switches to activate reactors and so on while Dennis Quaid stays on the bridge and whispers sweet nothings into your earpiece and asks you to fix the coolant leaks on level 3 .. "I'm a soldier not a f**king plumber" you might cry...but this is space, and no- one can hear you scream. So...the story. Dennis Quaid and some other vaguely familiar bloke awake from hypersleep on a giant spaceship, they seem alone, they are not, something has happened to all the other passengers...it appears they have all (a) died (b) gone feral or (c) devolved into some breed of deformed aggressive mutant
.
D-Quaid...I have to say, the guy must really be hitting the yakults and jogging, he appears to be aging incredibly slowly. And the movie itself...seems a lot longer than 100 mins or so. I feel asleep watching it the first time, came back to it the next day and was amazed to find I still had nearly 50 minutes to go! The last 20 minutes or so pick up a bit, but the first hour is just tedious, badly paced, strangely edited and irritating.... There is an explanation as to why everything on the ship has gone as mental as it has, but its completely incomprehensible. The enemy mutants are a fairly generic lot of  bald spikey carnivores and the heroes are a tedious bunch. If you manage to avoid (hyper)sleep during this mess you are doing better than me. So well done,


GAMER - the movie equivalent of canine intercourse



The older woman's fancy man Gerard Butler ("This is Spartaaaa" etc) stars in this vein-bulging, headache-inducing, overedited sci-fi shambles by Nevilene and Taylor. As the creators of the Crank franchise, and clearly aware of those movies' similarities to a live action Grand Theft Auto,  N&T have decided to push the live action computer game concept forward with Gamer. Not sure why they bothered.  In a not-too-distant future everyone seems to be playing Slayers - like playing Modern Warfare, except you are controlling real deathrow inmates rather than a bunch of polygons - or Society, a pervy version of Second Life, populated by out of work actors being controlled by greasy salad-dodging lardasses, like this fine specimen below.



GB is the main man of Slayers, needless to say he's in there because he's been set up, he manages to break out and is determined to find out The Truth blah blah. Like Crank, this is more like a 90 minute music video than an actual movie...no shot seems to last more than a second and the camera jerks around like a dog biting an electric fence.



There is a huge bodycount and plenty of female nudity but it's far too stylised and dumb to appreciate. Play your xbox/ps3/sega megadrive instead, you'll have a lot more fun.


INVITATION ONLY - "your names not down, you're not coming in"



Taiwan's first horror movie apparently, and sadly not an auspicious beginning. Pretty dull thriller with a hint of Hostel (the rich getting their kicks through torturing randoms etc) with a couple of mildly gruesome sequences (one unfortunate individual get jump leads attached to his bellend...you don't need that)



It's all quite forgettable and in fact I'm only reviewing it so I can post a pic of Maria Ozawa...who, brilliantly, shows up, acts badly, gets naked and gets dispatched soon after. Perfect. If only Megan Fox had done the same in Jennifer's Body.






THE TOURNAMENT - Battle Royale as re-imagined by a 12 year old thicko





Dear me. Summing up...rich people betting on an annual event involving a couple of dozen bombpregnated blood-hungry assassins killing each other off. Each year The Tournmament takes place in a different exotic location, this year it's in....Middlesborough. This is so random it actually nearly endeared me to the film, (I mean....boro...why?) but the film itself is so utterly disabled by its massive duh levels that it just can't be let off the hook like some screaming brain-damaged albino stickleback. Seriously, this movie is so mongified it makes Crank f**king 2 look like Battleship Potempkin.



There's some mildly entertaining splattery ultraviolence and the main actress is quite attractive but if you have actually gone pubic you WILL spend more time rolling your eyes and muttering "f**k the f**k off" than deriving any actual enjoyment from the movie. Begbie from trainspotting is in it as well. He needs to glass his agent, and soon. I have plenty of time for low-IQ movies - loved Punisher Warzone - but this? Load a pish! I want..my stupid movies...to be stupid...in an intelligent way. This....is like Warwick Davis after a severe head injury, it's not big and it's not clever. I will give it a minor plus point for being set in Middlesborough though. That really is just strange. Otherwise utter gash. Highly recommended to pre-teen boys and simpletons though.

SAMURAI PRINCESS



What the f**k is wrong with the japs? Is it something to do with their post-war blanket ban on the depiction of pubic hair? The nation that gave us Hentai, bukkake, omorashi, kegadoru and vending machines offering shrinkwrapped used schoolgirl panties to sweaty salarymen quite clearly has a few sexy toys in the attic. So it seems their nationally stifled sex drives need to expressed in various other unpleasant fleshy ways. Here's the latest in the weird sci-fi gore bodyhorror genre that seems to be pretty popular with our repressed vertically-challenged asian brethren. Tokyo Gore Police, Machine Girl, Meatball Machine...it's along these (warped) lines.


Rubbery prosthetic phallic mutations? Check. Huge spurting geysers of blood? Check. Awful music? Yep. Incomprehensible plot with jolting mood shifts and spastic editing? Oh yeah. Just mental, like Bad Taste-era Peter Jackson directing an episode of Monkey. Spectacularly inventive gore effects but ultimately tiresome..the shrill "acting", goofy humour, cheap production values, amateurish cgi and generally overloud histrionics prove too much after about half an hour (what's all that nonsense with the guitar...?)



The story....group of girls get offed by bad men in a strange japanese forest. The sole survivor is turned into a "mecha" - a severely modified human - and goes off to wreak unneccesarily gory vengeance with swords, fists and bio-mechanical boob grenades. Dozens of overacting cannon-fodder get various body parts slashed off, skeletons punched out of their bodies, brains pulled out then squashed and stuffed back in, heads bifurcated, etc.