KUNG FU FLID - small arms expert

Have you ever thought about how many midgets you could defeat, if an infinite amount of them poured down a narrow corridor where only one at a time could fight you? How about babies? Toddlers, infected by the rage virus? Of the former, I'm going to hazard a guess at about 5-6....some of them are pretty buff, and look like you could hurt yourself hitting them around the head. Toddlers I'm thinking more 80-90, before sheer fatigue and vague child-injury-related remorse would lower my Mighty Boot of Torment. And then they would swarm over me and devour me like a giant screaming farleys rusk.

What about...flids?

The answer....well for a start, a flid is apparently a derogatory term for "thalidomides" and if this movie is anything to go by...less than 1. Because "Barry"  is one mean thalidomide (or, "flid"). He would reach down your throat, rip out your pelvis and cave your skull in with it.

Or he would, if he could reach that far with his tiny little t-rex arms. You have seen this guy on telly before, always seems a bit understandably aggro about being dealt quite literally a bad hand by fate. If I had little chicken wings like him i would invest in a baggy jumper  You have to hand it to him...he has made a decent fist of his light-of-limb condition...the sheer rage (possibly) channeled by the inability to wipe his own bottom has manifested itself in a doublehard martial arts expert actor type guy...He's in a band as well. Fair play. In his position I'd probably just spend my life in a darkened room learning to masturbate with my feet and mourning my inability to wear long-sleeved shirts. This astoundingly ill-conceived movie however is just a generic shot-on-video el-cheapo slap-em-up/shouty "drama" with lots of naughty language, the only USP it has is that the lead looks like something out of Total Recall.

So be careful next time you're thinking about randomly attacking a disabled...they could end up handing you your arse...using their feet. So leave em alone eh, don't have a go just because they're different and hilarious.

Seventh Moon - cinematic epilepsy

Here's an another movie by Edward Sanchez, co-creator of The Blair Witch Project, following on from the mildly enjoyable Altered where he obviously had a bad experience with a  tripod becuase he's clearly decided to go entirely handheld. There's no conceit to the movie being "found footage" or anything like that, it's just shot in this way. Which would be fine if they hadnt decided to forgo an actual professional cameraman and apparently MOUNT THE F**KING CAMERA ON THAT F**KED UP DOG FROM YOUTUBE'S HEAD. There are vast swathes of this movie that are unwatchable. Seriously I watched this movie on a 10 foot projector and its actually impossible to tell whats going on when people are doing anything other than just sitting and talking. Which is a shame...could have been creepy and I would most certainly not like to get lost in the Chinese countryside. Which is what happens to the two protagonists, some chinese-american guy and Amy Smart, who ripped her jaw off in the bath in the lamentable Mirrors and got ploughed by Jason Statham in the Crank movies. And there's ghosts and etc etc, cant see anything, what's the point, buy a f**king tripod!

Zombieland - Dead on Arrival

Never, never did I think I would say it, but I'm getting a bit sick of the undead. There are more reanimated flesh eating rotten bastards around now then even their halycon period of the early eighties and to be honest I blame Danny Boyle for it. But if its zombies or vampires well I'll have the shambling/sprinting dead over a lot of preening eurofag bloodsuckers anyday so yeah - Zombieland. Not really a horror-comedy this...its pretty much just National Lampoon's Vacation with some minor head trauma and cannibalism. Shaun of the Dead seems to be held up as the benchmark for horror comedy and to me that is a travesty when movies like American Werewolf in London, Reanimator, Return of the living Dead, Brain Dead and Evil Dead 2 vomit blood on it from a great height in terms of actually mining the elusive "humurous horror" seam. And most of those are zombie flicks to boot. So if movies starring the shambling reanimated corpses of our neighbours are already mostly funny/satirical anyway, what is Zombieland's raison d'etre?

 Heres the thing....its not really got any "horror" bits at all, the horror elements are almost just background static. Its a buddy pic. Its a post - apocalyptic Dumb and Dumber with the occasional post-post-modern "Scream"-type reference to horror movie RULES (these pop up in big writing on the screen when referred to in the flaccid voiceover, so you can nod a bit and go, "Oh yeah, thats right! This movie's Self-Aware and not adverse to Pointing Out The Cliches in the Genre in a Humourous fashion! I get it!" So that's all fine. It's quite fast and clever, and the first 20 minutes are great. After that it plummets. Woody Harrelson is good. The main character is a boring sub-emo wet blanket who looks like he would cry if you gave him a dead arm. I laughed twice. It's not a bad movie, it's just indicative of the appalling year its been so far that this is getting some pretty warm reviews and positive word of mouth.

 I'm going to wait for Rec2 and Survival of the Dead (and advance word on the latter is not good...not surprising considering "Land" and "Diary"....leave it George...just...leave it) And then I hope the entire zombie genre shoves it's flyblown head up it's desiccated maggoty colon and stays there until someone with real vision comes along to resurrect it once again.

The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

Only a short youtube video...but watch this. It's f**king funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y

9 - muppets vs machines

This is a strange one. A dark (VERY dark...this is not a movie for very young kids....there are several corpses including a dead child within the first 5 minutes! This movie will scare the s**t out of any kid under the age of 10) animated feature about a gang of littlebigplanet-alike cloth puppet people being chased through a post apocalyptic landscape by weird hybrid robots. Looks great but has virtually no plot...its essentially 7 or 8 action sequences strung together to form a  feature that just barely makes 70 minutes and even that limited running time feels like its pushing its concepts to their absolute outer limits. It's a padded out short, in other words.

Not bad, per se...just unexceptional in the current era of spectacularly good animated movies such as Up, Coraline and anything not by Dreamworks. I'm giving it a pass for its eye candy and the art design which will appeal to anyone with a sci-fi art-geek fetish.

The Offspring - Meat is Murder!

Cannibals...who needs em? Certainly not the protagonists of The Offspring, a grimy cheap but in fairness entertainingly wacko horror flick based on some obscure novel. The aforementioned protagonists are a family of middle-class bad actors whose dull but adequate lives are made a bit more entertaining - and shorter - by a feral tribe of gut munching tribesmen who suddenly appear out the forest intent on some human meat to go.

Abysmal acting and cheap production values, plus a weird and random story, but also has some very harsh violence, an effectively sparse score consisting almost entirely of odd atonal sounds (probably took about 10 minutes to score to be fair) and an unsettling 70's style atmosphere. Plus its short, 78 minutes. Short, dumb and mean....like a special needs midget with a grudge.

Altered - "I come in peace"

"And you go in pieces, a*****!" Wise words there from Dolph Lungren in ropy 80's sci-fi Dark angel. And as always, Dolph Lungrens wise words are words of really...wise...wisdom. Because do I not like aliens. With the occasional exception like ALF or chewbacca most of them are c**ts who want to give us a kicking with superior technology, use us to incubate their parasitic young or gangprobe us mercilessly. With Altered the tables are turned on these star-spawned arseheads. A bunch of previously abducted hillbillies manage to capture an ET and are intent on some redneck payback, possibly involving blowtorches and heads-in-vices. Naturally things go badly...meddling police officers, excruciating spouses and flesh-eating alien diseases all conspire to make things go very definitely pear-shaped. Plus the alien is a sneaky and vicious bollix with vague telepathic powers and an inclination towards disembowelment.

This is a movie by one of the team responsible for Blair Witch but I wouldn't let that put you off...well, much. Its a decent enough little time filler, although the main alien-napping concept - while cool - doesnt really stretch over 90 minutes....its more like an extended mid-90's episode of the x-files with gore and bold language. F**king alien bastards!