THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

The first in a trilogy based on the Millenium trilogy by dead swedish author Stieg Larsson, and a book very popular with the termites that pack London's tubes. For the past year or so, everyone seems to have been reading this, something about vampires or the latest load of shite by Dan "A.D.D" Brown, whom I'm convinced isnt an actual human, but some kind of robotic literary experiment by a cabal of market researchers and data analysts huddled in a bunker somewhere. I read the first 100 pages or so of the Larrson book last christmas...didnt grab me particularly, seemed like a rather slow-moving euro version of  a Jonathan Kellerman murder-mystery, except with a journalist and a sapphic hacker tag-team instead of a psychologist and a man-fancying cop. What about the movie though? Well it's 2 and a half hours long, and with not much going on for a lot of that duration, save dramatic montages of people squinting at laptops and staring intensely at 40 year old photographs. The story involves the previously mentioned sweaty journalist and a gothy, slightly dysfunctional lesbian (wiv a dragon tattoo, yeah) trying to solve a decades-old missing-presumed-dead case involving a young girl in a rural swedish community of rich elderly coffin-dodgers.

 I have never used the words "lesbian", "arse-nude" and "gratuitous" in the same sentence before, but I will be soon. The first half of the movie contains some unexpectedly harsh abuse and violence involving the girl, really quite graphic and unsavoury. It also contains an agreeably gratuitous scene where she rises arse-nude from her lesbian-filled bed to answer the door. She's vaguely attractive in an undernourished, tomboyish way, if you can look past the hairy armpits and child-like frame. She's certainly more interesting than the generic middle-aged journalist, who's alternates between being dull, slightly creepy and generally a bit useless. The movie is a slow burner, but it's also slick, beautifully shot and despite its length, managed to keep my wandering fingers away from the fast forward button. Worth a look. Apparently in the works for a Hollywood remake as well, shock surprise. Will they include the scene where one character gets what looks like an massive glade plug-in rammed up their chocolate? We'll find out in a year or so.

CALIGULA

Mad this. I had heard about this abortion years ago, but only now got a chance to have a look at it in its full, uncensored, erm, "glory". An extremely OTT retelling of the debauched reign of Roman emperor Caligula, it was the brainchild of some wildly ambitious porn barons with delusions of cinematic grandeur. Its like nothing youve seen before...it almost needs its own deranged genre.

 It's consists of about 2 and a half hours of static camera shots of vast and expensive theatrical sets, intercut with Malcolm McDowell as the infamously mental emperor/despot/horse-botherer and clumsily edited-in porn shots. Proper porn too.But dont go thinking this is in any way erotic, we're talking about thirty-year old hardcore here! This means paedobeards, pasty flesh, flabby arses and enough pubic hair to completely stuff a lifesize rubber Brendan Grace sex doll. Unbelievably, the movie cast also includes Peter O'Toole, Helen Mirren and Sir John f**king Gielgud. How?? It beggars belief.

Plot? Caligula poncing around in a miniskirt. Kills the venereal-looking and crazy Tiberius (Peter O'Toole, clearly off his head). Random shots of people doing naughty things. Senators shouting at each other. Roman soldier gets a cord tied around his bits and forced to drink huge amount of wine before being stabbed in the bladder. Random orgy shot. Couple get raped and fisted by Caligula as a wedding present. Shouting. Orgy stuff. Scene where prisoners are buried up to their necks while a giant spinning beheading combine harvester type thing slowly moves over them. Random oral sex scene. Man gets stabbed repeatedly, urinated on then gets willy cut off and fed to dog. More orgy rubbish. Malcolm McDowell runs around in the nude. Malcolm McDowell stabbed by some guy. THE END. May not all have happened in that precise order, but you could probably swap most of these scenes around in any order and it would work just as well ie excruciatingly badly.

The story behind this classically-themed cowpat is fascinating - what a gloriously ill-conceived and disastrously realised mess it is. It's terrible but if its on and youre in the vicinity..you'll watch it. Its like watching a giant golden bus full of morbidly obese nude babies falling over the side of a cliff in slow motion...you just cant look away. But you will feel more than a bit...eugh...afterwards. But at least Sir John f**king Gielgud didnt get his knob out. That's dignity Sir John.

That's dignity.

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD - "When a man dies, he gets stupid"

GEORGE! GEORGE! GEORGE! GEORGE! GEORGE! Stop it now! Stop making zombie filums, please...please! I'm beggin you man! Beggin you like a nude limbless tramp at a cashpoint! If  "Land of the Dead" was a crushing disappointment and "Diary of the Dead" was even worse well just wait until you see the latest strange turd George A Romero has curled out over the desecrated grave of the original "Dead" trilogy. F**king hell.

So there's this island split between two warring Oirish clans, the O'Flynns and the Muldoons. Begorrah! There's clearly been aggro for generations and now the fact that the fir marbh are staggering around very slowly has divided the families further, one lot want to kill them all, the others want to keep the wormy revenants around and try to train them to eat pork instead of human. Some national guard stereotypes and a geeky teenager arrive on the island and get caught up in the paddy-on-paddy-on-zombie action. It's boring. It's clumsy. It's completely retardicated. One of the island zombies is galloping over the windswept hills on a horse like some monged ad for undead hair conditioner. There's about another 15 or so of the "deadheads" in a shed. That's your zombie count. "Epic" this aint.

The acting is awful (in fairness, Romero has never been exactly an actor's director, but whoa) dialogue hopeless, wacky mutating accents ahoy, there's nowhere near enough cannibalistic carnage (compare it to the 20-year old Day of the Dead and it looks remarkably tame) and its just....odd. What's George been smoking? Why has he made this? Those are my main questions. WHAT. WHY.

Seriously George don't make any more zombie movies you old bollix, you lost your undead mojo decades ago and now you just don't know what you're doing any more.

THE DESCENT PART 2 - plumbing the depths

F**K OFF. The original The Descent was a fine horror flick, nasty, brilliantly edited and paced and would have worked as a stand-alone claustrophobic thriller even without the carnivorous nude cave goblins. This vastly inferior rehash isn't fit to wipe its clammy, gollum-like arse. I'm really annoyed. The original movie had a quite definitive ending, but apparently the US cinema release cut off at the "dream sequence" fake ending, where the protagonist Sarah actually escaped from the caves. So a group of no-mark hacks have gotten together, thrown in the laziest of all screenwriters cliches - amnesia - and have Sarah and a clusterf**k of bellends going back down the subterranean hellhole to find what remains of the original party.

They didnt even bother with a new soundtrack. The whole thing is a souless shambles which doesnt even deserve to be mentioned in the same paragraph as the tight and scary original. So the new load of cannon fodder face off against the carnivorous nude cave goblins, get chewed up, kill a few of the cave goblins in a bloody manner and then it finishes up with a contrived shock ending which is entirely unearned and just pushes the leering rapist c**k of this cinematic fraud further up the unwilling sphincter of the weeping original. For shame. Everyone involved should be twatted in the moneymaker with a large heavy shovel and thrown down a deep, hopefully nude-monster-infested hole.

If you -do- decide to watch it, just skip the first 30 minutes. Seriously. No point at all. Just rubbish screenwriters and a clumsy director trying to justify a few more people going down a hole to die. That's it. That's all it is. I wasted 90 minutes of my time....dont make the same mistake I did. Tidy your sock drawer. Have a shave. Learn Makaton. Swear at a baby. Just don't watch this, it's a pale shadow of a facsimile of a counterfeit of the original.