Right, well...I'm ill. Very ill indeed. It feels like beelzebub himself has ejaculated broken glass down my throat and my entire body feels like its got toothache so lets pass that general feeling of unhealthiness onto you gentle reader. No clever wordy foreplay, lets get your mental underpants off and onto the rough and unlubricated penetrating reviews.
BIRDEMIC - SHOCK AND TERROR
F**k me. So this is what it's come to. A "movie" (and I use that word with grave reservations) which has gained significant internet buzz simply because it's so bad it doesn't really deserve to be described as a serious piece of work at all. Look at the
trailer. This has really annoyed me to be honest, its obviously a calculated attempt to deliberately make a truly bad movie. It's utterly without worth, but of course in our sensation-craving tinternet culture an extreme of whatever variety can be passed off as a virtue. Don't buy in to this horsec*ck of swill, I watched this entire f**kin thing and i'm genuinely offended by its laziness and cynicism. Just...no. Believe it or not, its actually F**KING BORING watching something that looks like it was made by special needs teenagers with a stolen camera for 100 minutes, really really boring. F**k off Birdemic. Non-actors being attacked by animated gifs, yeah maybe that's worth 5 hilarious minutes on youtube but this?
Everyone involved is in the wrong industry. Genuine Bad Movies should be accidental, like babies. Mongy, harelipped babies perhaps, but inspiring a vague uncomfortable affection nonetheless. Watch
The Room or
Troll 2 or
Deadly Spawn if you really do want to see a bona fide bad movie classic. Will writer-director James Nyugen have the bird seed to make a sequel? Who knows, but I reckon if you attached a camera to a chicken and made it film James Nyugen for a couple of days the resulting movie wouldnt be much worse than this contrived avian abortion.
SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR
Have you heard the one about the grotesque fat rapey man with the 15 inch penis? No, its not one of lovely
David Brennan's home videos on youtube ("I swear, someone stole them from my usb drive") It's the antagonist of this genitally fixated basement-quality horror endurance test. A bunch of terrible acting drug-happy medical students being raped to death by the aforementioned excessively-willied bad man forms the basis for this delightful little tale.
Eh....thats it really....the students are an unspeakable bunch of nob-ends and every moment where they are not being horribly murdered seems endless. So we've got awful, bad-improv acting, an ending that seems very similar to Reeker/Campfire Tales, detestable characters and face-palm dialogue, but it also has interesting weird sound editing/effects, and an agreeable grimy feel to it, and has
VERNON F**KIN WELLS IN IT so...
Well I can't really recommend it because it's clearly complete and utter rubbish, but at the same time its also mental and wilfully warped, so well...go on then, just so you can go in to work the next day and tell people you just watched a terrible horror movie starring a penicidal serial killer, you'll be even more popular than before! (Have a wash as well, people are starting to talk)
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE/ THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST
The sequels to Steig Larsen's
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but apparently despite having the same actors, shot back-to-back on a much lower budget intended to go straight to swedish TV. Didn't really notice a massive quality dip myself as I can't remember the original that well. And I only saw it a couple of months ago. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE kicks off a year or so after the events of the original, dead-eyed goth hacker Lisbeth and froglike journo Micke get involved with deformed evil russian spies and James Bond-like unstoppable giant henchmen. It's not bad, it's pretty tight, some gratuitious lesbionic sex, bursts of graphic violence....quite enjoyed it.
The third one, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST is a f**king two hour courtroom-based bore-gy that finally drops all the plot pieces onto the table while the viewer stares at them and goes "WHAT, IS THAT IT? THAT'S IT?" I'm convinced these books/movies are only so massively popular because of chubby introspective females that see Lisbeth as a fascinating totem of aggressive feminine independence, and an equal number of socially-challenged geeky men who fantasise about showing Lisbeth the hetro-light (shining on their sweaty glans no doubt) when in actuality she's merely a borderline autistic computer nerd good with violence and useless at small talk. That's just not enough for me. But she does have a nice bottom. And she's far more interesting than the rest of the tedious lineup of zero-dimensional script fodder. Watch the one that isn't cack, skip the other, you'll be no worse off.
THE WOLFMAN
An American Werewolf in London is one of the greatest horror movies of the past 30 years. Big words. But I honestly think its a work of pure enduring class that still looms over the manwolf genre nearly 30 years later...there are quite a few movies that aspire to horror-comedy, more and more nowadays, as its easier to be mediocre at both than excel at either (exhibit A:
Zombieland) but John Landis' 1981 masterpiece is actually properly scary, genuinely funny, clever and ultimately sad and melancholic. With awesome Rick Baker effects. And Nurse Jenny Agutter. Yes. I showed my little brother the transformation scene when he was about 5 and it made him cry. That's abuse, to be honest. It covers these disparate bases better than any other film I've ever seen and The Wolfman is one movie that, well let's not get carried away here because its nowhere near as good, but it uses AWIL as much as a reference as it does its alleged source material, the Lon Chaney original.
Really, its a bit AWIL meets Sleepy Hollow, with surprising amounts of carnage and gore. It's a bit camp, it's a bit messy, the transformation ratio is about
60% simian, 40% vulpine which makes the lycanthropic antagonist a bit unintentionally humorous, the movie also bears the hallmarks of being edited and post-produced by committee...but I enjoyed it. After the raft of awful straight to video shite I've endured of late it was pretty feckin decent. Well after Birdemic I think David Brennan dancing in his underpants miming "I'm Every Woman" for an hour and a half would be pretty feckin decent. And a turn-on, to be honest.
