MACHETE - or, "meh"chete.

This is what happens when the internet turns into some kind of giant, free focus group for eager to please filmakers. Ok, the fake Grindhouse trailer looked quite a laugh but constructing an entire movie around a series of OTT moneyshots...? No. Just...no. Tell you what, check out the red band trailer that was released about a month ago. That's all you need to see. There's nothing else in the movie, and the remaining eighty-odd minutes are just Rodriguez killing time between the trailer spots, treading water and basically just pulling his pud. And with the outrageous eye candy onscreen, who can blame him for using his camera as a penis and the audience as a massive oily frantic hand? Jessica Alba...just ridiculously fit, useless character saddled with fist-bitingly bad dialogue...Michelle Rodrigeuz, looking honed toned and ready to be boned, and as always looking never more than 24 hours away from a fairly decent moustache, Linsay Lohan, who's famous or something, and a bevvy of other lovely ladies with their boobs and arses out. This is A GOOD THING.

There's loads of washed up eighties action fodder in here as well but apart from a nifty double shotgun decapitation IT'S ALL IN THE RED BAND TRAILER. I felt the same about 300, saw the ad and thought, hmm, looks cool and ended up sitting through filler while waiting for bits I'd already seen. A trailer shouldnt be a whore giving up all the good stuff. For the rest of it, well any kind of criticism is pretty subjective as it's meant to be crap, sort of. I just find it strange that it takes a modern film-maker 20-30 mill to make a film that looks like it was shot with a budget of the square root of f**k all. Maybe all the money went towards Alba, Rodriguez, De Niro, Segal etc's trailers and personal masseuses....and as for Danny Trejo as scrotum-faced Machete...good bad guy, mediocre good guy with zero screen presence and forgettable lines. The action that isnt in the trailer is meh and it just isnt as much fun as it promised. I cant believe I'm giving a movie with an intestinal abseiling scene a thumbs down but there you go. Isnt life strange?

NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET - Burnt Fondler Vengeance

I have no objection to remakes. It doesnt seem that long since the last 1st gen episode Freddy vs Jason, but if someone wants to randomly restart the franchise with new ideas and new tech, why not? I don't care. Its acceptable for Superheroes to get an occasional "refresh", why not stripy jumper wearing child molesters? I'll tell you why not...BECAUSE THIS IS W**K. I was never a massive fan of the original or indeed Wes Craven, but he's come up with a few cracking concepts in his time even if the delivery has frequently been a bit of a shambles. The sort-of classic original had some gory kills, a strange trippy feel and the second scariest dermatologically-challenged glove-wearing child-toucher ever. But it does look dated now, which means in my mind a rework is fully justified. It's been 26 years! But by hell what a feeble-minded dead-on-arrival fraud we have here.

 I'm actually struggling to assemble my dislike for this abhorrence into coherence...What we have here is a real clusterf**k of a spasticated script, high school students (who all look at least 25 years old) screaming and frowning a lot, loud noises masquerading as scares, Freddy now repackaged as a decomposing alien shortarse, lame versions of the originals setpieces....cheap, dumb, boring, childish, predictable, illogical, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive....After the rubbish Friday the 13th, Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboots here's another greasy turd for the turd-pile. I suppose it'll be Hellraiser next. Get your wellies on.

One, Two Freddy's coming for you, 
Three, Four, better lock your door, 
Five, Six, grab your crucifix, 
Seven, Eight, gonna stay up late, 
Nine, Ten THIS SUCKS FARTS FROM DEAD CHIMPS

REPO MEN - THE LUNG GOODBYE

Organs....arent they weird? A motley crew of ugly blobs, shiny tubes and purple squishy bits which somehow come together to form a balanced organic mechanism which allows us to process food, create other humans and write rubbish on the internet. Youve got your alpha-organs like your brain, heart, lungs and knob, then a secondary lot like er, kidneys and spleen and bladders, and then useless lumps of meat like appendix, the Bez of the human body, which should be surgically removed from babies at birth along with tonsils, wisdom teeth, earlobes and foreskins. Optimised babies...the way forward. Like little human jpgs. "What are you banging on about now" you're probably shouting. "Stop talking about babies and organs" Well I will, but this whole review is going to have more organs stuffed into it than your missus on her last girly holiday in faliraki, so get used to it.

Colon then, who told Jude Law he was leading man material? Listen, he's a perfectly competent actor, And very suited to support roles like in Gattaca and Sherlock Holmes but with his shop-window-mannequin good looks, strange warlock's hairline and general oestrogenal aura he's not "ovary" suited to action man status.In this filum he plays a organ repossesion officer in the near future. Along with boss-eyed shambler Forrest Whittaker he spends his day tracking down miscreants who havent been keeping up on the financal installments on their new stomach, kidneys etc. When they catch the gut burglars they dont serve them with a stern letter with shouty red ink on it, no they whip out their scapels and get repo-ing.

If you've seen The Meaning of Life there was a sketch where this exact scenario is played out so there it is...it's a cross between an obscure sketch on Monthy Pythons least well known movie and a sci-fi chase em up like Minority Report. The first third is enjoyable - The lads go about their jobs, spill a lot of blood and look like they enjoy their work. The middle bit is dull, lots of running about as one of them ends up skint and packing a borrowed organ. The last third goes completely mental, throws in hardcore violence, a love scene that redefines "penetration", a brilliantly casual throat stabbing and even throws in a Total Recall type narrative spasm. It's very strange overall and the casual observer will hate it but if you have a bit of undemanding geek dna you'll probably sort of like it. I did...and if Repo Men was a woman I wouldnt think twice about "donating" her my "organ". Hmm.

Incidentally its got nothing to do with cult 80s movie Repo Man, which starred Emilio Estevez. Where's he now?

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT ORGANS
The SKIN is the biggest organ in the human body, especially if you are a fat f**ker
The LIVER is the second largest, unless you are IRISH
A dried LUNG makes a handy "storage facility" for wasps while you are harvesting their JAM
Licking a live bull's VAS DEFERENS reputedly endows one with great VIRILITY
If your LOWER INTESTINE was removed from your body, unravelled and stretched out along the entire length of  a tennis court you would die from TRAUMA and MASSIVE BLOOD LOSS
WOMEN blink twice as much as men. This is why they have trouble following complicated MOVIES as they miss many SUBTLE PLOT POINTS and VISUAL CUES
Your EYES never grow. But your NOSE and EARS do until you die.
CONGENITAL MICROPENIS is the medical term given to those cursed with a tiny KNOB

Thats enough for now. But come back soon for some more medical titbits from your Dr Gii-bag.

Burning Bright - HELLO KITTY

So you've gone down to the kitchen at 3am to get a sandwich. You shouldnt be eating f**king carbs at this hour anyway but there are more pressing matters.You turn on the light and what's in front of you, turning your bowels to freezing water? No, not a midget burglar masturbating into your italian cheese pasta, but a feckin great...tiger.

Is that scary? I'm not sure and thats probably one of the problems that Burning Bright has. Being trapped in your house during a storm with a massive hungry carnivore would probably be mildly fatal and generally unenjoyable but it's not really the stuff nightmares are made of. So this tiger, who - according to Meat "Remaining Men Together" Loaf - is a bollix of a tiger who once ate a horse, gets purchased by some cracker with deluded ideas about creating a safari in his back garden. A mighty storm descends and a tidy young lass and her young brother - who has a touch of the screaming rainmans and the regulation hollywood child bowler haircut - get locked into their house with the stripy malevolent feline. Technically, It's actually all done really well considering such a odd premise, but there's no real sense of menace and it's all very tame.

 The tiger growls a bit, eats through some doors and flails at our heroes in a dodgy after-effectsy way but meh. At least the house is massive, so we get a lot of running from room to room. Who'd get sick of that eh.

"Jeez you got a big pussy! Jeez you got a big pussy!"
"Why'd you say that twice?"
"I didnt! AAAAAAGH HELP A MASSIVE TIGER HAS GOT MY LEG"

FROZEN - "you ah nat sending me to da coolah"

Have you ever been snowboarding? You have? You liked it? You enjoyed snow jetting up your bleeding nostrils, shattering your arse again and again, wiping out an elderly woman skier at 50mph and constantly having middle class french people look at you like you'd fallen out of a dogs bottom? Or was that just me. Seems like a lot of hassle just for a few facebook pics. Frozen details the trials and tribulations of three young americans who gets trapped on a ski lift after hours on the side of a mountain. It starts to freeze. Help is not on the way. And they can hear howling...Surprisingly decent, tight little thriller this, from the director of the not-very-good Hatchet. It's as big a step for him as a film maker as The Descent was for Neil Marshall after the enjoyable but messy and amateurish Dog Soldiers.

Bones pop through clothing, skin freezes to metal, frostbite starts to rot flesh...it's surprisingly bleak and very cleverly constructed. I give it a shaking, frostbitten thumbs up. Incidentally, you know the best way to cure hypothermia is to climb into a sleeping bag with a naked woman? Thats a scientific fact. There's no -real- evidence for it...but it is scientific fact. I just feel sorry for the poor naked woman who is having a giant fat nude freezing beardy man being shoved into her sleeping bag.Why is he fat? Why has he got a beard? Has he got hypothermia because he's nude, or did that happen afterwards? Only Reaper knows, and after he went off to the toilet with Stringer Bell he hasnt been seen.

Please send Reaper back to us Mr Bell.

Please

:(

Piranha 3d - FISH AND TITS

I always thought that if 3d had any future whatsoever it would be in the veiny, stretchy, fourth-wall-defying world of porn. Piranha does its best to gnaw the peripherals off this notion with such clumsy 3d that the veritable boobalanche that rolls over the viewer will just leave you with squinty-eyed nipple-fatigue. Is it just me? I can barely remember Kelly Brook's prolonged nudey submarine lesbecian frolicing. But it definitely happened. Yes. So....plot, there's some kind of random underwater seismic activity and a plural of prehistoric bastardfish are released into an american lake-resort teeming with horny teenaged fish food and some past-it Proper Actors.

Lots of screaming, wince-inducing but hilarious fish-related injuries and gore....the 3d is employed poorly and purely for novelty "check out the floaty severed penis" type shots...still, quite enjoyed it overall. It marks a semi-return to form for director Alexandre Aja after the badly fumbled Mirrors, but it's not in the same league as his excellent and f**ked up The Hills Have Eyes remake and the even more f**ked up Haute Tension.

If you love carnivorous fish and women whose clothes keep falling off, and who doesnt, then you could do a lot worse, but I'd wait till it's on dvd ...just so you can express your appreciation of Kelly Brook's tits performance in that special way.

By the way that pic above? Doesn't happen in the movie. Weird.

THE EXPENDABLES - Grumpy old men

Age....it gets to us all. Look at Reaper...once possessed of Samson-like flowing locks of curled knicker-dampening masculinity...now his head a fallow field of wispiness and lost dreams, punctuated by the occasional boil. Watching The Expendables is an uneasy experience for those of us of the VHS generation...once strapping young bucks eagerly scanning the shelves of the local "video store" for the latest "18" rated Arnie/Stallone/Van Damme...now in decline, flab-fringed baggy-eyed kidults watching pirated hd screeners on our vast plasma screens while frantically ramming a kamagra down our urethra as our leatherfaced f**k buddy screams racist abuse at our malfunctional ugly genitals. I don't want to speculate about his genitals, but Sly looks quite frighteningly muscular for a 64 year old man, god knows what unholy cocktail of steroids and surgery is responsible but Arnie, a mere 63, looks quite frail in comparison when he wanders on for his 30 seconds or so of glory. I have to admit I was quite impressed with Stallone's Rambo reboot, just for its sheer blood-drenched audacity, so was quite looking forward to this much-hyped testosterone bath.

In truth, this fan-ad made the Expendables look like a lot more fun than it actually is....it's very 80's and refreshingly not trying to be any way self-referencial but its also very stupid and doesnt make the most of the gathered titans of mancinema. For a start, Arnie and Bruce Willis are in it for a matter of seconds. Glorified cameos. There's still plenty of macho to go around mind.... Let's just list the cast or I'll sure I'll forget someone. The cast IS the film here, the story is a load of bollix.

Stallone: The leader of The Expendables, and the moral core of this group of withered mercs. Shoots people.

Statham: uses his full range of facial expressions (1) and dramatic range (whispery staring hard man all the way to shouty stabby hard man) as Stallone's knife-happy cohort and bromantic interest. Most of the movie is Sly and Statham, the latter probably gets the best action sequences.

Dolph Lundgren: Has been languishing in direct-to-dvd limbo for decades now...malevolent golem-like bruiser here.

Jet Li: Still can't speak english properly. Seems to be here for comic relief, as he's quite small. And everyone else is massive, innit.

Some Wrestler guys: Don't know who they are. One of them has a massive automated shotgun which is quite impressive.

Mickey Rourke: The Expendables Armourer. Stays at home, delivers some raspy monologues and has a knife-related rivalry with Statham.

Arnie: As mentioned, shows up, delivers about 4 lines of dialogue, then wanders off.

Bruce Willis: Shows up for one scene, gives Stallone his mission, then disappears. Could have used more of Bruce, he's probably got more screen presence than any two or three Expendables combined.

There's bone-crunching hand-to-hand action, some iffy cg blood, a high body count and a pretty anticlimatic final battle. It's only really a minor skirmish, just another day in the office for the lads. The end would hint this is an attempt to get a new franchise off the ground, but while it's mildly entertaining watching these lumbering man-mountains assert their flagging virility it's not vintage stuff or even particularly memorable. Or maybe that's just the alzheimer's kicking in.