VALHALLA RISING

Look at that cover! F**king look at it! Quite possibly the most blatant bit of false advertising imaginable. Heres the synopsis, its sounds cool and I'm going to tell you why the actual film is not cool in the slightest, but actually w**k. Hard as nails, mute and optically challenged slave fighter from muddy viking-era scotland kills a few people in a grisly fashion to gain his freedom and then joins Christian warriors on a crusade to Jerusalem, except they take a wrong turn somewhere and end up in Canada(?) where they come up against the local unfriendly natives. Again look at that cover. Sounds good right? Vikings versus savage apocalypto-style natives, cant go wrong can you? Turns out you can ...YOU CAN GO VERY WRONG INDEED. While the cover would suggest a gory and action packed 300-style sword-and-axe filled epic romp, instead we have a handful of bearded men stumbling around in the mud for 80 minutes. It is the very opposite of "epic". The first 20 minutes are quite promising... very graphic violence, stunning cinematography, you'll be thinking "what was he on about, this is cool!" Alas, the movie then slowly, slowly morphs into a self-indulgent, surreal and painfully slow endurance test. It still looks great, but if I want to see something that just looks good I've got a mirror. Unbelievably anti-climatic ending as well, and probably deliberately so. There's a real whiff of anti-audience hostility here, or maybe its just a boring and pretentious wasted opportunity? Ultimately  I'd describe it as Terrence Malick's down-syndrome brother doing an arty remake of The Thirteenth Warrior, except much, much worse than that sounds.

I watched this film so you didnt have to. What a load of film-school c*ckwash. Instead of a rating, I've actually painstakingly recreated a far more accurate dvd cover for your education. Probably wouldnt shift as many units as the one above, but at least its not a shameless bit of blatant marketing misdirection.

I LIKE...FILUMS

Right I've a few to get  through here, and surprisingly these are a fine bunch of movies, I'm going to be nice and complimentary to them and their creators, so shut your f**king facehole and let me get on with it.

KICK ASS
Entertaining and surprisingly violent black comedy about mentally unstable vigilantes and mobsters  kicking off. Kickass himself is a curly haired demi-nerd with an drearily unremarkable homelife and a rep as a bit of a gay, which ironically endears him to his love interest, who's apparently just come out of the closet as an bereft fag hag. After a few ill-fated encounters with low-level bad lads where KA gets a good shoe-ing he becomes a massive t'internet sensation, attracting the attention of  both the local evil crime lord and Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, who do what he does...just a lot better and with added dismemberment and heavy weapons.

There's a few things I don't like about this movie...the mildly annoying soundtrack with its focus-group-derived songs, the jetpack moment (which brought back deeply repressed and traumatic memories of Robocop 3...MAKE IT STOP) but it's funny, never boring, Hit-Girl has some awesome gun-kata-esque moves and I'm giving it two thumbs up. Until some hollywood bell-end decides to get their thumb out of their arsehole and bring Marshall Law to the big screen this is probably the best mildly-subversive black comedy superhero beat em up type thing you are gonna get. Anyway if the Daily Mail dont like it, that should be recommendation enough.  Christopher Tookey...you appalling c**t!

SOLOMON KANE
How bad was Van Helsing? That's right, it was so bad that if you got got close enough to the screen you could actually feel it trying to suck your balls. Superficially this looks a little similar to the untrained eye, but if you can bother training your eyes to be a little less retarded, then you will see this has got a lot more going for it. Even though the main guy does actually resemble a stunted version of Hugh Jackman.

 I had never heard of Solomon Kane before, it's a character written by Robert E Howard, who created Conan, was mates with HP Lovecraft and ended up eating a bullet after a life of prolonged depression. Solomon Kane is a cursed ex-pirate/buccaneer/murderer type who battles demonic forces in muddy 17th century Somerset (!!!!!) Takes itself very seriously but looks great, some good action scenes (forget about the xbox-type demon at the end though) and I'll always have time for a hero with a wurzel accent.

SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND: THE REST OF IT
By Jupiter's c**k!! So its finally ended, and I have to say with it the finest saturday-morning-hungover-illegal-download-watching ever. Mad, mental and the rest, but finally came out triumphant after gravely inauspicious beginnings. The first couple of episodes are just a hazy, vaguely cringeworthy memory, and this crude and ballsy festival of ultraviolence, back-stabbing bastardly behaviour and nudey men and women finished up as a compulsive, shocking and ridiculously addictive alternative to whatever shite you are currently watching. A second season seemed inevitable, but now indefinitely delayed as apparently the actor playing Spartacus has got The Cancer!  :(  Bad tidings...kick its ass man, kick its f**king ass and get back on screen knobbing ludicrously attractive slave women and mangling Romans in ludicrously graphic ways.

IP Man 2
I liked Ip Man 1. It was a stylish turn-of-the-century beat-em-up about Bruce Lee's teacher and his early life and struggle against Evil Imperialistic Japanese Invaders. IPM2 is actually more of the same, except Ip has relocated to Hong Kong, wheres he's now pitted against Evil Imperialistic Brit Invaders. As before, Donnie Yen plays Ip Man as a genuinely nice laid-back bloke who just happens to have the ability to reduce your face and limbs to strawberry jam in a matter of nanoseconds. This time Donnie faces off against some the local Hong Kong masters and primarily a pantomime end-of-level baddie in the form of a cartoonishly evil "western" world champion boxer. The english speaking actors are so ropy it drags the film down from the level of the first, but its still well worth a look. Great fight scenes, especially the one between Ip and the procession of auld fellas on the table.

The Book Of Eli
Denzel Washington. Post-apocalyptic western. Guns. Swords. Bibles. Good post-pub undemanding stuff, but think a movie version of the late great David Gemmell's Jerusalem Man would cover very similar ground (but much more interestingly)

I've also got Alice In Wonderland, but I'm not really arsed watching another "quirky" burton/depp/elfman threeway so f**k off and watch it yourself.

THE PACIFIC - first 8 episodes

 If you are a man then you know that Band of Brothers is quite possibly the greatest TV series ever filmed. If you don't think that, well just pull on your tampon string for a bit and allow me a moment of internet-based reverence... It even had Ross from friends in it, playing an absolute arse, and still managed to turn in 10 hours of pure cinematic-quality war-gold. It's inevitable that The Pacific is going to held up to this ludicrously high standard, and after the first 8 hours...reign in your expectations a wee bit men. It's good, very good...but...not truly great. At least...not yet.

Bad points? The first 4 episodes are just disappointing. Early on...some night-based combat where you can see F**K ALL. It  rains. A lot. They get bad bladders and worse feet. An entire episode where the soldiers go on leave. They have a few drinks and get some sugar from the local lasses. All well and good but this is about WAR. Watching soldiers courting and enjoying a bit of craic is like watching a porno where after some minor foreplay the fluffer and the stud wander off set for some mixed bean salad while the boobenomically enhanced star who had previously been tentatively gobbling crank has a quick game of Fruit Mystery on her lube-flecked iphone. BoB managed to build character and develop relationships without ever leaving the theatre of combat. But when The Pacific finally hits its strides around episode 5 it throws its cast into a hellish combat-based cement mixer that makes most of BoB look like a rather genteel pensioners' disagreement about lawn-bowling.

The ferocious and little-known battle for Pelieu is where things start to get really nasty. The body count is immense, the marine vs japanese warfare is truly medieval at times. And each episode just gets better and better, leading up to a seemingly restrained episode 8, which concentrates on an almost forgotten earlier character...and ends up by throwing him into a jaw-dropping 10-15 minute abbatoir-like battle sequence based on the landings on Iwo Jima. The final two episodes will deal with the biggest battle of the entire pacific war at Okinawa...it looks incredible. If only it hadnt started off so comparitively weakly - but perhaps it was the escalating scale of the war in the pacific itself that gave it that particular narrative direction...so if you start watching it, don't bail after the first few episodes, it gets infinitely better, and you can flick pebbles into my exposed brain and roast me with a flamethrower if that aint so.

Clash of the Titans - Pegas-arse

What a load of Tit(an)s! I still have fond memories of the 1981 original - Jim Morrison and a robot owl beating up on some of the late great Ray Harryhausen's offspring, not his children, that would be abuse - but I imagine it probably hasnt dated well, and I'm in no rush to find out. Some things are best left in the past, like hirsute porn and that girl you fancied in college. That's right...she got real old. So...the beefcake from avatar spurred on by unimpressive gods played by proper actors who clearly need a new kitchen/agent take on a mob of CGI'd endangered species who have for blatant box-office reasons been shoehorned into clumsy 3d for the easily pleased masses.

Medusa's quite hot....dont know about stone, but certainly capable of inducing some form of rigidity into manly viewers. It might be worth a watch on dvd if you are feeling charitable and bored, but after being irreversibly corrupted by Spartacus:Blood Agus Sand, when I see armoured men legging it around with large bladed weapons I'm expecting excessive gore and oiled breasts so it all seems a bit floaty and almost Harry "pay to watch me learn to act" Potter to me. In fairness, it's not aspiring to be high art, its just throwaway fire-and-forget fodder, but rent it on dvd if you must. Just not worth braving the sticky floors and gibbering termites infesting your local fleapit for.

Human Centipede : When good surgery goes bad

The Human Centipede - Sequence One

Alright let's get the synopsis out of the way. It's so out there that even typing it makes me worry about my tenuous grip on reality. Far Beyond Mental german surgeon gets his hands on a couple of annoying american girls and a shouty jap and uses them to create his dream project...an apparently 100% medically accurate(!) and rather invasive procedure involving the three of them being skin-grafted together arse-to-mouth to create a, well, human centipede.

Alright so. Strange thing is, as soon as your brain stops screaming and you just watch the movie, its actually quite an enjoyable mad b-grade thriller. In fact it's very similar to Stephen Kings Misery, if you just exchange James Caan for a screaming japanese man with two women hanging out of his hole. The acting's brutal of course but it all looks good, it's actually not gratuitously graphic and it's so defiantly bizarre that I'm actually going to recommend it.