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Welcome to our Movies and Visual Media area. We shall try to keep up with the latest big screen and little screen antics, especially any related to games and stuff that is just... cool! WARNING! May not be suitable for under 16's

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE - something about "payback" and "bitches"

The original ISOYG was a strange and nasty thing, one of those poster children of the ludicrous 80's "video nasties" era. Always seemed to be I Spit on Your Grave or the equally colourful-sounding Driller Killer being held up as some tenuous cinematic evidence of society's screaming descent into debauched anarchy. It's a peculiar movie, a bit schizo and clumsy and not as effective as the similarly themed "Last House on the Left" which also dealt with rapey violence and revenge. It really is a great title though..big improvement on "Day of The Woman", and a major influence on Gi-Bag Studios' first feature "I SPIT ON YOUR GRAN"...(not coming to a theatre near you soon)



Last House on the Left got its reboot last year complete with exploding microwaved heads, so here's its grimy cousin, all shiny and remade and probably getting Daily Mail readers' Complaining Fingers twitching just looking at the title. It's not giving anything away to say the movie is basically 50% woman being horribly abused and penetrated, 50% bloody vengeance and 10% vague social commentary. But we're not here to discuss maths, let's get down to this movie's grim and angry content.It's hard to actively enjoy a film like this, the first half is just unpleasant but does do a good job in raising old testament feelings of righteous wrath in the viewer.The victim is a bland but inoffensive hottie stranded in deliverance country (drops her phone down the toilet) who gets graphically abused by a clot of horrible redneck scum...but  as she goes about her avenging angel routine in the second half the viewers' cathartic cheers of "you go girl!" will probably be gradually replaced by mutterings of "eh...steady on..." as she morphs unconvincingly into a sadistic rape-spawned nicer-arsed version of Jigsaw.



 She'd be scarier as a blank faced automaton with a stanley knife, not a sneering fishhook-toting serial killer constructing elaborate and unlikely bespoke deathtraps. And yeah, someone gets their willy cut off with shears and stuck in their mouth, as you'd expect. The acting's functional at best, the effects are fine (except  I saw some cg blood during the "crow" scene..not happy about that..) The cinematography is grainy and strangely bleached looking..although that could have been the quality of the illegal  particular copy I was viewing...ultimately it's well put together and does its ugly work effectively but you'll probably get more out of it if youre the kind of person who  genuinely thinks rapists should be castrated. And if you think that maybe you should f**k off to Saudi Arabia or summat. Before I f**king rape you.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

I SAW THE DEVIL







After the chimps-with-cameras bloodsoaked willyfest that was Life And Death of a Porno Gang it's a sort of relief to get back to "normal" movies, even if the one in question is a brutally violent and merciless korean serial killer pic. If I was to say "Kim Ji-woon" to you you'd probably just stare at me blankly or just say "no thanks I'm not hungry" but you might get a little more animated if i mentioned he's the director of the  highly creepy horror Tale of Two Sisters (remade reasonably as The Uninvited) the awesome gangster epic A Bittersweet Life and the highly entertaining wild west themed The Good, The Bad and the Weird. I Saw The Devil sees him jump fearlessly to yet another genre and own it effortlessly. This is a grim and nasty serial killer vs cop revenge piece with an bizarre plot twist half way through...Rubber-faced octopus botherer  Choi Min Sik plays a truly loathsome femicidal murderc**t who spends his leisure time picking off stray women with a crowbar until he picks the wrong victim..the fiance of the cop hero.




 I dont want to give anything away here...one of the main strengths of this film is its unpredictability and athletic plot gyrations - but suffice to say the cop tracks the killer down less than halfway into the movie...but he doesnt kill him, or bring him in...






Like any of the director's previous films I Saw The Devil looks spectacularly beautiful and is masterfully put together, the performances range from adequate to scary and the violence levels are ramped extremely high...there's one multiple-victim stabbing frenzy in a speeding car that has to be seen to be believed, and some horrible testicle vs hammer and tendon vs scalpel action. It's nearly 2 and a half hours long but the time passes in an OTT screaming blur and it's highly, highly recommended...if you have the stomach for it.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Life and Death of a Porno Gang - Definitely not coming to a cinema near you soon





There's a time and a place for masturbation, gay sex, horse fellatio, goat murdering and golden showers, and that time and place was last night, in my bedroom. BOOM actually it was just on my telly because I was watching a movie. What kind of movie? Well, it's only the second serbian film ive ever seen, and considering the excesses of the first one and my description of this one, well, the Serbian Tourism Board must be s***ing thermselves. You can expect a degree of taboo-busting with a title like "Life and Death of a Porno Gang" or LADOPORG as I'll be calling it, but so much grimness! It's nasty stuff.






 The story's not a million miles away from its already-infamous balkan sibling...porno-performers get caught up in creating snuff for a mentalist mentor...but the executions vastly different. Compared to Serbian Film's slick cinematography and overall technical polish, this is a rough, crude and grainy cheap beast of a thing. Looks like it was shot on home video, but the (apparently non-professional) actors do a pretty good job, considering the kind of shenanigans they have to engage in. More penises than a Spencer Tunick exhibition. I've already explained the premise, the plots fairly functional and is probably a bit true to life...the main character is a film director, he wants to make pretentious horror flicks with weird sex deviant shite...oh hang on that does seem to describe LADOPORG pretty well. So this lad and a motley crue of gays, transvestites and weirdoes go on the road, travelling from town to town with a f**ked up hardcore burlesque style show, until they run into an old german weirdo who proposes they take the next step in on-stage extremity...Considering the microbudget the special effects are wince-inducingly realistic, the crummy film stock and wobblycam probably accentuate the realism in fairness.






 There's a scene where one of the character watches a "war machete decapitation" video...I've seen a few of these actual f**kin things out of sheer morbid curiosity on the net and I genuinely wish I hadnt...I think the one in the movie isnt real...but it looks it! There's also a goat getting its throat cut with a penknife and that actually looks real as well. C**ts!! LADOPORG is obviously doing -something- right if even me, Master Gi-Bag is unsure exactly what the f**k is real or not. It's not an enjoyable experience at at - for all its excesses, Serbian Film could actually be viewed and "enjoyed" as a truly dark horror-thriller - but this is a stomach churning, pretentious and artily grim affair that'll you'll not watch more than once, assuming you make it all the way to the student-movie ending. There are probably deep levels to this movie that a non-balkan simpleton like myself can't fathom - political allegory, social commentary, the scars of war wounded communities and a traumatised nation bleeding onto the screen  - but it all get buried in a piss-soaked avalanche of screaming goats and gay horse penises.


Thursday, January 13, 2011

Scott Pilgrim vs the World vs master gi-bag

I'm a child of the 80-90's computer game scene. Michael Cera will always have a page in my good book through the peerless Arrested Development. I quite enjoyed Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Yet why does this self-referential, self-indulgent, annoyingly alt opus by Edgar Wright not light my candles? Oh yeah...for all those reasons. Apparently it's been a bit of a flop and it's quite easy to see why. There's one thing to have a movie that nonchalantly pays affectionate homage to old computer game tropes and 16-bit landmarks but this f**king thing is like watching someone else staring at some frowning emo knobhead playing with their nintendo while two italian plumbers rub their oily hands all over your body, a tiny blue hedgehog rapes your face and a tiny green elf thing with pointy ears rams a blunt looking sword down your urethra. It's just too much of everything. Its like, quirky, man.


I'm a demi-geek, but this movie made me feel insufferably superior and simultaneously joyless. I can see how it might click with easy-pleased obscure game-pop reference spotters out there, but when we have this avalanche of wanky computer game jizz splattered over a tedious teen romance centered on the eternally pre-pubic confused-avian-featured Cera and his tiresomely left-of-centre muse....the whole thing just hangs together like a down sydrome clown thats just fallen through a skylight into an electrified chandelier. It's messier than Reaper's underpants.



 It's bloody headache inducing, its way too long, it has a cheaply malleable narrative reality that treats the viewer like some kind of bizarre passive experimental test subject and I just fail to see what level it really works at....as comedy I think I got a handful of reluctant smirks, as an action adventure it's not fit to lick Kick-Asses homemade boots and as a teeny romance it's just plain interminable watching the gormless and one-note Scott pursuing his slap-provokingly emo amore.There's even a resident gay in there to drop in witty asides and dry oneliners but its feels like a filmaker just  f**king everything at the wall, overediting it mercilessly and hoping something will stick. It's a load of sound, color and just stuff signifying not a lot more than nothing and definitely one for the love it or hate it camp. Self-indulgent just doesnt cover it. I hope Michael Cera goes on to other things, he seems an amiably limited sort even if he now resembles a half-formed replicant version of Beck who will never be able to grow facial hair. Onward and upward George Michael Bluth, I'm still in your corner bro but you need to up your game yeah?

DREAM HOME - house plice clash


Give me a break, I havent watched a filum for ages, there's been the square root of f**k all worth downloading for free renting hence me catching up on some TV based stuff (Boardwalk Empire....gangster-based shenanigins, started well but became a bit interminable...and The Walking Dead... But suddenly loads of movies just started to, well, materialise on my hard drive again. So I watched them. I'll skip Big Boob Oil Orgy ("a masterpiece") and get straight on to Dream Home.


In these troubled times where vast sums of missing theoretical money are threatening to reduce entire nations to  wastelands of baby-eating derelicts its nice to have the option of a bit of escapism, so why not kick off with a heartwarming tale of a woman who gets driven mental by contrary apartment sellers in Hong Kong and decides to murder a whole load of people in extremely graphic ways to lower property prices? That's the plot yeah...says at the start its Based On A True Story but I suspect that may be bollix.



It's a bit confusing to follow as the narrative jumps arounds randomly but really, it's a CAT III hong kong gore flick so don't feel too guilty if the narratives multiple layers remain enigmatic, you'll probably be too busy wincing at the excessive disembowelings, eye-poppings, castrations and general splattery mayhem to care. It's probably the grisliest thing I've seen since the brilliant À l'intérieur. But nowhere near as good. It's also strangely slapstick and I think is actually meant to be a very black comedy. Worth a watch....hey, what's negative equity compared to having a broken plank of wood rammed repeatedly down your oesophagus? 

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

2010 - line em up and knock em down!

I know it's late! JE SUIS EN RETARD, as they say in Rome. What do you mean, where have I been? Where have YOU been fatty? Real life man...well I had a lump on my balls. There. I know you've been waiting for your latest fix of movie-slandering but its hard to write a poxing movie review when you are awkwardly microwaving your testicles because some idiot on the internet said it was a good way to reduce nodular swelling. So I had to go to the doctor...needless to say I threw a rod as soon as the rubber gloves came out so as I sit here in Casa de Gi-bag with a overwhelming sense of toe curling humiliation, new year trepidation and a severely burnt penis I ask you...were 2010's crop of films even worse that 2009?

Of course they were. Maybe. Let have a look.

FILM OF THE YEAR - KICKASS / TOY STORY 3


To be honest, the best entertainment this year was on TV. There was the Walking Dead (good, but too short), Boardwalk Empire (good, but too long) The Pacific (veered wildly between awesome and merely average) and Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which was f**king amazingly enjoyable. I'd give Spartacus my gold medal for this year right away but as its not an actual movie lets go with...
A tie. Kickass - funny, violent and unexpected. TS3 - Unsurprisingly excellent. Pixar are still the big dog.

WORST MOVIE - SHITEMARE ON ELM STREET


I could list some cheapo sleaze like Header or amateurish tat like Birdemic, but I'm actually going to go with the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, which was about as necessary and welcome as an erection in a creche. Lazy, clumsy and generally just unbelievably cynical. Shameful. The whole remake/reboot thing is really starting to wear me down now.


MOST OVERRATED MOVIE - INCEPTION
Hang on...I'm not saying it was bad...it was of course pretty good. But it really is a shocking state of affairs when  there is actually only one "intelligent" blockbuster all year, and as a result its by default everyone's fav flick. Cool effects, interesting plot, awesome soundtrack but just didnt quite scale the heights for me. And I'm sick of Leonardo de Caprios frown and tiny mouth.

RUNNER-UP - BLACK SWAN
Strange, disjointed and pretentious psychomological thriller thing about obsession, ballet and lesbiany stuff. A strange but suitable companion piece to The Wrestler, which also seemed to get excessive critical mileage out of handheld camerawork and overwrought performances. Maybe Professional Wresting and Ballet have more in common than fans of either would like to admit.

And as an addendum to that...
SCARIEST WOMAN OF THE YEAR
Well now I dont know if you remember Barbara Hershey as the comely ghost-raped milf from The Entity but she's the mom in Black Swan....brrrr. TOO MUCH SURGERY BARBARA YOU CAT-FACED REVENANT

GOLDEN SICKBAG AWARD


Serbian Film - Well made but whoa, come on lads. Harsh...genuinely harsh. Extremely unpleasant but made by people with genuine if dark talent and massive potential.
Human Centipede - Twisted concept gets it a mention here, but the movie itself wasnt as OTT as suggested. Think of it as Misery with added arse to mouth action.

Eh...thats it...