REAPER MOVIES

BBFC BANS HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2

2011-06-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

If you've seen the original Human Centipede then you're aware that it really wasnt "that" bad...it suggested more than it actually showed and was a mildly entertaining laugh on it's own deeply wrong terms. However it looks like something has gone a bit mental with the sequel...read on...

This new work, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), tells the story of a man who becomes sexually obsessed with a DVD recording of the first film and who imagines putting the 'centipede' idea into practice. Unlike the first film, the sequel presents graphic images of sexual violence, forced defecation, and mutilation, and the viewer is invited to witness events from the perspective of the protagonist.Whereas in the first film the 'centipede' idea is presented as a revolting medical experiment, with the focus on whether the victims will be able to escape, this sequel presents the 'centipede' idea as the object of the protagonist's depraved sexual fantasy.

The principal focus of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is the sexual arousal of the central character at both the idea and the spectacle of the total degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder of his naked victims. Examples of this include a scene early in the film in which he masturbates whilst he watches a DVD of the original Human Centipede film, with sandpaper wrapped around his penis, and a sequence later in the film in which he becomes aroused at the sight of the members of the 'centipede' being forced to defecate into one another's mouths, culminating in sight of the man wrapping barbed wire around his penis and raping the woman at the rear of the 'centipede'. There is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience. There is a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure. It is the Board's conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character's obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.

Well there you go, sounds like a f**king laugh riot.

WE HAVE MOVED LOCATION!!!

2011-06-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

Calling all Reaper Heads!! We have moved location to www.REAPERGAMING.com - There will be no more posts here on this Blog site - Its Dead! Please reset bookmarks and do please continue to follow us at the new location - its better but still the same!

Los Ojos De Julia - EYES EYES BABY

2011-05-31T14:50:00.000-07:00

Genuinely spooky spanish psycho thriller from the guy who brought you The Orphanage, again midwifed by the obesely talented Guileermo Del Toro. Julia's Eyes...qué es acerca de? Well, like "My Left Foot", "The Man with Two Brains" or "Hung" It's exactly what it says on the tin. A bit like ronseal. Except in this case its not a tin of petroleum-based varnish, but instead a tin full of...eyes. Eyes going....bad. Julia has a degenerative disease which is slowly eroding her eyesight. Her twin sister had the same malady and came to a unfortunate end, but something about this seems wrong to our optically challenged heroine, who starts to delve into matters suspicious.

Beautifully shot, superb performances and just a little overlong, but well worth a look. It's gripping and mostly bloodless BUT - much like The Orphanage and its grim van vs old woman scene - when its decides to get graphic, well there's some rather unsavoury kitchen knife stabbery followed by a bit of eyeball violence that had even me, a man with ice in his blood and fire in his pants, grimacing, turning away and examining the backs of my hands for few seconds (quite hairy) The premise of gradual blindness is creepy enough, and fused with a mysterious, almost supernatural malevolent character lurking in the shadows...brrr. The ending is strange...bleak, downbeat but oddly uplifting. The main performance by Belen Rueda (who also starred in The Orphanage), is quite stunning, and that's high praise indeed coming from someone who doesnt normally see actors as much more than mobile set dressing.

So if you fancy a trip to your local fleapit this week....Check out Los Ojos De Julia. So much more worthy of your time and hard earned moolah than some mong-pleasing tat like The Hangover 2. You'll probably see that instead, and that's why I'm writing this while you're sitting at home in your pants with a uneasy sense of self loathing.

THE WILD HUNT - Get your geek on

2011-05-17T16:06:00.000-07:00

LARPing. That is today's acronym-derived verb. And what is "to LARP"? It stands for Live Action Role Playing and involves people gathering together at weekends and dressing up as vikings, elves or vampires and acting out a loosely defined ever-shifting scenario with dungeons and dragons style rules to govern its development. Er. To be fair it sounds shockingly uncool even for a t'internet movie geek like myself but, really, is it any worse than dressing up in military khakis and running around with a paintball gun, or dressing up as a sexy nun at halloween, or going to a murder mystery party,...alright it is worse. If you have ever stood downwind of a Games Workshop or accidentally wandered horrorstruck into a comics convention you may have a rather uncharitable preconcieved notion of the kind of human who would be drawn to LARPing but...well at least they arent f**king furries.

It's a strange little world, and incomprehensible to those outside it, and The Wild Hunt doesnt really make any narrative concessions to outsiders. It's a simple, lowly of budget tale about a massive LARPy event in the canadian woods and a number of hairy men fighting over an undeniably beautiful but also backhand-provokingly irritable girl.

The roleplayers are a motley crue divided into knights (arthurian yeomen, probably IT workers in real life) elves (tolkienesque pointy eared lesbians) Vikings (bearded shoutymen, resemble unemployed fishermen) and the Celts (facepainted barbarians, look like sinister grindcore fans) Glib descriptions aside, there's a good mix of character types in here, they arent all malodorous endomorphs and the director is clearly aware of the inherent ridiculousness of the LARP concept still while managing to treat the characters seriously. The majority of the movie is mildly amusing and trundles along agreeably at a sedate pace until a rather shocking and unexpected downbeat climax that changes the film's entire tone.

By the hammer of Odin! It's well shot, solidly acted and if it seems a little overlong even at a mere eighty-odd minutes, the last 15 or so elevate The Wild Hunt from a "meh" to a "Hmm...not bad".

DRIVE ANGRY - a look into the fevered mind of Jeremy Clarkson as he sleep-masturbates drunk and sweating at 3am after watching a double bill of The Dukes of Hazzard and Spawn

2011-05-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

Here's another big step in Nicolas Cage's relentless quest to establish himself as the all-time A list actor with the worst resume in Hollywood history. "Awful script? Dodgy haircut? Where do I sign maaan?" ...His latest opus Drive Angry is a amazingly crude, ultraviolent action-horror shambles from Hell itself. It's got a huge body count. Terrible 3d and terrible cg. It's got classic american muscle cars for the geeky petrolheads to leer at, and the tragically sapphic Amber Heard for the rest of us. It's a grindhouse movie, if grindhouse has now become a new label for movies that you have to be at least partially drunk and a bit thick to "appreciate" properly. I'd charitably describe it as a live action adaptation of a comic book scribbled on walls by a frenzied child in a muzzle. In crayon.

The script...well can you really call people swearing at each other for 90 minutes while a vague plot meanders along behind them a script? I really imagine the writing process went something like this:

WRITER1: Dude I have to write something..I have to write some...words
WRITER2: Ehh...how about.."F**k you motherf**ker, F**k, f**k. C**t?
WRITER1: Yeah man! This writing thing is like, totally hard but also like, rewarding?
WRITER2: Dont forget bro, lots of boobs man. Heh...boobs
WRITER1: Uh huh huh huh huh. Boobs!

There's no point being snobby about it though. As long as a movie like Drive Angry delivers enough gratuitous gore and naked women to keep my chimplike inner 16 year old grinning spastically and feeling himself through his pants then I can forgive a lot.

The plot is...immortal badass Cage escapes from Hell and drives around angrily killing lots of ugly people while looking for a baby and listening to a sub-skynyrd soundtrack. He's tooled up with some legendary shotgun, paired up with a hot blond and tailed by a supernatural repo man figure. Despite me slagging it off for nearly this entire review, it is actually highly enjoyable, even though (or maybe because) it's so adolescently hyper it makes Crank2 look like The Remains of the Day.

I dont understand the closing credits sequence though. It appears they ran out of money and just decided to stick a cat on a skateboard and roll it slowly down a road with a camera on its head. Why?

SUPER - A New Kind of Hero. Again.

2011-04-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

Here I am again to save you from having to watch any more Balding Part-time Helicopter Pilot Marries Grateful Commoner With Good Bone Structure...HE'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU KATE, MARRY ME INSTEAD, A 37 YEAR OLD MAN WHO REVIEWS MOVIES ON THE INTERNET Anyway, yeah, there seems to be a few wannabee superhero/vigilante movie bobbing about at the mo. There’s obviously Kick-Ass, then there's the lamentable Defendor, Some Kind of Hero and now Super. It’s not unusual for Hollywood to spontaneously cannibalise itself and belch out multiple variations on a suspiciously similar theme…and it’s understandable for an ideas-poor industry currently in a frenzy of reboots to jump on a relatively fresh concept like dogs on bacon. So does Super fly high like a triumphant Christopher Reeves, or stumble badly like a drunk homeless man with a cape made of binbags?

The storyline is almost exactly the same as Kickass. Just change Kickass from a dweeby student with a punchable demeanor to a thirty-something sad sack with serious mental problems. His wife gets seduced and stolen away by a dessicated Kevin Bacon Druglord and he subsequently has some kind of meltdown involving hentai tentacles and gets reborn as an inept super-vigilante called Crimson Bolt. Paired with tidy sidekick Boltie (Ellen Page channeling a homicidal unpregnant version of Juno) Crimson Bolt declares hostilities on crime, with suitably painful and disconcertingly real life consequences. Much as it bears narrative similarities to Kick-ass this is a far darker and less crowd pleasing affair. You’ll not see any jetpacks here. It's written and directed by James Gunn, whose chequered cv includes the Dawn of the Dead remake and both Scooby Doo movies. Hmm.

I was prepared to dislike this movie and the first half hour just seems a bit quirky and laboured but it gets better as it goes on, a lot better. It's crude, shockingly violent at times and I wish they had used a f**kin tripod a bit more but...I liked it a lot. Wannabee superheroes need to watch Super...fighting crime aint all bulging codpieces and ironic self-depreciation you know.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec - NE VOUDRAIS PAS

2011-04-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

Hello, how was your easter? Did you enjoy loads of chocolate or does your skin always look like that? No chocolate for me, only sun...lots of sun. And now have a burnt neck. And a burnt leg. But so what? I'm burnt, you're ugly, but we've got movies to review, so tais-toi!

So let's begin with the directorial return of Luc Besson. The man who brought us Leon and The Fifth Element has been a bit quiet of late, doing the odd bit of producing and writing but hasn't really bothered his french arse with directing since the critical immolation of Joan of Arc, a vanity project for the aesthetically pleasing but dramatically limited Mrs Besson, and a few poxy kids films. So whats this...thing?

The confused story has the extremely good looking Adele Blanc-Sec and a swath of deeply ugly men gurning, twitching and shouting their way through a muddle of CG pterodactyls, amiable mummies and "hilarious" japes as the heroine tries to jailbreak some old coot who can resurrect some egyptian pharaoh who can cure her brainlocked sister. So what are Adele's good points?

1. It looks great. But then that's a given for A film de Luc Besson.
2. She (albeit briefly) gets le tits and le derriere out. Viva la France!
2. She's not THE Adele whose pie-hungry whalesong is constantly dribbling out of the radio like the fat-streaked jism from a randy hippo's penis while boring people say "She's got a really good voice doesn't she?"

D'accord, now what are her not-so-good points?
1. Annoying. The whole movie is plagued with really, really annoying pantomime acting accentuated by horrendously twee music cues.
2. Doesnt have much in the way of le plot, it really doesnt.
3. On the one hand it seems like a film for french 10 year olds, on the other theres a bit of nudity and a rather unsavoury accident involving a hairpin and a brain, and its nearly 2 hours long. Who is this for, exactly?

I'm a massive fan of french cinema, primarily because of the recent crop of merciless horror films such as Maryrs and the amazing L'Interiour but this is just a silly gallic version of The Mummy. With tits!

GAME OF THRONES - We're not in middle earth any more

2011-04-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

"It's Boromir! shouted Frodo in delight as a familiar shape lumbered out of the forest. Liv Tyler lowered her magic bow and breathed a sigh of relief. Samwise stopped eating and mumbled hello to the approaching man, spraying wet crumbs over the soggy ground. Frodo ran up to Boromir shouting about magic rings and walking trees and giant eagles and wizards and trolls and elves and.... Boromir looked at him in silence. Then in one smooth movement his hand fell to his sword hilt, there was a blur and the babbling hobbit's body exploded, fingers and hairy feet scattering across the red ground. A curly head dropped into Sam's lap. His eyes bulged and he began to scream, then vomited half-digested magic elf bread over frodo's glassy eyed face. He tried to stumble to his feet while pulling out a clumsy sword but collapsed and promptly impaled himself through the groin. He rolled onto his back shrieking and convulsing like a dung beetle having an epileptic fit.

Boromir watched this impassively, then in five long strides was at Liv Tylers side as she stared aghast at the hobbity carnage. "Why Boromir? What has brought thou to such fell deeds?" she screamed. Boromir glared at her. "My name is Eddard Stark" He spat. One gauntleted fist lashed out and Liv Tyler found herself facedown in the mud gasping. "I've no idea oo this bormar is, but i dunt like sound of im, and i dunt like these f**king shortarses either." he announced. He then reached down and ripped off Liv Tylers bodice and skirt in one manly movement, revealing her royal elvish arse. Eddard Stark chuckled and began to unbuckle his codpiece."And now I'm going to right rape you, by 'eck. With m'penis." He added.

Liv Tyler moaned..what was going on...this kind of thing never happened in middle earth...help me jrr tolkein...help me...

HBO's latest Big Budget tv epic Game of Thrones, based on the fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice (clearly a slightly too geeky title) I'm a bit conflicted by fantasy fiction in general, but this first episode has already shown it stands well apart from a limited genre dominated by the impressively detailed but dramatically subpar scribblings of JRR Tolkien. Game of Thrones has been heralded as The Sopranos in Middle Earth, which I dont really see, its got a lot more in common with something like Rome. Disembowelings, naked women, bold language. Theres no c**ting hobbits having second breakfasts or motherf**king camp aryan elves singing songs and washing their hair...there IS a dwarf, but seeing as his introductory scene involves him having his crank gobbled by some large-breasted strumpet we'll allow G.O.T a vertically challenged protagonist. It's not exactly that fat f**k Gimli is it?

I'll try not to give too much away. The pre-credits sequence is more like a horror movie than some kind of rum sword and sorcery romp...dismembered body parts, decapitation, scary creatures that vaguely resemble the uber-orcs from The Lord of The Rings. Followed by a stunning credit sequence. Very cool. The rest is a muddy and dark medieval intro to the main players in Game of Thrones and there's a fair few of them. Sean Bean's the main man here, didnt recognise anyone else. It all looks stunning and theres enough rugged man-hugging, blood, midgets, incest, sexual politics and paedocide to keep even the most jaded viewer engaged.

I have say I'm highly impressed...I think this will be huge. I just hope it doesnt go the way of Boardwalk Empire which started off with a cracking first episode but then slowed right down and just plodded along in a vaguely interesting way for another 10 hours. Recommended, and looking forward to seeing where this goes. Winter is coming, I tell thee...

THE CANDY SHOP - mmm....children

2011-04-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Earrrgh! Someone said the road to hell is paved with good intentions…now, I don’t know what that means exactly. So that intro ends…here. So lets just say, sometimes you have to be cruel to the kind. Thats not a typo. The Candy Shop is apparently a shout out for a child welfare society...slagging it off makes me feel like I’m kicking a baby giraffe repeatedly in the teeth but what can I do. Master Gi-Bag is no charity (but am certainly open to bribes) In its favour, first is the “good intention”. Apparently, Atlanta, Georgia is swarming with more kiddy fiddlers than the Royal Junior Philharmonic International Orchestra and child sex trafficking is huge sweaty business. This..short film…is a way to draw attention to it. It’s also free to view here. Can't help thinking that a team of undercover police midgets could solve this scourge in a matter of days but what do I know about procedural police investigation?

Ok now onto the negative bits. I’m not quite sure how to kick this off but it’s REALLY BAD. Nearly as bad as rampant child buggery. The story involves a badly-acting child actor getting involved with a creepy, sub-willy wonka sweetshop owner who's somehow involved with a spate of missing ankle-biters. As a crude allegory, The Candy Shop's heart is in the right place but everything else (especially the brain) manifestly is not, a bit like one of those telepodded baboons in The Fly.

It looks good, technically it’s put together beautifully on a limited budget, but there’s no way around an awful script with fist-bitingly bad dialogue, amateurish performances and brutal direction. It’s just a very very very stupid idea. Wait till you see The Machine. You’ll understand. Anyway, go on their website…maybe, together, we can stand up, raise our voices and put a stop to the hidden crime of child sex trafficking. Forever.

And then there won’t be a f**king Candy Shop 2.

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN - PUMP ACTION BUM ACTION

2011-04-09T05:18:00.000-07:00

"Spare change sir? A pound? 50p? Even 20p?" The homeless was staring at me, mouldy hand outstretched, watery eyes bulging madly like Reaper's underpants. I reluctantly handed over the dough and glared at him malevolently. 5 minutes later I saw him chatting on a mobile phone. I'm not Larry David so didnt confront him with some aggressive but amusing rhetoric about whether he was an blackberry or an iphone guy, but kept it festering inside me until getting home, turning on my puter, logging into Reaper Movies and typing:
"GIVE MY 20p BACK YOU PIKEY C**T"

But lets not get bogged down with random encounters with a homeless that might have a better mobile phone/disposable income/sex life than me and turn our poached-egg pikey eyes to HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN, a frankly mental grime-gore vigilante pic created by the winner of a "create your own grindhouse ad" competition. Heres his winning entry, and well, if you like this you'll love the full length movie. Rutger Hauer is the titular Hobo, running amok in a dystopian sh*thole that makes Robocop's Detroit look like the Eleysian Fields.

There's clearly a limited budget here but it works in its favour, the film influences are clearly grainy grindhouse sleaze...its garish colours, whiplash camerawork and splatter made me think of those mad japanese bio-mechanical DTV gore pics like Tokyo Gore Police and Meatball Machine. Apart from our man Rutger who carries himself with a slightly unhinged dignity the rest of the cast are irritatingly over the top and get saddled with dialogue so crude its just distracting.

Other than that....great fun, hilariously mean spirited, inventively graphic and any movie with a bus load of children being torched by a mentalist with a flamethrower gets a charred, wobbly thumbs up from me.

HATCHET 2 - AXE AND YOU SHALL RECIEVE

2011-04-09T04:54:00.000-07:00

The original "Hatchet" was a mildly entertaining 80's style slasher with some nifty OTT kills and a scorchingly hot female lead. Nothing special, but agreeably old school splatter. It was an admirable calling card for newbie director Adam Green (currently spending a lot of time on twitter moaning about people stealing his movies via the internet. They probably wouldnt have heard about your movies without the internet, guy. Anyway I bought Frozen after downloading it for free, so f**k you in the ear Adam Green)

So how is this sequel to a homage to a traditionally highly derivative genre?

A big let down after the excellent "Frozen", which was a genuinely sharp and well-crafted survival horror thriller, and inferior to the not exactly awesome original...but does have Ministry's "Just One Fix" as its title music. No real reason for it to be there and its a bit jarring but a good song is a good song. The problems are as follows:

There's too much Victor Crowley. He isnt scary, he looks like a huge mongoloid garbage pail kid. Except not as scary as that sounds.

The extremely fit girl from the first movie did actually survive, except now seems to have been replaced by a 14-year old imposter.

The first half of the movie DRAAAAAAAAAAAGS. The sole survivor from the first movie makes her way out of Crowley's swamp, wanders back to town and spends what seems like about 40 minutes trying to engineer a new platoon of Crowley Cannon Fodder back to the swamp.

Thankfully once all thats out of the way, the giant fire-damaged Chucky doll shows up, the killing starts and it's harsher, splatterier and more wince-inducing than the original. In fact the violence is really all there is. The acting is uniformly awful and the script seems to have been written mere minutes before the cameras started rolling. Ultimately a rather shoddy and rushed effort that suggests the filmakers probably had marginally more fun making it than you'll have watching what is essentially an enjoyable 20 minutes special fx gore showreel hidden in an 80 minute movie.

THE TROLL HUNTER - UNMYTHABLE

2011-03-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

God dag! Here's a strange one. Norwegian shakeycam fake-u-mentary about a bunch of film students following the titular Troll Hunter of the title. ~~WHAT DOES HE DO~~ He's an old, grizzled doublehard ex-soldier who lives in a scabby caravan and spends his working day hunting down and exterminating evil legendary beings who have strayed from their reservations in rural Norway. "Trolls! GTFO" No....it's actually pretty cool. The found footage concept is getting a bit stale now, mostly because by its naturalistic construction it's almost impossible to construct a satisfying conclusion... Just look at The Last Exorcism...a decent little flick that puts in a fine performance over 60 minutes but then suffers an epic fail at the vinegar stroke and s**t all over the bed.

Troll Hunter does suffer from this iffy climax syndrome, but cheats a bit and drops in a jokey coda at the end. It still ends pretty abruptly....once you see the BIG troll, that's the movie pretty much over, and just when it seem to be finding it feet. It does take an age to get going but when the bug-eyed film crew finally come face to face with the Trolls...awesome effects, and a whole fascinating troll ecosystem and hierarchy is uncovered. The trolls come in all sizes and several breeds, some explode when exposed to UV light, some turn to stone, they hate christians, all of them are ugly c**ts and are violent to boot. The Troll Hunter however never misses a beat, he's just doing his job, and he's pretty good at it.

The effects are excellent as noted, the CG trolls are hollywood-quality, beautifully rendered and animated and even though they look a bit like refugees from a very dark depressed period of Jim Henson's adolescence (a period of intense genital abuse and initial traumatic attempts at growing a beard) they manage to be both convincing and menacing in a mildly goofy way. They are certainly more convincing than the Trolls from The Lord of The Rings trilogy (have you watched any of these recently? Whoo they are starting to look dated) The students are only vaguely annoying, the Troll Hunter is a cool old fearless troll-slaying machine and seems to view his quarry with a strange irritated affection, the way you'd view a pet dog with extreme bowel disorder. I'd like a sequel, this is the best thing to come out of Norway since.....er.......anyway yeah tune in and watch some mythological norse creatures getting a shoeing from a hatted man with a beard, its even more fun than that sounds.

RARE EXPORTS - jingle cock and jingle balls

2011-02-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

SANTA YOU C**T When was the last time you saw a kids movie with plentiful use of the word "f**k", four hundred dead mangled reindeer and lingering shots of old men with their withered johnsons out? I'll tell you when...never! Well I suppose this isnt really a kids movie...unless the kid is one of those weird pale ones that smell weird and play with run-over dogs...but the protagonist is a wee un and most of the movie is seen through his unusual, down syndrome-bjork eyes. The premise is...Father Christmas is entombed within a Finnish mountain and a vague crew of menials are digging him out. This isnt friendly Santa, clad in coca-cola red with a bleached-sheep beard and twinkling non-paedo eyes, but something far older and a lot less benevolent. In the valley below Santa's crypt weird things are occurring, aforementioned reindeer are being mutilated and children are disappearing. One morning one of the locals finds something strange, nude and bearded in his wolf trap...It quickly becomes clear that something bad is coming...So it it any good then, is it a post christmas cracker or a bag of shiny reindeer cack?

Heres the thing....unlike Alive in Joburgs transition from youtube to mahoosive cinematic paydirt in the excellent District 9, Rare Exports has made the move a bit less successfully. It's a youtube video with a load of flabby backstory tacked on the front end. It's not bad at all, but the truly sinister image of a fat bearded man standing at the foot of a terrified child's bed still remains to be fully realised . Just watch the original. It's only 7 minutes long. Ho ho f**kin ho!

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

2011-01-26T11:42:00.000-08:00

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.

I SAW THE DEVIL

2011-01-18T11:12:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2011-01-17T11:39:00.000-08:00

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.

Scott Pilgrim vs the World vs master gi-bag

2011-01-13T14:50:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-13T14:42:00.000-08:00

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?

2010 - line em up and knock em down!

2011-01-11T15:42:00.000-08:00

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...

THE HOLE

2010-10-11T12:14:00.000-07:00

Ah look, a documentary about Reaper's favourite erogenous zone! Actually no, thankfully we'll never have to see that, this is a alleged "kids" movie by slightly twisted "Gremlins" director Joe Dante. I say alleged because if you showed this to an average child it will probably scar them irreversibly and reduce them to a twitching whimpering mess. I dont know which genius producer in Hollywood suddenly pulled his thumb out of his hole and said "you know what we f**king need? A creepy, english language surrealist hybrid of Cellar Dweller and Ringu, except for f**king kids!" but fair play to him as he obviously hates children. A single mum and her two sons (a) generic mardy teen knobhead and (b) younger, bowler-haircutted mccauly culkin clone who incidentally acts his big brother off the screen, move to a new house with a mysterious heavily bolted trapdoor in the cellar and some chirpy jailbait next door. So the door gets opened, and next thing they are up to their pubeless groins in ghost children and homicidal clown dolls.

The brothers have a pleasingly violent relationship, there's a minimum of cheese, there's some creepy moments and thankfully a lack of CGI. It has a real 80's feel. I liked it, but it loses its way in the last 20 minutes and the end is just...weak. Don't show it to your kids unless you want to spend years paying for therapy because they start screaming every time you drive past McDonalds.

MACHETE - or, "meh"chete.

2010-09-26T14:24:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

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"

2010-09-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

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.

EVEN WORSE THAN USUAL

2010-07-22T13:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quickie today luv, now get your knickers off.

2001 MANIACS - FIELD OF SCREAMS
Awful, awful, shot-on-video sequel to a not very good remake of a terrible 60's thing. Acting that isnt even inert enough to be called wooden, its actively irritating. A gang of useless cannon fodder shooting a ropey reality show run into the southern cannibal/maniac/ghost people. I think its supposed to be a comedy, and there's nothing worse than an attempted horror comedy with no laughs, no budget and strangely almost no proper gore. It actually looks like it was shot in less time than it takes to watch, which probably violates some obscure scientific principal. There are some women with their tops off and some half-hearted lesbecian action but if you are that desperate for nudey action just go here and type "lesbian boob woman". Aggh...just did that, hope you like em with some meat on their bones man.

HEADER
You might be thinking this when you hear the term "Header" but no! If youre some redneck maniac with handy access to some power tools and a grudge you'll have a different definition, namely that of drilling a hole in some poor feckers head and having sex with their brain. That's right...actual brain-f**king. All the criticisms from the movie above, except even worse, with additional cranial rape.Whats the point? Turned it off after about 30 minutes as I felt the filmakers were not only raping my brain, but writing rude messages on its facebook wall and trying to give it a wedgie. Leave my brain alone! I cant believe this is the third movie in as many months I've seen where people are getting killed by penises.

AFTERLIFE
Not be confused with the orrible Aftermath, but also set in a funeral home with all kind of post-mortem machinations. Wednesday Adams has a fight with her wetend of a boyfriend (the guy from Drag me To Hell, looks like a deranged child's drawing of Keanu Reeves) and gets involved in a car accident, wakes up in a funeral home where she finds Liam Neeson telling her that she is in fact dead. Is she dead? Or is it some kind of mental mindgame? She spends large parts of the movie naked, which will have everyone's inner paedo rubbing their grubby palms together as she still looks about 14 and in fact resembles a big nude fetus in a ginger wig and makeup. A million miles from being a classic, but compared to the previous 2 sense offenders it's David f**king Lean. At least it's got things like a proper score, cinematography, direction, editing etc. The end is really going to wind people up as well as its ambiguous to say the least.

Until the Light Takes Us - Stabby metal weirdos and their burny ways

2010-07-18T11:12:00.000-07:00

Do you remember Anvil! The Story of Anvil? Well this is nothing like that. It's a way overlong documentary about Norwegian Black Metal...just what we've all been crying out for. Now, metal in general's pretty far down the foodchain when it comes to social credibility - dont get me wrong, quite partial to a shouty blast of Dillenger Escape Plan myself from time to time - but even among the vaguely geeky, soap-dodging echelons of "the scene" the black metallers are like that kid in class who ate worms and smelt like athlete's foot. Just check out an Immortal video on youtube and witness the unholy and hilarious depths which this sub-genre plumbs. The story in UTLTU isnt funny at all though. It concerns a small clique of black metal musicians in Norway in the early 90's and their frankly bizarre descent into church burnings and homicide. Some of the interviews with the guilty parties are quite candid and provide a vaguely interesting insight into what happens when boredom and low self esteem meet bad music and f**ked up nazi/pagan ideology. The documentary is lacking elsewhere though, and would work a hell of a lot better at 50 minutes long without all the hilariously bad performance art rubbish and tuneless fisher-price keyboard soundtrack.

A Serbian Film - It's sodomy o'clock baby

2010-07-15T02:40:00.000-07:00

Well...the world cup's over. As the screams and self-flagellation of the english/french/italians fade away, its time to reflect. And... it wasnt very good. But a bad World Cup is like a bad blow job...it's still pretty goddamn good. So ditch your vuvezela, take your penis out of your cat's mouth and read the words. Which I am typing...here.

Oh dear! Well THAT was remarkably unpleasant. I am currently restraining the urge to scrub my monitor and hard drive with bleach...and maybe my eyes and soul as well. Only kidding...it's not that bad. But it's not nice either...basically, you know you are in cinematic freefall when one of the LEAST offensive kills in a movie is someone getting skullf**ked to death via their eye socket (possible opportunity for an ad campaign for specsavers here?) Serbian Film isnt a non-stop bloodbath - there are 4 or 5 scenes that are staggeringly grim - but the overall tone is just bleak, grimy and explicitly sleazy. If youve seen the trailer you know what to expect.

Retired caveman-looking porn star Milosh has two things going for him...(a) a lovely family and (b) a legendary willy. Some sick f**k producer appears out of nowhere and offers him a fortune to de-retire and appear in some conceptual porno epic which needs his supercharged penis. After a few unpleasant early on-set experiences milosh has had enough and walks...needless to say, thats not the end for him, and milosh spends most of the second half of the movie nude and up to his eyeballs in horse viagra killing or f**king pretty much anything the film crew shove in front of him. There are no happy endings here...for anyone. Very harsh...but all executed very well indeed, it's not some amateurish cheapo gore-flick made by and for 14 year old idiots, but it's an actual, serious movie...which just happens to have horrendous scenes of machete sex decapitation, baby rape(!!) and a final coda which is so unbelievably mean-spirited that I actually started laughing in shock.
Not a chance in hell this is going to get through the censors either, so if you're really that curious to see the current holder of extreme cinema's equivalent of the Jules Rimet trophy then you know where to look, you sicko.

PS Ive just realised this is the second movie I've seen in the past month or so involving people being killed by erections (other peoples obviously) I don't know if this is a reflection of a growing cinematic trend or my own viewing habits. Let's just pray Toy Story 3 doesnt go down this particular phallocidal route.

COMING SOON!

2010-06-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

Why aren't you watching the World Cup fatty? Ah never mind, pull up a chair, stick some bees in your ears and crack open a warm beer, it'll be just like South Africa, without the endemic ~~rape~~ petty crime. I'll have to leave you there though, because I AM watching the world cup so let's just have a quick look at some exciting movies about to drop. You've probably heard about a couple of these already...if not...then you probably never will!

A SERBIAN FILM
This looks....a tad pretty f**kin messed up. Advance word is that it's genuinely excessive...jaw-dropping trailer, makes even Master Gi-Bag a bit hesitant about seeing the full filum...

More Bold Balkans! LIFE AND DEATH OF A PORNO GANG

So our friends in Europe are still pushing the limits, whats going on in Japan?

GOTHIC & LOLITA
By the perpetrators of Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police, why not indulge in some cheapo CG, meatheaded humour and fine engrish, after all "this is the only movie that blows stresses and blues of your boring life!" I'll take your word for that lads. All your base, etc.

and eh..the rest....

PREDATORS
They surely cant f**k this up again can they? What's that wet-end from King Kong doing in here? And bloody Morpheus as well! Fingers crossed eh?

SPLICE
What the...there's that guy from King Kong again, this time looking like an unattractive emo chick. Looks like Species by way of David Cronenberg...there are dodgy versions of it out there lurking in the dark corners of the interweb, but they arent decent quality, otherwise you'd be reading a review of it now. Or possibly doing something more productive.

CENTURION
I reckon this one is just about to hit the internet equivalent of that dodgy stall in Blackrock Market that sells 3dvds in a blank case for a fiver so expect a review fairly soon. It's Neil Marshall, even when he's bad he's good so hopes are high here. Cant be worse than Valhalla f**kin Rising anyway

Thats all for now, I hear the in-no-way-annoying siren drone of the vuvuzela so I'll post again when I actually have something to say. ANYONE BUT FRANCE

PS I watched Alice in Wonderland, and as I expected it was a tedious, overlong and narcissictic Burton-by-the-numbers load of emo wank. I wasnt surprised. And I bet you're not surprised that I'm not surprised. Has Tim Burton done anything decent since Sleepy Hollow?

Here's some more films...mostly pretty bad ones!

2010-06-05T11:27:00.000-07:00

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.

VALHALLA RISING

2010-05-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-12T15:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

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.

EASTER MOVIE THING - GONG TAU, GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES, CARGO

2010-04-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

Hello! I've not done one of these for a while yet here I am, returning like a dog to a pool of its own sick, to bring you some alternatives to whats on in your local multiplex or Blockbuster. I'm not a big fan of rabbits, eggs or undead saviours so while the rest of you fat lent-crazy animals stuff your faces with chocolate I'm writing this review roundup.....so after making your body sick, why not make your mind sick too?

What better way to kick this off with CAT 3 Hong Kong gorefest GONG TAU. What's cat 3? It's the adult-only video rating for hk movies, usually reserved for rubbish soft porn or rather nasty and graphic pieces like the "All Night Long" series and "Bunman". This one is a schizo police thriller/supernatural horror, and you know it means business when you get a stabbed baby in the first 15 minutes or so.Who's responsible for the perforated páistí? Why it's Gong Tau, or basically a kind of asian voodoo curse, in this case the nasty Needle Gong Tau, which has been cast on an unfortunate policeman's family.

But Needle Gong Tau is small beer compared to the worst of all gung tau, thats right you guessed it, FLYING HEAD GONG TAU, which is brilliantly demonstrated when the evil magician-lad's head remotely detaches from his body, pulling all his internal organs out after it. Why he does this I'm not actually sure...apparently detaching your head utilising Flying Head Gong Tau gives you added vampiric ju-ju....or something. At least we're spared seeing him trying to get his newly floaty head and attached organs back into his body...have to assume a painful and prolonged arse-related re-entry. But what with this, stabbed babies, graphic autopsies, people throwing up centipedes and exploding hands you can see why this has gotten itself Hong Kong's equivalent of a NC-17 rating. It's odd because the other half of the movie is standard issue police thriller, with alley shootouts and informers being shouted at. Strange.

GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES
If you thought most anime consisted of massively-eyed japanese schoolgirls being arsetentacled by leering paedophile demons, well, you'd be partially correct. But what of Studio Ghibli? Having only seen Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, both of which I enjoyed, I was a little puzzled by the awe that people like John Lassiter of Pixar hold for this legendary japanese animation company. Not any more. Grave of the Fireflies is a masterpiece of depression...who'd have thought a movie about two children slowly dying of malnutrition would be such a downer? Beautifully crafted, although I always have a aesthetic issue with the cliche jap animation "eyes five time larger than the mouth" approach. If you saw someone like that in real life you'd run a mile or try to kill it with fire. It's 20 years old now, but its grief-stricken sincerity and anti-war messages are genuinely timeless. As always, get the subtitled version, not the cheesily dubbed one. A work of rare power, which addresses distressing themes that Pixar - never mind Disney or those bean-counting c**ts at Dreamworks - will never, ever have the courage to deal with. But I'll not watch it again...no f**king way.

CARGO
Low budget Swiss version of Sunshine would be a lazy way to describe this, so lets go with that. But I'm not damning it with faint praise, i thought Sunshine was a solid sci-fi which more good points than bad, and this apparently low-budget sci-fi really does deliver, visually at least. After seeing low budget sfx miscarraiges like Gene Generation and the disastrous Mutant Chronicles this shows how a restrainted budget (apparently around 3 million quid??) can, with the right art and production direction and superb cinematography lend an appropriately epic, big budget feel. The story involves a crew on a long space voyage who awake from hypersleep to find something's amiss...yes nul points when it comes to originality. It's quite a slow burner...not enough really happens to justify the 2 hour+ running time but it just looks so impressive I'm giving it a pass anyway. And it's better than Pandorum.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

2010-03-15T16:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

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"

2010-03-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

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.

Spartacus - Blood and Sand....episodes 3-6

2010-02-27T05:41:00.000-08:00

Well I've stuck with it so far, its now reached the half-way stage, thought I'd give it another mini-review...so after the initial 2 hours of excessive violence, cheese and nudity I'm pleased to say SPARTACUS has continued to audaciously vomit all over the boundaries of good taste and decency in a way not seen since the jaw-dropping glory days of OZ. That's a good thing. The acting is still flinch-inducing, its still amazingly camp, and has, as Mrs Gi-Bag shouts frequently, "Too much penis!" But almost despite itself, after six hours of pecs, sex and decapitation its managed to gather some momentum and actual narrative, and it has actually improved significantly as it's progressed.

The actors are still contending with some truly ludicrous cod-classical dialogue flecked with jarring invective and as most of them seem to have been cast purely on how well they fill a codpiece as opposed to any oratorial skills, they are probably doing as well as possible within their limits. It's thankfully moved a little closer to Rome than 300/Gladiator story-wise, and a second series is already green-lit..

It will struggle in the long-term...primarily because Spartacus himself is one of the least interesting characters on the show...but in the absence of Rome, this will do. Sure, maybe that's like getting a full-body massage from a chimp instead of a woman, but as long you're not looking for a happy ending, then perhaps Spartacus will fit the bill.

Cabin Fever 2 Spring Fever - the kids are not alright

2010-02-25T15:48:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the original Cabin Fever? I f**king do, it introduced us to that bellend Eli Roth. It was quite grim and generally unsavoury plague-core with some crude humour and one of the worst endings ever, but Quentin Tarantino took a shine to this dashing young turk and decided to act as kingmaker to the present patriach of "Torture-Porn". Hostel followed and...actually I'm boring myself here. F**k Eli Roth, he's got nothing to do with this in-name-only sequel so adios Eli, don't get mangled by a killer whale, that would be awful.

Shameless cash-in this, disowned by it's director and apparently heavily f**kified in the editing suite after he did a runner. But it's actually quite entertaining, in a gross, squishy, icky way. It shows it intent in the first 5 minutes, when the only survivor of the original movie - now infected by the virus and looking generally unhealthy - staggers out in front of a school bus and well, explodes like a tomato. I laughed. In fact I laughed quite a lot despite myself.. Then again I thought Poultrygeist was hilarious even though I also recognised it was terrible s**t.

So the movies skimpy running time consists of a bunch of pre-prom horny students developing the flesh eating lurgy in various unwholesome ways...I recommend finishing all consumables before the movie gets too far...unless you think you'll really want that last slice of pepperoni pizza after watching some poorly pox-ridden pubescent pulling on his pus-pulsing pecker. Pass the sick bag vicar. We've got heads smashed in with fire-extinguishers, infected characters de-limbing themselves using bench saws, messy uteral splashdowns, blood gouting from every imaginable orifice...There's also a hilarious scene involving a chubby chaser and an enormously obese girl (a species strangely absent from normal american high school movies) getting it on in a swimming pool...it looks like a scene from a f**king greenpeace fundraiser.

So check it out...good craic if you are the right (very wrong) frame of mind. Definitely not a date flick. Unless you are dating yourself. Which is a good idea, don't want you getting a disease now do we? But wear a rubber anyway you sexual tyrannosaurus you.

REC 2 - demonios!!

2010-02-25T11:39:00.000-08:00

I had been looking forward to this. If you'd seen either the original REC or the almost instantaneous american remake Quarantine (which was almost shot for shot identical...which meant (a) it worked almost as well as the original and (b) it was as pointless as a tampon in a men's prison) you know what's on offer here. Epileptic handheld camerawork, people screaming and zombies running amok. It was fast, smart, scary and pretty bloody with a high body count. The sequel continues mere seconds after the first film ends with a team of heavily-armed SWAT members accessing the f**ked building along with a government official on some vague rescue/recon mission.

The build-up would seem to suggest machinegun-filled carnage( The head, shoot em in the head!) but if you are imagining a 90 minute live-action version of Left4Dead that's not gonna happen. For the first 30 minutes, the sequence following the SWAT team does seem to suggest that direction....viewed through interchanging video feeds on their helmets, it's quite reminiscent of "Aliens" . The FPS-style SWAT vs "infected" scenes are quite cool but there's not a lot of that. The movie stumbles a bit when a bunch of expendable and irritating teenagers are introduced, in fairness they are probably needed just to boost the bodycount a bit. Compared to the first REC it's also got a lot more unnecessary exposition and background...

There's no weird space virus or military experiment gone tits-up here, the infection is demonic in nature...something only hinted at in the first movie. Satan, that s**t, he's at it again! Strangely, at the very end the movie shifts again and drops in a totally f**king unnecessary scene reminiscent of excellent and criminally underrated 80's sci-fi The Hidden. So there you are, it's exactly the same as the first except it has demonic possession, hidden dimensions, exorcisms and sci-fi parasitic body horror. Er. It still could be fairly accurately described as a load of screaming spanish people running up and down some stairs for an hour and a half. Still recommended as an action/horror hybrid, it's just not as good as the first. Clear indications of another sequel, but no more shaky handicams por favor. Muy bien.

TRAIN - Revenge of the Fat Controller

2010-02-23T14:16:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you've experienced a five hour train journey involving intense stomach cramps, a broken toilet door and an old woman staring at your penis then you will agree that there is definite horror potential involving public transport. This shameless load of old c*ck however is an example of exactly how not to fulfill that potential. After being relatively benevolent with the last crop of movies to mysteriously materialise on my hard drive it's time to put the boot in again. And what better recipient of a internet-based shoe-ing than another cheap and graphic Hostel rip-off? It's a group of hapless american travellers who start to get graphically dismantled by sinister sweaty eastern european villains, who bring the hapless victims to a dungeon-like room where they cut bits off, except this time...IT'S ON A TRAIN...HENCE THE TITLE. "TRAIN". YEAH? BRILLIANT.

It stars Thora Birch, who I though looked familiar, so I had a look at the Internet Movie Database thing to view her "oeuvre" (french for "egg"). I vaguely remembered her starring alongside Scarlett Johanssen in a strange indie-ish movie called Ghost World a few years back. While Ms Johanssen and her large breasts have inexplicably become incredibly famous and has a perfume named after her/them, the rather more bovine-looking Ms Birch is doing Hostel on a Train.

And it's BAD.

Badly written, shambolic, gore-onically graphic ripoff that's so spectacularly gratuitious that it would be borderline offensive if it wasnt so laughably bad. Not as berserk as Grotesque but it's pretty hard core. Could be even bloodier, as it looks like some of its more explicit scenes have been crudely cut, but maybe that's just the editing style and par for the course...you can't polish a turd, even if you pop it in the freezer first.

Choo choo!

DAYBREAKERS - I hope you all get gingivitis you bloodsucking freaks

2010-02-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

Hurrah...more vampires! There's no escaping the feckers these days. Every time you turn on the idiot-box there's a new crop of the bitey c**ts strutting around in their insufferable "we're better than humans and we know it" way. This one seemed to slip under the radar, but it's an enjoyable take on a vampire-dominated future where a class war rages between upper class yuppie bloodsuckers and a feral mutating underclass of blood-starved vampiric chavs while the price of blood skyrockets due to dwindling stocks of humans.

That's right, they are using us like massive hairy battery hens while a few surviving free-range humans skulk in the shadows led by a sleep-acting Willem Defoe. Where's Blade or even the Frog brothers when you need them? The appropriately ageless Ethan Hawke play a vampire scientist searching for a blood substitute to ease the plasma draught while Sam Neill plays some bastardly vampire version of Warren Buffet. These arent cool and sexy vampires like the ones posing their way around Bristol or Bon Temps, they are just ordinary looking accountants, doctors, policemen, tramps...they just happen to be immortal beings with a fairly allergic reaction to the sun, and have built a fully functioning futuristic society around these points.

Iffy, can't-really-be-arsed acting and the occasional "why the f**k would they do that?" moment aside, it's good clean undead fun, although the end's a bit odd...after a truly spectacular bloodbath involving dozens of blood-enraged soldiers ripping each other's giblets out the movie just....ends. So it's a bit of a mess, heavy handed allegory and shameless plugs for Chrysler abound, but it kept me conscious and semi-engaged and it's got enough exploding heads, eviscerations and overall mayhem to get a thumbs up from me.

TOWN/BLOOD CREEK - horse vs shotgun hilarity

2010-02-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

So this is where Joel Shumacher's been. After camply violating Batman in such a prison-rape manner that the entire franchise was aborted and started from scratch it seems poor old Joel's cred dropped a tad (no one really seemed to escape unscathed from the cataclysmic clusterf**k that was Batman and Robin....Batgirl and Robin disappeared entirely, possibly to hermit-like existences on remote islands far from any televisions or dvd players, and only George "Teflon" Clooney seemed to keep a career going, although his acting seems now to consist of being slightly fat and intense, or just playing himself. Which he is, admittedly, very good at.) And Joel? Despite being famously derided by drug-fueled megaproducer julia phillips as "a better window-dresser than director" in the highly enjoyable marathon bitch-fest autobiography that was "You'll never eat lunch in this town again" he's actually turned out a few decent flicks among the dross. Falling down? Lost boys? Joel...youre okay by me. So Town Creek..a troubled production, shot in eastern europe on a clearly limited budget, and has been sat on a shelf for a couple of years, hidden away like a paedophile uncle in a family photograph. The omens are not promising.

But....it's alright. Its a solid, if unspectacular horror siege flick, mainly concerning a couple of ex-military brothers and a family trapped in their farm by a cenobite-y nazi necromancer that lives in their root cellar. Its not gory or scary enough to generate any t'internet buzz, but its fast, nicely shot and contains an absolutely brilliant scene where a freshly-resurrected zombie horse breaks into the kitchen and gets shredded by multiple shotgun blasts at close range. Something I havent seen before, at least recently.

Bit of irish interest in the cast as well, with Dominic Purcell (the butch older non-gay brother in the interminable Prison Break) and Michael Fassbender (the posh english officer in Inglorious Basterds, the unfortunate chavling- fodder in rather unpleasant brit horror Eden Lake) It's probably not high on their respective cvs, but if you fancy a mildly diverting 90 minutes of shouting, whispered plot development and more farmyard carnage than a PETA video, check this one out.

NB Went on youtube to see if the horsey shotgun bit was on there, it wasnt...when I started typing "Horse" youtube's predictive text came up with the suggestion "Horses Mating with Humans". Try it. Not the horse-mating, the youtube search-thing. What the hell is wrong with you people?

NINJA ASSASSIN - Let the body parts hit the floor

2010-02-12T12:12:00.000-08:00

What red-blooded slightly immature man doesnt love a bit of ninja style slicing and dicing with plentiful shuriken flinging, cool ninja posing and stealthy skullduggery? After the first 5 minutes of this you will be thinking warm sexy thoughts as an unseen almost supernatural presence graphically dismembers and mutilates a gang of nasty triad types in an almost Predator-style unstoppable fashion. It's quality. Really, we are talking top levels of the aul ultraviolence here, aided by plentiful amounts of actually quite well done cg blood spurtings and sprayings. The ninjas in this are HARD and SCARY.

Unfortunately most of the rest of the movie is pretty dull....the occasional burst of extremely graphic gore perks it up a bit - a wince-inducingly messy assassination in a bathroom, a highly enjoyable face-off between about 40 ninjas and an army of special forces near the end - but everything else creaks and bumbles along with nary a hint of intelligence wit or acting ability. Half of the movie consists of boring flashbacks to the hero's early life in some rural ninja creche somewhere. I have absolutely no idea what the main storyline involved. The action scenes would help a bit more if most of them weren't shot in almost complete darkness with spasticated editing.

The movie's star is apparently the korean r+b equivalent of Craig David. Riiiiiiiight then. He's no Tony Jaa but he jumps around nimbly enough and has a stomach you could grate cheese on. Plus you have to love a hero who, after killing a random female ninja in a laundrette, stuffs her scrambled corpse into a washing machine, for no apparent reason whatsoever. It's very stupid, written-by-teenage-boys stuff, but I'll give it a pass for about 15-20 minutes of highly enjoyable computer-aided carnage. But next time let's actually see what's going on yeah?

Hungover Weekend January Roundup Special Omnibus Compilation Edition

2010-02-01T14:33:00.000-08:00

I feel very poorly! So I'm going to hit these reviews fast and hard, like a nude Usain Bolt chasing a shopping trolley full of vaginas and weed.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL - Your own house is probably significantly more interesting.

I'm not very patient in general, and slow movies make me quite angry. This is my life and its running out one minute at a time, so I resent filmmakers who dont get on with providing entertainment on demand...I'm dying here! Now there's Slow, and there's Slow... and then there's THOTD. First thing that will strike you is how cleverly its been created to resemble a movie from the late 70's/early 80's. Dont run away, that's actually quite cool and really convincing, but move itself is so boring it's borderline offensive.

Story's about a cash-strapped but hot student who babysits for some strange people in a remote house by a graveyard....she strolls around, eats some pizza, listens to her walkman....nothing happens until the last 10 minutes by which time you'll probably have chewed your own feet off in boredom. Seems more like a below-par episode of Masters of Horror than a stand-alone movie, and would have benefitted from being AT LEAST 40 minutes shorter. Considering the movie is only 90 mins long, thats harsh criticism. Dozed off twice.

GROWTH - its naaad a tumuh...

...its actually some horribly leechy worm things! Short but not particularly sweet body horror-thriller thingy about a mad genetic experiment gone wrong on an island populated by rubes and bad actors. The CG parasite are rendered moderately well, but the budget shows through and we see a lot more of the boring infected humans than the actual squidgy little feckers.

These mardy molluscs dont give you socially inconvenient arse-itch, but in fact make their hosts superstrong with bruce lee reflexes and lady-killing mojo powers....Women just cant resist an infected leechy lad...until they clock the hideous wormy thing hanging out of him. Yeah...what man can't relate to that? Decent intro, slow middle third, no real protagonist and the fat sheriff gets some truly fist-bitingly awful lines. Watch Slither instead.

UN PROPHET - Je voudrais dormir! Garkon, etc

Very well received French prison thriller about a juvenile arab hoodlum who gets thrown into chokey where he gets involved with dodgy corsican mobsters. Some horrendous razor-blade-related activity early on, then it just gets a bit drawn out and dull.

I may watch it again though, it's clearly an intelligent and well-made piece that deserves better than me watching it after about seven pints and then dismissing it like a midget butler with a badly mixed martini. I will return....

DANTE'S INFERNO - Hell-o!

Based on a recent video game apparently...ask Reaper. I had some bug-eyed experiences with japanese manga in the early 90s (delightful tentacle-f**king and vein-popping fare like Uroksokidoji: Legend of the Overfiend and Fist of The North Star) and this is cut from the same bodily-fluid-soaked cloth.

Doublehard Crusader loses his missus to some twat of a demon and follows her to hell, where he goes truly medieval on armies of insectile babies, vagivourous succubi and his own mutated demonic dad. Stereotypical limited, massively-eyed jap animation with occasional CG elements, OTT voice acting and a break every 15 minutes for a end-level boss battle...still it's gory and outlandish enough to warrant a look.

Van Diemens Land....an bhuil ocras ort?

2010-01-19T14:52:00.000-08:00

What's irish for "cannibalism"? It's never answered in this bleak and depressing Australian telling of Alexander Pearse and his fellow-convict-consuming ways in Tasmania in the early 19th century. Apparently he was convicted for the theft of six pairs of shoes....back then that didnt mean an asbo or a stern dressing down from your local garda, but deportation to Tasmania for labour, lice and probably a swift and unhygenic end. Pearse and a group of his fellow scurvy miscreants escape from their wardens and find themselves crossing a desaturated, muddy, never-ending jungle with no food, no hope and no chance of an idyllic retirement in zihuatanejo. It starts well....but after the more distinguishable characters are killed off early on it just degenerates into a random and slow procession of almost interchangeable beardy grot-bags bumping each other off in the mud. Interestingly a lot of the movie is actually in proper spoken irish, so if you fancy a really slow, not very exciting but admittedly beautifully shot version of Ravenous as gaelige ("LEABA"...that means bed)..then your dreams have come true. Having said that, if you DO dream about that, perhaps you need to talk to someone qualified. Don't bother with this, its beautiful but muddled and slow, like Megan Fox staggering out of a severe automobile accident. Ni maith liom.

Spartacus - Blood and Sand....first 2 episodes

2010-01-15T15:46:00.000-08:00

If 300 and Rome had a boss-eyed, mewling low-budget tv baby...then Spartacus: Blood and Sand is it. Someone is going to fired for this...unbelievably crass, cheap and derivative yet also highly amusing car crash soft porn-afterfx orgy starring a load of antipodean non-actors and 3d backgrounds...Its the start of a new series by a previously unknown company called STARZ, which seem to be the tesco value equivalent of HBO's Rome. Rome was a violent, profane sex-filled soapy romp through the vaults of the Roman Republic but at the same time was also intelligent, educational and beautifully crafted.

This...well, it stars Xena the Warrior Princess getting fingerbanged by a bored menial while john hannah is getting his crank gobbled by another willing subservient. Yep, thats the acting apex we're achieving here. What this has to do with THE spartacus is a mystery...all I know is S:B+S=
1. Lots of CGBlood. i mean...lots. Stupid amounts. Mental amounts. Parody-esque amounts.
2. Nudey women/wholly gratuitous sex scenes. +10
3. Men walking around with their knobs out. Bloodthirsty gays will love this show, lots of oiled pecs and muscle marys strutting about. And why not? BRING ON THE PENII
4. Abysmal acting and script
5. Hilariously derivative 300-esque muzak by everyone's favourite musical magpie, Joseph deLuca

The plot....thracean hardcase mercenary is double-crossed by his evil roman masters, given a good kicking, wife taken, and he's thrown into gladiator school, where he gets trained as a elite gladiator who becomes a big hit with the baying roman crowds while he harbors thought of revenge...gladiatory revenge. What does that sound like to you? Hmm....Have I made it sound terrible? It certainly is, yet also hideously compulsive. I'll be watching the next episode. So will you. Unless youre a lesbian. Or very intelligent. Or both.

2009 ROUND-UP (NOT A VINTAGE YEAR REALLY)

2010-01-13T14:19:00.000-08:00

Well after a fine xmas where i did little but move around slowly constantly eating like a land-basedmanatee i thought I'd better get some kind of end of year review thing together, everyone likes listsright? I'll throw in a few new reviews first though...

Well everyone on the planet has seen this by now so I'll keep it short.

It genuinely -is- Dances with Wolves/The Last Samurai/A Man called Horse in space. THERE ARE NO SUPRISES AT ALL. NOT ONE. Why couldn't Jim have thrown in some kind of f**ked up twist at the end? Like the blue alien pocahontas the hero was knocking boots with...actually turned out to be the hero's alleged "dead" brother in a gender-bending interspecies f**ked up gay Crying Game incest...thing? Or when the SPOILERY BIT HERE hero wakes up at the end, his new body turns out to be completely paraplegic? Perfect opportunity for an over-the-credits "NOOOOOOOOOO!" here. Or the humans themselves turn out to be avatars controlled by some third species, possibly a methane-based lifeform resembling a sentient jelly...anyway nothing like that happens.

I can't remember a single line of dialogue.

It's too f**king long.

The alien flora and fauna - while rendered in a staggering way - are all a bit...meh. Watchthe amazing BBC wildlife series Planet Earth...we have some f**ked up organisms on this planet that are aswhacked out as anything on some fictional hippy jungle world like Pandora. Although brilliantly some people are actually feeling "depressed and even suicidal at not being able to visit utopian alien planet"

Michelle Rodriguez....the mardiest looking woman on the planet, a woman that looks like she'd pick a fightwith her own baby while giving birth...what purpose does she serve in this movie? I QUESTION YOURCHARACTER'S MOTIVATION AND PURPOSE MICHELLE.

The 3d....not groundbreaking. It's the same tech as My Bloody Valentine or The Final Destination, just used a lot more subtly. You forget its there after a while. And when you DO notice it, its slightly distracting.

The music..by the usually reliable James Horner...is entirely forgettable. End credit ballad that willmake you run screaming from the cinema.

But..I still have to recommend it, it's just SO big and vibrant and beautifully crafted it manages to deliver thekind of cinematic kick that frauds like Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich will never ever manage even ifthey clone themselves and continue to pump out cynical intelligence-f**king bloatbusters for the next 10generations. And the final 30 minute battle is amazing, The blue chick is hot and the bad guy is bad-ass.So for all its multiple faults, the bar has been raised again, and if as a result we get future films withCameron's tech, a decent story and some sick subversive like Paul Verhoeven behind the camera then the potential is just mind-blowing.

Grow your beard back Jim....you look like an old woman.

Right then, at the other end of the cinema spectrum we get

Apparently a remake of some cheapo horror flick from the 70s, it's a wince-inducing cheapo horror flickwith an orally-fixated killer knocking off some prom queens with a tire iron heavily tooled to vaguely resemble thethrowy thing from Krull. It's bad. Really bad. The last 20 minutes in particular are an absolute ape-directed shambles. And not enough female nudity. That's why I downloaded it, and i didnt get it. Look at the cover! It's likeordering a vanilla milkshake, and getting a cup of cold hairy sick instead. I feel angry now..angry andfrustrated.

"Thriller" involving a cat and mouse psychological face off between Gerard Butler and the guy fromCollateral. Obviously there was a communication breakdown between the studio and the casting agency here.Gerard Butler plays a, er, mental genius who goes vigilante (in more of a Jigsaw than Charles Bronsonway) on the system when his family's killers get off lightly. Not awful, and very slick etc, but watching Gerry playing a mad criminal mastermind is like watching Corky from Life Goes On playing Soduko.

BEST MOVIE OF 2009 - WHICH HASNT BEEN A VERY GOOD YEAR REALLY
I'm going with District 9. Funny, excessively violent, great fx, and an exciting new talent in NeilBlomkamp. "folking prons etc"

Honourable Mentions
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (funny, beautifully made and just strange), Up (Pixar...), Moon, Drag MeTo Hell.....er.......um.....

WORST MOVIE OF 2009 - AND THERE WAS SOME REAL TURDS
Transformers 2
Abysmal and headache-inducing robo-shite. At least the vast numbers of awful obscure horror movies I watchare over in an hour and a half. This heavy metal whore sits on your face for nearly three suffocating hours.

Dishonourable Mention
Antichrist. F**k off.

MOST OVERRATED MOVIE OF 2009
The Hangover
Everyone seemed to find this funny. Except me. The best comedy is on Tv now anyway, just watch AlwaysSunny in Philadelphia, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, Modern Family, hell there's loads of good stuff outthere. Don't bother to go to a cinema for humour, the audience around you will make you laugh at stuff you normally wouldnt, it's some kind of group pychosis thing.

Runner-up
Zombieland
Not bad, just very unspecial and a watered down smartarse version of much better movies.

Wait, there's more! Actually no, there isnt.

Gary Coleman wants his penis removed from movie

2010-01-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

Gary Coleman ("Diff'rent Strokes") just got out of a hospital after suffering a seizure. And while he's doing much better, he is now planning to get a lawyer in order to stop a company from showing his private parts in a film called "Midgets vs Mascots."

Apparently Coleman appeared in a scene that shows him breaking up a locker room fight. During the sequence, his robe accidentally flies open, briefly exposing his penis to the camera.

"With regards to Gary Coleman's displeasure with a scene in the film in which he briefly shows full frontal nudity," the producers said in a prepared statement, "the producers of the film have multiple contracts -- signed by Gary -- which give the filmmakers full rights and permissions to shoot any and all footage, including nudity, during the making of the film. Therefore, we have no plans to remove that particular scene from the film. We met with Gary this morning and he is aware of our decision."

Upon learning of this, Coleman quickly made his own statement, claiming that the penis shown in the movie is a body double.

"I wanted all my fans to protest my penis being in the movie, because I didn't want that," he said. "It's a body double, I believe, because I certainly was not gonna do this. And I heard that the body double is ugly, and is unattractive, and does not make me look good."

Panic Attack!

2009-12-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

Here's a fairy tale that could only happen in the movies. Man makes YouTube video. Goes to Hollywood. Gets pots of money and a movie deal. Except this story is true.

A relatively unknown producer (and most likely Visual Effects Artist) from Uruguay, Fede Alvarez, shelled out about $300 to create a video of a robot invasion in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. The four-minute short, "Ataque de Panico!" (Panic Attack) features ginormous weapon-wielding robots that blow stuff up (a lá The Iron Giant crossed with War of the Worlds).

He could follow in the footsteps of Neill Blomkamp, who made the South African-based alien mockumentary 'Alive In Joburg', and later went on to develop it into the full length feature that is "District 9".

Well, Alvarez' short film has already been viewed on YouTube over 3 million times. and hasn't gone unnoticed by Hollywood. He told BBC, "I uploaded 'Ataque de Panico!' on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of emails from Hollywood studios." In the end he agreed to $30 million deal with Sam "Spiderman" Raimi's Ghost House Pictures.

The picture will be a sci-fi thriller set in Argentina and Uruguay, although it won't be a high budget remake of 'Panic Attack'. Alvarez says he will start from scratch.

Here's the amazing video that made him rich.

Collapse - its all going to go f*kin pear shaped lads

2009-12-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

Well in fairness I, er, "acquired" this strange thing by mistake....had a creepy cover and lots of quotes by people I've never heard of saying things like "THE MOST TERRIFYING FILM OF THE YEAR!!" and "I QUITE LITERALLY SH*T MY PANTS WHILE WATCHING THIS MOVIE" Well...don't make the same mistake i did if you are looking for a scary horror flick( Unless you find old men with mustaches terrifying - and there's probably a term for that...for example, Coulrophobia - Fear of Clowns. And you thought you werent going to learn anything on the internet today!) So yeah, the movie is an hour of an old man with a moustache telling an interviewer that we're all pretty much doomed because of peak oil and natural resource depletion, and a load of other vaguely connected conspiracy theories with chucked in mysterious deaths and that to give it a proper x-files paranoid feel.

picture of an old man with weary expression cigarette and moustache here

But I'll check my cynicism...Once i got beyond the fact that I was staring at a chainsmoking old man with a moustache for an hour, some of what he says - tenous, melodramatic and slightly mental though it may seem - is f**king scary. It's just a shame that a lot of the apparent savvy he claims he possesses is not materially backed up re: ability to read market trends and such, as he lives alone with a dog and a guitar and is, according to the end credits, about to be evicted for non-payment of rent. But if only 10% of what he posits is true, then you'd better get yourself some arable farming skills and a shitload of organic seeds. Because Mad Max times are a-comin....and I've got my Humongous costume ready.

Halloween 2 - Taking the f**king michael

2009-12-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

Where's John Carpenter when the industry needs him more than ever? Here we get Rob Zombie instead, continuing on from his unnecessary and crap 2007 "reboot" of JC's original classic. It appears to carry on directly after the conclusion of part 1....except hang on, no, it's a dream sequence, remarkably from multiple characters perpectives at once in a way that actually resembles an actual movie opening but isnt! So after about 20 minutes of this fiction-within-a-f**king-fiction we carry on with the actual story. Laurie, the main protagonist from the first movie (boot-faced raging harridan who will have you praying for her imminent demise via blunt force trauma to the head within minutes) is moping about a year after the original killings. Michael himself seems to have survived and is living as the world's biggest homeless man in redneck country. Even Dr Loomis has managed to uncrush his skull after his death in the first movie and is touring the states selling his book about the events and having no effect whatsoever on the story apart from apparently upping the movie's c**t level (which is extraordinarily high already...so many horrible, irritating characters)

Zombie continues with his process of trying to give some depth to a character whose whole point of being was that he was a machine-like void in the first place. Watching Michael Myers getting a backstory is like trying to give the shark in Jaws some kind of psycho motive involving flashbacks to its youth showing it being punched repeatedly by fishermen or being bullied by squid. Instead of the silent, lethal golem from the first franchise the boy Zombie apparently thinks a growling 7-foot WWF wrestler channeling Jeffry Dahmer is scarier. . It's really not. Now f**k off and go back to doing sub-ministry metal for kids in hoodies.

Thirst - "let us prey"

2009-12-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

Vampire priests...? As someone who grew up avoiding the clammy hands and bulging pants of a whole army of boy-hungry christian brother paedophiles in 80s Dublin the idea of a priest that only wanted to suck my neck would seem to be fairly tame stuff in comparison. Guilt-ridden korean catholic bloodsuckers? Bah, make a movie about my old principal, Brother Kelly, that'd really s**t people up! But like a priest I believe in ~~buggery~~ charity and charitably...this movie...it's a mixed bag....like what you'd get if a chimp did your weekly shop in tesco (probably lots of mouldering fruit, and sweets. So you'd end up with a tooth decay-maddened ape with leaking bowels. And that's why I sleep with a mirror and a baseball bat under my bed...the mirror to temporarily confuse the mardy primate, the bat to beat it into submission) So, Thirst. Pious priest goes off to africa to volunteer for some weird medical experiment where he gets transfected by vamp blood. So he comes home, and in-between endless bouts of mahjong, starts to turn into a hedonistic bloodsucking guilt-ridden ballbag. Who seems to spend as much time getting his end away as actually procuring blood for his infernal plasma-lust.

There is some very squishy and wince-inducing blood-letting here but by hell it's long. Weird. And frequently very dull indeed. Director Park Chan-wook is highly overrated in my opinion...liked Oldboy, bored by JSA, thought the "Sympathy" movies were just odd and if you haven't seen "I'm an android but that's ok" you have by default lived a better life than me. But if its this or some teeny emo vampire bollix then for f**ks sake watch this. It's an easy movie to admire for its style and sheer balls but very, very hard to like.

'Gears of War' movie to be like 'Cloverfield'

2009-12-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

So apparently, film producer Wyck Godfrey has been revealing details on the upcoming "Gears of War" movie. In an interview with 'MakingOf', he says the following:

"The hard part is to make it into something that doesn't feel like a world torn asunder and people just in battle. I think we really want to focus on the idea of a world that's running well and then it's Emergence Day. Kind of make it impactful and immediate and like what those 48 hours are as people survive Emergence Day," said Godfrey. "It's more like Cloverfield or something like that because trying to tell the epic story of an alien planet that's living in a horrific environment just feels like the wrong mood right now."

Godfrey confirmed that he's working on it with Underworld and Die Hard 4.0 director Len Wiseman for Legendary Pictures (300, The Dark Knight) and New Line Cinema. And Billy Ray (Breach, Shattered Glass) is currently rewriting the GoW script originally penned by Chris Morgan (Wanted).

So there is the slightest, tiniest chance that it might not completely stink up the place like a rotten foetus... but only slightly. After all, it is another videogame-to-movie adaptation, and we all know how they go. 'Super Mario Bros. The Movie' anyone? *shudders*

Tentative release date is 2010. Can't wait for those clips of beautiful families enjoying idyllic lives only to be put out by a mass uprising of ugly creatures.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

2009-12-05T05:32:00.000-08:00

Watching the bad movies I watch is like being some kind of cinematic proctologist. You end up rummaging around in the arse end of cinema itself, holding your breath and hoping to get out clean and educated but usually end up elbow deep in something horrible, feeling a bit sick and soberly delivering a pessimistic diagnosis. So let's run with that tenuous anal-ogy (!), glove up and part the hairless buttocks of the latest cinematic victim patient to end up on Dr Gi-bag's table. But what's this? A clean, intelligent sphincter? Shiny, fat-free colon? And most importantly, a computer-generated prostate just throbbing with wit, good humour and wondrous animation? Er. Anyway...so "Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs". No it's not a kids movie! Well it is, but what a nice surprise it is, like climbing into bed expecting a man and finding a woman with a lovely bottom instead.

Flint the hero lives on a rather bleak grey island in the atlantic where everyone lives off sardines, the worst of all fish. Except crabs. So he, "helped" by Steve the gay monkey (who is the best thing in the movie and deserves his own trilogy) invents a machine which can transform rainwater into food...any food. It's a fairly simple "be careful what you wish for" parable with a bit of parental unit tension/reconciliation thrown in, but unlike the numerous other written-by-commitee pixar knock-offs by lesser soulless studios this one really works...it's genuinely funny and mental, the visuals are stunning (the giant computerised food actually made me extremely hungry) and after a streak of really bad movies this one gets a big fat ky-lubed thumb up.

Aftermath - get a "lobe" of this corpse-related tomfoolery

2009-11-30T06:22:00.000-08:00

"Nacho, nacho man, I want to be...a nacho man" Well in fact I don't, not if I end up anything like the Spanish writer and director of this pleasant little necro f**k-flick, Nacho Cera. This is a 34 minute script-free piece showing a number of very realistic autopsies and then a corpse-randy coronor jumping up onto a table and knocking boots with a partially eviscerated and flayed cadaver. Then he goes home with a piece of the corpse and feeds it to his dog. "Tell me more!" you (probably don't) say. Well this dark little movie has been knocking around for quite a while now , has assumed a legendary status and gathered quite a few people who claim it's a work of thought-provoking and challenging art.

Now everyone has their own opinion of who constitutes art, and that in my mind is art's greatest strength and it's greatest failing. In this case I fail to see what "message" or intelligent discourse this movie is meant to generate. Is it conveying the futility of existence and the grim reality that once we're dead all we leave behind is a helpless bag of clammy meat? Thanks for that, and there was me thinking that upon my heroic demise my body was going to mutate into a enormous bejewelled faberge egg floating in a giant pool of rainbow juice. What's that Nacho? Your next movie is going to be a 30 minute arse-cam closeup of a bear evacuating it's bowels in a densely forested area? In it's defence the movie looks great, but then again so does Kelly Brooke and you just know that within that exquisite skull there's nothing but a few lonely isolated brains cells jumping around trying to keep warm. Perhaps the fact that the soundtrack consists of classical music has subconsciously triggered the art label in some viewers minds. It's unsavoury stuff. I'm an open minded man, in a very rigid and inflexible way, but this definitely triggered the This-is-a-bit-wrong-o-meter. Recommended only to cellar dwelling german weirdos and future serial killers still living with their parents.

Mother of Tears - one bad mutha

2009-11-29T15:10:00.001-08:00

DARIO ARGENTO YOU TWAT. Don't know where to start here. I've never been a huge fan of the mans work but iconic movies like Suspiria and Inferno are so highly regarded that I'm willing to admit there is something of substance there that I've just not picked up on. But after this, I'm tempted to say that not only is the emperor in the nude, but he's got a micropenis and strange balls. The story...Asia argento (director's daughter, hopeless actress, looks like uma thurman after a month of hard nights) discovers a magic red t-shirt which unleashes a wave of violence and anarchy across Rome (this breakdown of society is portrayed by about ten extras running around breaking car windscreens and flinging babies off bridges) as an ancient (and extremely foxy and mostly naked) witch is resurrected, and, armed with her magic red t-shirt and a gaggle of special-needs followers, plans to unleash a new dark age upon the earth. That was quite a long sentence. The movie itself is incredibly gruesome and mind-blowingly awful.

After the first ludicrously OTT on-screen killing - museum worker is mutilated, stabbed and gut-strangled by a mob of monkey-controlled mentalists - you are not sure whether you are watching some kind of bizarre satire or simply a horror maestro willfully shoving his movie credibility so far up his sphincter than a oral hygienist would be required to retrieve it. Good gore fx. Acting so bad it "transcends" bad acting and enters a weird and unique void also populated by the "cast" of the video sequences of the original resident evil, soft porn and Keanu Reeves. And a final shot that will have you staring in disbelief at its sheer unbelievable cackitude-ishness. All that said...I wasn't bored. The excessive violence and nudity kept my inner serial killer watching. But it's not so bad it's good, it's so bad it's f**king c**ting s**t.

Triangle - warning....could seriously brain your damage

2009-11-29T15:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a cheery tale about a group of annoying middle class people who get caught in a storm at sea and end up on a creepy CGI liner that appears to have nobody aboard, marie celeste style. Or is that actually what it'sabout? Main protagonist is unstable single mum Melissa George...the best thing to come out of australian 90'ssoap operas since Guy Pearce and Natalie imbur embarg umbergl the brunette who sang that song about being "naked on du floah")Without giving too much away...I'm confused. I'm not sure if this movie is about timetravel ala excellent spanishthriller Chronocrimes, some kind of weird afterlife...thing...or merely the nightmares of a damaged brain andI'm not sure the writers know either. My head hurt after watching it, and not just because I'd trapped my headin the fridge door earlier.

There are parts of the movie that will make you go "eh?" some other bits that will have you muttering "I don't understand" and still other parts where you will go "Oh, I get it! Oh no wait....I don't," but I am a stupid man in many ways and if you can figure out what exactly is going the f**k on then fair play to you and your brain. (I thought I -nearly- had it...until the "dead birds on the beach" scene"...cueschizoid embolism) Melissa George is an attractive and talented actress (although for the entire movie she lookslike she's trying to mentally negotiate advanced trigonometry while in the grip of severe PMS) and until your cerebellumstarts to swell it's good-looking and gripping enough with some bursts of graphic violence. But I was waitingfor a big kicker of a finale, I didnt get it and triangles are worst of all shapes anyway. Look at toblerones. Shite.

The Final Destination - is it though? Probably.

2009-11-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

I AM SICK OF COMPUTER GENERATED EFFECTS. There. That's what you'll be thinking while you're watching this latest installment in the franchise. I quite like the final destination movies to be honest...attractive people escaping a intro setpiece of extreme carnage only to be killed off later in hilariously outlandish and often very bloody ways while generic rock bands get their 20 seconds of glory on the soundtrack. But by Death's hairy balls this latest one tested my childlike patience. You know exactly what to expect here but WHAT is going on with the ropy After Effects deaths?

If my absolute suspension of disbelief is being sorely tested by bad acting and witless dialogue and a loopy plot then give me good effects and the realistic demise of cardboard characters! Meh. There is a good homage to Chuck Palaniuks infamous short story "Guts" with a pool-related arse-vaccuum sequence but maybe I'm giving the screenwriters a little too much literary credit there.

WEIRD JAPANESE...THING - just for Reaper

2009-11-24T12:57:00.000-08:00

I say again...whats wrong with the japs?

I have watched this about 14 times now.

Help me.

Help me understand.

SAW 6

2009-11-23T12:02:00.000-08:00

Jigsaw wants to play a game. Despite his name, he can't play with himself so as usual a number of non-entitiesare lined up to get fed into a kind of krypton-factor-with-acid-and-blades dungeon gameshow. Hang on, isn'tjigsaw dead? Yes he is, and the producers must really regret that now....the last three movies have beencomprised mostly of flashbacks and feeble plot devices that attempt to pull in elements from earlier movies in the franchise to try to create a neat, overall plot arc where none actually existed in the first place.

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These movies are cheap..they are filmed like tv shows, the cast drop further and further down the food chain with each movie and it beggars belief that these actually get cinema releases. I like my ultraviolence a lot but who the F**K is watching these? As usual there are two simultaneous plots running throughout...the "cops and killer" bit and the "victims" bit. Ther first part is mind-bendingly dull, the "victims" part pretty standard, involves some health insurance guy forced to kill or save members of his staff.

Gore wise the movie blows its beans in the first five minutes and the rest of the kills are quite meh.(and certainly nothing to compare to the "key lodged behind the eye" bit at the start of Saw 2. Argh!) They don't even bother with a big dramatic reveal at the end as they normally do, simply because there -is- nothing more. This dead horse has not just been flogged, someone's been sick on it. All the scenarios have been played, but all the signs point to a Saw 7. And if you go see it, I'm going to come around to your house and force you to play Boggle with a f**king beartrap around your head.

JENNIFER'S BODY - Too much Jennifer, not enough body

2009-11-22T05:59:00.004-08:00

Well we might as well deal with the sexy elephant in the room first....so let's lube that trunk and get on with it. Megan Fox. Eh? Eh? Has ever a movie star been so aptly named, so....well, meganey? We'd all hit it. Just like we'd all hit the mysterious button to kill a stranger for a million quid, we'd all - men, women, gays, lesbecians, children, animals, minerals, vegetables, all - rattle her fillings all night long and what's more secretly video it on a craftily concealed cameraphone for generations of future, er, "study". It's the kind of legacy you could leave to your grandchildren. Whether or not they'll want to watch an ancient sex video of their dead grandfather and his frantically thrusting balls is another matter entirely. So now I've asserted my hetrosexuality so casually, lets now move onto Jennifer's Body, and the main burning question....does she get her bum out?

No she f**king doesn't is the answer, as usual I don't know much about this movie, it's written by Diablo Cody, ex-stripper and writer of smartarse but amiable Juno. Anyway Ms Fox gets possessed by a demon and, developing a voracious taste for man-meat(!) starts to pick off the local lads in a pretty un-graphic manner while her geeky mate tries to sort everything out. The result is a nondescript teen-horror with nowhere near enough gore or feminudity for anyone other than perhaps teenage girls, who will probably appreciate it's sarky tone and restrained bloodshed.

PLAGUE TOWN - Dere's more to oirland dan dis

2009-11-22T05:59:00.003-08:00

Jaysus! As an irish ex-pat I'm often asked the same questions by the natives of whatever land I am currently residing..."Can you put that away please" "What are you doing in my house""Is it in yet" etc. No one however has ever asked me why irish horror movies are so rubbish, and why would they, it's a retardedly random question that no normal person would concievably ask. But is it as retarded as such cinematic cowpats as Rawhead Rex, Dead Meat, Shrooms, Boy Eats Girl etc? Bail o dhia ar an obair, but they are all f**king awful. Does Plague Town buck this bog-trotting trend, or does it suck as badly as its predecessors? Well....yes and no. Yes it does suck, and no, it doesn't not suck.

There is definitely a rich seam of irish mythological lord of the rings-esque fantasy that is begging to be mined cinematically, but horror wise, well there only so much you can do with banshees, pookas and leprechauns. So in this case it's fairly bog standard mutant inbreds who pick off an cliched american family and a cheeky english lad who get stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Eyeless babies, grisly gore sequences and a bizarre soundtrack keep the interest well enough, but the dialogue is cringworthy, the acting perfunctory at best and it's all a little crude and clumsy. At least at a mere 80 minutes it doesn't outstay its welcome. Begorrah!

PANDORUM - Throw this space turkey out the airlock

2009-11-22T05:59:00.002-08:00

Another film with minor genre potential falling flat on it's fat f**king face. The unholy progeny of Event Horizon, Aliens and The Descent, although nowhere near as good as that might suggest. In fact, what it really reminds me of is a generic first person sci-fi shooter. You know the kind...where you are wandering around dimly-lit beige spaceship corridors replacing battery coils and hitting switches to activate reactors and so on while Dennis Quaid stays on the bridge and whispers sweet nothings into your earpiece and asks you to fix the coolant leaks on level 3 .. "I'm a soldier not a f**king plumber" you might cry...but this is space, and no- one can hear you scream. So...the story. Dennis Quaid and some other vaguely familiar bloke awake from hypersleep on a giant spaceship, they seem alone, they are not, something has happened to all the other passengers...it appears they have all (a) died (b) gone feral or (c) devolved into some breed of deformed aggressive mutant
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D-Quaid...I have to say, the guy must really be hitting the yakults and jogging, he appears to be aging incredibly slowly. And the movie itself...seems a lot longer than 100 mins or so. I feel asleep watching it the first time, came back to it the next day and was amazed to find I still had nearly 50 minutes to go! The last 20 minutes or so pick up a bit, but the first hour is just tedious, badly paced, strangely edited and irritating.... There is an explanation as to why everything on the ship has gone as mental as it has, but its completely incomprehensible. The enemy mutants are a fairly generic lot of bald spikey carnivores and the heroes are a tedious bunch. If you manage to avoid (hyper)sleep during this mess you are doing better than me. So well done,

GAMER - the movie equivalent of canine intercourse

2009-11-22T05:59:00.001-08:00

The older woman's fancy man Gerard Butler ("This is Spartaaaa" etc) stars in this vein-bulging, headache-inducing, overedited sci-fi shambles by Nevilene and Taylor. As the creators of the Crank franchise, and clearly aware of those movies' similarities to a live action Grand Theft Auto, N&T have decided to push the live action computer game concept forward with Gamer. Not sure why they bothered. In a not-too-distant future everyone seems to be playing Slayers - like playing Modern Warfare, except you are controlling real deathrow inmates rather than a bunch of polygons - or Society, a pervy version of Second Life, populated by out of work actors being controlled by greasy salad-dodging lardasses, like this fine specimen below.

GB is the main man of Slayers, needless to say he's in there because he's been set up, he manages to break out and is determined to find out The Truth blah blah. Like Crank, this is more like a 90 minute music video than an actual movie...no shot seems to last more than a second and the camera jerks around like a dog biting an electric fence.

There is a huge bodycount and plenty of female nudity but it's far too stylised and dumb to appreciate. Play your xbox/ps3/sega megadrive instead, you'll have a lot more fun.

INVITATION ONLY - "your names not down, you're not coming in"

2009-11-22T05:59:00.000-08:00

Taiwan's first horror movie apparently, and sadly not an auspicious beginning. Pretty dull thriller with a hint of Hostel (the rich getting their kicks through torturing randoms etc) with a couple of mildly gruesome sequences (one unfortunate individual get jump leads attached to his bellend...you don't need that)

It's all quite forgettable and in fact I'm only reviewing it so I can post a pic of Maria Ozawa...who, brilliantly, shows up, acts badly, gets naked and gets dispatched soon after. Perfect. If only Megan Fox had done the same in Jennifer's Body.

THE TOURNAMENT - Battle Royale as re-imagined by a 12 year old thicko

2009-11-22T05:57:00.001-08:00

Dear me. Summing up...rich people betting on an annual event involving a couple of dozen bombpregnated blood-hungry assassins killing each other off. Each year The Tournmament takes place in a different exotic location, this year it's in....Middlesborough. This is so random it actually nearly endeared me to the film, (I mean....boro...why?) but the film itself is so utterly disabled by its massive duh levels that it just can't be let off the hook like some screaming brain-damaged albino stickleback. Seriously, this movie is so mongified it makes Crank f**king 2 look like Battleship Potempkin.

There's some mildly entertaining splattery ultraviolence and the main actress is quite attractive but if you have actually gone pubic you WILL spend more time rolling your eyes and muttering "f**k the f**k off" than deriving any actual enjoyment from the movie. Begbie from trainspotting is in it as well. He needs to glass his agent, and soon. I have plenty of time for low-IQ movies - loved Punisher Warzone - but this? Load a pish! I want..my stupid movies...to be stupid...in an intelligent way. This....is like Warwick Davis after a severe head injury, it's not big and it's not clever. I will give it a minor plus point for being set in Middlesborough though. That really is just strange. Otherwise utter gash. Highly recommended to pre-teen boys and simpletons though.

SAMURAI PRINCESS

2009-11-22T05:57:00.000-08:00

What the f**k is wrong with the japs? Is it something to do with their post-war blanket ban on the depiction of pubic hair? The nation that gave us Hentai, bukkake, omorashi, kegadoru and vending machines offering shrinkwrapped used schoolgirl panties to sweaty salarymen quite clearly has a few sexy toys in the attic. So it seems their nationally stifled sex drives need to expressed in various other unpleasant fleshy ways. Here's the latest in the weird sci-fi gore bodyhorror genre that seems to be pretty popular with our repressed vertically-challenged asian brethren. Tokyo Gore Police, Machine Girl, Meatball Machine...it's along these (warped) lines.

Rubbery prosthetic phallic mutations? Check. Huge spurting geysers of blood? Check. Awful music? Yep. Incomprehensible plot with jolting mood shifts and spastic editing? Oh yeah. Just mental, like Bad Taste-era Peter Jackson directing an episode of Monkey. Spectacularly inventive gore effects but ultimately tiresome..the shrill "acting", goofy humour, cheap production values, amateurish cgi and generally overloud histrionics prove too much after about half an hour (what's all that nonsense with the guitar...?)

The story....group of girls get offed by bad men in a strange japanese forest. The sole survivor is turned into a "mecha" - a severely modified human - and goes off to wreak unneccesarily gory vengeance with swords, fists and bio-mechanical boob grenades. Dozens of overacting cannon-fodder get various body parts slashed off, skeletons punched out of their bodies, brains pulled out then squashed and stuffed back in, heads bifurcated, etc.

Halloween Horror Roundup

2009-11-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

Yes, its a couple of days late...I was ill, no kids were arsed to show their gormless faces at Casa del geebag so i was obliged to eat a kilo of year-old haribo myself. This made me very sick indeed. CURSE YOU GOLD BEARS. Enough of my aching oesophagus and ravaged colon, let's crack on.

Are you afraid of ghosts? I used to be...as a young man I was convinced the ghost of a down-syndrome toddler lived under my bed, coming out in the dead of night to chew my star wars figures' legs and leave a strange sticky ectoplasm all over my darth vader duvet. But as the years past I stopped believing in ghosts, and Star Wars, and as the movies I was watching became more and more deranged desensitisation set in and the most a "scary movie" could provoke in me was a dull, mild sense of discomfort and a vague appreciation of the cinematic sleight of hand involved in genuinely creepy movies. So it is with Paranormal Activity...lots of hype...but despite my initial apprehension, this movie definitely has...something. It could be the absolute suburban normality of the location and the general blandness/realistic irritability of the two leads, but yes...some people - and by people, I meant women - will find this very chilling indeed. I watched it alone in a darkened room with headphones on and it did provoke, somewhere in the withered dead pit of my consciousness, a mild sense of discomfort. But that's a recommendation of sorts. And, actually, its not even a ghost at the heart of this film, it's some kind of demon, and a c**t of one...it takes the piss and has a malevolent intelligence that make it far worse than some supernaturally confused disabled ghost children. Wait till it's out on dvd, and watch it alone, in an ancient sinister house, or possibly a disused asylum surrounded by decaying tramp cadavers, for the full impact.

"Creepshow" style anthology....its apparently been sat on a shelf unreleased for a couple of years and I'm not sure why...perfectly serviceable little horror, nothing special but a painless way to pass 90 mins or so. The stories are a mixed bag as you'd expect, but the sack-headed kid is freaky and it's got the annoying chick from True Blood in it.

I watched this after "watching" Transformers 2, which isnt really a movie you watch, its something you experience....but not a nice experience, like the first time you used minty shower gel on your freshly shaven nad jacket, but a bad one, like being raped by a screaming tractor for TWO AND A HALF F**KING HOURS. After than cgi-based molestation, Moon was like a quiet. mellowing balm on my fevered, haribo-and-transformers addled brain. It's a low-tech 70's style sci-fi drama about a man alone on a space station on, well duh, the moon. After a routine bit of maintenance goes badly wrong, he wakes up back at base, goes back outside to where the accident happened and finds....well to be honest, no point saying much else it would give some genuinely interesting plot points away. Dopplegangers and that. Intelligent and well acted, definite phillip k dick vibe. Recommended.

Alright, not a horror, but I loved Tony Jaa's previous beat em up Warrior King, it was a thoughful and intelligent character study involving Tony going around shouting "Where are my elephants??" and breaking people's limbs. Included the infamous single take stairway sequence and a superb scene where a wrestler flings a elephant through a plate glass window. There are many more elephants in Ong-Bak2, but unfortunately none of them get thrown through windows, not actually sure what this has to do with the first Ong-Bak actually, its a pretty incomprehensible but enjoyably barmy and OTT medieval beatdown with a gibberish plot and head-scratching finale. Apparently Tony himself went a bit unsane during the filming and hid in the jungle for a few months, so the movie own schizophrenia itself could be a reflection of this apparent instability. Worth a watch though, the boy's got moves, and it looks spectacular.

Now if you'll excuse me i have to go to the toilet again

KUNG FU FLID - small arms expert

2009-10-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

Have you ever thought about how many midgets you could defeat, if an infinite amount of them poured down a narrow corridor where only one at a time could fight you? How about babies? Toddlers, infected by the rage virus? Of the former, I'm going to hazard a guess at about 5-6....some of them are pretty buff, and look like you could hurt yourself hitting them around the head. Toddlers I'm thinking more 80-90, before sheer fatigue and vague child-injury-related remorse would lower my Mighty Boot of Torment. And then they would swarm over me and devour me like a giant screaming farleys rusk.

What about...flids?

The answer....well for a start, a flid is apparently a derogatory term for "thalidomides" and if this movie is anything to go by...less than 1. Because "Barry" is one mean thalidomide (or, "flid"). He would reach down your throat, rip out your pelvis and cave your skull in with it.

Or he would, if he could reach that far with his tiny little t-rex arms. You have seen this guy on telly before, always seems a bit understandably aggro about being dealt quite literally a bad hand by fate. ~~If I had little chicken wings like him i would invest in a baggy jumper~~ You have to hand it to him...he has made a decent fist of his light-of-limb condition...the sheer rage (possibly) channeled by the inability to wipe his own bottom has manifested itself in a doublehard martial arts expert actor type guy...He's in a band as well. Fair play. In his position I'd probably just spend my life in a darkened room learning to masturbate with my feet and mourning my inability to wear long-sleeved shirts. This astoundingly ill-conceived movie however is just a generic shot-on-video el-cheapo slap-em-up/shouty "drama" with lots of naughty language, the only USP it has is that the lead looks like something out of Total Recall.

So be careful next time you're thinking about randomly attacking a disabled...they could end up handing you your arse...using their feet. So leave em alone eh, don't have a go just because they're different and hilarious.

Seventh Moon - cinematic epilepsy

2009-10-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

Here's an another movie by Edward Sanchez, co-creator of The Blair Witch Project, following on from the mildly enjoyable Altered where he obviously had a bad experience with a tripod becuase he's clearly decided to go entirely handheld. There's no conceit to the movie being "found footage" or anything like that, it's just shot in this way. Which would be fine if they hadnt decided to forgo an actual professional cameraman and apparently MOUNT THE F**KING CAMERA ON THAT F**KED UP DOG FROM YOUTUBE'S HEAD. There are vast swathes of this movie that are unwatchable. Seriously I watched this movie on a 10 foot projector and its actually impossible to tell whats going on when people are doing anything other than just sitting and talking. Which is a shame...could have been creepy and I would most certainly not like to get lost in the Chinese countryside. Which is what happens to the two protagonists, some chinese-american guy and Amy Smart, who ripped her jaw off in the bath in the lamentable Mirrors and got ploughed by Jason Statham in the Crank movies. And there's ghosts and etc etc, cant see anything, what's the point, buy a f**king tripod!

Zombieland - Dead on Arrival

2009-10-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

Never, never did I think I would say it, but I'm getting a bit sick of the undead. There are more reanimated flesh eating rotten bastards around now then even their halycon period of the early eighties and to be honest I blame Danny Boyle for it. But if its zombies or vampires well I'll have the shambling/sprinting dead over a lot of preening eurofag bloodsuckers anyday so yeah - Zombieland. Not really a horror-comedy this...its pretty much just National Lampoon's Vacation with some minor head trauma and cannibalism. Shaun of the Dead seems to be held up as the benchmark for horror comedy and to me that is a travesty when movies like American Werewolf in London, Reanimator, Return of the living Dead, Brain Dead and Evil Dead 2 vomit blood on it from a great height in terms of actually mining the elusive "humurous horror" seam. And most of those are zombie flicks to boot. So if movies starring the shambling reanimated corpses of our neighbours are already mostly funny/satirical anyway, what is Zombieland's raison d'etre?

Heres the thing....its not really got any "horror" bits at all, the horror elements are almost just background static. Its a buddy pic. Its a post - apocalyptic Dumb and Dumber with the occasional post-post-modern "Scream"-type reference to horror movie RULES (these pop up in big writing on the screen when referred to in the flaccid voiceover, so you can nod a bit and go, "Oh yeah, thats right! This movie's Self-Aware and not adverse to Pointing Out The Cliches in the Genre in a Humourous fashion! I get it!" So that's all fine. It's quite fast and clever, and the first 20 minutes are great. After that it plummets. Woody Harrelson is good. The main character is a boring sub-emo wet blanket who looks like he would cry if you gave him a dead arm. I laughed twice. It's not a bad movie, it's just indicative of the appalling year its been so far that this is getting some pretty warm reviews and positive word of mouth.

I'm going to wait for Rec2 and Survival of the Dead (and advance word on the latter is not good...not surprising considering "Land" and "Diary"....leave it George...just...leave it) And then I hope the entire zombie genre shoves it's flyblown head up it's desiccated maggoty colon and stays there until someone with real vision comes along to resurrect it once again.

The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

2009-10-06T13:21:00.001-07:00

Only a short youtube video...but watch this. It's f**king funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y

9 - muppets vs machines

2009-10-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

This is a strange one. A dark (VERY dark...this is not a movie for very young kids....there are several corpses including a dead child within the first 5 minutes! This movie will scare the s**t out of any kid under the age of 10) animated feature about a gang of littlebigplanet-alike cloth puppet people being chased through a post apocalyptic landscape by weird hybrid robots. Looks great but has virtually no plot...its essentially 7 or 8 action sequences strung together to form a feature that just barely makes 70 minutes and even that limited running time feels like its pushing its concepts to their absolute outer limits. It's a padded out short, in other words.

Not bad, per se...just unexceptional in the current era of spectacularly good animated movies such as Up, Coraline and anything not by Dreamworks. I'm giving it a pass for its eye candy and the art design which will appeal to anyone with a sci-fi art-geek fetish.

The Offspring - Meat is Murder!

2009-10-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

Cannibals...who needs em? Certainly not the protagonists of The Offspring, a grimy cheap but in fairness entertainingly wacko horror flick based on some obscure novel. The aforementioned protagonists are a family of middle-class bad actors whose dull but adequate lives are made a bit more entertaining - and shorter - by a feral tribe of gut munching tribesmen who suddenly appear out the forest intent on some human meat to go.

Abysmal acting and cheap production values, plus a weird and random story, but also has some very harsh violence, an effectively sparse score consisting almost entirely of odd atonal sounds (probably took about 10 minutes to score to be fair) and an unsettling 70's style atmosphere. Plus its short, 78 minutes. Short, dumb and mean....like a special needs midget with a grudge.

Altered - "I come in peace"

2009-10-06T12:47:00.000-07:00

"And you go in pieces, a*****!" Wise words there from Dolph Lungren in ropy 80's sci-fi Dark angel. And as always, Dolph Lungrens wise words are words of really...wise...wisdom. Because do I not like aliens. With the occasional exception like ALF or chewbacca most of them are c**ts who want to give us a kicking with superior technology, use us to incubate their parasitic young or gangprobe us mercilessly. With Altered the tables are turned on these star-spawned arseheads. A bunch of previously abducted hillbillies manage to capture an ET and are intent on some redneck payback, possibly involving blowtorches and heads-in-vices. Naturally things go badly...meddling police officers, excruciating spouses and flesh-eating alien diseases all conspire to make things go very definitely pear-shaped. Plus the alien is a sneaky and vicious bollix with vague telepathic powers and an inclination towards disembowelment.

This is a movie by one of the team responsible for Blair Witch but I wouldn't let that put you off...well, much. Its a decent enough little time filler, although the main alien-napping concept - while cool - doesnt really stretch over 90 minutes....its more like an extended mid-90's episode of the x-files with gore and bold language. F**king alien bastards!

GRACE

2009-09-30T14:20:00.000-07:00

Eurgh! More bad babies! This one has had a fair bit of hype, and the director has been mooted as a protege of Eli roth. What..? Thats a recommendation? After an accident and a traumatic birth, the main character - dont know here name and couldnt be bothered finding out, that's what IMDB is for- has a seemingly normal baby. But it aint. Its a wrong un. It's not happy with milk. Its needs something more....so the distraught mother goes to various lengths to pacify this vampiric twat of a baby. She tries cow blood, siphoned off from frozen meat from the local supermarket. Baby doesnt like it. So things just get worse and of course a few human cadavers show up and well....this is an icky movie. it takes itself very seriously and actually carries off such a mental and to be honest tasteless premise quite well...but its not fun to watch. it will make your skin crawl. Dont watch this if you have a young one yourself because it may force the point home that your little bundle of joy that has the cutest smile is, in fact, a blank-eyed soulless parasite. Have a broody missus with a touch of the baby-fever? Show her this...she'll be on the phone booking you a vasectomy before the credits have finished rolling.

The Gene Generation - like the Matrix, except cheap and retarded

2009-09-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

Bai Ling's breasts.

Alright, now lets move onto the bad points. This is a sci-fi adaptation of an obscure comic (sorry, GRAPHIC NOVEL) which seems to be a william gibson-derived cyberpunk (hate that word but my vocabulary doesnt have any other words to describe "vaguely blade-runnery, grimy dystopian future setting") The rather fetching Bai Ling is an assassin hunting down DNA-thieves or summat, despite the fact that she seems to ignore the stealth approach and strides around looking like a intergalactic raver in goth boots and hot pants - god forbid we have a slightly overweight moon-faced female killer with greasy hair, she's an assassin so she has to be SHEXSY.

So there's some mad plot about a stolen widget that can do...stuff..there are some boring action scenes and the entire thing look like it was filmed in three locations, her apartment, a corridor and some kind of foundry. Except for the exterior scenes, which look like some obscure japanese PS2 game intro (red sky over futuristic landscape with zeppelins and archaic boat-things floating overhead.) Theres a hilariously gratuitous sex scene and a whole load of awful supporting characters who do little but act as plot points and irritations.The micro-budget shows through at every seam and really....I admire ambition but this is trying to remake the matrix with your mates and a copy of after Effects. Avoid, unless you like seeing fit asian actresses looking hot and angry. So in fairness, its actually is probably worth, not a thumbs up, but maybe a mild trouser twitch of a recommendation.

District 9 - Master of the Pron!

2009-09-30T03:21:00.000-07:00

Watch this...

Right thats the premise out of the way...

Giant alien mothership has been suspended motionless over johannesburg for 20 years. A million malnourished and scabby aliens have been airlifted out of it and set up in their own shantytown directly underneath it. The government decide to move them all on to specially designated concentration camps outside the city and the movie kicks off with paramilitary police and contractors moving in to serve eviction notices on all the inhabitants of district 9.
But some of them dont want to go...

The aliens themselves are mostly an unsavoury lot, essentially they are a mob of intergalactic pikeys, and District 9 is like a giant squalid halting site. And like travellers, you really wouldnt want to live next door to them. They'd get sick on your lawn, eat your car tires and urinate everywhere. Actually its probably like living next door to Reaper. They are mostly - with a few more notable exceptions - a fairly grimy lot of mardy chitinous bipedal crustacean idiots who like a bit of a ruck, scrambling around the junkhills and shantytowns of D9 dossing about in the streets and trading alien weaponry for catfood with dodgy nigerian gangsters.The parallels to the travelling community are unmistakeable. Except for the whole alien Weapons thing. SOME OF THEM EVEN WEAR PINK F**KING BRAS

There were rumours of debut director Neil Blomkamp helming the long-rumoured Halo-movie. After seeing this I think it could actually work. The CG is outstanding...the aliens are perfectly realised, if a little generic - Im sure ive met these guys before in some console game - and fit seamlessly into the handheld action. The movie itself begins in a quasi-documentary style before morphing into a chase/action flick with large quantities of fantastic ultraviolence and cronenberg style body horror. The final confrontation is a particularly spectacular bloothbath involving exploding body parts, mech-suits and pig missiles. Everything flies past at a blistering pace and is so densely layered and detailed that it will really reward repeat viewings. There is room for a sequel...but I really hope that doesnt happen. The end is perfect.

Brilliant. NOW DON'T POINT YOUR FOLKING TENTACLE AT ME YOU FOLKING PRON
by Master Gi-Bag

Grotesque - Gewy not Chewy!

2009-09-30T03:19:00.000-07:00

Whooo! We've got a live one here! There's been talk- and a spectacularly grim trailer - on the web for a while for this Japanese torture-porn, and having just watched it, i have to say...PASS THE F**KING SICK BAG VICAR. As clearly inspired by 80's pseudo snuff Guinea Pig, there is no plot, which is great, saves me having to type it out, because the entire thing is an hour and a bit of a mentalist torturing and dismembering a young couple than he has seemingly plucked at random off the streets. After about 15-20 minutes of pointless rambling and some wholly distasteful sexual abuse, he ups the ante, declares he will spare one if the other takes his/her place, and then goes to town of them with a chainsaw, icepick, hammer, scissors...you know, the usual.

It is of course complete and utter rubbish and genuinely reprehensible, but I have to admit I enjoyed it in a "Eaargh, no, not the balls" kind of way. There is no way in hell its going to get past the censors over this neck of the woods so you'll need to "acquire" it in other ways...down with this sort of thing etc. Ah it seems it actually has been officially banned!
By Master Gi-Bag

Embodiment of Evil - o reaper é um homossexual!

2009-09-30T03:17:00.000-07:00

EMBODIMENT OF EVIL

Here's an odd one. A brazilian sequel to a horror series last seen 40(!!) years ago, main character an underground cult figure called Coffin Joe. He (CJ) is released from prison and immediately embarks on a quest to mate and create a perfect child. Never mind the fact that this is a portly pensioner who resembles a homeless paedophile magician with three inch fingernails, hordes of stunning brazilian beauties flood to him to offer their wombs to him, but as he's old and probably not got much lead in his pencil he just tortures the hell out of them instead. One unfortunate girl eats her own bottom, another gets a cheese-frenzied rat up somewhere you really dont want a rat.

CJ himself is hilarious, the acting is so over the top that the words CHEESE and HAM are just entirely inadequate. The whole affair in incredibly camp and OTT, and just...hilariously bad. And wince-inducingly torture-y. But does have many nudey women! Thumbs up for brazilian slappers, thumbs down for everything else.

Its Alive - or is it?!

2009-09-30T03:15:00.000-07:00

When i was a young Gi-bag I used to have an unwelcome reoccuring dream where I'm having relations with a hugely pregnant woman. Just on the vinegar stroke the fetus grabs my member and pulls me into the womb and eats me. This movie...brought those dreams back with a vengeance. It's a remake of Larry Cohens 80's cheapo schlock-horror (original cover above...couldnt find the new one on google images!), but shares little other than the main feature...a doublehard, cannibalistic c**t of a baby.

Everyone knows babys are inherently violent anyway. They pull hair, bite, punch you with flabby fists and aim unerringly at testicles with flailing bootee-ed feet. (note i dont have any children myself...last time I met my newborn nephew my sister asked me to wind him...i thought that was a bit cruel so i just gave him a dead arm instead) In the original movie the baby was an ugly rubber-headed mutant of a thing. In this one the baby looks normal most of the time, but frequently goes off on one and when it does its blood and entrails everywhere. Even when being born, the little bollix manages to wipe out 2 doctors and 2 nurses. You read that last bit right, IT KILLS 4 PEOPLE WHILE BEING BORN

The main problem here of course is credibility. And the movie struggles to even come close...most kills are of the victim-gets-pulled-offscreen-blood-spurts-out variety. Because they know that the sight of a ninja-powered monsterbaby will cause hilarity whatever the circumstance. Plot, meh, kid born, kills lots of things, mother takes it home and goes a bit mental looking after it. Various characters drop by the house and meet messy ends. Not even sure why the baby was a wrong un in the first place...something to do with pills off the internet?

The acting is awful, and there is one character...the kid in the wheelchair...who seems to serve no purpose whatsoever.Why is he there? Did he win a competition? Technical stuff is all adequate, Im giving this one a bare pass just because I like to see bad actors killed by babies.
By Master Gi-Bag

Anti Christ - Send him back to daddy!

2009-09-30T03:11:00.000-07:00

You've no doubt doubt heard a bit about this one. Hysterical reports of mass walkouts and people crying and getting sick in the aisles, no hang on I'm confusing it with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of A Load of Alien Bollix. Yes...yes I can feel my sphinter pulsing ominously just thinking about that excrement-smeared screaming boil-encrusted abortion of a movie. And abortion is a suitable lead-in to Lars Von Triers newest, er, opus, AntiChrist. Because I'm sure I recall a deer abortion in this movie. Or was that Willems Defoes' penis? I'm not sure, this movie is so jaw-droppingly pretentious, hilariously gratuitous and exquisitely tedious that i actually began to forget the movie while in the process of watching it, whole sequences of muttered dialogue, boring dream sequences and shouty domestic tension folding in on themselves and imploding like craig t nelson's house at the end of Poltergeist.

It's about 2 hours long, theres about 30-40 seconds of quite explicit imagery...the now-infamous cliterectomy, the intro sequence's x-rated "piston" shot and the also-infamous Bloodwank (Charlotte Gainsburg bashes Bill Defoes scrote with a large stone thing. Then she looks at his prone unconscious body and notices....he's only gone and thrown a rod, despite his massive testicular trauma! So she grabs the tumescent prosthetic/stunt nob and proceeds to knock one out, only to recieve, not a healthy gush of baby batter, but several highly-realistic looking spurts of blood! It is definitely a cringeworthy scene, and not one to think about if you are throwing it up your missus ) Story...ehhh....couple lose their child (he falls out the window while they are having it away) and they head off to a cabin and...ah I couldnt be bothered.

This really does seem like the work of a misanthropic film student, its truly beyond parody. I have loathed all of Von triers previous work and this just confirms my previous prejudices...he's a chancer, and he needs to GTFO. C**t!
By Master Gi-Bag

District 9 - Get your prawns half price!

2009-09-09T03:36:00.000-07:00

Allow me to welcome our new movie guru, Master Gi-Bag. He shall be sharing his weird and wonderful insight of the movie world and has a taste for the unusual as well as the normal celluloid offerings. He shall delight and horrify you with his opinions... but it will keep you reading, of that I have little doubt!

Coming soon from Master Gi-Bag - District 9 review