BBFC BANS HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2

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.

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Los Ojos De Julia - EYES EYES BABY

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

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

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.

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

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

"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

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

"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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

DREAM HOME - house plice clash

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

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

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