Burning Bright - HELLO KITTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please send Reaper back to us Mr Bell.

Please

:(

Piranha 3d - FISH AND TITS

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

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

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

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

THE EXPENDABLES - Grumpy old men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EVEN WORSE THAN USUAL

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.