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.