mattbaxter72 Reviews

The Snowman (2017)

Mister Police, you are a blithering idiot

[1/10 · 27 January 2018]

The chances are, you know about this movie by now. The production schedule which meant that about 15% of it wasn't even shot, and the fact that somehow the director didn't notice this until he was in the editing room. The bizarre Val Kilmer cameo, and its terrible dubbing. The fact that Chloe Sevigny plays twins, for literally no reason.

None of that can prepare you for the experience of actually watching this thing. It's utterly baffling, to the extent that you have to wonder if everyone involved lost their minds while they were making this film. Characters speak in strange, stilted dialogue, as though English isn't their native language. Accents are parcelled out randomly - Fassbender does an English accent, Adrian Dunbar retains his natural Irish accent, Sevigny and JK Simmons try out something that's probably meant to be Scandinavian, while Kilmer was apparently dubbed by Tom Waits. Plot threads go nowhere, scenes are inserted for no reason, and there's a recurring theme involving the awful song 'Popcorn'. Toby Jones appears for thirty seconds, and is gone again. I spent much of the film sitting there going 'What?' over and over again.

At the centre of it all is Michael Fassbender, playing a brilliant alcoholic who's sometimes a detective. Actually, he's only sometimes an alcoholic, too - he has a remarkably ripped physique for someone who routinely wakes up on park benches. His topless shot is a five-second scene in which he stands at a window and looks a bit moody. He has several scenes like this, although in most of them he's wearing more clothes. At one point he wanders into a house and starts making donkey noises at a small child. Incredibly, that's only about the fifth most embarrassing moment in the movie. When the case is finally solved, the great detective Harry Hole (yes, really) solves it more by chance than anything else.

For all that, you have to see this movie. Here is a major movie, with big stars that was released unfinished into cinemas. You have literally never seen anything like this.

November Criminals (2017)

Not actually a movie

[1/10 · 17 January 2018]

November Criminals has been advertised as though it's a movie, but there is no way in which it really is one. For a start, there's the sheer brevity of it. Take away the opening and closing credits, and this thing is 74 minutes long. That isn't a movie, it's an extended short film.

It does make up for that by feeling as though it lasts for hours. In those 74 minutes, the following actual things happen: Boy and girl have sex, in gauzy Mills-and-Boon-o-vision. Boy's friend is killed, off-screen. Boy investigates friend's death, a bit. He confronts another character, who just flat-out tells him who the killer is. He confronts the killer, a character we haven't seen until the final 10 minutes. He gets shot, but very slightly and he's quite all right really.

That's it. All told, that amounts to about 10 minutes of things actually happening. The rest of it amounts to more bland filler than my grandma's meatloaf, with l-o-o-o-o-n-g scenes of people driving, people walking, and people having anguished conversations that go nowhere and illuminate nothing. We even get the full 3 minutes of David Bowie's 'Life On Mars' at one point. It's a good song, but those three minutes, like most of this stuff, could have been cut out very easily.

The two lead actors give frankly baffling performances. Chloe Moretz is trying, at least, but her character has nothing to say and even less to do. Why she agreed to be in this is something of a mystery. As for Ansel Elgort, he gives a thoroughly charisma-free turn which is so different from his captivating, fluid performance in this year's Baby Driver that I seriously wondered if it was the same actor. There are scenes here where he stumbles around as though he's forgotten how to walk.

In short (and it's worth saying again, this really was very short) there's nothing here worth anyone's time. I don't know why this thing exists. I'm pretty sure the people who made it don't know why it exists, either.

Futureworld (1976)

Yul Brynner is haunting my dreams

[2/10 · 8 December 2016]

(Spoilers for the movie Westworld. Though if you haven't seen that, heaven only knows why you're watching this).

Back in the day, studios didn't really take sequels seriously. It wasn't uncommon for the stars, director and writers of a major hit to all jump ship from the sequel, leaving a bunch of second-stringers to pick up the slack, and the resulting product was almost always inferior. Even by those standards, though, Futureworld is a godawful mess.

The plot doesn't really matter, and it's similar enough to Westworld anyway. So let's just list some of the more jaw-droppingly stupid moments in this mess:

1) So they're just re-opening the resort, huh? After about 150 people died last time round. And people are just lining up to visit the place? Yeah, I don't see that happening in the real world, somehow.

2) Apparently these events where a load of people died are so obscure in this universe that people need a refresher course in what happened, all of two years later.

3) If you invite an investigative reporter to your theme park, you can't really act all surprised when he wants to investigate stuff.

4) 'Meet me 10 minutes from now in the Hyatt'. On the 50th floor, no less, though Fonda doesn't specify where, in this enormous hotel, he wants to meet his source. He doesn't even ask where the source is calling from - he might have been in LA or Australia for all Fonda knew, but luckily he was at most a couple of minutes away from that hotel.

5) Judging by how the bystanders react, a guy being stabbed to death in front of you is perfectly unremarkable.

6) So, uh, you're just going to leave the ruins of Westworld like that, huh? Not clear up, or build over it or anything? You're even going to leave body parts lying around? That's just icky.

7) The main bad guy is so nice and avuncular that he might as well have 'EVIL' written on his head in neon.

8) Good lord, Blythe Danner is useless in this movie. I know it was the 1970s, and attitudes were different back then, but surely she could do something other than stand around and scream helplessly?

9) Yes, robot ninjas are an excellent way to get rid of those pesky reporters. 'Crusading reporters killed by rampaging robot ninjas' is a headline that'll make page 9, at best. No possibility of bad publicity there.

10) Should I mention the dream sequence, or shall we just all look the other way in stunned embarrassment and pretend that none of that ever happened? That absurd sequence is the only time that the 'star' of this movie, Yul Brynner, appears in anything other than flashback footage. He didn't act again after this, and I don't blame him.

11) Almost none of the movie takes place in actual Futureworld, and you'll see much more of air-conditioning ducts and boiler rooms than futuristic wonders. It's probably because they had a tighter budget this time around, leaving the whole thing looking very, very cheap.

In short, this is not a good movie, and not even an entertainingly bad one. It's not unwatchably bad, but if you can get through without using the fast-forward button a couple of times, you're more patient than I am.

Triple 9 (2016)

Well, that was certainly a movie that I watched

[5/10 · 21 February 2016]

All the signs were good for this movie. I like heist movies, and I couldn't imagine being bored by one, at least. I kind of liked the director's previous movie, Lawless, though it wasn't without flaws. But most of all, there's that cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anthony Mackie, Daryll off of The Walking Dead, that guy from Breaking Bad, Clifton Collins Jr sleazing it up, Woody Harrelson hamming it up, and Kate Winslet vamping it up.

Here's a note for any would-be directors out there: if you manage to get a stellar cast, you might want to try giving them something to do. Here, everyone gets exactly one characteristic, so Ejiofor is mopey, Mackie is angry, Collins is sleazy (obviously) and Woody Harrelson is off in his own little world, cheerfully ignoring everyone else.

None of them gets time to really develop a character, and because there are so many people competing for screen time, none of them even gets that long to do his thing before we're off to someone else. The editing is choppy, and when Winslet isn't on screen, most of the movie consists of men growling incomprehensibly at each other. The heist scenes are well-executed, but the linking scenes are insufferably dull.

That problem isn't helped by some baffling narrative choices. Norman Reedus is an effortlessly charismatic screen presence, but all his scenes here are shot inside vehicles. I'm not joking - I can't remember if he even gets to stand up. And then there's poor old Casey Affleck, a dreary bore who's inexplicably made the centre of attention instead of much more interesting actors. Come to think of it, that was my main complaint about Lawless, too, that the action concentrated on the most boring character.

Triple Nine isn't hateful, and it isn't hopeless. The heist scenes do work well, and Vampy Winslet is fun, but there's way too much gunk to plough through in order to reach the good bits.

Kill Your Friends (2015)

Adolescent drivel

[2/10 · 8 November 2015]

There are people who really like this movie. Good for them. I have only one thing to say to people who really like this thing: please stay far, far away from me.

I want to make myself quite clear here, and leave no room for misunderstanding. I like villain protagonists. I like black comedy. I like satire, and I know what satire is. You can say I don't understand this movie, that I don't appreciate its depths or its subtleties, and I'm sure the many fans of this thing will say just that. You just don't get it, man.

I get it. Satire has to make us think about the thing being satirized, to see the issues in a new way. This movie's one, flickering brain cell is simply incapable of doing satire. Black comedy should make us laugh, at some point. A film with no actual jokes is not a comedy. It's not even a bad comedy, since even that would have jokes that fail, but this has none at all.

Most of all, a film with a villain protagonist has to realize that he is, in fact, a villain, and not a role model. This movie has been compared to American Psycho, and that comparison is actually useful, because that movie understands that Patrick Bateman is a broken, pathetic human being. He's interesting, otherwise the film wouldn't work, but he's not someone we're expected to actively root for. This movie reads like bad American Psycho fan fiction, written by someone who really identified with Patrick Bateman and thought he was just peachy. We're clearly expected to want Nicholas Hoult's character to win out, and cheer when he does. Again, if you do find anything remotely redeeming about this smug, hateful, smarmy twit, that's great. I hope I never meet you.

The point of view of this putrid little film, as far as I can see, is to say that the music industry sucks, people suck, the world sucks, and only hateful, morally bankrupt scum win out in the end. It's the sort of world view that seems incredibly profound when you're 16 or so, and incredibly stupid when you become a grown-up. This film is adolescent in outlook, and the fact that it was apparently made by adults is incredibly depressing.

Solace (II) (2015)

Ham and cheese

[3/10 · 29 September 2015]

This is a direct-to-DVD movie, which has inexplicably attracted a couple of big stars, but that shouldn't obscure the fact that Zalman King was knocking out stuff like this back in the 80's. At least those movies had boobs to distract you from the ridiculous plot: this thing can only offer Anthony Hopkins' weird hairdo.

Hopkins, in one of his more restrained performances of late, is a psychic who can see people's futures by touching them. Meanwhile Colin Farrell is the killer he's tracking, who's always one step ahead because - gasp - he's psychic too! Sounds like some cheesy fun, right? Except someone decided that this was a Serious Film, dealing with Big Ideas about morality and justice and destiny and fate and stuff, and so everyone looks really dour all the time, no one has any fun, and by my count at least four people get cancer. I'm pretty sure there were less cancer patients in The Fault In Our Stars. And more jokes.

Hopkins and Farrell do their best here, Jeffrey Dean Morgan sleepwalks through it and Abbie Cornish... well, she looks pretty I guess, though to be fair Meryl Streep would have struggled with such a cliché-ridden character, a classic example of a female character written by a man who apparently has never met any real, live women.

The real villain here, though, far worse than Farrell's murderer, is the director. He uses hand-held cameras for no reason, and does so incredibly ineptly, to the extent that I was all but shouting at him to hold the bloody thing still, already. He uses clunky flashbacks and awful symbolism, inserts rubbish montages for no particular reason, and at one point has 77-year-old Anthony Hopkins enact a sequence that looks as though it could be the video to 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams'. In the end, it's only the director's staggering incompetence that you'll remember about this tosh when you catch it on late-night cable in a couple of years' time.

The Lords of Salem (2012)

A god-awful mess

[2/10 · 3 July 2014]

Let's get this out of the way from the start: I like Rob Zombie's movies. House of 1000 Corpses was good and creepy, Devil's Rejects was one of the best horror movies of the last 20 years, and the Halloween remakes were... honestly pretty good. I'm pretty down with Satanic cult movies, too, and in fact I wish Hollywood would make more like The Devil's Rain or Race With the Devil. So when I heard Rob Zombie was making a Satanic cult movie, I thought it had to be good. It had to at least be interesting.

It isn't good. It isn't interesting, except in sporadic moments. It isn't even really a movie, so much as a bunch of unconnected scenes strung together without reason or purpose. You feel the director had about 45 minutes' worth of material, so he had to pad it out with a whole subplot about people searching for the key to the mystery (i.e. Bruce Davison reads a lot of books. Cinematic!). It's padded out with tedious scenes in a radio station that only served to remind me of the much better Pontypool, and wish I was watching that instead. It's padded out with a three minute sequence of a character sleeping. Then waking up. Then getting dressed. Then peeing, on-camera. That's not building atmosphere, that's padding. I can't believe Rob Zombie has apparently forgotten that.

Honestly, that might not be unsalvageable, but for the horrendous acting performances in this movie. Sheri Moon Zombie is allowed to give a somewhat naturalistic performance, but nearly everyone else spends most of the movie screeching absurd dialogue at the tops of their voices. You'd think that would make it into a camp classic, but the effect is more like being trapped next to a loony on the bus for an hour and three quarters. It's not camp, it's not fun, it's just tedious and, ultimately, embarrassing.

The set design is good, Rob Zombie can still frame a shot, and the boom mike didn't get in shot, so I guess it isn't a one-star film. But dear lord it's bad.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

Turn the bloody lights on!

[2/10 · 28 August 2013]

The Aliens and the Predators are back, and this time it's not in a spaceship, or a weird planet, or even in the Central American jungles. This time they're infesting a small American town! But it's worse than that - much worse. This time they're - lazy! Seriously, this has to be one of the laziest, most uninspired sequels I've ever seen. The characters are stock clichés - the overburdened sheriff who never calls for backup, the nice but nerdy kid, the slutty girl, the school bullies, and so on and on. None of them is a protagonist, which means that we don't have anyone to lead us through the story.

Not that this really matters, since the story consists of: people are attacked by aliens. People are eaten. More people are attacked by aliens. Repeat until closing credits. Alien, Aliens and Predator built up suspense, and had resourceful heroes trying to fight back against the monsters, even if the odds were impossible. There's none of that here. Bland non-characters are attacked and immediately eaten. That's all you're getting, over and over again.

Even that action is barely visible, because for some reason (to disguise cheap special effects?) the whole thing is shot in near darkness. On the rare occasions that you can make something out through the gloom, your response is likely to be 'Who's that? Oh, never mind, he just got eaten. Oh, it's gone dark again'.

The sum total of links to the other movies is that there's a character called Dallas. This movie is a wretched, cack-handed insult to fans of Alien and Predator alike.

Savages (I) (2012)

Please, just make the voice-over stop

[3/10 · 25 September 2012]

There are many bad things about this movie, but let's list the good things first. The plot makes sense, kind of. It's nicely shot, and the beach looked pretty. And... I guess John Travolta looked as though he was having fun? Which is more than I could say for the poor buggers who had to sit through this mess.

Your two leads, ladies and gentlemen, are Aaron Johnson, last seen being upstaged by a preteen girl, and Taylor Kitsch, who Hollywood keeps casting as the lead in blockbusters which then tank spectacularly at the box office. You know why that is, Hollywood? It's because Taylor Kitsch has no charisma. None. The furniture was more interesting than he was, and had more emotional range. Even he's better than Johnson, a black hole of tedium from which nothing interesting can escape. These are two of the blandest leads I've ever seen, and I've seen movies that starred rappers.

But dear God in heaven, they are much, much better than Blake Lively. I haven't seen much else of her acting, so I can only think she can do much better than this. But here she's playing a 30-year-old ingénue, a woman-child who knows Shakespeare but doesn't know what 'savages' means. She's meant to be sexy and alluring, but she comes across as so boundlessly stupid that no man could seriously find her attractive. I don't think that's her fault, but the no-nudity clause that made the sex scenes in this movie so absurd? Yeah, that was her fault.

Even that isn't the worst. There's still... that voice-over. The narration that infests this whole movie, but especially the early scenes, is some of the worst writing I've ever heard. 'I had orgasms, he had wargasms' is a phrase that will live with me until I die. And now, even if you haven't seen the movie, it'll haunt your nightmares, too. You're welcome.

Twixt (2011)

Subtle. This film is not it.

[4/10 · 15 September 2012]

If you're going to watch this movie, it's best to forget who the director is. Yes, Francis Ford Coppola has made some of the greatest films of all time, but that was a very long time ago; in fact, the last time he made a horror movie was nearly fifty years ago (Dracula, which was a bizarre costume drama, doesn't count). So you have to put all that out of your mind, and pretend that this thing was directed by someone you've never heard of, and have no expectations.

And it's still terrible. As Val Kilmer drives into the Mysterious Little Town where all dodgy horror movies take place, an ominous music track rises to a crescendo, a crow caws and somewhere in the distance, an actual bell tolls. Subtlety, what's that? Just in case you couldn't work it out, a voice-over tells us that something evil is occurring - the proof being that the town clock doesn't work properly. I only wish I was making that up, or the CHORD OF DOOM that strikes when the camera focuses on - a bird house! An evil bird house, obviously, with evil, demon-possessed sparrows inside it.

Well, all right, that's the opening five minutes. The movie does settle down after that, and, well, the cinematography is nice. Coppola still knows how to frame a shot, and it's all lusciously printed on proper film stock. It's horribly written, edited and scored, but the film stock is nice. To put it mildly, that doesn't make up for the film's problems, including a plot involving an Evil Vicar that is frankly idiotic.

Worst of all is the acting. You could almost believe that the actors here are in some kind of twisted competition to give the most lifeless performance possible - yes, even Bruce Dern - but you simply can't beat Val Kilmer in a competition like that. As with many of his recent performances, he seems to be asleep on his feet for most of this thing. But, just when you think he's giving the most awful performance of the movie, along comes his ex wife, Joanne Whalley, to steal the bad acting crown from under his nose. If you've wondered why she doesn't do many movies any more, this film will explain everything.

A couple of last things. Elle Fanning's character seems to be an, ah, object of affection for a good few characters in this movie. She is about twelve. The constant references to how pretty she is are seriously gross.

Secondly, there's a plot twist that references something that happened in Coppola's own personal life, which is *really* uncomfortable, especially in a cheesy horror movie. Maybe Coppola thought this film would be a lot more profound than it actually is. Maybe he should give up on the movies, and go back to making wine.

Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004)

It's not for you, it's for the morons

[1/10 · 25 November 2011]

I think everyone knows about this film by now. Critics hated it, audiences stayed away in their millions, and when the British Film Council was abolished recently, one of the main sticks used to beat its corpse with was its financing of this movie.

I thought it couldn't be that bad. I thought it must have some redeeming value. Some funny moments, at least. I was so, so wrong. If anything, the critics were too kind to this unfunny, putrid pile of steaming faecal matter.

Ah, but it's not for you, is the reply. It's not meant for people who can string a sentence together, or do sums, or walk upright. This one's for the idiots, who just like something simple, a good old-fashioned chuckle at some sexual shenanigans. If you don't like it, it's because you're an intellectual snob. This is the modern equivalent of a Carry On film, just harmless, smutty fun.

Except it isn't, and I hope the film's defenders are haunted by the vengeful ghost of Hattie Jacques for even mentioning Carry On in the same breath as this... thing. The Carry On films were funny, at least every so often. They had these old-fashioned things called 'jokes' which were designed to make you 'laugh'. Someone needs to explain these concepts to the people responsible for making this movie, because they clearly have no idea what those things are.

This is a movie that expects you to laugh at the idea of a threesome - with 2 guys and a girl! At a man who has a big penis! At Johnny Vegas getting drunk and singing! These things are funny by themselves, apparently. They must be, because I was clearly expected to laugh at them.

A lowbrow sex comedy ought to be funny, at least. If it can't be funny (and good God, this cannot be anything in the same county as funny), then it can at least be sexy. Sadly, unless you find Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie Crook to be gorgeous hunks of manhood, this ain't very sexy either. It's a dead loss, a worthless waste of time that will even disappoint the gibbons who are its intended audience.

The Hitcher (2007)

The Hitcher, generic own-brand version

[4/10 · 26 September 2011]

I admit that I'm biased when it comes to the original movie of The Hitcher. i love Rutger Hauer, I've driven more miles than I care to count down endless, empty American highways, and there's no doubt that after a while the loneliness gets to you. Out there, in the middle of nowhere, anything can happen. It's a scary place, and that movie distils those fears into the character of one mysterious, deadly man.

Even if you don't agree that the original is a masterpiece, though, it's far better than this pointless remake. The theme of loneliness on the empty roads is immediately jettisoned, since we now have two people in the car; the original's spooky beginning is replaced with a scene at a sunny college, set to a pumping, generic rock soundtrack. C Thomas Howell's lonely drifter is replaced by a couple of cute college kids. The rough edges have been sanded off, everything that was interesting has gone, and we're left with the Wal-Mart own-brand version of The Hitcher, complete with Sean Bean, the Wal-Mart own-brand version of Rutger Hauer.

Someone saw the spooky, disturbing, weird original movie, and decided it needed to be more mainstream, and the protagonists needed to be more 'relatable' - or more ordinary, in other words. What The Hitcher really needed was a coy shower scene, where the heroine holds her hands over her breasts, set to generic plinky-plonk piano music. It needed more jump scares. It needed a baddie who shoots down a helicopter with a pistol, from a moving car 200 feet away. I remember watching the original and thinking that was just what it needed to make it perfect.

Sean Bean, god bless him, is actually really good in this, nearly as good as Hauer in the original. But the movie doesn't deserve him. I know what the director deserves, though, and it involves two great big trucks...

Jack and the Beanstalk (2009)

They don't make 'em like this any more, thank God

[2/10 · 18 July 2011]

You know how your granny complains that they never make nice films any more, that the whole family can sit down and watch? This was clearly designed by your granny, as something nice and old fashioned; the trouble is, I think the old bird's getting a bit senile.

It goes like this: Jack lives in fairyland, where everything is a fairy story, and he wants to be a hero. But in order to do so, he has to go on a quest and learn about things like Sacrifice and Perseverance and I'm sorry I just can't go on. I just can't.

It's not the clichéd plot that kills this movie. It's not even the hideous, explosion-in-a-cuteness-factory design of the sets. It's the acting, and the characters. They're just AWFUL. Jack himself is the kind of precocious brat who needs a good whack upside the head, but he's nothing compared to poor Christopher Lloyd, who is forced to explain every joke very slowly, over and over, as though he's speaking to an audience that's suffering from major brain damage. Lloyd is better than the frantically mugging Wallace Shawn, who plays multiple roles, all of them dreadful. Even that shameful performance is far, far better than Gilbert Gottfried, who is just insufferable as a human chicken. Did no one look at that character? Did no one think that maybe, just maybe, a movie with that horrible, screeching nincompoop at the centre of it might be a bad idea? The only cast member who comes out of this mess with any dignity intact is Chloe Moretz, who filmed this just before she went on to fame in Kick-Ass. I think it's safe to say she won't be putting this movie in her show reel, though.

This is an old-fashioned family film, in all the wrong ways. It's far too twee and cloying for adults, and much too cutesy for kids who have been brought up on the harder edges of Pixar or Disney movies. There's never any sense of even slight danger, so that it's impossible for adults or kids to get involved in the film. I wouldn't recommend letting your kids see Kick-Ass, but there are a thousand better movies for them than this.

Wicked Lake (2008)

Blue balls, the movie

[5/10 · 18 July 2011]

Exploitation movies are a special genre. They don't need great acting - and this movie has terrible acting, which is par for the course. It also has lousy writing, stupid plot twists and cheap cinematography. All these things are only to be expected in this genre.

What you really need in an exploitation movie is, well, some exploitation. Buckets of blood, lashings of sleazy sex, and overall a movie that will horrify good, decent citizens everywhere.

And that's where this movie falls down, sadly. It has lesbians - coy lesbians, who kiss each other quite nicely, but don't show TOO much skin, and never seem to get past kissing. It has distinctly un-scary vampires, a bunch of hillbillies who are just gross and sweaty rather than scary, and the gore is laughably fake, and again, not too excessive.

The thing is, excess is what exploitation movies are all about. There's a lot of potential in this movie's Suspiria-meets-Deliverance plot, but for some reason the film-makers didn't have the courage of their convictions. Maybe there's someone out there who can take the same premise, and do it sexier, nastier - and better.

The Steam Experiment (2009)

Completely unwatchable

[2/10 · 18 July 2011]

Most bad movies at least have something going for them, something that makes you want to sit through them, even though you know they're rubbish. It's a rare film that is so thoroughly messed up in every department that it's literally unwatchable. That, plus the frankly bizarre premise, gives this thing some novelty value, if nothing else.

The premise is probably the best thing about it. Think Saw crossed with An Inconvenient Truth, with gratuitous nudity and gratuitous sweaty Eric Roberts. With a plot like that, it could have been a camp classic, but unfortunately everyone took it very seriously, for some reason, almost as though they really thought that this movie would carry a serious message about global warming.

Val Kilmer, above all, is VERY, VERY SERIOUS. He mumbles and stumbles his way through an embarrassing performance, but he's still the best member of a dire cast of non-actors and mugging over-actors. The quality of the camera-work suggests that someone just learned how to use the special features on Windows Movie Maker, and the dialogue seems to have been written by someone who has never heard English spoken before.

It's a challenge to sit through this deeply silly, but deeply self-serious movie. Really, you've got much better things to do with your time.

Cop Out (2010)

Is this a joke?

[1/10 · 1 February 2011]

This is supposed to be a comedy, allegedly. I only know that because it's advertised as a comedy, though - you certainly wouldn't know because of any funny moments in the film. It's a buddy cop movie, where Bruce Willis looks as though he's overdosed on Valium and Tracy Morgan makes up for that by doing what I can only describe as a minstrel show routine.

I don't want to get on my high horse about what's supposed to be a light-hearted action cop movie, but then again I didn't want to get angry after a light-hearted action cop movie, either. Angry about Morgan's performance, a gibbering, cavorting, screeching act that wouldn't have been out of place in the days of Stepin Fetchit. Angry about the fact that no one involved seemed to give a toss - in fact they might as well have spent the whole movie just standing there, holding up two middle fingers at the audience.

But I'm angry most of all at Kevin Smith, the director of this piece of utter garbage. He used to be talented. He used to make great movies like Clerks, Dogma, even Mallrats. Yeah, that's right, I'm the guy who liked Mallrats. These days he churns out lazy rubbish and then goes on Twitter and whines at anyone who dares to criticise it. He's thrown his talent away, and he's so wrapped up in the bubble of his own self-importance that he doesn't seem to realise it. By making a film like this, and clearly not caring at all about how it turned out, he's shown his complete contempt for movie-goers, fans and the smoking wreckage of his own career. Well done, Kevin. Well done.

Season of the Witch (2011)

Oh no! Must be The Season of the Witch

[5/10 · 7 January 2011]

This movie has lots of things going for it. Ron Perlman and Nicolas Cage, together at last. A silly medieval bunch o' nonsense about a couple of deserters from the Crusades who have to transport a witch across country and stop the Black Death, or something. And of course, zombie ninja monks.

And it's dull, so dull. Cage and Perlman are unusually restrained, and the plot plods drearily from Point A to Point B with all the verve and style of a kid doing a homework essay on plankton. That journey across the vast and unknowable heart of medieval Europe? There's bad CGI wolves, and a dodgy rope bridge. Our heroes run away from the wolves, and cross the rope bridge. That's it for the journey.

Once they arrive at the monastery, they do battle with the bad CGI zombie ninja monks, but the CGI is so very, very bad that you can hardly work out what's going on most of the time, and the monks are little more than blurry shapes. All the battle scenes are like this - confused, badly shot and impossible to follow. The director can't do tension or suspense to save his life, either.

Oh, it's not a total loss. The dialogue is often hilarious, sounding as though it's been translated via Babelfish from English to Ukrainian and then back again. I particularly liked Cage saying 'Can't sleep? Myself, as well' among many other examples. The scenery is nice, and you get to see Ron Perlman headbutt the Devil in the face. A few more moments like that and this mess might have been worth watching, but as it stands it's not good enough to be good, and not bad enough to be campy fun.

The Killer Elite (1975)

Yes! Peckinpah Is... Boring?

[4/10 · 2 December 2010]

I don't know about you, but I had certain expectations of a movie called 'The Killer Elite', starring two guys out of the Godfather and directed by the man who brought us The Wild Bunch and The Getaway. It's about spies! It's got 'killer' right there in the title! It's made in the 1970s, so you know there must be at least two car chases. Sure, this was made during the period when Peckinpah was single-handedly keeping several major pharmaceutical companies in business, but at least it couldn't be dull, right? Wrong. Oh, so very wrong. The Killer Elite is damn nearly incoherent, but that would be OK if the action sequences were any good. Or if anything, you know, happened for the first 50 minutes or so. Literally the only action during the first half of the movie is the sequence where one spy suddenly goes rogue, shoots the guy he's supposed to be protecting and his partner, and then buggers off. It's a good sequence, and one that lasts for maybe two minutes. The rest of the first half of the movie is given over to Caan and Duvall laughing uproariously at their own jokes, and the most gruelling depiction of physical therapy I've ever seen. Gruelling for the viewer as much as the guy going through it, because it seems to last approximately forever.

By the time we got to the halfway mark, I was watching a poorly-defined character who I didn't care about, but who was certainly very, very horny. Other than that single trait, James Caan's playing a guy with no discernible characteristics at all. He is later joined by several other cardboard cut-outs, and we are treated to something that I thought was literally impossible, a boring car chase.

Why is any of this happening? I don't know, and I really didn't care. The plot barely exists at all, everyone from the writers to the actors seem to be sleepwalking through the thing, and in a 110 minute movie you could cheerfully lose 100 minutes without getting rid of anything of importance.

If schools are really serious about getting kids to avoid drugs, show them this movie and The Getaway back to back. One was made by someone before drugs took over his life. The other was made by the same guy, after narcotics had wrecked him. This is a hell of a mess of a movie. And not in a good way.

London Boulevard (2010)

Welcome to the disappointment

[5/10 · 29 November 2010]

In a lot of ways, this is a puzzling movie. Every single element of it is so right, so how does it end up being so completely uninvolving that I ended up nearly falling asleep halfway through? The problem isn't the casting; Colin Farrell makes a hell of a gangster, all smouldering machismo stomping through the streets of London. And with a supporting cast that includes Eddie Marsan (sleazy), David Thewlis (sleazier) and Ben Chaplin (sleaziest, and very, very good), Farrell has some excellent support. Ray Winstone has never been scarier, but of all people it's Anna Friel who takes the acting honours as Farrell's sister, a woman who out-sleazes Marsan, Thewlis and Chaplin combined.

The problem isn't the locations, or how true to life they are. I lived in London for a long time, and I've rarely seen the city depicted better, all back streets and alleyways with nasty bastards lurking around every grubby corner. Considering the film's writer and director William Monahan is from Boston, I was worried that this might be the tourist's eye view of London, but that really isn't the case. The film positively drips with atmosphere, and the expletive-heavy dialogue rings true.

And yet it all sits there, lifeless on the screen, a collection of images and characters that seem only vaguely related to one another. It doesn't help that the main plot - will Farrell become a proper gangster, or will he end up with Keira Knightley's way-too-good-for-him actress - is hardly new. But that doesn't have to be a deal breaker, and there are plenty of interesting minor characters to pass the time.

The problem is really that the film feels rushed. Those minor characters aren't given nearly enough time - Marsan gets three scenes, none of them remotely important to the plot, and even Anna Friel doesn't get a lot to do. She's still better off than Stephen Graham and Sanjeev Bhaskar, great actors who are cast in completely pointless roles that could have been played by anyone. And so much of this movie feels tacked on, from the dozen or so subplots, to Winstone's pointless murder of the wrong man halfway through, to the stalker, obviously based on Mark David Chapman, who makes several ominous appearances and is then dismissed in a single line of dialogue.

If some subplots and characters are pointless, though, the ending made me feel that way about the whole damn film. Without giving too much away, it's a horrible, limp lettuce of an ending, with none of the resonance that the film-makers clearly thought it had achieved. That's the film in a nutshell - it wanted to be profound, but ended up as a giant 'so what?'

The Town (2010)

I'm puttin' this whole town in my rear view mirror

[9/10 · 24 September 2010]

According to Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in American lives. Which just goes to show how little he knew; Ben Affleck could tell him otherwise, and it's easy to see what attracted him about this story. This is about a man searching for another chance, and a way of escaping the town that forms his prison.

It's also about robberies, of course. There are three in total, at the start, in the middle and at the end of the movie, but while all three are superbly staged and shot, they're more punctuation than the main point of the plot. It's really about Affleck's character, trapped by circumstance, by family and ultimately by blackmail, and his attempts to escape the very grim destiny represented by his father, who will have to 'die five times' before he gets out of prison.

It's also a romance, of a sort, and one that plays out believably. Without giving too much away, this may be the first movie I've seen that genuinely explores the consequences of a robbery for the victims, and Affeck's character sees for the first time the damage he does. There is no glamour here. Robbers damage people, even if they don't shoot anyone, and in the end they're as damaged as anyone else.

Everyone in the movie is great, especially Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall and Pete Postlethwaite in a cameo that moves from minor character to a force of pure, blackest evil. But in the end it's Affleck's film, as actor and director. He's earned his second chance, in spades. It's no surprise that he wanted to make a movie about a man who's looking to atone for his past sins. What will be a surprise, at least to some people, is how good - and how deep and serious - this film is.

Night of the Demons 2 (1994)

This is not the movie you think it is

[8/10 · 16 September 2010]

It's a largely forgotten 90's horror flick, starring no one you've ever heard of or are likely to hear of again. It has the requisite boobs and gore, probably went straight to DVD, and it's the sequel to a truly awful film that no one liked. You know pretty much what to expect from this one, right? Think again. Against all odds, this is one of the most inventive and bizarre horror films I've ever seen. From breasts that turn into grasping hands, rape by lipstick and a decapitated body that stumbles blindly around, to badass nuns with party balloons filled with holy water, this movie takes you to places you never thought you'd go. The plot is more or less by the numbers, but the characterization is well done and believable, the acting is on a decent level, and the whole thing is much more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Admittedly, there's a LOT of set-up to get to the good parts - the whole first half of the movie is splatter-free, apart from a couple of door-to-door evangelists who meet a sticky end. But once the movie does get going, it's full of wit, invention and, yes, frightening scenes. This is how you do low-budget horror.

Ein Unbekannter rechnet ab (1974)

Because the plot says so!

[4/10 · 13 September 2010]

This is an adaptation of a work by Agatha Christie, although without many of her usual trademarks - no smarmy Belgians or pottering old ladies here, just ten nasty people trapped in a hotel in the middle of nowhere, being killed off one by one. The killer is among them, but who is it? Well, apart from the fact that the director likes giving long close-ups of one particular character for no obvious reason, a better answer might be - who cares? They're all nasty pieces of work, quite a few can't act for toffee, so kill 'em all, I say.

As if that isn't bad enough, the characters tend to speak solely in long chunks of exposition, and the whole thing is directed and written by people who clearly take 'plodding' to be a compliment. The worst of it, though, is that the characters in this suffer from a terminal case of passing the idiot ball. Hey, we're in a mysterious house where we're being killed off one by one - let's split up! And then explore the dark basement! What could possibly go wrong? Let's wander out into the ruins, alone! Or into the desert, wearing a heavy overcoat and carrying one small bottle of water! Not exactly for the first time in a movie like this, I felt the characters were only behaving this way because the plot told them to, and most were so stupid they deserved to die.

Oh, it's not irredeemably bad - with a cast like this, how could it be? But the actors, clearly hired from the Utterly Random Casting Agency, aren't given enough to do, or enough freedom to properly ham it up. As each character is killed, you expect them to show at least a little emotion, but mostly they just look like a bunch of actors waiting on a cheque.

It takes until the third death before someone says 'This isn't a game any more.' Perhaps if someone had been bright enough to realize that fact after the FIRST person was murdered, I wouldn't have been wishing so fervently for them all to get killed.

The Medusa Touch (1978)

I am the man with the power to cause catastrophe

[8/10 · 27 April 2010]

There are horror films, and there are horror films. Some have a bunch of teenagers being stalked by some nutjob with a mask and a big knife, and you have trouble remembering those the minute they're over. And some horror films have bigger ambitions, and less splatter, and the best of those can stay with you for a long time after they're over. The Medusa Touch, an almost forgotten gem from the 1970s, is one that might leave you with trouble sleeping if you watch it late at night.

The set-up is certainly eye-catching. John Morlar, a misanthropic writer played by Richard Burton, is a man who thinks he can create disasters. At the very least, people who annoy him have a funny way of dying - his parents, his teacher, the judge at a trial where Morlar was a lawyer. But that was in the past - now Morlar is thinking bigger, causing bigger and bigger disasters. Or at least, that's what he thinks. But is he really a man with devastating powers, or is he a deluded madman? In fact, although the movie leaves the question open in the early going, there's never much doubt as to what the answer is. The question becomes not so much what is he doing, as how he can be stopped. When you can't kill a man by smashing his skull in so badly that his brains ooze onto the carpet, can you stop him at all? I hadn't seen this movie for years until today, but I remembered enough of it from when I was a kid, hiding behind the sofa. Coming back to it as a grown-up, I had my doubts. It's a euro-production, with a couple of roles handed to French actors for no good reason. It was made by Lew Grade's notoriously cheap studios, known for wobbly special effects and ruthless editing to fit in with TV schedules. And most of all, the premise seemed a bit, well, silly.

I needn't have worried. The euro-actors acquit themselves well, especially Lino Ventura in what's effectively the lead role, the special effects are better than they have any right to be, and still stand up well. And as for the premise - yeah, it is a bit hokey. But as with any such mad sci-fi plot, everything depends on how the actors and the director play it. Here, they sell it, right to the bone - there's no smirking, no winks to the camera - and considering this is late-period Richard Burton, surprisingly little ham. Everyone is committed, and the result is that I was drawn in all over again, and I'll likely have nightmares all over again. That's OK, though. I just wish all my nightmares were as well-crafted as this one.

Mutant Chronicles (2008)

Made By Monkeys

[2/10 · 26 March 2010]

Supposedly, if you had an infinite number of monkeys sat in front of typewriters, and an infinite amount of time, the monkeys would eventually bash out the works of Shakespeare. Sadly, the makers of this movie didn't have an infinite number of monkeys. They had two monkeys, both of them slightly brain damaged, and instead of an infinite amount of time they had a couple of hours to work up a script. Mutant Chronicles is the result, but don't think too badly of them. They're only monkeys, and they were doing their best.

In all seriousness, though, why are video game adaptations nearly always like this? Millions spent on special effects, clearly enough on salaries for a few good actors to sign on - and written and directed by gibbons. The script for this one isn't really, really bad, just unbelievably bland - the characters have no character, they speak in clichés or hand out flipping great wodges of exposition, and the plot is strictly by the numbers. You've seen it a hundred times before, and it wasn't great those times, either. The director can barely frame a shot, and the whole thing drags, drags, drags, until 108 minutes feels like decades. When the movie was over, I half expected to look outside and see rocket ships flying past, but I guess it just felt that long. And just for fun, we've got some thuddingly obvious political commentary, a First World War battlefield in a movie set 700 years in the future, and at least 50 people getting stabbed through the head. That's no exaggeration, either - this director doesn't know much, but he knows that he loves him some head-stabbin'.

That probably all makes the movie sound more entertaining than it really is. It's really just boring and dumb, but there is some entertainment value in watching a vastly over-qualified cast trying to make the best of the horrible movie they've found themselves in. Ron Perlman goes with a truly awful accent which even the Lucky Charms leprechaun might think was a bit silly; John Malkovich makes no effort whatsoever, and mumbles his lines as though barely staying awake, while Thomas Jane mostly just looks depressed. Best of the bunch, though, is the permanently furious and confused look on Devon Aoki's face. 'I was in Sin City!' that look says. 'How did I end up in this piece of crap?' Maybe she ought to ask the monkeys.

Push (2009)

Great until the last 5 minutes

[6/10 · 17 February 2010]

There are a lot of things you need to know about this movie. One is that very little of the plot makes any sense. Seriously, you really mustn't try to follow what's going on, or work out who's on which side, or who in the hell that English woman is supposed to be. If you start trying to apply concepts like 'logic' and 'causation' to this movie, your brains will start to dribble out of your ears in a terribly messy way. It's better to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

And what a ride it is. The movie is set in Hong Kong, which has never looked more weird or more wonderful. Every shot drips with atmosphere, every individual scene is memorable. And as for the action scenes... well, these are some of the best fight scenes I can recall in a recent movie. All the characters have some kind of super power, and just for once they get to use them in imaginative ways - guns that really can shoot round corners, guys being dragged along the ceiling, and much more.

Mind you, the strength and the type of super power varies more or less according to what the plot says it should do, but that's another of those things you shouldn't worry too much about. The ride is fun, and it works better if you check your common sense in at the door. And try not to notice that most of these people can't act for toffee. Chris Evans is OK but instantly forgettable, as usual, and Dakota Fanning is all right, but everyone else is pretty poor. Again, it doesn't really get in the way of the fun.

What does, though, is the ending. I won't say too much about what happens because.. well, nothing much happens. This isn't your ambiguous ending, as in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly or the original Italian Job. This is an ending where literally NOTHING of any importance is resolved. The big bad is still around, Dakota's mum still hasn't been rescued - despite us being told that if she wasn't saved right now, she would die - the main Chinese baddies and that English woman are still knocking about somewhere, and it's not so much an ending that is sequel-friendly as one that needs a sequel to give even a little sense of satisfaction or closure. Any movie, even if it's definitely going to have a sequel, needs some kind of closure at the end, but this has none, and that's deeply frustrating. It also leaves the nasty taste of studio meddling in the mouth, of a bunch of men in suits who decided that everything had to be left open for the next, highly profitable episode. It's a shame that such an unusual, individual movie should end in such a cynical way.