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CAPSULE GUIDE

Message board musings for those films without a main review.
A mixed bag of genres for you to explore.
In Alphabetical order.

I - P

ICHI - 1
Not really gory (though it gets pretty damn bloody) but very violent and a good liitle introduction to the character from Takashi Miike's infamous "Ichi the Killer".
Low budget, but very well made. Worth a look for "Ichi" fans.

INVISIBLE MAN (THE) - 1933
Universal's groovy, pretty faithful, adaptation of HG Wells' story of the same name still holds up on many levels.

The FX are still damn good and effective, with no wires on show for the many moving objects, and the clever (and damn hard) invisible man effects are also fine...with the Black and White cinematography ensuring that the ancient matte work looks great thanks to none of those typically awful colour problems.
Hell , look at the truly dire matted Alien FX (a green hued blob on a wall more like) in "Alien 3" to see how even decades later colour problems could ruin many a matte shot.

Away from the great FX we have a fast pace, some great sets, a brilliant support cast of whacked out and theatrical local yokels (with the great Una O'Connor in top camped up form as the shrieking landlady and a top 'comedy cop' performance by E.E. Clive) and a wonderfully mixed brew of slapstick comedy, black comedy and out and out nastiness.
And it is Claude Rains who superbly utilises this mix of horror and humour.
Wrapped in bandages or quite simply not there at all Rains has only his commanding voice to make an impression. And he does.
His psychotic rants, mad cackling and comic singing as he causes mayhem all help to essay one of the most whacked out and downright nasty characters in any film ever.
Something I think people tend to forget.

Today, we mostly think of an invisible man as a purely comical creation or a good guy figure.
Add this to the fact that a man you simply can't see is somehow not as scary or visually impressive as a werewolf, vampire or man-made monster and the character has been rather pushed aside when we talk about great screen villains and threats.
But in reality...The Invisible Man is by far the most deadly figure in any 'Universal' horror film!
Dracula, The Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster are novices in death dealing!
The Invisible Man racks up a body count of...wait for it...122!
By the time he has bashed in heads, rung necks, pushed people of cliffs, sent a man (who screams in a genuinely unsettling way) crashing to his death in a runaway car as well as derailed a damn train...he's bumped of 122 human beings!
As such there is real sadism in the film, as the laughing killer routinely kills people with psychotic glee.

A few plot hiccups (a guy is murdered and next we see that the national press is reporting the murder in blazing newspaper headlines and yet the scene of the body being carried out of the room comes after this press coverage! Must have started to smell a bit!) fail to hurt the film to any degree and in fact the great dialogue given to the Invisible Man is so memorable it bulldozes everything else out of the way.
The embracing of the violence and mass death that is constantly on occurring, when added to the great FX, wonderful cast and generally effective black comic styling, ensures that "The Invisible Man" has dated less than many other 'Universal' horror films and still retains a genuinely horrific edge.

ILS ("THEM")
A couple is terrorised at home by a gang of hoodies!

Hmm....got rave reviews when it came out, but quite frankly I've seen better French Horror films recently
The main problem is the fact the director seemed reluctant to shout "cut".
Scenes go on for too long, thus mutating the tension initially built up into something approaching tedium.

An effective opening for example loses steam when we spend a good minute with a girl calling out to her missing Mother. On and on she goes...
The same happens with an early driving sequence involving our main woman character.
We know nothing is going to happen to her yet! We all know! The director knows we know as well, surely.
And yet the car is filmed creeping along roads (with a sinister plinky plonky piano score for company) as we wait for her to actually get home and start the film!

The same extended into boredom, where initially we had suspense, problem happens in a sequence where the woman slowly creeps through a (rather bizarre) room hung with dirty plastic sheets. Again, it goes on and on and on.
The couple like to talk, walk and move in slow motion too, as they endlessly gaze into each other's eyes in that cloying and sickly way good looking French couples seem to manage so easily.

And would anyone else like to see a home invasion/avoiding the psychos plot where the house isn't a mansion!?
The terrorised couple have so many rooms, crawl spaces and corridors to creep around in it seems they could live in the same house as the killers and not even meet them!
How about seeing if you can keep the tension and suspense up by setting the film in an average home, made up of a sitting room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom! That would really be clever (and actually far scarier!).

And it goes beyond stupid to think that the couple would do what they do during the final chase as well. Idiots!
And talking of the final chase...where the hell did that gigantic, lit by a few hundred electric lights, underground labyrinth come from!?
It seems to be very close to their house and yet completely unknown to anyone, despite the obviously huge electric bill all those lighted corridors must chalk up.

But there are some effective moments here.
Some of the scare scenes are well done with a nice use of camera angles and sudden reveals.
And the thing that I noticed got the most criticism when the film came out (though the film did not get much and was certainly over-praised) I actually liked.

Many seem to dislike the eventual revealing of who the killers are, as if it makes it an anti-climax. To me though it gave the film it's only real powerful and disturbing aspect.

I'M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA
Damn funny, this astute and affectionate parody of 70's Black street culture and Blacksploitation films delivers more hits than misses.
Good, solid comedy fun with a nice cast of new comedy blood and veteran Blacksploitation faces.

IMPULSE
Meg Tilly returns home after her Mother shoots herself.
As Mum lies in a coma, Tilly and her boyfriend, Tim Matheson, notice that the townsfolk are acting very strange. They seem to be acting on their most anti-social, dark and deadly impulses with not a care for the consequences....
Very good, well acted little horror/sci-fi thriller with a nice support cast (including Hume Cronyn, John Karlen and a young Bill Paxton) for Tilly and Matheson to play off, and an interesting set-up.
With a film like this the set-pieces are vital and this has some memorable moments of the respectable townsfolk going nuts. Old men pissing in the street, old women grabbing money from the bank, the Sheriff taking an automatic rifle to kids who commit the most petty of mis-deeds, people screwing in public, kids setting fire to things and a Vicar swearing like a trooper!
It's all played deadly serious as well which is nice to see. It's a dark, bleak but entertaining little movie and deserves a higher profile.

IN HELL
"In Hell" delivers not only a very good Van Damme acting performance, but also some brutal, realistic, un-flashy action and even a big chunk of soul in this prison set tale.
Like "Wake of Death" this latter day Jean Claude movie is a real return to form.
Director Ringo Lam goes back to prison and the move was a good one for him and his star.

IN-LAWS (THE)
Still a great watch!
Peter Falk and Alan Arkin are in top form in this mix of typically smart and funny 70's dialogue and slapstick.
Arkin's dentist gets involved in the complications of Falk's eccentric CIA agent...all before their kids are about to marry.

Falk and Arkin play off each other wonderfully, there's a good support cast of characters (the barmy South American general with his painted on hand puppet is a gem and James Hong's airplane safety routine speech that he gives to the almost catatonic Arkin in the tiny private jet, all done in frenzied Chinese and mime, is a blast!), it's fast moving and just plain out and out fun in that unique 70's way.
Which of course meant it got yet another pointless re-make recently.

IN THE CUT
Jane Campion's erotic drama/thriller is a very strange, but interesting, beast.
More of a character/relationship study than a thriller (the psycho plot is purely there to propel the characters along) it's an engrossing mix of the rough, the dark, and the raw with the sureal and the dream-like.
It looks great, sounds great, is well acted and is surprisingly frank, open and explicit. Not just in the blood and body parts, or the nudity and the sex (Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo both bare all for the cause, and very nice it all is too, and the blow job scene may be a dildo but it's a damn realistic one) but also in the shockingly honest and raw dialoge where the sex is concerned. If the sex itself is not hardcore it's verbal description is.
The finale is a bit simple and rushed given the build-up and the style that has gone before, but all in all this is a solid, serious, well made, well acted, beautifully raw and open example of film making for adults.

INSANITARIUM
Okay, we have a plot hole filled script that at times annoys with how silly it all is, but also some finely crafted chaos.
Guy wants to see suicidal Sister in Psychiatric Hospital.
Guy pretend to go nuts in the local park, gets sent to Psychiatric Hospital.
While there he finds out the the loony head of it, Peter Stormare, is experimenting on the patients by removing the higher brain functions (!) so he can get to the lower brain functions (those pesky primordial suckers like to hide) and cure madness.
On top of this he's also been injecting himself with the experimental serum for some reason never really made clear.
Despite the fact a load of the patients now have seriously weird eyes, act like wild animals around blood and rip the heads of cats, no one thinks anything is wrong until it's too late.
Too late means lots of primordial nutters escaping their very chic glass cells and eating everyone...or themselves!

Extremely bloody, well made, violent, gory with a splash of exploitative goodies (2nd best blood covered bared breasts in cinema after the mighty "Alucarda") this moves at a good pace as it builds the (very silly and unlikely) 'lunatics running the asylum' plot towards its manic, blood caked conclusion.
Some moist deaths and munching scenes are here for our delight (plus a groovy cleaver to the face demise that is something we see too little of in Horror cinema these days) but very little actual flesh biting is seen. Thus showing just how cutting edge, and stunningly extreme, Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" was and still is in this department.

The film's problems though are the aforementioned plot silliness and glaring stupidity (for example a Nurse gets bitten, in a hospital no less, but simply wraps an increasingly blood dripping bandage around the wound and carries on without a care), some very bad dialogue and needless, 90's style Horror, one-liners.
But the real drop in quality comes from a truly annoying turn by the ever barking Peter Stormare.
Hell fire and cobble stones! This makes his turn in "Armageddon" look like the height of subtlety.
He's an eye-rolling, word slurring pain in the ass! And that's before his character really starts to turn psychotic!

A pretty good twist ending caps off what is a very retro feeling Horror movie (has that 80's Euro trash/gore film feel) which delivers a no-nonsense, if rather silly, viewing experience but utilises lots of modern and well executed gore FX to really drive the crimson covered carnage forward during the balls-out last half.
We needed more mayhem though, and less Peter Stormare, who needs to see The Cohen's again for a lesson in the difference between an annoying, hammy, silliness packed performance and an effective, off the wall, exciting and scary performance.
Otherwise though..We have another good, graphic, 21st century Horror flick.
Check this out for cannibal carnage galore.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
One of the only worthwhile remakes.
And one of the reasons why are those (still) superb effects.
Add and excellent cast giving their all, a cloying sense (even down to the camera angles) of paranoia and fear, some effective emotional drama and a superb ending and you have yet another example of why the 70's were the best damn decade in film...from Hollywood productions to skid row Grindhouse fare.

INVASION U.S.A.
Oustandingly cheesy, with a few flat action scenes (the Mall shootout is awful, you can see why Hong Kong films blew so much life into action cinema when you see this badly made set-up) but it's a lot of violent fun, with some great stunts in that unique 80's American way and with a suitably nasty and theatrical villian in the shape of Richard Lynch.

INVISIBLE MANIAC (THE)
Breasts, more breasts, arses, forced sub sandwich eating, death by being jumped upon, even more breasts, shotgun splatter, crappy/fun acting, dead jocks, a few more breasts, more arses, bad jokes, flying bras, a fight between *two* invisible people and damn it...MORE breasts!
Not a good film though!

IRREVERSIBLE *spoilers*
given the 'backwards' flowing narrative I did think that once the 'action' (for want of a better word) was over in the beginning the film would fizzle out.
I was wrong.
By the time the normal, before tragedy, moments were shown you had really come to feel something towards the main characters and it created a very odd, but pretty unique, mixture of sadness and happiness.
It also made you think just how fragile life can be...to see the horror and then to see the innocence before it was far more powerful than the conventional timeline method of telling a story.

The fact that the revenge was a failure and that the man responsible for all the hurt simply smiled and walked away just made the tragedy even greater, but that after such brutal and tragic events the film actually ends on a light and romantic note means we are left with wonderfully conflicting emotions towards what we have witnessed.
Powerful, hard and very well made I thought it pretty much lived up to it's hype and praise, with the rape being as brutal as anything seen in the likes of "I Spit on Your Grave" and the uncut "The Klansman", despite not being as graphic visually.

JEEPERS CREEPERS
Good stuff. Some nice atmosphere, some memoerable set-pieces, a surprisingly bleak attitude to things and a nicely different monster.
But I still dislike the Sister, who's quite frankly an unlikeable character too full of herself and too often saying things are "full of shit" despite everything she has seen!
Plus I have no idea why, after it has gone to all the trouble of chasing them and running them off the road, it then carries on driving, leaving the the leads to explore it's lair! Or to phone the Cops, as it can't know the battery is dead on the mobile!

Oh well...Still a god time is had with the trip to the monsters lair being a particular highlight, as is the Police car 'incident'!

JEEPERS CREEPERS 2
Far more an action flick than the first one and all rather overblown and silly with it.
We also see too much of The Creeper and he starts to become Freddy character with comedy face pulling etc. Some dubious matte FX for the flying scenes don't help matters. We quite frankly don't need to see him in as much detail as we do, as such he really just becomes a make-up effect rather than the effective horror character he was originally.

It has some good things though. The plot links with the first film are welcome, some of the action is well done and entertaining and you are rarely sure who is going to die (or not) next.
Ray Wise is always fun as well.
But ultimately it's an overblown sequel that lacks the macabre tone of the first film or it's bleak, doomy atmosphere.
Nice ending though.

JUST BEFORE DAWN
The UK DVD is uncensored, but uses a crappy looking transfer that's actually missing a couple of crucial scenes despite having a few other extra bits.
It also has some bad scratches...one makes the killer creeping up on the girl suddenly leap right next to her!

But a High Def transfer would not fix the problems here.
Stupendously drawn out (50 minutes before we get to the meat) and even when it does get going the action is shot and edited to be as clunky and lethargic as possible.
Anyone whose sat through nearly an hour of backwoods love triangle tedium to get to the good bits in his "Squirm" will see the same stodgy pace and lack of energy here from Jeff Lieberman.
The twin 'twist' on the killers is thrown away from the very start and as such ruins a chance for a real unexpected reveal later on, and the killer's may be shot very well when they appear in scenes but when they 'get going' they're more comical than anything else.

There are a few good things here...the opening murder is nicely nasty and the shot of the killer then framed in the doorway, playfully trying on his new clothes is effective. As a a few shots of the killers actually as mentioned.
The setting is good and the otherwise flat cinematography shows off the vast wilderness well.
There a couple of moments that are marginally violent (like the machete in the stomach that leaves the guy still alive as it's later pulled out) but they are very few and far between and staged in that typically lethargic Lieberman fashion.
The finale treats us to one delightfully mad method of killing though that must be unique in horror cinema, if not cinema in general.
And the 'Girl Power' stance of the finale is groovy as well..especially as the guy just lies on the ground crying like a baby as his penis obviously shrinks away to nothing!
Shame the rest of the film was not as interesting or enjoyable.

KAGEMUSHA
Kurosawa's econd best film imho, after the majestic "Ran".
Clever, layered, emotional and profound it's quite simply superb cinema!

KALIFORNIA
Underrated serial killer/road trip thriller with some nice character/relationship observations, great cinematography, a good score and a fine cast.
Brad Pitt, Juliette Lewis, David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes all work well together and some of the violence in the 'unrated' version is suitably brutal.

KEEPER (THE)
Stevie the Seagul joins up with the same director as "A Dangerous Man" but to lesser effect.
Not that this is a bad film..just not as good.

Some nice and messy gunshot hits, quite a lot of action and smattering of martial arts (mostly just punches and blocks and much arm bending).
But the pace is a bit off, the story less than gripping and Seagal's very bad stand-in for the back of his head (WHY??), during conversations, is very distracting.
The ending has some good sniper rifle violence, but is otherwise a bit low key.

But...a fun enough, violent, romp with people worshipping Seagal so much, you have to wonder if he had a hand in the screenplay.
When (after recovering from being shot) a female fellow police officer states "You survived something that would have killed most men, you're an inspiration to everyone who wants to join the force" and when he has the young woman he's protecting going all drippy and moist over him... you have to wonder if Stevie Seagul flapped through the open window of the deserted script conference room and quickly added a little bit of self-love to the script when no one was watching.

KIBAKICHI
Jolly enjoyable Japanese japes in the form of a werewolf Samurai who befriends a village of mystical Japanese creatures (from Turtle monsters to Spider Geishas) under threat from beastly humans in fetish gear with a gatling gun!
Madness!
Barmy as only the Japanese can be, this is full of crazy sights and packs bundles of fun into he full on finale.
Early spurting comic strip bloodshed ala "Baby Cart" sadly vanishes until the end (with the other fights being strangely bloodless) but then the gore comes back with a vengeance as Kibakichi leaps around slashing off limbs.

Wacky creatures, Samurai coolness, solid action, very nice soundtrack and Spaghetti Western styling mixed with Japanese mythos all makes for a very enjoyable watch.
Needs a much better DVD transfer though!!

KICKBOXER
Okay for a few cheesy laughs and thrills and the fights are well staged and edited, But the finale fight is weak in emotion as it's just Van Damme getting creamed for the first half, and then just the bad guy getting creamed in the second half...there is no real back and forth 'fighting'.
And WHAT were those songs?!"Never Surrender! Never say die!", "Fight for love"!

KICKBOXER 4
Very cheesy, with a villain stuck with a stupid latex face to try and make him look Asian.
But otherwise this was surprisingly good popcorn entertainment.
Packed with extremely violent fights it moves at a nice pace and also manages to
cram in some welcome nudity (including a surprisingly exploitative threesome sex
scene that stops the plot dead - CUT in the American DVD) and a brutal torture scene with a surprisingly
nasty (especially given the victim), entrail exposing outcome.
A good, solid, brutal popcorn fight-fest that does what it needs to do without
pretension.

KING OF COMEDY
Easily the most unjust flop in Martin Scorsese's career and easily one of his finest works, as well as one of De Niro's most brilliant performances that hits every note perfectly.
Not a single member of the cast puts a foot wrong in fact. Sandra Bernhard is utterly bonkers in all the right ways and Jerry Lewis is magnificent in what was a very brave role to take.
Black as pitch, sad, tragic... funny, clever, astute. A rare mix, mixed perfectly.
While 3rd rate efforts like "Cape Fear" become hits, and deserved flops like the supremely overrated "Raging Bull" gain massive critical plaudits later...the superb "King of Comedy" hovers around in semi-obscurity.
All hail Scorsese and De Niro! This joins "Taxi Driver" as the pinnacle of their collaborations, followed by "Casino" and "Goodfellas".
Simply magnificent cinema on every level.
The 80's! Gotta love 'em!

KISS, KISS, BANG, BANG
A damn mini masterpiece!
Funny, exciting, surreal and dramatic mixture that features two wonderful lead turns by Downey and Kilmer and equally good support turns by the whole cast.

Despite the purposeful homages, light parodies and cutting observations on other films this manages to be quite unlike any other film in that Tarantino way...but with a far less fanboy attitude (not that I mind that).
Shane Black shows he can handle directing chores as well as he can handle the writing ones.

Took me a foolishly long time to see this, so if you haven't yet...don't be a chump like moi...See it!
Hell, OWN IT!

LAND OF THE DEAD
Much better than some of the negative remarks spewed around.
But it somehow felt a little empty and it was far too short!
It had some choice moments though, some nicely messy flesh ripping and gut munching in this unrated print (there was no need for lazy ass CGI blood though!), and a pretty good cast do a pretty good job.
Not the ground shaker it should have been given the long wait and the 'evolved' zombies sit badly with me, but it was generally a good romp and easily Romero's best film since the excellent "Day of the Dead".

LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (THE)
Not bad, with some nice spectacle and cinematography.
But too much time is spent on the fictional Doctor and not on Amin himself.
Some nasty scenes as well, but it all felt a bit rushed somehow. A rare case of a film needing to be longer.
Forrest was good as Amin but somehow, somewhere in the middle of the 80's Grindhouse effort "Amin: The Rise and Fall" and this film... a far better movie about Amin dwells.

LAST PICTURE SHOW (THE)
Peter Bogdanovich's seminal work was one of the first of the 70's 'maverick' Director movies to make a splash (after 67/69's "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Easy Rider" had led the way). And it holds up very well today.

The frank for the time (less so now, but it still has an edge) sexuality and expose of small town sexual mores and hidden scandals made the film a big, if controversial, hit and showed how Hollywood was growing up, changing, and attempting to drag the audiences back to the cinema and away from TV, not with flashy spectacle and gimmicks but with an explicitness (both in sex, nudity, language and violence) and adult orientated subjects and sensibility that TV just never offered.

The stunning ensemble cast and Bogdanovich's tight, assured, direction and editing ensure that even when not much, plot wise, is actually going on there is always something on-screen to keep us entertained, intrigued and moved.
It does seem rather slight today though, with much of what was new and radical at the time being far less so now. So it does work now on two levels; It works still as a finely crafted, superbly acted, small town drama, but it's also become a bit of a time piece and some of the cutting edge fascination has been turned into simple historical interest.

But the cast (with Cloris Leachman, Timothy Bottoms, Ben Johnson, a beautiful and young Cybill Shepherd - breasts and all- and Ellen Burstyn being the stand-outs) and Peter Bogdanovich's direction ensure that as an entertaining, often deeply moving, dramatic piece the film is still well worth a viewing in 2009.

LAST SAMURAI (THE)
Very good indeed.
And for a Samurai junkie like myself it was heaven to watch and listen to.
it may be overly sentimental and rosy coloured as far as the Samurai were concerned (it's not a good thing to go back the the class dominated, sexist, xenophobic Feudal life), but as an emotional, exciting and thoughtful Hollywood take on things it was excellent.
Great action and costumes as well.

LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (THE)
After a long build-up of nothingness the Earth loses it's oxygen for a while and everyone suffocates except three boring people (two men and one woman, hence the title) who were scuba diving at the time.
This delivers one good scene, of a child's body lying like she's asleep with her arm over her face on the roadside, which is rather creepy otherwise it's one long arguement about the obvious moral and social problems the situation raises with a dull lust triangle sub-plot for the remaining 50 minutes or so.
Written by future "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne of all people. A Roger Corman Sci-Fi.

LETHAL WEAPON
Forget all the needless sequels, this is the one and only.
Still as good today with a great mix of drama, action and comedy. BUT with a sadly forgotten dramatic edge where Riggs is concerned.
The extended Director's Cut adds some nice scenes, with some good extra characterisation for Riggs as he tries to cope with being alone and missing his Wife.
And Mel Gibson's serious acting in this is sadly neglected. The scene where he is held at gunpoint and tells the guy to shoot him is brilliantly acted as is his run in with Glover after the 'jumper' incident.
And the sequence where Riggs nearly shots himself (extremely intense), but breaks down and hugs his Wife's picture and says how much he misses her, is genuinely moving.
Wonderful chemistry between Gibson and Danny Glover and of course an iconic turn by Gary Busey as the stoic Mr Joshua.
Nice to see Tom Atkins as well.
PRIME 80's action movie making.

LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE
A real trip down memory..er...lane.
As always the young Jodie Foster does an amazing job, and is more appealing (and in better films) than the older Jodie Foster.
Martin Sheen (just before "Apocalypse Now") is superb as the sleazy, sexual predator and all in all this has aged very well and makes for compulsive viewing.
A very well crafted, low key 70's thriller full of excellent performances.

LIVE FEED
Hmmmm...........
Yucky video quality picture, dubious acting, cheap looking -not in a good way, sometimes ropey effects.
It just failed to grab me basically.
It had a few moments and aspects that worked (the mask wearing 'Butcher' character makes for a good and nasty sight, the Asian actress was yummy and some of the gore was well done) but it's a case of too much means far less.

By this I mean some of the death FX were more comedy than horror. Great big splats and spurts of blood with loud sound effects that scream out their falseness and as such lack the viscial power the makers think they are giving them.
Either make some OTT fantasy gore and blood fest or make a gritty, realistic slice of brutality (which is why the much better executed in general "Hostel" dropped the ball during the silly looking, squelchy goo during the 'eyeball' scene).
And the less said about the hero Japanese cop dude as well! BAD acting!

Too slight, too video looking, too many silly FX, poor acting, sluggish execution.
A Shame really as there was a germ of a successfully nasty film here (it does have the odd moment though and I'm still surprised the BBFC passed the full version intact) but it never really sprouted into anything.
Perhaps next time.

LONG GOOD FRIDAY (THE)
The KING of British Gangster movies (closely followed by the superb "Get Carter").
Bob Hoskins has only ever been this good once more, in the lovely "Mona Lisa", and in a film packed with great characters, performances, music and set-ups...he still manages to stay above everything and truly helps makes this the classic film it is.

LONGEST YARD (THE)
The original of course (and the point of re-making this was?)
Still as good as it ever was with a perfect mix of light humour, hard humour, serious drama and brutality.
And as this is the 70's nothing can replace Burt Reynolds on the cool meter.. Certainly not Adam Sandler!

LOVE AND DEATH
A smart and funny Woody Allen film that mixes visual gags with verbal wit to a petty succesful degree.
It falls apart at the end a bit and some of the European Arthouse homages are rather cumbersome and indulgent at times, but overall it has some marvelous moments that blend astute observation with straight ahead comedy.
The "My father owned a piece of land" gag is still hilarious.

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN
Being a big fan of Paul McGuigan's sadly ignored Brit flick "Gangster #1" (for whcih Paul Bettany should have had an Oscar nomination!!) I was looking forward to checking this fine thesp filled flick.
And sure enough he delivers again.
Stylish, hip, cool, nasty and with a sly wink in it's eye, that disarms the viewer into thinking this is basically a humourous tale, "Slevin" delivers on all fronts.
A fine cast is in good form (Willis is just a great screen presence...end of), with Josh Hartnett doing a particularly fine job, and McGuigan knows how to make a movie. Nasty violence, black humour, a touch of romance, hard boiled drama, much tension and expectation and lots of general entertainment.

The only trouble is (which is why i was glad I rented it not bought it) because it's basically a film about one long con, with lots of twisty turns (some you can figure, some will catch you on the hop) it's repeat viewing stance is negligible.
Once you know everything...much of the film loses it's edge and point.
Whereas in say the wonderful "Lock Stock" the twists were ultimately not as important as the characters, dialogue and style (like "Gangster #1" in fact, only that's more serious than "Lock Stock" by a LONG way), with "Slevin" the main point and strength of the film IS the plot and thus the twists.

So a GREAT one watch for certain with many fine moments...but more of a rental than a purchase purely because it's twist delivering existence ultimately makes it extinct once it's been viewed in my view.

MARATHON MAN
Yet another 70's gem.
A top notch cast on top form (Dustin Hoffman, Sir Larry Olivier, Roy Schieder amongst others), some aggressive violence, a intriguing plot, wonderfully ominous music score and some classic set-pieces.

The sequence where Olivier's Nazi goes to the jewellry area of New York to try and find how much his diamonds are worth is an absolutely wonderful slice of 70's cinema greatness.
The scenes of the old Nazi sadist finding himself surrounded by devout Jews as he walks down the street are superbly crafted as the once powerful Nazi is overcome with anxiety, paranoia, disgust and even a touch of fear. And when a couple of concentration camp ghosts scream out of the unknowing crowd to haunt him...this excellent set-up becomes a genius set-up.
Hoffman's performance in the final scenes is powerhouse stuff.
Essential cinema!

MASTER & COMMANDER
Well made, nice set pieces, but a definate lack of energy between skirmishes.

MEDUSA TOUCH (THE)
Stupendously underrated!
The late and oh so great Richard Burton could read a phone book and it would be heaven, here though he has some great apocalyptic dialogue and some fine acidic, barbed insults.
Some excellent set-pieces and a fantastic cast.
Excellent stuff.

MIAMI VICE
Yeah there was none of the Crockett and Tubbs friendship from the show, there was none of the occasional humour, we all missed the original cast to some extent, the rst of the squad had little to do (and were often never called by name) and the first 50 minutes was rather a lot of not much really....

BUT it picked up, it looked great, it had solid enough performances (i sure missed old Edward James Olmos though!), Gong Li was as yummy as hell, the action was delightfully brutal and as always with Michael Mann's own films exceptionally well crafted.
The wandering plot (which was simple really, but made complex by the chaotic structure and muffled dialogue) settled down to make a satisfying whole in the end and all in all...although it was not what almost everyone was expecting...it was a good, dark, solid and violent action thriller made with all of Mann's technical skills.

MIDWAY
One of the last big budget, all star war epics and one of the best. As this was late into the 70's the bloodshed was stronger than usual for such films (as was some of the language), but this gives the film an effective punch.
As they tell you at the opening that real footage is used where possible the jumps from fictional footage to real footage is overcome as they have already warned you.
Smart.
This real footage also adds a real depth to the picture as it's used very well and importantly does not feel like it was a cheap get-out to save money...If you are going to use stock footage this is the way to do it.

Despite the length (just over 2 hours) the film rarely drags and there is lots of fascinating stuff here to watch.
It's also very faithful with only the Charlton Heston character elements being full-on fiction.
Thankfully the pointless, overly soap opera, sluggish sub-plot (probably done only for TV, given the 'deleted scenes' full frame look) with his Wife was removed.
A top cast are well used and underused depending who they are (Mitchum has two very enjoyable scenes despite being stuck in a hospital bed, Fonda is great, Coburn is rather wasted though as is Mifune, who is also sadly dubbed) but they get the job done.

Some great action (real and not), a well told tale well made and the flaws are few.
It all gets a bit Hollywood at the end with Chuck Heston's role and Hal Holbrook's 'yee haw' accent and good ol' boy attitude is overused, and it would have been nice to have the Japanese speaking Japanese, as some sound very American indeed (obviously Japanese American actors).
Otherwise this is excellent stuff and a fine example of the dying all-star Hollywood epic.
Shame you lose that 'Sensurround' experience though!

MIRACLE MILE
Nothing can compare to how I first saw this film many years ago.
It was an unknown entry into a UK, all night, Horror film festival and none of us knew what the hell we had been given during the light comedy romantic opening as we meet Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham Then a phone call happens...and suddenly Anthony Edwards' character, and the audience, are propelled on a very different course as we, like Edwards, have to deal with the knowledge that perhaps, just perhaps, World War 3 has broken out and the missiles will soon be flying.

From here on we are expertly moved from romantic comedy, to black comedy, to deadly serious drama and epic tragedy as what Edwards' character may know sets off a chain of events that engulfs many, well played, support characters as he tries to get back to his new love Winnigham and escape the coming apocalypse that may or not be coming.

Mixing harsh language, romantic voiceover, love story, violence, light comedy and action "Miracle Mile" is amazing enough for the fact it got greenlit at all, let alone completed and released (no matter how small that release sadly was) and this mix, plus the about turn the film does from its opening 10 minutes, took the hardcore horror crowd I watched it with by surprise and I will never forget the sight of two leather clad biker types in the row in front of me wiping away the tears at the end of the film!
Where normally there were hoots of appreciation, or howls of derision, from any hardcore crowd of horror fans at the end of a film..here there was only a bizarre silence, broken only by hushed whispers of surprise and praise.

As such, the film benefitted from that introduction in a way that I felt was missing on this DVD viewing and the film does lose something away from such a memorable projection setting.
But it does remain effective and is quite unlike any other film on the way it handles its subject. Shamefully obscure and unloved...this is certainly a must see film for anyone at least once and will remain fondly in my heart because of that wonderful first exposure i had to it so many years ago.

MISSIONARY MAN
Dolph Lundgren joins the 'mini-comeback for old action guys craze' with a wider publicised and distributed DTV flick than normal.
He directs and co-writes this 'modern day western' take on "Pale Rider"/"Shane"/"High Plains Drifter" and "High Noon".
Dolph is a Bible toting, face punching, shotgun blasting stranger who breezes into a Native American reservation town to tell the children how good The Bible is and to ram sharp objects into eyeballs.

It's overly slow to get to the meat of the matter (but never really dull) and as such the final showdown with the late arriving top bag guys is rather rushed (10 minutes taken from the first 2/3 and put into the last third would have done wonders) but the various punch-ups with the dopey henchman are fun enough (and amusingly revel in the old cliches, we'd actually miss if they were not there) and the deadly serious finale showdown is nicely violent with a delightfully brutal, utterly cold-blooded, crowd pleasing pay-off.

The main problem here is that Dolph seems to have decided he wanted to do a Black and White film but compromised by de-saturating the colour SO MUCH that the entire film (even with the LCD TV colour up to 'max' and the DVD player chroma level up full) is almost sepia tone!
Muddy browns,purples pinks and greens are the order of the day with some darker scenes (or scene only back-lit) being almost gray and with little shadow detail.
Light surfaces also come alive with frantically dancing digital static.
The presentation adds an otherworldly grit to the film, but it's so extreme for so long that it does become rather wearing and any average-strength colour that does manage to make an appearance becomes like an ice cold glass of water to the parched viewer as they stagger through this digitally washed out desert.

The Holy angle of the character is only slightly played with, and is never really explained, but there are moments when it becomes cloying (not least of which is when, in a short and utterly superflorous scene, Dolph sits down some young Indian kids and tells them how the Bible is a guide to leading a good life...Yuk!) and the fact it's involving Native Americans smacks rather too much of real missionary work on behalf of Dolph.

It does provide moments of intentional and (surely) unintentional humour though.
Dolph preaching the error of their ways to bad guys just before pounding their heads in is fun and you have to laugh at this 'Bible is your guide through life' attitude when Dolph's character commits various acts of violence even when not directly threatened himself, goes murderously brutal during the finale and shags a busty Indian woman with not a marriage vow in sight!
Did I miss all this stuff being deemed as Godly?
The slight pacing, weird presentation and occasional crass preaching moment aside though "Missionary Man" is actually a lot of fun that constantly entertains with something going on, plays the action/western cliches well, and has a real kick in the balls and satisfying finale.

MISSOURI BREAKS (THE)
Lyrical, poetic, off the wall and often brutal 70's Western held together by the great cast and especially the two lead performances by Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando (who is an unrestrained joy as an eccentric sadist). Needs a much better DVD release though.

MOTHER'S DAY
It's a shame the slow start (after the initial kills) and typically stupid 'Troma' humour held this film back, as when it was in your face, disturbing and deadly serious it was a very good example of this type of film.
And coming at the very start of the 80's meant it owed more to the great days of 70's Grindhouse cinema than any 80's Slasher trend.

Some of the humour was okay and suitably black, but all too often it was just silly ads took away the power from the film. "TCM" did the (mild) black humour moments much better.
It was also padded out with too many fights/arguements.
But like I said, when it played it straight it truly delivered.
The scene with the main two women's friend in the woods was played totally straight and was genuinely powerful and emotive and very well acted.
As was the final death scene in the basement, before the ending, which gave us a very effective scene of mania and pent up madness.

The twist was perhaps a move too far though and shot in a way that made it look more comical than anything else.
Top 'wince' award to the twine/sleeping bag/hand scene as well...DAMN! That must have stung!

Flawed by too much silly humour and too much padding (you could lose a good 7 minutes here) but still an effective Exploitation shocker, when it plays it straight, that delivers the nasty content, as well as a few powerful moments, with a welcome if fading 70's aesthetic.

MUMMY (THE) - 1932
Iconic make-up, top notch performance by Boris Karloff, some nice set design and cinematography...and quite frankly not much else.

Out of all the 'Classic Universal Monster Movies' "The Mummy" has not only dated the most, it's also the least entertaining and theatrically stodgy.
The Mummy himself famously only appears looking like an actual Mummy (Im-ho-tep) during the opening, most effective part of the film as far as any horror aesthetic goes, scenes where he comes alive, steals a scroll and sends the only witness into lala land upon the soundwaves of much superbly over the top mad laughter.

From here though the film falls into a slumber deeper than that of it's bandaged icon. Only Karloff (now playing a talking and un-bandaged Mummy, but given a lovely 'wrinkled' make-up by the great Jack Pierce) and a surprisingly less hammy than usual Edward van Sloan give us anything interesting to focus on as a ridiculously fast, soppy as hell, romance and much talk now dominate the movie.
No more Mummy action is forthcoming and the 'love across the ages' plot involving Karloff's Im-ho-tep and (the very theatrical but fun) Zita Johann as his reincarnated Princess is less than thrilling.
It lacks any real horror, has little action, soppy support characters and is quite simply not much fun.

Wonderful 2 disc DVD though with lots of good extras, including excellent "Universal Horror" documentary.

MURDER SET-PIECES
I liked it.
It was nasty, gratuitous, violent, and extreme.
It was also exceptionally well made, with a generally good (if rather hammy at times) lead performance. but there's nothing deep and meaningful here in the killers' make-up.
The FX were okay, but were mostly blood. What was there was well done though and shot so as to add to the realism.
Nice soundtrack, nice cameos by Tony Todd and especially Gunnar Hansen, who is normally given crap to do.
BUT...it was not some wondrous look into the mind of a killer as some people (normally with an agenda) have said.
But then again perhaps there is not much TO look into. He kills, he likes it. End of.
But even if that's the case it obviously negates any deep delving into his psyche because there is nothing there to delve for.

Also, I was not emotionally pained by the murder scenes. They left no lasting impression at all and I never felt the TRAGEDY of it all.
YES it was gory, bloody, chaotic and violent. YES it was extreme, but NO, it did not disturb me as it should have.
Let us take a couple of films to show what I mean.
"In a Glass Cage" is not remotely gory or very bloody and certainly not chaotic and screamingly in your face.
BUT, it does hit you in a way this did not. Even with a young girl knifed in the stomach...there was nothing in "MSP" to compare to the feeling I got during the child murder scenes in "In a Glass Cage".
The scenes of child murder in "Cage" broke my heart.
And that is a powerful thing indeed...and no blood was spilt.
The dinner scene in the original "TCM" was far more brutal, oppressive and bludgeoning than any of the deaths in "MSP". And again blood was rare in "TCM".
Just that one close-up on the sweaty, agonised, mad face of Sally, as Hooper's camera almost sees into her terrified soul, accomplished far more than anything seen in "MSP".
The ONE scene that did hit hard was the baby scene.
But that was little to do with actual artistic skill (true, it took guts to DO IT though) and all to do with the fact this was a real, crying child being covered in blood and held up like a curio in a museum (nice directorial touch here I admit, and nice acting) before staggering down the hall, blood soaked, to lie its sobbing head on the dead chest of it's Mother.
As a Father of a two year old, that genuinely hit hard. But was it great cinema mastery...or a callous geek show that ANYONE could have filmed?

Overall then, "Murder Set-Pieces" is a solid, extremely well made, pretty well acted, nasty and extreme movie that does indeed need to be supported and it's nice to see such an extreme film get the kind of release (as much as it can today) that used to be the norm for such 70's classics.
But it's not the disturbing, gut wrenching experience it should have been.
Certainly check it out though.

MURPHY'S LAW
Average latter day Bronson fare, let down by a script that tries to juggle too many sub-plots resulting in not enough attention paid to any of them.
Love some of the cheesy lines though ("Well here's Jack Murphy's Law...Don't fuck with Jack Murphy" and the GREAT "Ladies first" finale quip) and Katherine Wilhotte's endless insults are entertaining with "Butt crust" being one of the highlights!

NARC
Gritty, well acted and with some clever twists. This is brutal, gritty film making backed up by superlative performances.

NATURAL CITY

Excellent Korean sci-fi film about a post-apocalyptic world where cyborgs are manufactured to help humans but only designed with a 3 year 'lifespan'.
Some cyborgs have got understandably annoyed at this and have set up a rebel force that the Military Police have to defend against.

The visuals are excellent and it has some fine special FX. We have some good acting and a lot of very lovely (and also very good) actresses on show as well.
It also delivers some highly bloody ultra-violence and well staged action scenes.
But this is mainly a highly complex, in motivation and morals, love story between a human Military Policeman and a cyborg exotic dancer on the verge of 'death' because her life-span is up.

Given such a tragic romance main plot the film is of course highly manipulative of our emtions, but it damn well works!
The excellent, brutal, heartstring tugging climax is perfect and overall this comes highly recommended.

NEW KIDS (THE)
Badly dated musically in a big way, but overall this slice of rough 80's 'bad teens' movie making is good stuff.
Only a year after his wonderfully likable turn as the High School hero in the excellent "Tuff Turf", James Spader does a superb about-turn and morphs into one of the most vile and nasty High School villains around!
And with his gang of vicious hick thugs he also makes for a formidable opponent for the Tom Atkins (a nice cameo) trained hero Brother and Sister.
Some violent action (including a great, and very chunky, bit of head destruction) and surprisingly harsh language and sexual threat ensures it also delivers the essential nastiness.

NIGHTMARE
Soild Korean horror flick.
A rather confused and confusing plot but some wonderfully creepy gothic/ghost girl visuals and a great and superbly used DTS soundtrack.

NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT
Rather a lame effort actually, but Chris Lee and Peter Cushing, and a nice scummy turn by Diana Dors, keep it at least watchable.
Bloody stupid plot though!

NOWHERE TO HIDE
The under-appreciated Amy "Streets of Fire" Madigan (one of those forgotten Oscar winners) stars as the tough wife of a murdered Airforce Major, who was killed because he was investigating a series of mysterious helicopter crashes.
On the run for her life,with her little boy, she fights to discover the truth....

Dreadfully overlooked little action thriller from (I assume) Canada.
Low budget it may be, but thanks to a stirling cast, fine acting, a tight pace and well staged action this conspiracy thriller has been a favourite of mine for many years.
While not overly violent it does have its moments, the strongest being the blood spattered shooting of the Husband (well played and who could easily have been a likeable lead hero) that ends on a genuinely disturbing note when his body drops onto the bed where his Son is hiding, meaning the child has to look right into the blood smeared face and staring eyes of his dead father.

Madigan is great here and does a superb job essaying a tough, resilient woman, a grief stricken widow, a terrified victim and a determined Mother throughout the movie.
The film makes her a strong nemesis for the bad guys (she despatches them with everything from guns to a blowtorch), while never (until the rather OTT finale) moving her away from what she ultimately is...A realisticlly scared, grieving, woman trying to protect her child.

Lots of tense moments and action is spaced nicely into the opening hour, and one of the best parts of the film has yet to even make an appearance...Michael Ironside!
The always welcome and wonderful Mr Ironside plays an ex-Army family friend, who now lives as a recluse in the mountains, who Madigan turns to for help when all seems lost, and he does a lovely job in a (sadly) too short role.
But he has a chance to shine as he takes out bad guys with his doberman dogs and deadly bow and arrows!
Should be better known and available.
Check it out for some solid, no nonsense, well acted, very 80's (bad 'military' synth score included) action funstuffs.

NUDE FOR SATAN
There are few things worse on God's green Earth than freeform Jazz.
But freeform Jazz in an achingly tedious, pretentious, plodding Euro Trash flick is indeed the very pit of hell.

A barmy plot about a man and a woman who, after a bizarre road accident, go to a strange castle and bump into evil versions of themselves all under the watchful eye of some man in a frock coat who waves a cane about.

Hysterically bad dialogue (spouted by enjoyably bad dubbing artists) annoying electronic chirps and cheeps, Jazz practice soundtrack, slow motion slow motion that moves so slow there is barely any motion at all and seemingly endless scenes of running around corridors and gardens all compete to try the viewers patience.
Laughable (but managing to become so bad they are good) highlight is the woman suffering a sudden plummet into blackness that ends with her crash landing onto a huge spider web, with her breast hanging out, before a spider (that looks like a horse dropping with twigs stuck in it) waddles up her body.

Take notice of that uncovered breast as well, as it will remain on display for the rest of the film.
In a gloriously awful bit of gratuitous Sexploitation goodness the actress now flees from haunting terrors, lies down and cries and sits around trying to work out what's going on with her wayward breast hanging out.
The man with her is no Gentlemen either! No attempting to cover her up, not even a mention of the fact she's popped out. Nothing.
He's not stupid!

We do have some very welcome full nudity of course (I should hope so with a title like this) and it's all very nice and hairy in that 70's Euro way. Lovely.
But sadly these odd moments of wonderment are nearly always played out via slow motion scenes that suck the life out of any erotic hopes the visuals may give us.

And of course inbetween this occasional nudity we have to put up with the worst kind of 'artistic' Euro stodge, non-sensical philosophical plot explanations, camp overload, deadening direction and pacing and sequences of such mind numbing tedium you slowly lose the will to live.
Want to see a man spend 5 minutes running in slow motion around a garden, trying to catch up with a top hat wearing figure who turns out to be himself, all backed by tweeting noises and that hateful freeform Jazz noodling?
Well you'll love this film then.
Everyone else should avoid it, or at worse simply wind through 70 minutes of arse water to get to the nude scenes. But quite frankly I wouldn't bother.
Who says the Devil has all the best tunes.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
Easily the best of the 'trilogy' in my view.
J ust the right amount of comic book action, a nicely complex (if rather messy) plot, excellent score, some good characters and Depp is a sheer joy as usual!

ONG-BAK
Takes it's time doing much in the first half hour, but after that it's full on all the way!
The fact that there is no wire work here is what amazes. Stunning acrobatics that are a joy to watch EVEN BEFORE you get to the bone shattering fights.
Here blows really look like they thud home with as much venom as they are supposed to be having.
Tony Jaa is like prime-era Jackie Chan and then some.
Some good and likeable characters help the drama (although Thai as a language does come across as overly shrill and sing-songy at times, especially the girl in it!) and it mixes light comedy with high emotion perfectly.
You could have done with not seeing almost every stunt 2 or 3 times though as that does take you out of the unfolding events and screams out "hey" you're watching a clever movie! Good isn't it"!
Golden era Hong Kong action films sometimes (esp Jackie Chan films) repeat a specific stunt again, but normally at the end of a sequence or during a natural break.
"Ong-Bak" repeated too many during the main stunt/foot chase sequence that was an ongoing, uninterrupted event. As such the constant 'winding back' of the action grated a bit.
BUT the stunts were astonishing and amazingly skilfull, the fights were jaw- dropping in their skill and thudding power and the finale really delivered the bone smashing (literally...the arm and leg breaks were as painful as hell) fight action and high drama.
No idea what the original score was like, but the new HKL score was very good and bombastic, but still retaining an ethnic flavour.
Damn fine martial arts viewing on a great UK disc.

OPEN RANGE
A slightly slushy ending, but otherwise this is an excellent character based Western drama with some nicely judged performances and two excellent lead characters.
Kevin Costner does well as co-star and Director, and Robert Duvall shows he's still got what it takes to craft the most fascinating and sympathetic of characters.
Some wonderful cinematography and set design, all round satisfying support playing (especially by Anette Bening, who plays the oft seen 'hard but beautiful and wise frontier woman' with a successfully modern edge).
And the finale shootout is expertly crafted, brutal, and perhaps the most emotionally satisfying Western gunfight scene since the king of them all in "The Wild Bunch".
This sharp, thumping, loud, carefully crafted set-piece has to be one of the finest action sequences to come out of Hollywood in many a year.

OUT FOR JUSTICE
We could have done without the long 'how it used to be in the old neighbourhood' morality speeches Stevie Seagal gives, but away from these the film was a lot of fun!
Loved all the Bronx/Italian-American accents spewing out endless (wonderful) insults, the violence was brutal and totally gratuitous (hooray!) and the ever welcome William Forsythe was delightfully over the top as the psycho bad guy.
Plus Seagal's character was outragously ruthless...blatantly murdering bad guys even when he had unarmed them!
Cheesy as all hell, but damn it...it entertained! I may have to delve further into some prime era Seagal (before he ate ALL the damn pies!)

OUTLAW
Oh dear! A vigilante film with almost no vigilante action!
a time wastiing opening leads to a promising set-up with absolutely no crowd pleasing pay-off!
There should have been a good ten minutes taken from the first half of the film for a 'general scum' takedown montage before leaping into the main 'take out the bigshot gangster' plot.
That is afterall what the general joe schmo wants. Big time gangsters are not the threat we wnat to see dealt with to your average old lady who gets beaten to a pulp for her handbag!

Too much messed up moralising here as well really...The people they are meant to be after are scum that the law (as we see in real life every day) fail to do anything about, or the laughable judges let off or give joke sentences to.
We don't need the moralising crap of "this is ultimately wrong though" that Director Nick Love gives us.
The superb "Death Wish" never took this, so called, moral stance because it had the 70's balls to know that Kersey was doing harm only to those that deserved it and stuck by its lead character and it's basic reason for existing. "Outlaw" is too tainted by 21st century political correctness though.

And the fact that the only real character in Sean Bean's gang that does anything against the criminals is a pyschotic weasal security guard means that the (in my view) just motives of those with a genuine grievence and reason to go vigilante were kept in the background and hijacked.
Thus the acts of vengeance became not justice but simply the crazed actions of a nutter who is basically using the vigilante cover for his own psychosis.
Fair enough to have a character like that as long as the legit vigilantes are seen to be taking the action they suppoedly chose to take and sticking by the moral reasons they insist they have.
But in making the general psycho be the only one that does a damn thing to me really says that Love was simply sabotaging his characters actions and telling us that such actions are just plain wrong afterall!

And this despite all the build up (via the news stories of crime and the chav/thug encounters we are shown) that seemed to be very strongly siding with such vigilante actions being taken as a last resort. make your mind up Nick!

A wasted cast and a wasted chance to have a balls out vigilante flick at a time where, in the UK at least, the public's faith in the law doing anything about the repeat offender thugs is at an all time low.
The fact is these vigilante's either refuse to take any action (no matter how damn justified) and normally make a mess of the few tiny things they do decie to do.
When I say that the biggest shootout the vigilante gang has is with the damn Police...you'll see what I mean!

WONDERFUL scenes with bob Hoskins though...his speech to Sean Bean was a brief but gorgeous leap back to his "Long Good Friday" days. But ultimately it was a grandstanding speech that led to absolutely no damn action taking place and no justice dispensed!

PATHOLOGY
Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylorhe, the writer/director's of the "Crank" movies push the boundaries again, only with not a trace of humour (black or otherwise) or comic strip craziness to be found.
Here they are only the writers, so perhaps the utter darkness seen here is down to the director Marc Schölermann.

A group of pathology students create a game where each commits a murder and the others have to autopsy the body to work out how the death was carried out....
True the story has a few possible plausibility issues but as a wallow in nastiness, nihilism and body fluids it's a well crafted slice of modern horror.
The fact it does not have any real energy or kinetic set-pieces means there is not any real excitement here and when added to the utter darkness, grit and grim content you can see why this basically vanished onto DVD. A fun night at the flicks this is not.

The FX are fantastically well done and the film clinically embraces the human corpse as a biological jigsaw, filled with foul stenches and stinking liquids.
And the attitude of the truly warped lead characters here (which means the film basically has no nice or sympathetic characters for most of its running time..another audience pleasing problem) is grotesque as far as any kind of sanctity or respect for human remains goes.
Brief flashes of violence and gore, or explicit sex romps on autopsy tables with the corpses lying a few feet away, are not the real uncomfortable aspects of the film...it's this attitude of someone's loved one being a macabre game where every part of them is a bloody playing piece.

There is no light here at all. It's a relentlessly grim wade through madness, callousness and pitch darkness.
That such a bleak and nihilistic, dour film got a few million dollars thrown at it (FX are top notch, the film looks glossy and chic and all is well crafted with solid, professional actors) is a miracle and shows that despite what many think there is a real up-turn in extreme horror filmmaking at the moment that's very welcome.
Well worth checking out if you are in the mood to wallow in the grimness of it all, just don't expect to be conventionally entertained or look forward to any fast paced thrills.

THE PATRIOT
Oh dear. Nature Boy Seagal takes on virus spreading neo-Nazis.
Now then, amazingly I like a lot of the tongue in cheek, insult driven dialogue that Seagal uses towards the bad guys as much as his limb snapping action, but his preaching is generally unwelcome, and boy, he sure likes to preach in this one in very slushy fashion!
Amazingly uneven in pacing this is a big chunk of waffle, followed by a nice bit of very splattery gun action, followed by another dull lull, then some more gun action, then a huge dull lull with a tiny bit of (still non-martial arts) action at the end.
The gun play is bloody but seems very tacked on and the rest of the film is badly plotted and slow.
Good points are LQ Jones in a support role, the squib work and a delightfully nasty moment when Stevie boy rams the broken stem of a glass into a guy's brain in the name of peace and harmony!
Otherwise...it was the start of Seagal's huge fall into straight to video hell and you can see why.

PATTON
Superbly realised battle scenes (and aftermaths), made so much better knowing that there is not a CGI figure in sight, with some amazing stunt work as massed ranks of men run between speeding tanks and huge explosions.
But above all towers George C Scott who rips up the screen in one of THE great movie performances, as a colossal figure in the history of modern conflict.
And let's face it...with more men like Patton getting things done the Western Democracies would be in a much stronger position against their enemies.
So sayeth me!
Great film making.

PEACE HOTEL
Chow Yun Fat's last Hong Kong film before moving to America is slightly better than the 2 bad efforts that went before it, "Treasure Hunt" and the especially awful "Return of the God of Gamblers", but it's still a huge drop from his glory days.
The problems are numeorus.
Too much bad humour in the first half, endless repetition of scenes and a basically simple plot made overly obscure by very messy plotting and script crafting.
Not much happens for the most part but all of it is chaotic and flat.
The action is very rare and shot in an overly chaotic and eye straining fashion.
Most of the emotion is basically lost in the mess and what does shine through the murk is very forced (as is the tragi ending).
BUT... the cinematography is great looking (if very cramped), the score is excellent (and includes a lovely, Hong Kong Film Awards winning, song by Cass Phang Ling) and Chow is as lovely to watch as ever.

Overall it's a basically good idea (a sort of HK Western with philisophical leanings) wasted by sloppy and messy scripting, needless muddle, unwanted humour, plot repetition and too little, too late in coming, overly chaotic action.

PERDITA DURANGO
Wonderfully deranged and sick adpatation of Barry Gifford's "59 Degrees and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango" novel that focuses on the Perdita support character from "Wild at Heart" (here Rosie Perez replaces Isabella Rosselini from "Heart").
Álex de la Iglesia's movie has a total 'fuck you' attitude and it makes for some fine, extreme cinema, entertainment.
And it's great to see (and hear) the late Screamin' Jay Hawkins as well.

PETRIFIED FOREST (THE)
Hardly a Gangster film at all, it's more akin to the Bogart flick "The Desperate Hours" about 'small fry hoods on the run'.
The problem is the amazingly stodgy first half hour (Bogart does not even appear and bOy, does it hurt) where the, delightfully English, Leslie Howard's scenes with a very young Bette Davis are arse-numbing in their twee tedium!
On and on they waffle as Bette bugs out her eyes and flutters her lashes and Leslie sups on his pipe with measured civility.
Damn! Where the hell are the hoods when you need them?'
'Warner's' amazingly obvious, but cute, stage-bound outdoor set adds a nicely comfortable charm, but we REALLY need Bogart to appear!
Eventually he does (over half an hour gone) and at last some real drama and atmosphere arrives with the balls out hard boiled attitude of Bogart waking the audience up!
The moral/psychological/sociological dialogue exchanges between Howard and Bogart are cliche of course, but they work well enough and the huge contrast between these two actors really works.
You could not get a more English actor as Leslie Howard (who would of course die in the approaching WWII) or a more American actor as Bogart. One hell of a strange combination but it's what makes the film work.
But damn! This sucker is so slow, marshy and annoyingly mannered for the first 35 minutes or so (and now and again later on as well) and it's generally very dated.
For fans of Bogart there are some good moments to be had, but it's a case of the parts being better than the whole.

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (THE)
'Hammer's' adaptation is a very flat, has far too much opera footage during the finale and contains a really 'what the hell happened?' moment where the fate of nasty Michael Gough is concerned (shame).
A far too sympathetic Phantom too, resulting in a Phantom that is not remotely threatening.
But it looked nice, with suitably well crafted studio sets and it had a couple of 'Hammer jolts' in the form of a swinging hanged man ripping through the stage scenery and a vicious knife in the eye demise.
There was an all too brief but good turn by Patrick Troughton as a wonderfully grubby rat catcher and a superbly nasty, sleazy, arrogant and generally mad turn by Michael Gough.
Very flat finale though and generally only 'ho hum'.

PIRATES CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
The budget had obviously gone up, as had the pace and general far out fantasy.
And although it was at times verging on total sensory overload and had perhaps too many plots flying around...I liked it a lot!

The FX were superb, but more importantly the wonderful imagination that should fuel all such things was present and correct.
Davey Jones was a fantastic creation both artistically and technically, the humour was spot on, the outstandingly creative set-pieces were huge and perfectly crafted, the whole cast was brought back and in top form and it had some really surprising moments of characterisation.
Here we had a cast of characters who were all a shade of grey...I think it was a pretty brave move to make the audience popular Captain Jack far from the heroic rogue he was in the first film. He had herosim, but it was often kept in the shade of his often ruthless self-serving attitude.
The entire relationship dynamic had been made far less cozy and trusting in fact.
Certainly Knightley's character has undergone some shocking changes...as we see at the end especially!

Totally crazy, magnificently crafted, full of wild flights of imaginative fantasy and surprisingly dark. Perhaps too long, but not by much. Certainly a must see and certainly a film to see at the cinema.
And of course it has a great finale that sets up the final part of this epic tale very nicely. Shame the ythird film was so weak in many ways and wasted Chow Yun Fat!

PIT FIGHTER
The fist fights are brutal, bloody and in your face (especially when the guy has his eye punched out!) and Dominique Vandenberg, as the messed up fighter Jack, is a force of nature in the fighting stakes.
We also have some meaty squib work on numerous shootouts.

The bad is that the plot gets bogged down in catholic angst, messy flshback twists and (Steven Bauer aside) the out of the pit acting is pretty damn bad especially Brit Scott Adkins who spouts hysterically bad dialogue hysterically badly.
Best line of dialogue comes after a brutally violent, astonishingly bloody flashback to a string of cold-blooded assassinations by Jack (including hacking a guy to death with an axe) where, at the end of the carnage, he states “I think I might not have been the best of men”. No shit sherlock!

And the end is plainly stupid. Now we have bad shooting in films of course but this takes the biscuit! Jack stands in the open, in the middle of a square in borad daylight with 50 odd guys firing at him with machine guns at no more than 10/20 feet away...and every single bullet misses for about 5 minutes flat!
At one point Jack turns his back on 2 men who then proceed (in the same shot!) to unload their machine guns at him, and he's never hit!
It's like a homage to the old Shaw Bothers swordplay finales where one guy takes on 50 all around him. the thing is though you can get away with that when they stand 10 feet away with a sword...But not when they stand 10 feet away with a machine gun!
Some fine moments, but flawed overall. Still, a good watch.

PREACHING TO THE PERVERTED
Totally OTT and set in some alternatate universe I think!
But it's lots of fun has some superb and sexy sights and set pieces set pieces, good music and some far out fetish clothing.

PREDATOR 2
Obviously suffered editing problems, but still a solid and underrated sci-fi action flick and a bit of Busey goes a long, macho, way!

PRICK UP YOUR EARS
Wonderful bio of 60's playwright Joe Orton during the last few months of his life in swinging London, with two standout lead performances.
Alfred Molina as his badly wired sometime lover and partner Kenneth and Gary Oldman as Joe are both wonderful to watch.
Funny, clever, sad, decadent, tragic and full of life..even towards death.
And some utterly divine dialogue rounds it all off nicely.

THE PROFESSIONALS
A whoop dee doodle of a cast of course (Burt Lancaster, Burt Lancaster's teeth, Lee Marvin, Woody Strode, Robert Ryan, Claudia Cardinale, Jack Palance, Ralph Bellamy) and a smattering of solid action.
But Ryan seems poitlesss quite frankly as his character does nothing at all (literally!) except get them into trouble.

Perhaps the biggest reason this does not reach the heights it could have (should have) is because it tends to be a 'cool guys on a mission' guy's flick while at the same time beng mostly very serious and (until the finale) amazingly bleak about human nature.
It's genuinely chilling when Lancaster's character is more than willing to put a bullet in the unconcious head of his one time ally and friend played by Palance.
In fact the way all one time friends (especially concerning the revolutionary female character and Lancaster) are willing to betray and kill each other.
Lancaster is truly a cynical, nihilist of the most mercenary nature and as such perhaps his final decision is rather out of character. But at least it gives us some hope and good feelings to what would otherwise be a bleakly cynical movie indeed.

But it's an engaging ride for the most part, taken with a great cast with Marvin especially giving a thoughtful performance, stuffed with just enough above average action moments and ending with one of the GREAT final speeches in moviedom:
Bellamy (To Marvin): "You bastard"!
Marvin: "Well, yes sir. In my case an accident of birth.
But you, Sir... you're a self-made man"!

A glorious way to end the film!

PROOF OF LIFE
Very underrated thriller that very carefully mixes drama, thriller, action and mature melodrama.
A nice cast (with some very cool David Caruso support) do superb jobs, great location filming, well paced and with a very well written central triangle of characters.
Damn good stuff.

PUNISHER (THE) - Not the Dolph version.
Okay, but low on action (when the best and longest action scene is the pre-Punisher assassination of Castle's family, you know something is wrong!) and the way he never bothered to hide seemed silly. No wonder all those bad guys were sent to kill him!I much preferred the Dolph version's idea of the underground lair.
Some great stunts though, some (all too brief) well staged action and a nice high tech, high budget bang...for me though the best version would be the Dolph film with the technology and budget of this film attached to it.
Dolph may be woody...but he seemed to be darker and more serious about the whole thing than Tom Jane.
Too much scheming and not enough shooting as far as the revengw was concerned as well.
And we had a weak ass villian in Travolta.