Porkhead's Horror Review Hole

In Conversation with Robert Englund II: a horrortalk interview.

2012-01-29T17:26:00.004Z

One of the highlights of 2011 was interviewing horror icon Robert Englund in regards to his film The Moleman of Belmont Avenue. I could probably have died a happy chap there and then. But recently I got to do it all over again, as Horrortalk.com invited me to speak with Mister Englund about his latest film: Inkubus (which I reviewed too, here). I managed to hold back the fanboy hyperventilation for long enough to ask him a few questions:

JH: What attracted you to the project?

RE: The real drawing card was that I was going to get to work with William Forsythe, the great character actor. I've been a fan of Bill's for years. We almost butted heads years ago. I was up for the skinny version of one of the two brothers in Raising Arizona. I was looking forward to having William Forysthe playing the nemesis of Inkubus. And I think it's a very original story. It's very nasty, in the best sense of the word. I put my stamp of approval on it. It's down and dirty and nasty.

JH: It seems like a while since we've seen you play a properly villainous character. Is this something you've actively tried to avoid?

RE: Coming out of the make-up at my age, after 20 years of Freddy, Phantom of the Opera and my Stephen King films, I was older and my face was starting to change. I went in a boy and came out a man! By the time I was done with Freddy, I looked like Trevor Howard — a little bit of Klaus Klinski. It's natural for me, once or twice a year, to do a Vincent Price or Klaus Klinski role. Because I'm paid better for genre films. It's the natural way for me to go. Occasionally I'll have some fun doing a horror comedy, like Strippers vs Werewolves, 2001 Maniacs, things like that. I've been doing traditional acting too; I worked with Brian Cox on a film called Red.

JH: I really enjoyed seeing you pop up in Red. It's a great film.

RE: I would do anything to work with Brian Cox because I'm such a fan of his. That's a great little slow-burn movie. There's this real Don Siegel/Sam Peckinpah thing to it. And I'm hoping to work down the line with Lucky McKee again. There's a lot of controversy about it here in the states, but I thought it was a great film — his new movie, The Woman. It's really terrific.

The full interview, as ever, can be found at Horrortalk.com, where he talks some more about Inkubus and the perils of typecasting.

Red, White & Blue

2012-01-29T15:07:00.007Z

Director: Simon Rumley (2010)

Starring: Amanda Fuller, Marc Senter, Noah Taylor

Find it: IMDB

True story*: sixty percent of this movie's budget was spent on duct tape. Also a true story*: so much duct tape was used during the making of Red, White & Blue that America had itself a national shortage of The Serial Killer's Favourite. Red, White & Blue is so sticky-tape happy that almost every character ends up tied up with the stuff at some point. There's a great scene in which angry Nate (Taylor) turns up outside a victim's house, several rolls of tape hanging off've his belt. I haven't seen so much duct tape used in a film since that one time I spent all evening** watching certain specialist videos on myvideo.

Erica (Fuller) is what certain people might call a 'loose woman', diving into bed with almost every man she meets. After accepting a job at a DIY store, she meets and befriends Nate, a strange fellow with an incredible beard. They form an odd-couple friendship; surprisingly sweet, given the film's reputation. Meanwhile, amateur rocker Franki (Senter) is one of Erica's conquests. The three individuals' miserable, lonely lives violently converge when a certain revelation is ~~revelated~~ revealed.

Red, White & Blue takes a long time to kick off, but once it does so, it happens with explosive, unforgettable results. The film is reminiscent of the British Dead Man's Shoes. Noah Taylor sports a beard that even puts Paddy Considine's to shame. It also shares with Dead Man's Shoes (my third or so favourite movie of all time, by the by) a set of semi-sympathetic 'villains' and a magnetic performance from its leading man. I've only ever seen Noah Taylor playing nice guys with weird faces. Here, he's properly intimidating. It's probably the beard. You don't fuck with a man who wears a beard like that. I had a University lecturer who wore a Red White & Blue beard. Needless to say, all of my assignments were handed in on time.

"You do not use Wikipedia as an academic reference..."

Also a nice surprise was Marc Senter. I've only ever seen him before in the Jack Ketchum adaptation The Lost. He plays an equally odd looking character here, but the tics and Jim Carrey-isms are toned down a lot. Amanda Fuller is sympathetic and vulnerable as Erica. There are no heroes or villains in Red, White & Blue; no-one to properly root for. It's a difficult, intelligent piece that's heartbreaking and hard to watch at times. Billed as a "slacker revenge movie", it proves that not all slackers are as cuddly as Simon Pegg or Nick Frost.

"G'day there; I'm your door-to-door knives & duct tape salesman."

It's the sort of movie where lonely, miserable people go around being lonely and miserable all the time. As a result, it'll probably make you feel lonely and miserable too. Unless you own shares in a duct tape company. It's basically one long advertisement for duct tape.

* not a true story.

**weekend***

***week

Red State

2012-01-28T10:11:00.001Z

Director: Kevin Smith (2011)

Starring: Michael Parks, Nicholas Braun, John Goodman

Find it: IMDB

Blatant schadenfreude for anyone who's ever looked at the Westbro Bastard clan and thought "I wish they would shut up." Trawling the Internets for sex, three horny American teenagers happen across a Craigslist-like website where a local lady promises to do the lot of them at once. I'm not sure why that would appeal to anyone, but the lads are thrilled. They jump in their car and take off to the woman's trailer forthwith. So far, so Inbetweeners. It's also schadenfreude, then, for anyone who's ever looked at a horny teenager and thought "DIE."

For pretty soon, Red State turns all Hostel; the youths find themselves captured by a deranged preacher (Parks) and his adoring followers. It's a film partly inspired by the infamous Westbro Church and partly by the infamous 1993 Waco siege which saw a cult of Bible lovers violently clash with US law enforcement. The latter influence is particularly well felt in the second half of the film, wherein it becomes less a horror movie and more a standard sort of action/thriller affair. Thankfully the horrible teenagers take a back seat, allowing the Reverend Cooper (who looks distractingly like an evil Richard Branson) and John Goodman's Federal Agent to take center stage. If there's a problem with the acting, it's the film's decision to have Stephen Root wasted on an awkward retread of his Office Space character.

Following the atrocious Cop Out and having read his Batman comics, I was ready to give up on Kevin Smith (that said, I am an unabashed fan of Jersey Girl, which everyone else seems to hate). But Red State is indeed the return to form that many proclaim. Much of that is down to the magnetic Michael Parks as the villain. Half an hour or so into the movie, there's a very lengthy scene in which Reverend Cooper delivers his sermon. Many movies wouldn't have survived such a prolonged lack of action, but the acting, script and direction ensures that it's not at all boring. It's actually the extended gunfights during which Red State flounders. It briefly finds its way again during a surreal showdown - and then loses it yet again in a silly, smug sequence that thinks itself cleverer/funnier than it is.

As critiques of religion go, Red State is smarter and more entertaining than most. It's not at all preachy and lacks the forced look-I've-read-the-Bible feel that so soured Dogma. Despite the difficult subject matter, it's a lot of fun. It's probably the most fun I've ever had with a Kevin Smith movie. And it raises a lot of questions too. Like, where did a bunch of hardline religion nuts come by a ball gag? Someone, it would seem, has been frequenting some very un-Christian shops. You can't just buy that shit in Sainsbury's, y'know. I actually tried: that's why I'm banned from Sainsbury's.

A great film from that Kevin Smith, Red State truly puts the fun and da mentalism into fundamentalism.

Detour

2012-01-26T10:03:00.010Z

Director: Severin Eskeland (2009)

Starring: Marte Christensen, Sondre Krogtoft Larsen, Jens Hulten

Find it: IMDB

Inspired by a true story. But more inspired by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (particularly the remake and The Beginning). Driving home to Norway, Lina (Christensen) and Martin (Larsen) are stuck in rural Sweden when their car breaks down. A friendly policeman leads them to a house that looks just like the house in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where they are set upon by (Swedish) Hillbillies straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But instead of eating their victims, these Swedish sadists film their torture and demise to sell online.

From the premise to the 'twists' and secretly pregnant heroine, everything in Detour has been done before. Of course the friendly cop is in on it; the friendly cop is always in on it. At least R. Lee Ermey had the good grace to not even bother pretending to be friendly. Detour presents the least professional torture dungeon I've ever seen. Every five minutes victims are escaping all over the place. At some point you gotta take note and realise "this kidnapping lark ain't for me."

The run-up to anything happening is incredibly boring and predictable. It takes a good half hour for the car to even properly break down. When it does get going (the film, not the car), it becomes more enjoyable but hardly riveting. For the life of me, I can't remember what happens at the end. Answers on a postcard, people. Send them to another address though, because I'm not sure that I actually care.

"STFU. They might hear us. It's The Texas Chain Saw guys: they want their plot back."

If nothing else, Detour is proof that not everything with subtitles is groundbreaking or awesome. If you're thinking of watching this movie, I'd advise taking a Detour of your own: via something else.

Sucker Punch

2012-01-24T10:06:00.002Z

Director: Zack Snyder (2011)

Starring: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone

Find it: IMDB

AKA Speed Ramping: The Movie. It's like 300 except with super hot women instead of super hot men. It's a movie that probably employed more makeup artists than actors. Even when lead hottie Babydoll (Browning) is incarcerated in a hospital for the clinically insane, she's done up to the nines. I've seen the Joker wear less makeup in Arkham Asylum.

I really enjoy Zack Snyder's movies, but it's starting to feel as though he has trouble delivering anything beyond fancy visuals. His debut, the Dawn of the Dead remake still remains my favourite Snyder movie. Watchmen never really transcends the source material enough to become its own thing, and I've never been a fan of 300. It's the same reason I can't play Call of Duty; too much macho makes me feel ill. Sucker Punch might be all about the hot girls, but it still feels sickeningly macho. If 'girl power' is female macho, then Sucker Punch has girl power in spades. I actually think it would have been improved by putting some Spice Girls on the soundtrack.

But Sucker Punch has no such self-awareness. And its supposed female empowerment is undermined by a wardrobe that's all fishnets & schoolgirl outfits and the leering gaze of the camera. After accidentally shooting her sister and attempting to murder her rapey stepfather, Babydoll is committed to an asylum for the criminally insane. There she awaits the arrival of a lobotomist to relieve her of her troublesome mind. Can she escape before he arrives? In an attempt to do so, Babydoll retreats into a fantasy world and then another fantasy world inside that fantasy world. It's like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest if One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had been stupid. It's like Shutter Island as made by somebody who didn't read Shutter Island but played a lot of videogames instead.

In her fantasy world, Babydoll is friends with Vanessa Hudgens, Jena Malone and Abby Cornish. Apparently Vanessa Hudgens plays the streetwise one, although I didn't really pick that up, given that she only has a handful of lines of dialogue. To escape the institution, Babydoll and her friends must steal a number of tools. Every time Babydoll wants to steal something, she does a hypnotic dance at a warden/the cook/the mayor and her friends steal said item. Instead of seeing anyone steal anything, the film retreats into the fantasy-inside-the-fantasy and we see the girls fight Samurai or robots or zombies or serpents. This always happens in slow motion and it's always stupid except for maybe the one with the giant robot Samurai.

Sucker Punch looks lovely but its story verges on unbearable. None of the characters ever feel real - like videogame avatars they do little other than pout or kill things. Occasionally they pout and kill things at the same time. There's as much emotional investment as a game of Tomb Raider. Sucker Punch is like watching someone else play a videogame: it's very pretty and all, but entirely boring unless playing yourself. I may not physically have been punched, but I feel like a sucker for watching this movie.

Jason Goes to Hell: the Final Friday

2012-01-13T11:26:00.009Z

Director: Adam Marcus (1993)

Starring: John D. LeMay, Kari Keegan, Kane Hodder, Steven Williams

Find it: IMDB

Widely regarded to be the worst Friday the 13th movie and suffering from a crippling lack of Jason, Jason Goes to Hell is the strangest of them all. Even more so than that one where he went to space. The plot is like that Denzel Washington bodyswapping movie, except with Jason and not very good. When his body is blown to pieces by the FBI, it looks like Jason Voorhees is finally gone for good.

Except of course not. When a mortuary worker eats Jason's heart (which he does in a manner that makes me feel ill every time) the serial killer takes control of his body and sets about effecting his own rebirth. It's a very misleading title. He spends even less time in Hell than he does Manhattan. The only part of Jason Goes to Hell that anyone remembers is the final shot, in which Freddy Kreuger's disembodied hand appears and grabs Jason's mask. It would take a further ten years for Freddy vs Jason to emerge. Enough time for Jason to go to space and back. In this movie he goes black.

Briefly. Body swap shenanigans abounds as Jason seeks out a family member to possess. Only through a Voorhees can a Voorhees be born or killed. As that synopsis might suggest, Jason Goes to Hell is the stupidest Friday so far. It wastes a great opportunity for a cool not-Jason character with Steven Williams's Creighton Duke. Duke introduces himself as a bounty hunter determined to hunt down and kill Jason. Duke is set up to be like this movie's version of Dennis Hopper in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2. I spent the whole film waiting for Creighton Duke to do something awesome.

Spoiler: he doesn't.

Cretin Duke is a waste of time and money. Until the day comes that someone takes out a bounty on your fingers, Cretin Duke is a shitty bounty hunter. All he does is look weird during a word association game and break some dude's fingers.

Jason Goes to Hell is bad - almost Freddy's Dead bad - but I like it, all the same. The first and last ten minutes provide some reasonably good Jason action, whilst cameos from Kane Hodder, Freddy Kreuger's hand and a certain Necronomicon provide amusement. It's a bizarre entry, but not an entirely uninteresting one. If you want to see naked teenagers die at a campsite, there are eight other films to choose from. Let this one have its moment of semi-interesting madness.

Jason X

2012-01-13T10:47:00.008Z

Director: James Isaac (2001)

Starring: Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder

Find it: IMDB

The first Friday the 13th movie I ever saw*. For a full two years, Jason X was my favourite slasher movie. And then Freddy vs Jason came out. And then I re-watched it and realised that Jason X is kinda crummy. But it is also kinda awesome. Because as we all know, slasher icon in space = movie gold.

In futuristic 2008, Jason Voorhees has been captured and is being held at Crystal Lake Research Facility. Scientist Rowan LaFontaine (Doig) decides to cryogenically freeze the slasher bastard, keeping nubile teens everywhere safe from his seasonal rampages. But Jason escapes and violently kills a team of soldiers. Of this I approve. Watching Jason fight trained soldiers is infinitely more entertaining than watching Jason fight stupid teenagers. Before Jason can kill her, Rowan freezes them both. To the future!

In the year 2455, Rowan and Jason's frozen corpses are discovered by a field trip of intergalactic pupils and their teacher. The Earth has become dangerously polluted and now humanity lives on another planet. The kids and their teacher take the Jasonsicle and the Rowansicle back to their spaceship and set sail for outer space. Both Rowan and Jason make a full recovery. In Rowan's case, this means shivering and pouting a lot. In Jason's case: killing nubile teenagers.

It's not as good as I once thought it was, but Jason X is still a bit of a blast. As an introduction to Friday the 13th, it was a revelation to sixteen-year-old me. Jason hacks and beats his way through a spaceship full of soldiers, teachers, students and androids alike. He even makes to the holodeck and fucks that up too. There's room for a replay of my favourite Friday the 13th kill evarr (that'll be the sleeping bag against the tree, then) and a cameo from David Cronenberg. Yes, that David Cronenberg.

You may be scornful, but this is proof that sometimes the sequel-in-space route does work. The great thing about Jason Voorhees is that his shtick works anywhere. Be it Manhattan, Elm Street, Hell, Texas or space, I'd be quite happy to watch Jason stab the bollocks out of someone wherever, whenever. Jason X is the closest I'll ever get to a Star Trek crossover so shut up and let me have my moment of happiness.

Wherein the tie-in is actually worse than the fan-fiction.

That said, robo-Jason is horrible. Robo-Jason is proof that not everything needs an upgrade. You can keep your 3D, Facebook timeline and your hashtags; I prefer my Jason to be all smelly and raggedy. It's fortunate that his transformation to stupid glittery space robot is only for the last 20 minutes of the film. Although it does allow me to imagine an alternate ending where his remains crash near a small squad of Cybermen and he rises to become king. King robo-Jason of the Cybermen. After lopping Amy and Rory to bits, Jason kills The Doctor with his own bowtie (repeatedly, until he can't regenerate anymore) and steals the TARDIS. He takes it back to the inception of the Earth whereupon he and his Cybermen become overlords of Crystal Lake; always and forever. Just a little idea of mine. Feel free to use that, New Line Cinema and Steven Moffat.

It's no 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Jason X will always hold a dear place in my own heart. As the last proper Friday the 13th movie, it goes out with a damn big bang.

* So much so that I didn't realise that the 'X' stood for '10'. I thought it was just a fancy futuristic way of making Jason sound futuristic.

My Soul to Take

2012-01-11T12:17:00.010Z

Director: Wes Craven (2010)

Starring: Max Theriot, John Magaro, Denzel Whitaker

Find it: IMDB

Something of a return to form for horror maestro Wes Craven, following the Screaming turd that was Scream 4. I went into My Soul to Take with the lowest of expectations. Best case scenario: a mediocre disappointment ala John Carpenter's The Ward. But please, by Cthulu, don't let it be another Cursed. Thankfully it has more in common with the director's own Red Eye. It's a cruel and surprisingly nasty picture. Best of all, My Soul to Take is kinda good.

Seven children are born as a serial killer goes on the rampage in small town USA. They become known as the Riverton Seven. Sixteen years later and it seems that The Ripper is back, hunting down the unfortunate seven. At the centre of it all is Bug (Theriot) a troubled young individual whose connection with The Ripper goes deeper than even he knows. Myself, I was just amused at the fact that a character called 'Bug' lives with his aunt May. LOL, tenuous links.

I thoroughly expected to hate My Soul to Take. It's (mostly) bloodless horror with a cast of sixteen year olds. I hate (mostly) bloodless horror and sixteen year olds. But the film covers its relative lack of gore by making the kills count - I actually found myself feeling for the kids as they were being knocked off, one by one. Some of them are kinda douchey, but I felt genuinely bad as one of the youths had their throat slashed before me.

Not all of the kids are so likeable (the jock character and Bug's sister are horrible), but it makes a real difference to not be loathing the movie's characters all of the time. Even when they're not being stabbed by The Ripper, they find themselves beaten black and blue by one another and their own family too. A scene in which Bug is set upon by his own sister made me laugh and sob at the same time. Mostly the former.

The ending is convoluted and a bit stupid; the identity of the killer wholly predictable. The script is occasionally bad and Bug's mental issues do get annoying. But My Soul to Take is a slick, tense and grim slasher picture that's probably not as bad as you'd expect it to be. Well okay, it's not quite a return to form, but at least it's not Cursed.

Captivity

2012-01-08T13:38:00.009Z

Director: Roland Joffe (2007)

Starring: Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gillies, Pruitt Taylor Vince

Find it: IMDB

The movie that made a lot of people realise just what a tiresome subgenre torture guff was. Until Craptivity, we'd gone along with the likes of Hostel, pretending that we were being clever and arty by watching films in which kids wear ball gags and find themselves carved up by weird foreigners. For myself and many others, it was a case of the emperor wearing no clothes: Hostel was shit and its imitators are shit too.

So along came Craptivity and outraged everyone by putting its silly posters up even after the MPAA said not to. People began to realise "actually, films about torture and ball gags are a bit wank, aren't they?" But worse than shitting in its own bed, Craptivity tried to ruin it for the rest of us too. It gave horror a bad name. It made people say things like "won't somebody please think of the children" and made us horror fans seem sick in the head, the sort of people who enjoy putting gruesome posters opposite schools (which is admittedly quite funny). And that's partly why I hate torture movies and I hate the phrase "torture porn". But mostly it's because torture movies are boring, stupid self-serious nonsense.

24 star Elisha Cuthbert plays celebrity model Jennifer; object of a crazed stalker's affections. I didn't recognise Cuthbert at first, since every time I saw her on 24 she had a piece of duct tape or a hand over her mouth. It takes about ten minutes before somebody covers her mouth with anything in Craptivity (in this case a leather glove, Giallo style) but it's still her most kidnappy movie so far.

She wakes up in a gloomy basement and is repeatedly set upon by a shadow-dwelling figure, who gasses, chloroforms, buries and forcefeeds her face over and over again. Eventually, Jennifer realises that she is not alone - enter Gary (Gillies) who claims also to have been kidnapped. If you believe that for so much as an instant, you're even stupider than Jennifer. Before I'd ever watched Craptivity, I was reading a Fangoria story on the film. "I bet this Gary bloke is in on it," I thought. The Gary bloke is indeed in on it, using the torture dungeon like his own private Plenty Of Fish.

An actual screencap from Plenty Of Fish's 'success stories' page.

There's nothing to Craptivity but suspenseless torture scenes and Elisha Cuthbert looking hot. For a girl who endures days and days of violent torture, she comes out of it all as fresh as a daisy. After half an hour on the bus I look like a wreck, let alone a week in a torture dungeon. What I wouldn't give for Elisha Cuthbert's T-zone.

After drinking a smoothie made up of body parts and being forced to shoot her own dog, poor Jennifer is trapped in a little box that rapidly fills up with sand. She needn't worry though - like a Brazil nut in a bag of museli, she just rises straight to the top. Earlier, there's a scene where she communicates with Gary by scratching messages into her side of the glass. Bless her, she fails to realise that she needs to be writing backwards (as you would to read something in a mirror) in order for Gary to read it properly. It's a movie that hopes to distract the viewer with gruesome tortures and sexy Elisha Cuthberts.

It doesn't have the unintentional brilliance of I Know Who Killed Me, nor the intelligence of the few torture movies I happen to like (an exception to the 'all torture movies are terrible' rule; look under subsection 'hypocrite'). Other than the fact that I like Elisha Cuthbert and it has Pruitt Taylor Vince in it, Craptivity has few redeeming features. It's anything but Captivating.

Cowboys & Aliens

2012-01-02T12:42:00.001Z

Director: Jon Favreau (2011)

Starring: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell

Find it: IMDB

James Bond and Indiana Jones team up to fight aliens in the Wild West, directed by the bloke who made Iron Man. And yet Cowboys & Aliens struggles to be as fun as that sentence would have you imagine. Still, it's more successful than the unreadable comic book upon which it is based. Cowboys & Aliens is one of the few comic books I couldn't bring myself to finish reading. And I managed to read The Dark Knight Strikes Again.

What I did read doesn't much resemble the film I saw. Tough guy Jake Lonergan wakes up in the desert, barefoot and with no memory of who he is or how he came to be there. Attached to his wrist is a device that looks (and works, as it happens) like what the Predator wears in Predator. He finds his way to a nearby town where he is promptly arrested by Sheriff Keith Carradine and harassed by grumpy Colonel Dolarhyde (Ford). Then aliens arrive and kidnap Keith Carradine and a handful of other settlers. Lonergan, Dolarhyde and the remaining villagers band together to rescue their missing relatives and send the dastardly alien invaders packing.

Rather than feeling like a proper film about cowboys fighting aliens, Cowboys & Aliens feels like product. It's like Transformers. It's easier to watch than Transformers, but there's that similar sense of cliche and perfunctory action. Perhaps if Olivia Wilde did something. Literally, she just stands around with a dumb expression on her face. Even when she's grabbed by an alien spaceship, she's very blasé about it. Perhaps if Daniel Craig could make up his mind whether he's doing an English accent or an American one. Perhaps if Harrison Ford pretended to give a shit. But at least it has Walton Goggins from off've Justified, Sam Rockwell and Clancy Brown in it. Between the cast, Cowboys & Aliens manages to muster up some of the fun it could have been.

Cowboys & Aliens is review proof. No matter what anyone says about it, it'll always have that title. There'll always be that doubt in the back of your mind: "it's a film called Cowboys & Aliens. It can't not be good." And it is good. Occasionally. But not like it should have been.

Steel Trap

2011-12-31T16:40:00.001Z

Director: Luis Camara (2007)

Starring: Georgia Mackenzie, Mark Wilson, Pascal Langdale

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

An irritating cross between Die Hard and Saw 2. One New Years' Eve, a disparate gang of bickering bastards meet for a secret party as organised by an unknown source. There are party balloons, nursery rhymes and cake and everything. No booze though, which they should have taken as the first sign to get the fuck outta there. But the piteous fools don't get outta there, and soon find themselves hunted by the party's host - a sinister psychopath wearing sparkly gloves and a metal-looking skull mask.

Steel Trap so wants to be a Saw movie that it's embarrassing. Aside from a few balloons and less cancerous whingeing, it follows the template of a Saw right down to the pig's head and barbed wire. It's a boring film, full of bickering, mediocre performances and a distinct lack of gore. Georgia Mackenzie plays the lead character, a celebrity chef. It's good that she's front and centre, since everyone else is shouty and annoying. Never mind the murder and all the torture, the guest list already makes this the party from hell.

When the revellers weren't arguing and being stupid, I enjoyed some of the kill scenes, the glittery killer and some of the more surreal set designs. The ball gag enthusiast in me coveted the silver piece a character wears at one point.

This aside, Steel Trap is boring, overlong and predictable. Occasional bouts of prettiness can't make up for its lack of imagination, annoying characterisation and rubbish actors. Steel Crap, more like.

A Lonely Place to Die

2011-12-31T16:36:00.000Z

Director: Julian Gilbey (2011)
Starring: Melissa George, Ed Speleers, Eamonn Walker
Find it: IMDB

Melissa George is an expert mountain climber (no, really) climbing in the Scottish highlands when she and her friends find a little girl abandoned underground in the wilderness. Melissa and her friends rescue the poor dear, unwittingly putting themselves in the sights of the girl's kidnappers. What follows is the plot of Backwoods (that's the largely unseen Gary Oldman/Paddy Considine feature, not the Duff version).

A Lonely Place to Die looks absolutely beautiful, even when Melissa George isn't onscreen. I'm a sucker for some lovely Scottish mountains, and the mountains in this film are very lovely. Even when they're smashing people's heads open, they're lovely. But I suppose A Lovely Place to Die doesn't have the same ring to it.

The mountain climbing and rappelling scenes are reminiscent of Cliffhanger (favourite Stallone movie evarr) whilst the tense forest shootouts and chase scenes have a Deliverance heavy feel. There's even something about The Wicker Man to the film's local Scottish village. It's not a very original movie, but that makes it no less pretty to watch. It could have been Melissa George sitting on the side of a mountain for two hours and I still would have enjoyed this. Heck, I could sit and stare just at Melissa George's grazed knee and be perfectly content.

But it also has the delightfully rat-faced Sean Harris as one of the villains, which gives you yet another reason to watch A Lonely Place to Die. He was great in that music video where his shoes come to life, and he's great in this too. We're spared a horrible child performance in that Anna (Holly Boyd) is practically mute. The action scenes are tense and realistic, making the most of the amazing environment.

It may indeed be a Lonely Place To Die, but when loneliness looks so bloody gorgeous, company is overrated.

25. Black Christmas (1974)

2011-12-25T23:59:00.000Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Bob Clark (1974)
Starring: Margot Kidder, John Saxon, Olivia Hussey
Find it: IMDB

The Halloween of Christmas movies, in that I was as guaranteed to review this today as I was Halloween on October the 31st. Hey, it's Christmas. Why should I waste my time being original or having ideas when I could be eating chocolate or getting shitfaced. Besides, I'll take any opportunity to sing Black Christmas's praises as I can get. It's an underrated slasher gem and a Christmas mainstay in my DVD player. Black Christmas stars one of the greatest genre actors of all time alongside The One True Lois Lane herself. A creepy criminal harasses a sorority house at Christmas time, growling filth down the telephone until Margot Kidder gives him a taste of his own sweary medicine.

It's a much darker, meaner movie than Halloween. In some ways, I prefer Black Christmas to John Carpenter's masterpiece. The understated Black Christmas is more stark, grimmer and it stars John Saxon. I find the atmosphere more chilling, a series of POV shots and telephone calls really setting the tone for things to come. Halloween was of course influenced by this minor classic, and it shows. Carpenter's use of the same techniques is more overtly stylised and cinematic, ramping up the tension and pace but feeling more cartoonish as a result. The deaths in Black Christmas feel more real. It's nearly as bloodless as Halloween, but I could have sworn that Black Christmas was gorier.

In its plastic-bag-over-the-head routine is one of my favourite horror deaths of all time. The bagged corpse in the rocking chair is tremendously creepy. Then there's the House Mother being dragged up into the loft. True story folks, that's what me bringing girls back to my house after a night out looks like.

Elsewhere, John Saxon plays a very archetypal John Saxon character. Were it not for the fact he has a different name in this movie, he could well be playing Nightmare On Elm Street's Lt. Thompson during the day job. There's a disappointing lack of rollneck jumpers to Saxon's performance, but he does a sterling job all the same. Little moments, like his cracking up at the word 'fellatio' are just adorable. Doomed house mother Mrs. Mac (Miriam Waldman) is fun. But best of the bunch is Margot Kidder's permanently inebriated lush, Barb. She's almost as intimidating as the actual killer, chugging wine from the bottle and swearing like a trooper. My kinda girl. That she's relegated to a supporting role is a shame - she's a far more interesting character than Jess (Hussey). All Scream Queens should be as feisty as Barb, it'd make a lot of movies more interesting. Most slasher bastards would wet their knickers after a lashing from Barb's Barbed tongue (I'm looking at you, Leatherface). It's little wonder that Clark Kent was always too shy to ask her on a date. It's the same that Jess is so comparably dull, but she's no worse than any other Final Girl out there.

Black Christmas is a fantastic festive horror treat. A Christmas Cracker, if you will. Ho ho ho. Happy Christmas, y'all. Hope Santa got you all something nice. Maybe a less predictable joke.

24. Black Christmas (2006)

2011-12-24T14:08:00.000Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Glen Morgan (2006)

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg

Find it: IMDB

Better than you'd expect it to be. Much better than the Prom Night and Sorority Row debacles, which I didn't think it would be. Black Christmas doesn't entirely besmirch the original piece's name. It stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead who is literally amazing in literally everything (she was the best thing about The Thing, even better than The Thing itself). There's even a bit of gore and some faintly disturbing scenes of cannibalism and biscuits. And yes, the movie might, but I'm not calling this Black Xmas. 'Xmas' isn't a word. You don't call him Jesus X, do you?

Black Christmas follows the original movie's template, having a sorority house being stalked by someone who may or may not be an escapee from a lunatic asylum. I love asylum escapee horror. It's delightfully retro. Some impressively cruel and creepy scenes are hidden amongst the chaff. I particularly enjoyed a bathroom scene in which a hidden eye spies upon one of the drunken girls. The sleazy pupil staring through a hole in the floor is a bloody chilling bit of imagery. Once more, the bin liner kill is the most memorable moment in the movie.

Aside from The Winstead, the acting elsewhere is perfectly fine. Michelle Trachtenberg is in this Black Christmas, but try to forget about that; just like you forget about those seasons of Buffy she ruined. Katie Cassidy is in it too, playing out yet another movie that should have starred John Saxon in a rollneck jumper.

If you only watch one seasonal horror called Black Christmas this festive period, then it should obviously be the one that stars John Saxon. But if you're planning a seasonal feast this holiday season, Black Christmas '06 might as well be on your list.

23. Feeders 2: Slay Bells

2011-12-23T12:06:00.000Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: John & Mark Polonia (1998)
Starring: Bob Dennis, Jon McBride, Patricia McBride
Find it: IMDB

I had no idea that there was a Feeders 1. After watching this sequel, I'm vaguely curious. More than any other movie I've watched on this Advent Calendar, Feeders 2 is the biggest surprise. I loved every moment of it. Feeders 2 has itself a merry Christmassy theme, with the titular aliens invading Earth during The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. It's up to Santa Claus and his Elves to save the day. Really. A handy opening montage recaps the story of the first film.

I don't know what I'd been eating, but I did a dark green shit once. Too much information, I know. But the aliens in Feeders 2 are the spitting image of that green toilet trout. Maybe they should have called this film Close Encounters of the Turd Kind. They're the worst looking aliens I've ever seen in a film. There's little consistency - sometimes they look like poo, other times like pipe cleaners stuck to a ball of sage & onion stuffing. They sound annoying too, screeching for every moment they're onscreen. At first it's quite effective, but it soon grates. That this is the film's biggest problem is a stunner. I expected Feeders 2 to be unwatchable. But it's quite the opposite.

Everything is hypnotically bad, from the crappy aliens to the music and acting. That acting - maybe purposefully bad, but I doubt it - is like Napoleon Dynamite, all stilted deliveries and vacant stares. The children are actually better than the adults.

The music is utterly fantastic, all elevator muzak recreations of 'Oh Christmas Tree', 'Jingle Bells' and 'Greensleeves'. Its rendition of Greensleeves sounds like an early mobile phone ringtone. I'll be hearing it for the rest of my life on the soundtrack to my wettest dreams.

Just as it begins to droop at the halfway mark, Santa turns up and is attacked by the aliens. I physically did a LOL as an alien attached itself to an Elf's face. It's made even better by the fact that the Elf is so obviously just holding a doll to his face. It's a terrible movie, but I loved every moment of its surreal stupidity.

For what it is, Feeders 2 is quite impressive. Obviously it doesn't take itself too seriously (it's Santa Claus fighting aliens) so you've only yourself to blame if you watch it expecting something good. It's almost competent though, which I honestly hadn't expected. I actually preferred it to Peter Jackson's Bad Taste. Which is a symptom of my own Bad Taste I guess. Feeders 2 is a close encounter of the best kind.

22. Santa Claws

2011-12-22T11:54:00.001Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: John A. Russo (1996)
Starring: Debbie Rochon, Grant Cramer, John Mowod
Find it: IMDB

One Christmas Eve, a jealous child finds his mother humping her new squeeze, a Santa-hat wearing fatty. Little Wayne digs out the family gun and blows them both away. All grown up, Wayne (Cramer) becomes obsessed with B-movie Queen and horror actress Raven Quinn (Debbie Rochon, pretty much playing herself).
Adult Wayne has grown up to look like a caricature of a 1990s' horror nerd, complete with beard and ponytail. He has conversations with a bust of ~~Debbie Rochon~~ Raven and collects memorabilia. Luckily for this stalker, he happens to live next door to the object of his affections. All the easier to knock off anyone who gets in his way, one by one.

As stalkers go, Wayne is very polite. He offers to babysit Raven's children, listens to her woes and murders anyone who gets in her way. He's pretty useful to be fair, not coming across as overtly weird, ponytail aside. It's only his puritanical tendencies that annoy Raven, telling her she shouldn't appear in as many nude scenes or date a producer.

What might look like yet another Killer Santa movie hardly even has a Killer Santa in it. Wayne dresses in a balaclava and boiler suit most of the time, barely even acknowledging that it's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. There's hardly any Christmas at all in this Christmas horror movie. Nor any horror. It's as though they tacked some Christmas scenes onto their crappy stalker movie and called it Santa Claws. It's a waste of a perfectly good title. There is a claw though, best employed in a scene in which Wayne uses it to comb a woman's hair before poking her to death with it. Eventually Wayne combines the Santa outfit with the balaclava outfit, like some kind of Guerilla Santa Claus.

Far be it for me to bitch about nudity, but there is far too much of it in Santa Claws. Wayne's boring obsession is punctuated with scenes in which Raven's husband shoots naked photographs of various women. I resented these scenes because it made Santa Claws last even longer. It's not proper nudity either, just the softcore stuff that you can find if you look hard enough on Dailymotion or whatever. Not that I would know anything about that.

Santa Claws is not as bad as Satan Claus, but it's still one of the worst Psycho Santa movies out there.

21. Christmas Evil (You Better Watch Out)

2011-12-22T00:23:00.000Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Lewis Jackson (1980)
Starring: Brandon Maggart, Jeffrey DeMunn, Dianne Hull
Find it: IMDB

Yet another synopsis which sports the phrase "psycho in a Santa suit". This being the twenty-first Christmas horror movie I have watched in as many days (yeah, I reposted one review, but then I watched Bad Santa again tonight, so 21 still stands), I'd be quite happy to never have to read the words "psycho in a Santa suit" ever again. That said, Christmas Evil (or You Better Watch Out) is probably one of the best Evil Santa movies out there.

One miserable Christmas Eve (or Christmas Evil, geddit) little Harry finds out the hard way that there's no such thing as Santa Claus. If you're a child reading this, ignore that last sentence. Harry sees momma kissing Santa Claus (and then some) and winds up traumatised. Adult Harry (Maggart) devotes his life to becoming the One True Santa Claus, living in an apartment full of Christmas tat and keeping a book in which he records the "naughty and nice" children in his neighbourhood. Naughty Moss Garcia, cutting nuddy pictures from a magazine (and also for his "negative odours"). He works in a toy factory and is generally regarded as a schmuck by his co-workers.

The movie offers one of the best psycho unravellings available. I do so enjoy an unravelling psycho horror movie. As Harry notices more and more naughtiness around him and realises that people think he's a bit of a tit, he unravels in style. Christmas Evil might be my favourite Christmas horror movie.

It's very peculiar to Christmas horror films - you can't help but sympathise with the killer, whoever he may be. Christmas is prime time for losing your shit, whether it be at the works' Christmas party, whilst shopping or during an awkward family gathering. Never have I felt so maddened and nearly insane as wandering around busy shops during the Christmas period. I wish it could be Christmas every day? Yes, because I can drink whiskey from nine in the morning and not sober up until Boxing Day. Abolish Christmas and you'd probably cut the crime rate by 90% (statistics completely accurate and only slightly made up). Well with a whole month devoted to shitty music and shitty TV and spoiling your shitty children, a little murder seems like the very sanest thing to do. And Harry, as it goes, is a lovely lunatic. He tells kids to respect their parents, which is always a nice message.

When Harry's inevitable rampage does come, it's very well done. After bragging that he has "superlative taste" a man gets stabbed in the face with a toy. Which is what you deserve for talking like a prick. Harry does so outside a Church whilst music which sounds remarkably like the Psycho score twitters away. The background music is fantastic. I think Christmas slasher movies tend to sound amongst the best in the genre, whether it be inappropriately timed Carols or just the dodgy score. There's plenty to enjoy in Christmas Evil, most notably its use of 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus'.

Christmas Evil is a fantastic bit of seasonal horror. It has a fun story, great kill scenes and a villain who's at once sympathetic and scary. If you have superlative taste, you should be watching Christmas Evil. Also, watch your eye.

Summer Scars

2011-12-21T14:25:00.001Z

Director: Julian Richards (2007)

Starring: Kevin Howarth, Ciaran Joyce, Amy Harvey

Find it: IMDB

Six horrible Welsh children skip school in order to fuck around in the woods on a stolen scooter. On their travels, they happen across sinister drifter Peter (Howarth) who ingratiates himself to the children by threatening bullies and acting mentally unstable in a manner that children seem to love.

Despite no budget and a cast of disgusting children, Summer Scars is a watchable cross between Stand by Me and Kidulthood. The children are incessantly unbearable, as is the movie's villain, but there is some gold in them there Welsh hills. Not much. Maybe the equivalent of a fiver or so in change. But it's a lot more than I'd expected.

Nasty bastard Peter (Howarth) is the woodland-dwelling weirdo. At first he seems like a friendly natured sort of tramp, letting the children punch him in the face and play with his pellet gun. A bit like the training levels in Bully (Canus Canem Edit) where a tramp teaches you kung-fu skills by letting you kick the shit out of him. Only Bingo (Joyce) takes it too far, breaking Peter's not-the-face rule. One of the brats is shot up the nose with the pellet gun and all hell breaks loose. The already creepy atmosphere becomes almost unbearable when Peter starts demanding to see the kids' pubes.

It's a grim and uncomfortable tale, naturalistic in its direction and the acting. Kevin Howarth is suitably horrible as the terrible tramp. I could almost see it as a Shane Meadows film, starring the brats from Eden Lake and Paddy Considine. It's not that good, but it could have been. The children are loathsome, so it's admirable that you end up rooting for them. However, I have a very low tolerance for whining, crying children, so I still hated Summer Scars quite a lot. If they'd finished the film by killing both the children and the dangerous drifter, I would have been a happy bunny. As it is, the climax is predictable but fitting.

There's an old kids' TV show called Tracy Beaker here in England in which Ciaran Joyce plays a chavvy fuck who goes around playing 'hilarious' 'pranks' on the other kids in his orphanage. I couldn't take him at all seriously in this, playing would-be hard nut Bingo. Amy Harvey is the least irritating person in the film, and even she is fairly irritating.

Despite its considerable flaws, Summer Scars is tense, chilling and surprisingly decent. Grim as it becomes, I couldn't quite turn it off. It has an oddly magnetic quality.

I wasn't scarred by the film itself. That poster, on the other hand...

20. Satan Claus

2011-12-20T12:47:00.005Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Massimiliano Cerchi (1996)
Starring: Robert Cummins, Lauretta Ali, Robert Hector
Find it: IMDB

A serial killer dressed as Santa stalks the streets of New York, lopping off victims' body parts to adorn his Christmas tree with. An actor, a police officer and a voodoo lady team up to stop him. At least, I think they do. Satan Claus is so dingy that it's impossible to tell what's going on.

I thought I'd seen the worst that Christmas horror had to offer with Don't Open 'Till Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night 3, but Satan Claus makes those movies look like holy Christmas masterpieces by comparison. You can rest some of the blame with the film's low budget, but that doesn't excuse the horrible story or the decision to play it relatively straight. "Is that why you cut off her head?" a man asks, after Satan Claus mercilessly murders his missus, "because it was beautiful?" Seriously, this film needs to work on its lighting; nobody in Satan Claus is 'beautiful'. Satan Claus is so dingy that even its own characters can't see what or who they're doing. The whole thing takes place at night in a city apparently devoid of lightbulbs. Even the movie's police station is drenched in darkness.

Satan Claus (Cummins) himself is terrible. He certainly doesn't seem like Satan, just another dick in a Santa suit. Even as murderous Santas go, he's nothing special. As he goes about his grisly business, Satan laughs like a rubbish Caesar Romero (even making a "hoo" noise at one point) and sings carols like a twat. When not decorating his tree with body parts, Mister Claus amuses himself by taunting the police Captain via telephone. I like how surprised the police are to hear that Satan Claus laughs during his murders, as though they expected sanity (fools, there is no Sanity Clause) from a man who goes around killing people while dressed as Santa. Then, because they had to work in the title somehow, the film elevates him to voodoo devil at the end. The denouement makes no sense. Just because no-one will see your 'twist' coming doesn't make it a good twist. No-one will see the twist coming because we expect movies to make sense nowadays.

A rampage towards the end is amusing, as is a rubbish voodoo witch character (Ali). Some of the dialogue is unintionally funny (the line "work, work, work candy bar. Work, work, work, hot dog" particularly cracked me up) as are the actors' deliveries. Satan Claus boasts the least passionate "you fucking son of a bitch" ever committed to film. A man delivers a desperate monologue on the evils of vigilante justice (yes, he says the phrase "judge, jury and executioner") that's so bad it had me hoping somebody would go all vigilante justice in his face with a shotgun.

At least Satan Claus is only an hour long. It could have been less. It's so dark, I think I might have spent ten minutes watching a blank television screen by accident.

19. The Night Train Murders

2011-12-19T20:15:00.000Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Aldo Lado (1975)

Starring: Flavio Bucci, Irene Miracle
Find it: IMDB, Amazon

The most miserable entry in our advent calendar, The Night Train Murders posits a terrible hypothesis: "imagine if the plot of The Last House on the Left happened to you... on Christmas Eve." True story: you can make any horror movie 40% more depressing by having it happen on Christmas Eve. Nothing is more depressing than being murdered on Christmas Eve. Not even burnt turkey.

Of all the Last House On The Left rip-offs I've ever seen, The Night Train Murders is the rip-offest. That it was acquired by the 'Shameless' DVD label is apt, since shameless is the only word to describe its constant thieving. It basically is Last House On The Left. Only the murders happen on a train, which makes it okay. Even the tagline (YOU CAN TELL YOURSELF IT'S ONLY A MOVIE*) is stolen from Wes Craven's infamous video nasty. Most of the time, it doesn't even try. Which is understandable. Because making a movie is hard enough without having to think up an original story too.

To repeat the plot is pointless, since it's Last House On The Left. I suppose this movie being set during Christmas is different. But a Friday the 13th ripoff entitled Saturday the 15th would still be a Friday the 13th ripoff. My point being, I've seen The Last House On The Left, so I could have done without seeing this.

The preamble to the atrocities is boring and goes on for too long. Well, unless you like watching people do boring Christmas shopping and have boring Christmas parties. And then the atrocities themselves are boring and go on for too long. The parents' revenge is boring but doesn't go on for nearly long enough. There's not even a chainsaw, David Hess nor a microwave. The train toss is passable enough, with the lovely young things running afoul of two junkies and their evil ho friend. As you knew was going to happen from the very start of the thing, the girls are raped and murdered. A random commuter joins in for some of the rape.

One of the girls is then violated with a knife, which is icky but fairly original. She dies, as you do, from blood loss/shock. Her friend jumps from the moving train. It's entirely inappropriate, but I did laugh when the second body was thrown out of the window. And Poirot thought that The Orient Express was bad. I'll stick with The Polar Express, thanks. The rest of the movie is no laughing matter. Firstly because the subject matter is so horrible, secondly because it's a dull film, and thirdly because it's shit. The highlight being that one of the actors has a fascinatingly ugly face.

I'm not a fan of rape/revenge movies even when done well. And The Night Train Murders certainly isn't done well.

*You'll know it's ONLY A MOVIE. Because you've seen THE MOVIE before. Back when it was called you-know-what.

18. Don't Open 'Till Christmas

2011-12-18T23:25:00.001Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Edmund Purdom (1984)
Starring: Edmund Purdom, Alan Lake, Belinda Mayne
Find it: IMDB, Amazon

It's Christmas in London, and a psychopath is on the loose, offing anyone he sees dressed as Santa. Inspector Harris (Purdom) and reporter Giles (Lake) team up to take down the Santa assassin in a plot that's reminiscent of the recent Blitz, except with Santa instead of coppers. The mysterious murderer goes about garrotting and spearing Santas like there's no tomorrow. Well, after Christmas, his gimmick is a bit redundant, so time is short. His actions seem extreme, but let's be fair to our killer; dressing as Santa is usually the modus operandi of a bell-end.

Aside from the terrible attempt at police procedural, the story is little more than a thinly veiled excuse to have a lot of people murdered whilst dressed as Father Christmas. The British setting is a novelty, but otherwise it's just another urban slasher movie ala Maniac Cop and the occasional Giallo. The mystery elements are tedious, the red herrings predictable. And in a city populated by people too stupid to, y'know, not dress as Santa when there's a Santa-hating murderer on the loose, the killer has plenty of victims to choose from.

The script is atrocious, even by 80s' slasher standards. People say things like "he was the victim of another Santa murder" and ask "are you any nearer to solving these Santa Claus crimes?" with a straight face. "What possible reason could I have for killing Santas?" asks a suspect. "My father's just been murdered. I can't concentrate," says one poor girl. Indeed not, and especially with that horrible music going on in the background. The acting is just as bad, either stilted or a bad Roger Moore impression.

If I opened a parcel to find she'd given me a copy of Don't Open 'Till Christmas, I would punch my Grandma square in the fucking face. You should definitely open before Christmas - someone might have given you a copy of this movie, after all. I hope they kept the receipt.

17. Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker

2011-12-17T00:00:00.000Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Martin Kitrosser (1991)
Starring: Mickey Rooney, William Thorne, Jane Higginson,
Find it: IMDB

The Silent Night I was dreading the most. I hate movies about killer toys. Bah humbug I know, but killer toys are a stupid idea for any movie, let a known the fifth in an established franchise. I hated killer toys when Halloween 3 did them, I hated killer toys when The Simpsons did them, and don't even get me started on that Puppetmaster bollocks. Chucky is my least favourite slasher icon, and I even hate Toyman in the Superman comics. The only killer toy movie I like is Small Soldiers, and that's because it has Tommy Lee Jones as a crazy Action Man.

The Toy Maker starts as stupid as it means to go on, with a man being strangled to death by a glorified Christmas tree bauble as his young son looks on. The Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise is built on traumatised children, and the death of daddy dearest renders little Derek (Thorne) incapable of speech. In order to cheer up down-in-the-dumps Derek, mum Sarah (Higginson) takes him to a local toy store. The toy shop is run by Mickey Rooney playing a man called Joe Petto. Joe Petto has a son called Pino, be still my aching fucking sides. Not aching from laughter mind, but full-frontal assault with shitty scriptwriting.

The presence of Mickey Rooney makes for oddly compelling viewing, this being the goofiest instalment of them all. There's only so much I can hate a film in which Mickey Rooney plays a man called Joe Petto. Who would have thought that in a franchise which boasts Clint Howard (who cameos in this movie), Bill Moseley and Mickey Rooney, the latter would emerge as king? At least he has the good grace to don a Santa outfit for us.

It fails completely as a horror movie. Killer toys are inherently not scary. Not even Chucky. Mickey Rooney is even less scary than that. There's no tension, no drama, nor any of the brilliant death sequences that Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 & 2 was famous for. Instead there are stupid Pinocchio jokes and a child called Derek. Fucking Derek, a child who hardly speaks during an 85 minute movie, but still gives its worst performance. Even worse than Brian Bremer as Pino - and Bremer's character is literally a robot.

Instead of beheaded Nuns and garbage day memes, The Toy Maker has a child being run over whilst speeding around on evil roller skates. The scene in which a couple are attacked by living toys pretty accurately summarises why I hate killer toy movies. Even late eighties' Freddy Krueger would have been ashamed of this cock. It's more memorable than Initiation and better than Part 3, but not by much. The ending is just bizarre, turning into a rapey cross between Bicentennial Man and AI: Artificial Intelligence.

In less than ten years, Silent Night, Deadly Night is a series that (d)evolved from a superior Santa slasher into a stupid killer toys feature. Also, Mickey Rooney is a robot at the end and calls a woman "mommy."

16. Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation

2011-12-16T22:10:00.000Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Brian Yuzna (1990)
Starring: Clint Howard, Neith Hunter, Reggie Bannister
Find it: IMDB

One dark night, a woman jumps off the rooftop of a high-rise building and bursts into flames. Reporter Kim (Hunter) investigates this strange case of human combustion, only to discover a strange cult dedicated to the Egyptian God Isis. Just another Silent Night, Deadly Night movie, folks.

Clint Howard plays a man called Ricky (presumably not that one, given his intact brain) and Reggie Bannister is Kim's editor. Directed by Brian Yuzna, I had hoped for something a cut above the rest from this sequel. It's certainly different to the previous three movies, forgetting the killer Santa motif (well I am getting tired of typing out the name 'Santa Claus') and doing its own thing entirely. It's an approach that didn't work for Halloween 3 and doesn't work for this. The Caldwell brothers and their Santa fetish were the most enjoyable thing about the Silent Night movies.

As she investigates the mysterious woman's flaming suicide, Kim comes to the attention of bookseller Fima, who hopes to initiate Kim into her cult. I much prefer this franchise when it's lopping the heads off've Nuns and pumping Santa full of lead. Fima woos Kim by giving her free books and inviting her to sinister picnics in the park. The slow burning story isn't a particularly interesting one, despite the best efforts of Yuzna and Howard. It has a creepy atmosphere and great background music, and is recognisable as a Yuzna film. It's not alternately known as Bugs for no reason, with plenty of foul insects about to add to the unpleasant atmosphere. There are some genuinely horrible bits involving massive slimy bugs and Clint Howard in a Clockwork Orange style rape mask. A gloopy, surreal nightmarish sequence in the middle of the movie actually manages to be the most creepy thing in the whole series.

Given the lack of a proper villain, Howard is great. Aside from Reggie Bannister in a brief cameo, he's the only actor with any presence. Maud Adams is useless as Fima, whilst Neith Hunter is unremarkable as Kim. A cast of wrinklies round off Fima's cult.

Silent Night 4 wasn't as bad as I'd anticipated - it's far more bearable than its immediate predecessor - but it's a forgettable, directionless entry in a series that should have stopped after the first movie. The story is boring and stupid, the central mystery uninteresting. This Silent Night is for franchise completists only.

15. Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out

2011-12-15T12:56:00.000Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Monte Hellman (1989)

Starring: Bill Moseley, Richard Beymer, Samantha Scully

Find it: IMDB

It's an unwritten rule that every 80s' slasher franchise should have at least one movie in which the killer fights a teenager with psychic powers. Even better if said teenager is blind. Silent Night, Deadly Night's threequel follows the rules and has killer Ricky (Moseley) trying to kill blind psychic Laura (Scully). Well I think she's supposed to be a teenager, but Scully looks about thirty.

Silent Night, Deadly Night III opens with a thoroughly promising sequence. Fully grown Laura sits on Santa Claus's lap and asks him for "a barbie doll, a bicycle, some roller skates, ballet shoes, and a mickey mouse watch." Thoroughly unimpressed, Santa produces a knife and makes with the stabbing. It's all dream though, manufactured by Doctor Newbury (Beymer) to somehow awaken killer Ricky Caldwell from his coma. Doctor Newbury's plan to use psychics to communicate with coma victims is pretty cutting edge stuff, although I think he overestimates the ratio of genuine psychics to coma patients. It's a success though, and Ricky awakens. Unfortunately for Laura, Ricky is aware of their psychic connection and plans to sever it - with a KNIFE.

Unlike Silent Night 2, this is a proper sequel - the sort without forty minutes of flashbacks before the story begins. Unfortunately, this means that there's more crappy movie to persevere through than before. I'd sort of hoped that Better Watch Out would spend forty minutes recapping the previous movie in an anarchic "fuck you" to its audience. It could hardly have been much worse than the actual film. Also, you try watching three Silent Night, Deadly Night movies in a row.

Aside from the stupidity of the story, it has Bill Moseley wandering around with what looks like a colander on his head. And in an effort to make their blind protagonist seem strong and wilful, the filmmakers have her acting like a complete knob to people. Upon meeting her brother's new girlfriend for the first time, Laura refuses to shake her hand and makes a blowjob joke. Movie blind people are dicks.

Those hoping that Bill Moseley might do something entertaining will be disappointed by his portrayal of Ricky. Even Eric Freeman did a better job, and he did nothing but stare at people. The remarkable thing being that Moseley made this film three years after doing a completely cartoonish Chop-Top in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2. If I hadn't seen his name in the credits, I'd never have known it was Bill Moseley.

Freddy or Jason would have made mincemeat out of Laura within half an hour, but Ricky takes all day about it. After murdering a hospital Santa and a receptionist, Ricky makes his way to Laura's family home and murders Granny off-screen. It's pretty funny watching Grandma mistake Ricky for a handicapped tramp, but this movie really puts the silent in Silent Night. Gone are the outrageous kills and sleazy atmosphere; Better Watch Out is tremendously dull and without either a compelling killer or characters. Ricky doesn't even don the Santa outfit. Although I suppose the hat wouldn't have fit over the stupid bowl on Bill Moseley's head.

The previous film ended with a Nun's head falling off. This one ends with Ricky accidentally impaling himself on a stick. You better watch out - Silent Night, Deadly Night 3 is a terrible movie.

The Thing (2011)

2011-12-14T11:34:00.006Z

Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr (2011)

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen

Find it: IMDB

A remake and prequel at the same time. More remake than prequel though, because it's exactly the same story as John Carpenter's The Thing, except less good and with a crappy CGI finale tacked on at the end.

An alien spacecraft is discovered near an Antarctica research site. When alien remains are pulled out of the ice, paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Winstead) is called upon to assist in the excavation. No sooner have they returned the alien remains to their research base than it comes to life, breaks free and starts murdering scientists. The team quickly burn it to death, but not before one of their number becomes infected. Tensions become fraught, a helicopter crashes and soon Kate has a fight for survival on her hands. Unable to decide who's human and who's an alien, the stupid humans bicker and fight until only Kurt Russell can save the day! Bully for them, Kurt Russell isn't in this movie.

Mister Eko from LOST is in it though, which pleases me. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a massive fetish for ex-LOST castaways in my movies. I'll even take Matthew Fox in Smoking Aces with a giggle of delight. Eko isn't given much to do, but he rounds off a solid cast along with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ulrich Thomsen. Joel Edgerton is fairly bland, not even managing to muster a decent beard out of it all. There are some manly beards that are nearly as good as Kurt's though, worn by the Norwegian characters. The most interesting thing about this Thing is the decision to make the cast (and director) so Norwegian. It's an effect that's spoiled, however, by the Norwegian fellows essentially being cannon fodder for the Americans.

The creature designs are fine without being as iconic as the original monsters. There's far too much CGI; none of the kills as fun as the 'hands through the chest' moment in Carpenter's bit. But they sound very good, and I particularly enjoyed a scene in which a man's hands fall off and attack the rest of the humans. If only it hadn't all been CGI, I would probably have enjoyed the monsters more. Rated a mere 15, there isn't enough gore to make up for the crappier effects. I much preferred the videogame sequel for the PS2 - the only sequel or remake that The Thing really needs.

The Thing is a serviceable piece of sci-fi horror, similar in quality and design to the likes of Aliens vs Predator and Whiteout. Even if you've never seen Carpenter's Thing (WHAT), you won't be wowed. The thing is, the best thing about The Thing is that it made me want to watch The Thing again.

14. Silent Night, Deadly Night part 2

2011-12-14T11:10:00.002Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Lee Harry (1987)

Starring: Eric Freeman, James Newman, Elizabeth Kaitan

Find it: IMDB

The sort of sequel that consists mostly of footage from the original movie. Billy's brother Ricky (Freeman) talks to a psychiatrist about how he came to follow in Billy's bastardly footsteps and become a Christmas killer too. Silent Night, Deadly Night part 2 re-uses even more footage from the original than The Hills Have Eyes 2. No doggy flashbacks this time, but baby ones instead. Ricky even has flashbacks to events he wasn't even present for. There's so much recycled footage that I felt cheated by having watched the previous film in preparation.

But at least the bit where police officers shoot an innocent Santa Claus in the back is repeated. Every Christmas movie should be required by law to have a scene in which police officers shoot Santa in the back. It would certainly make Tim Allen movies seem ~~more~~ entertaining. Later in the movie, Kris Kringle's execution is utilised to amusing effect. But Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 retells literally the whole of the previous film to the extent where there are only fifty minutes of original sequel.

Finally Ricky gets around to telling his own story. He was adopted by a family who gave the kid a decent upbringing but failed to recognise the trauma underneath. If cinema has taught us anything, it's that careful parenting can turn a serial killer into a Batman or a nicer kind of serial killer who only preys on criminals. Where Billy was terrified of Santa Claus, Ricky has a phobia of Nuns. I suppose Nuns are pretty scary. Pause for my favourite Nun joke:

Two Nuns are walking through Transylvania late one night, on the way home from a Transylvanian convention for Nuns. A vampire jumps out at them, from the undergrowth. "Agh!" shouts one of the Nuns, "a vampire. Quickly, show him your cross!" The other Nun shakes her fist at the vampire. "Grr," she says, "I am so angry with you right now."

As Ricky's stepfather passes away, the lad's demons begin to surface. He relieves himself by indulging in his brother's favourite hobby - a little Christmassy murder. But where Billy seemed genuinely disturbed and conflicted, Ricky is a bit of a dick. He's an annoying, overly talkative sort of killer, smugly bragging about his murderous conquests and swearing at his put-upon psychiatrist. Although there is the best utilisation of an umbrella that I've ever seen in a horror movie:

Eric Freeman does some great things with his eyes throughout. Ricky finally loses his shit completely when he finds out that his girlfriend isn't a virgin. It culminates with an Internet meme in which Ricky shoots a man taking taking out his garbage. In a series of increasingly brilliant murders, Ricky kills a guy who looks like Fred from Scooby Doo and strangles his girlfriend with a car aerial.

His rampage ends with him exploding a car with a pistol. This sequence of events is an incredible bit of trashy horror cinema, outdoing anything in the original movie. Indeed, were it not for the abundance of flashbacks and filler, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 would make an even better movie than its predecessor. At once, it is one of the best and worst sequels ever made.

13. Silent Night Deadly Night

2011-12-13T13:00:00.004Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Charles E Sellier Jr (1984)

Starring: Robert Brian Wilson, Danny Wagner, Linnea Quigley

Find it: IMDB

A bit like Halloween, in so much as it’s set during a titular Holiday. Other than that, it’s nothing like Halloween. After a series of childhood traumas, a troubled, Christmas-hating youth goes on a Crimbo killing spree, murdering everyone on his naughty list. Also of interest: Nuns, shagging, bosoms, a rapey Santa Claus and plenty of assorted festive cruelty.

As the movie begins, we meet young Billy Chapman, his parents and baby sister. They’re a very nice, all-American family, and as such are doomed to die. But before all that, the family visit their crazy grandpa at his home in a cosy mental institution. They then leave young Billy alone with the old coot. Crazy granddad proceeds to traumatise the poor kid, telling him that “Christmas Eve is the scariest damn night of the year,” that Santa punishes the naughty kids, and that he better run if he sees Santa. Sounds like someone’s been watching Santa’s Slay.

Not traumatised enough by his own grandfather, Billy goes on to see his family murdered by a fella dressed as Santa. Looks like Gramps ain't so crazy after all. His parents dead, it's at this stage where a kid either decides to dress up as a giant bat or become a serial killer.

But with no kindly English butler to look after Billy, the poor kid finds himself in an orphanage. Still traumatised by his experience at the hands of Santa Claus, he passes his time by drawing lovely pictures of murdered Santas and beheaded reindeers. Kid’s got talent, reminiscent of the work of Charlie Bronson. More trauma is heaped upon poor Billy as he gets himself a beating from the orphanage’s Mother Superior. Lesson learnt: “Punishment is good”. And so Billy grows up to become the movie’s villain; a punisher of petty crimes; like the Punisher, but with added jolly.

Like many 80s’ slasher movies, Silent Night Deadly Night isn’t too scary, but is plenty creepy. It’s lurid and often gratuitously cruel. Does anyone really need to see a lady raped by a chap in a Santa costume? Not really, but the creepiness of it all is excellently done and partnered with a wonderful soundtrack of standard 80s’ synth and cheesy Christmas music. It’s lighter on the gore than its notoriety might suggest (a bunch of outraged mothers got it pulled from several cinemas), but it’s sleazy enough anyway to make up for the lack of onscreen claret. Plus, there's this, the greatest sequence of events ever to grace a Christmas film since Billy Bob Thornton beat the shit out of a child in Bad Santa:

Of the myriad of Christmas horror movies, Silent Night Deadly Night is perhaps my favourite. The story’s generic, but not so much that it can’t hold a few surprises. Billy’s transformation from innocent wee kiddiwink to traumatised psychopath is a plausible one; you too would likely go crazy if you had as much shit heaped upon you as he gets in this movie. And the pace is not as slow as Black Christmas, the tone less overtly silly than Gremlins or Jack Frost.

So if you thought that the likes of Fred Claus are too light on the stabby-stabby, beheadings and impalements (and yes, it was. Incidentally, that film is vastly improved if you imagine Paul Giamatti burying an axe in Vince Vaughan's fucking face) then Silent Night Deadly Night is surely the flick for you.

12. ...And All Through the House (1972)

2011-12-12T12:05:00.008Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Freddie Francis (1972)

Starring: Joan Collins, Chloe Franks, Martin Boddey

Find it: IMDB

A man is quite happily reading his newspaper one merry Christmas Eve when a disconcertingly sexy Joan Collins walks in wearing a stupid hat and bludgeons him to death. The man is her husband and Joan is hoping to claim his life insurance by murdering the poor chump. As insurance scams go, that one's even older than burning down your own house. I guess screwing insurance companies over was easier in the 1970s. Still, Christmas Eve is a pretty shitty time to be murdering someone. Especially when you have a young daughter upstairs. Little wonder Joan ends up topping off Santa's naughty list.

Whilst disposing of the body, Joan hears on the radio that a serial killer has escaped from a local lunatic asylum. Moments later, this psycho Santa arrives at the door. But poor Joan can't call the police because she has a dead husband bleeding all over the carpet. On lockdown from scary Santa, Joan concentrates on cleaning the mess up. She doesn't count on stupid daughter Carol letting crazy mister Claus in the house. Joan Collins is strangled to death by creepy Kris Kringle and wee Carol is left orphaned on Christmas Eve. Heh, Carol. Christmas Carol, geddit.

A ten minute tale from the Tales from the Crypt movie, ...And all through the House is perhaps the creepiest story in the film (although Peter Cushing's Poetic Justice is the real highlight). It's simple but very effective, with a haunting twist. Particularly chilling is the use of Christmas carols playing on the radio throughout, even during Joan Collins's eventual murder. The killer is understated. Where the 1989 television remake had Larry Drake in fake teeth and heavy makeup, our murderer here could be any department store Santa or fancy-dress dad.... and that's a lot scarier than even Larry Drake. And I love me some Larry Drake.

11. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

2011-12-11T14:46:00.007Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Jalmari Helander (2010)

Starring: Onni Tommila, Jorma Tommila, Tommi Korpela

Find it: IMDB

A Christmas horror movie that treats its subject with relative seriousness, thereby imbuing it with more class and gravity than one would expect from an evil Santa film. Buried in the depths of the Korvatunturi mountains, excavators find Santa Claus. The Santa Claus. Soon afterwards, local children begin disappearing and young Pietari (Onni Tommila) finds mysterious footprints in the snow by his window. Santa Claus, as they say, is coming to town. Careful though, he's a biter.

Pietari's gloomy hunter father (Jorma Tommila) finds what he believes to be Santa, caught in one of his traps. He ties poor Santa up and hatches a plan to sell not-so Jolly Saint Nick to the highest bidder. It emerges that the going price for a Santa Claus is a lot less than I thought it would be.

It's something of a slow burner for a comedy/horror, but when it does kick into gear, the payoff is well worth the invested time. In its tale of a quiet, sensitive, lonely child finding his way in life, Rare Exports is like a Christmassy Let The Right One In. It picks and chooses its festive elements wisely, never outstaying its welcome. Particularly well employed is the way in which the characters use gingerbread to hold Santa at bay and a set of "rules"to keep you off've Father Christmas's naughty list. He's no Bill Goldberg, but you'll want to stay in his good books.

The biggest problem with Rare Exports is that you can only really watch it once a year. Never mind the turkey or presents, I'm counting down the days until I can watch this Christmas Tale again.

10. The Gingerdead Man 2: The Passion of the Crust

2011-12-10T11:00:00.007Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Silvia St. Croix (2008)

Starring: Joseph Porter, Kelsey Sanders, K-von Moezzi

Find it: IMDB

The first few minutes of this sequel are far more entertaining than the entirety of The Gingerdead Man. It's a montage that consists of footage from the first movie, narrated in the style of a fairy tale. It actually makes The Gingerdead Man look like a film worth watching. It even looks tolerable.

After this uncharacteristic highlight for the franchise, The Passion of the Crust becomes a slightly different variety of intolerable. The story takes place on a film set, where Kelvin Cheatum (Moezzi) is struggling to keep his father's failing studio afloat. The Gingerdead Man (not Gary Busey) is delivered to the studio amongst a box of baked goods. As Kelvin escorts dying fan Tommy (Porter) and carer Heather (Sanders) about the place, The Gingerdead Man picks them off, one by one.

Like most movie-in-a-movie horror features, The Passion of the Crust feels self-indulgent and obvious. I resent the implication that all horror critics are angry virgins who live in their mothers' basements (presumably alongside Frank Miller's Occupy protestors). Well I live in my mother's attic - in your inaccurate face Gingerdead Man 2. "Never listen to critics," the narration grumbles, "those arseholes are lame." Not as lame as The Gingerdead Man, we ain't.

It's a funnier movie than the original bit, less boring and with more screentime for the titular Gingerdead Man. They're the same sort of improvements as made in Jack Frost 2. It doesn't manage to be as funny as Jack Frost 2, but at least it aims for something beyond silly baking puns. Although it does end on a "that's the way the cookie crumbles" joke, the finale is dementedly genius, a glimpse at what the franchise should have been.

Gingerdead Man 2 is half-baked stupid nonsense. Nothing makes me feel an Old Scrooge like failing to enjoy a film about a homicidal gingerbread man. Although, after watching both movies back-to-back, I do have the strangest craving for gingerbread. Hold the Busey.

9. The Gingerdead Man

2011-12-09T13:08:00.006Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Charles Band (2005)

Starring: Gary Busey, Robin Sydney, Ryan Locke

Find it: IMDB

Brilliantly named killer Millard Findlemeyer (Gary Busey) walks into a diner and kills everyone there. After the killer spends too long speechifying, the police arrive in time to arrest him. Survivor Sarah (Sydney) testifies and Millard is sentenced to death. In a sequence of events that could only happen in an anthropomorphic horror movie like The Gingerdead Man, Millard's ashes become mixed up with the cake ingredients at the bakery Sarah happens to own. As an employee's blood drips into the gingerbread mix, The Gingerdead Man is born. With the staff bleeding willy-nilly into the cakes, it's little wonder that business isn't booming. All blood and cremated remains, the Gingerdead Man mix wouldn't look out of place in a Heston Blumenthal recipe book.

This is only a Christmas movie insomuch as people (apparently) eat gingerbread men at Christmas. You can watch it any day of the year you like but I suppose Christmas is the optimum time for watching ridiculous films about sentient food. Christmas is the optimum time for substandard shit being passed off as entertainment. Which would go some way to explain Fred Claus, the Star Wars Christmas special, the X-Factor Christmas no.1, the entire Christmas TV schedule, sprouts and The Gingerdead Man.

Better in concept than execution, Gingerdead Man is of about the same quality as Jack Frost. Few of the jokes are particularly funny whilst the horror elements are just useless. Gary Busey is physically in the movie for less than five minutes, and it's the most bizarre of his performances that I've ever seen. Which is what happens when Meat Loaf isn't around to keep him in check. It's actually a shame when Millard becomes the Gingerdead Man because it robs the film of a potentially awesome Gary Busey performance and lends it a stupid monster that's even less threatening than the gingerbread man in Shrek. As it is, Busey just grumbles a few lines and then goes home. However, he does tell a rat to fuck off.

Gingerdead Man is a movie in which grown adults are menaced by a wee gingerbread man and none of them do anything to fight it. They don't even do the bare minimum, which would be to leave the bakery. I'd be embarrassed to die at the hands of the Gingerdead Man; even more so than Jack Frost or Chucky. It takes a special breed of dipshit to die at the hands of an article of baked goods. Even when one considers that the movie is supposed to be a comedy, Gingerdead Man is stupid. A character becomes possessed towards the end and the movie has the cheek to reference Army Of Darkness.

If you must attempt to watch The Gingerdead Man, I'd suggest taking a leaf from Gary Busey's book - give it five minutes, until Millard's arrest in the diner, then just do one.

8. Tales From The Crypt: And All Through the House

2011-12-08T21:33:00.012Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Robert Zemeckis (1989)

Starring: Mary Ellen Trainor, John Kassir, Larry Drake

Find it: IMDB

A chilly segment of the horror chocolate orange that is Tales From The Crypt. But not the one starring Joan Collins. ...And All Through the House is an episode of the television series, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Despite telling the same story, this version does it in an altogether more colourful fashion (befitting the original garish EC Comics). There are even jokes; all of them funnier than anything in The Santa Clause. One of them is even a "Santa Clause" joke.

One merry Christmas Eve, Joanne (Trainor) murders her husband, smashing his head in with a poker. Those Tales From The Crypt people; always murdering their bloody relatives. As she's hiding the body, she hears a news bulletin announcing that there's a murderous bastard on the loose wearing a Santa outfit. Joanne runs into the killer outside, scoping her house with an axe. She fights him off and barricades herself indoors. But she can't call the police on account of her serious case of dead husband. Doom is brought about when her greedy little fuck child lets 'Santa' into the house. With a nasal cry of "where are my presents?" mummy's death sentence is signed. Children; little shits would start the apocalypse if they thought there was a present in it for 'em. They don't tell you that on the John Lewis adverts.

The wonderful Larry Drake plays psycho Santa, trashing the set with the same glee as he did in Darkman and Doctor Giggles. This version lacks the original's creepiness (and Joan Collins' disturbing 1970s' sultriness) but tries to make up for it by being louder, more melodramatic and funnier. But like any scene-for-scene remake, if you've seen the original, it all feels a little predictable and pointless. I hoped for some sort of twist on the ending, but it's pretty much the same. If anything, it's less graphic. But if you've not seen the original Tales From The Crypt movie (WHAT) ...And All Through the House will be a treat.

Inferior or not, it does have its uses. When I was but a wee brat, my grandmother used to have a phrase saved for whenever we misbehaved. "Father Christmas is up that chimney," she'd say, "he's watching you." Ever the atheist, I believed even less in Santa than I did god. But my stupid cousins, they were shitting themselves. Like clowns, Santa is every bit as terrifying as he is jolly and lovely. Just imagine if my dear old gran had let us watch Tales Of The Crypt. Parents take note: Used correctly, Larry Drake Santa Claus will keep your kids in line for years to come. Next time that little ponce refuses to eat his or her sprouts, show them this episode. Larry Drake's up that chimney. He's watching you.

7. Santa's Slay

2011-12-07T16:32:00.001Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: David Steiman (2005)
Starring: Bill Goldberg, Douglas Smith, Emilie De Ravin
Find it online: IMDB

Nothing says Christmas like Santa Claus setting heads on fire and blowing children to itty-bitty-pieces. In this case, Jolly Saint Nick is a wrestler (Bill Goldberg) and he starts off this movie by brutally murdering James Caan. He then proceeds to be very angry all the time and chase around the blonde Australian girl from off’ve Lost and The Hills Have Eyes. It's wilfully daft, but I'll take that shit over Tim Allen anyday. In fact, the Coca-Cola adverts could use a little more dismemberment too.

The rest of the movie isn’t so great, but it’s worth it for the delightfully ridiculous opening sequence alone (recapped so much better on the excellent I-Mockery) in which he sets fire to a girl’s head and murders James Caan with a turkey drumstick.

According to a cute little animated montage, our Santa Claus is actually a murderous demon who lost a bet to an angel, and was forced to spend the next millennium delivering toys to children instead of killing them. The story picks up just after the end of that millennium. As you might have gathered, Santa is back to his old killing ways.

Enter our protagonists, the horribly named Nicolas Yuleson and a girl called Mac (Emilie De Ravin – only slightly less annoying than usual). Because of some silly Deus Ex Machina or something, Santa wants to kill them dead. But obviously, none of this is important. The main bulk of the movie simply has Santa wandering around the kids’ small village town murdering everyone in sight, in increasingly stupid and hilarious ways. Later scenes see Santa flying round on his sled, driven by “hell deer” and targeting innocent vicars. No-one is safe from Santa’s wrath, not even strippers or Jewish shopkeepers.

Surprisingly enough, Santa proves himself quite well as a bona fide horror icon. He’s big and angry looking, and one suspects that he could possibly go toe-to-toe with Jason Voorhees and not entirely embarrass himself. Wrestler Bill Goldberg plays Santa, and does a really good job of it throughout. Wrestlers are always at their best when playing villains (Dwayne Johnson excluded – he’s the least menacing tough guy this side of Twilight) and Goldberg certainly makes the most of the character he’s been dealt; even if Futurama did get there first. Mythical holiday characters make great slasher icons. I’d love to see the Easter Bunny or Jesus get the same treatment.

Santa’s Slay is no classic – the teenage leads are too bland and occasionally irritating – and the whole thing is a little self-consciously silly (although how could a movie about a psycho Santa not be). Occasionally the tone and action feels too much as if it's trying to be Gremlins 2.0. The movies have a lot in common. There’s a lot of carnage onscreen, but no real gore nor anything particularly offensive.

Some viewers might balk at the light-hearted tone and negligible story, but Santa’s Slay is well worth a watch; particularly as an antidote to the usual toxic trash that the TV seems to throw us this time of year. Fuck you, Tim Allen. I’d rather see my Santa murdering strippers with their own pole.

6. Silent Night, Bloody Night

2011-12-06T09:47:00.004Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Theodore Gershuny (1974)

Starring: Patrick O' Neal, James Patterson, Mary Woronov

Find it: IMDB

Galling Giallo with a Christmas twist. A man inherits a mansion that used to be a mental home. Well, didn't they all. After deciding to sell up, he spends Christmas Eve in the house. He and his ladyfriend are promptly murdered by an escapee from another asylum. The killer makes a call to the police station, threatening to murder anyone else who sets foot in the house. Note to Santa, steer clear of this chimney tonight.

It's a minor classic and all, and I did try - but Silent Night, Bloody Night is bleeding dull. Black Christmas was released at around the same time, and it's easy to see how that one went on to inform Halloween whilst Silent Night, Boring Night remains largely forgotten. Although there are enough similarities between this and Carpenter's masterpiece to not discount it altogether. The opening, for example, is remarkably sort of similar (well, in that it has a person escaping from a lunatic asylum in a car).

The plot is convoluted, the acting bad and the script terrible ("that's why I'm holding a gun. You scare me"). The video and sound quality is terrible. Perhaps time would have been more favourable to Silent Night, Bloody Night if it had been properly (or at least partly) restored before its release on DVD.

But it does possess a shabby charm. The black gloved killer stuff is inherently creepy, whilst the flashback sequences are enjoyably shouty. There's some fun sub-video nasty violence. A couple are chopped to bits with an axe. A man is set alight. In the movie's best kill, a woman reaches out into the darkness only to have her hand lopped off.

It has its moments, but not nearly enough of them. If you find your overexcited self unable to sleep this Christmas Eve, pop Silent Night, Bloody Night into your DVD player. It'll have you off to sleep within ten minutes.

5. P2

2011-12-05T11:24:00.018Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Franck Khalfoun (2007)

Starring: Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley, Simon Reynolds

Find it: IMDB

Christmas really drives home the loneliness, doesn't it? Cheerful couples walking around, hand in hand, planning a Christmas full of presents and sex together. Love, Actually on TV. Kissing under the mistletoe. Fucking happy bastards. Thomas (Bentley) is a security guard who works in a parking garage beneath the office block where Angela (Nichols) works. Come Christmas Eve, and Thomas snaps. He grabs Angela and holds her hostage in his security booth. What with lonely Thomas and batshit Walter (of Human Centipede 2 infamy), parking lot security guards have been getting a rough deal of it lately. If ever I see a parking lot security guard, rest assured I'll be punching the creepy shit right in the face. I will not be your Human Centipede, sir!

Co-written by Gallic horror maestro Alexandre Aja, P2 is a taut and suspenseful psycho-thriller that shows just how unbalanced Christmas can make people. Which singletons amongst us haven't considered kidnapping a crush just so's we have someone to spend Christmas with?

LOL kidnap jokes. Not really. I spend every Christmas stalking my ex on Facebook, screaming the lyrics to Last Christmas by Wham! at the computer screen, until it becomes blurred behind a film of my own furious drunken spittle.

LOL, I'm a psychopath. Not really. She's blocked me on Facebook. I actually spend every Christmas sitting in my underpants with no presents, crying and watching Silent Night, Deadly Night OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

P2 is like a gender-reversed version of the Australian thriller The Loved Ones. It's a more straightforward piece than that later movie - women being chased around by obsessive stalkers has been done to death, darling - but shares a few moments of quite icky cruelty. Also, the whole thing put me in mind of The Dark Knight sequence in the car lot - right down to the fight with the dog. P2 is like The Loved Ones crossed with The Dark Knight. Put that on your blurb and smoke it.

It's not particularly memorable (I had to re-watch it for this feature, since I don't remember anything about it) but does have an Elvis Christmas song on the soundtrack and some properly grisly violence. For sure, it'll make you think twice about wandering around parking garages late on Christmas Eve.

4. Gremlins

2011-12-04T09:46:00.003Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Joe Dante (1984)

Starring: Zach Gilligan, Phoebe Cates, Dick Miller

Find it: IMDB

Like the first two Die Hard movies, Gremlins is one of the few Christmas movies that it's acceptable to watch during the other eleven months of the year. You could watch Silent Night, Deadly Night in the middle of July if you wanted to, but only if you're The Grinch. Gremlins is also one of the few horror movies that they'll play on TV during the middle of the day. That in spite of the fact that it's downright cruel at times.

Billy (Gilligan) is gifted a cute, cuddly Mogwai. The pet comes with three rules that will be burned onto the psyche of anyone who was vaguely around during the mid 80s and 90s. Don't let them come into contact with water, don't feed them after midnight and heavens, no bright light. The first two rules are broken in quick succession. The first fuckup results in more (less cute) Mogwai. The second turns them into Gremlins, who proceed to trash Billy's small town and murder an old lady. I found the violent murder of the old lady hilarious when I was ten and find it even funnier now. It's second only to the liquidizer kill later in the movie.

As if Gremlins wasn't fantastically 80s enough already, it has Dick Miller in it. Nothing says fun 80s trash like Dick Miller. He was also in Joe Dante's own Small Soldiers, which is nearly as fun as Gremlins. Whenever I picture Dick Miller, it's sitting at home chilling with a beer; then something terrifying, stupid or both comes crashing through his wall, making him swear off beer forever. He has a great everyman persona, constantly being bugged by pesky Terminators or Gremlins or Small Soldiers.

Of all the scary Christmas movies, Gremlins manages to be the most disturbing ever. Well, if you're ten years old, it is. Murder all the old biddies you like, but don't defile Christmas; it's the scene where Kate (Cates) is explaining why she hates Christmas; how her father died in a chimney whilst dressed as Santa Claus. It's an old urban legend, but it taps into a quite terrifying childhood fear - what if something ruins Christmas?

WHAT, NO ACTION MAN?

(image stolen from here)

And speaking as someone who lost a close relative on Christmas, yes, it is a fucking bummer. On the flipside, now I can go around like Phoebe Cates, traumatising children by telling them why I think Christmas sucks. In your face, youthful innocence.

Well, that killed the mood, didn't it? Gremlins is a bona fide classic, up there with Ghostbusters and Die Hard as the best of the 80s. Except for when Corey Feldman is in it.

And Soon the Darkness

2011-12-03T23:27:00.006Z

Director: Marcos Efron (2010)

Starring: Amber Heard, Odette Yustman, Karl Urban

Find it: IMDB

A whole movie predicated around Amber Heard and Odette Yustman being in their bikinis. And Soon the Darkness is a Turistas remake of a British thriller from the 1970s. Most remakes are pointless, but the 1970s version of this didn't have Amber Heard and Odette Yustman in bikinis. If you're not inclined towards enjoying Heard & Yustman in bikinis then consider your enjoyment lessened. By The Elder Gods, I actively enjoy Heard & Yustman in their bikinis and even I was bored.

During a cycling holiday in Argentina, Stephanie (Heard) and Ellie (Yustman) start bickering about blokes. When Stephanie storms off, Ellie is kidnapped. With the help of Karl Urban, Stephanie sets about tracking her friend down. It has some good actors, but And Soon the Darkness is not a good movie. I would call it predictable, but there are only two or three plot points to predict.

Amber Heard and Karl Urban are usually good, but the movie must have been an off-day for them both. Heard looks completely lost, whilst Urban mumbles a lot. Thankfully he has the sort of face that looks intense all the time, naturally elevating his crappy surroundings. There's nothing for either of them to do until Heard gets herself kidnapped too. I won't insult your intelligence by labelling that a spoiler.

It's exploitative rubbish really, people hoping that you'll come for the half-naked heroines but stay for their crappy horror story. Well, you've already paid by that point. As soon as its heroines get dressed, all colour drains out of the film. Nothing to see here, move on. And Soon the Darkness. Indeed, I turned the TV off.

YellowBrickRoad

2011-12-03T14:00:00.008Z

Directors: Jesse Holland, Andy Mitton (2010)

Starring: Cassidy Freeman, Michael Laurino, Anessa Ramsey

Find it: IMDB

The most terrifying thing to come out of Oz since Michael Jackson's Scarecrow. YellowBrickRoad is like The Blair Witch Project crossed with The Evil Dead. A gang of aspiring documentary makers investigate the disappearance of a small town's population. In 1940s' New England, the villagers of Friar wandered off into the hills of New Hampshire. They were never seen again. Given the movie's title, I was expecting to find a tribe of man-eating Munchkins, but YellowBrickRoad delivers something entirely creepier. There is a Scarecrow though, briefly.

Not that one.

Led by Teddy (Barnes) the filmmakers follow the villagers' supposed path into the hills. Again, another lie on the title's behalf. The road isn't yellow. It's not even a road. This is like The Hills Run Red all over again. YellowBrickRoad takes a while to warm up. For the first twenty minutes, it's nothing special; all ignorant villagers and smug kids. But then, as our protagonists reach the point of no return, YellowBrickRoad starts to get a little bit special.

From beyond the hills, they start to hear music. 1940s' dance hall style music with seemingly no source or explanation. The further they travel, the more the road starts to mess with their minds. They begin to turn on each other for the silliest reasons. Harsh words are exchanged and limbs are lost. It's a suspenseful movie with a great atmosphere and concept. The later scenes in the movie are genuinely unsettling. As two of the ill advised idiots begin munching on poisonous forest berries, YellowBrickRoad becomes a superior Shrooms. Trippy and terrifying at the same time, it's properly "far out" (that's what you kids say these days, isn't it?)

The ending won't be to everyone's tastes. There's a sense of bathos that one could liken to finding a wizened old cretin behind the curtain at the end of The Wizard Of Oz. I enjoyed it in a David Lynch kind of way, although it does feel a little anticlimactic.

No lions or tigers of bears, but this YellowBrickRoad is still one worth following. Oh my.

3. Jack Frost 2: Revenge Of The Mutant Killer Snowman

2011-12-03T10:56:00.010Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Michael Cooney (2000)

Starring: Christopher Allport, Eileen Seeley, Scott MacDonald

Find it: IMDB

Sam Tiler (not that one) is in therapy following his trauma at the hands of killer snowman Jack Frost. To relieve some stress, he packs his bags for a Carribean holiday with the wife (Seeley). Yes, it's a I Still Know What You Did Last Summer kind of sequel. Jack Frost is back too, resurrected when scientists dig up the can of anti-freeze that holds his imprisoned soul. Wait, what? A maintenance worker wakes Jack up by spilling a cup of coffee into the vat of anti-freeze, because that could totally happen, and he too sets sail.

This time even heat and anti-freeze can't stop Jack. His powers increased, he freezes a whole room like a low-budget version of The Day After Tomorrow. Despite being an invincible snowbastard, Jack still chooses to pick his victims off one by one. It's tedious at times, but mostly quite amusing and imaginative. The humour works better than it did in the previous film. It's really, really bad humour, but I laughed. Most of the time, anyway. "It's a sign that there's traffic," says Anne, trying to appease her husband's nerves, "a traffic sign, geddit?" Oh how nobody LOL'd.

For a movie about a mutant killer snowman, there's a complete dearth of mutant killer snowmen. There are quite a lot of snowballs though. Most of the time, Jack exists only as a disembodied carrot or ice cube. The kills are quite good, nevertheless; particularly the one where a woman eats a Jack Frost ice cube and then her head explodes. A naked woman goes swimming and Jack says "I wouldn't mind a little breast stroke myself." Heh. And there's actually some really good gore later in the movie, seemingly inspired by Gremlins in its anarchy.

Embracing its inner silliness has done Jack Frost 2 the world of good. Where the original movie was surprisingly dull, the sequel is fun and infectiously likeable. Bless, it was made in an era where it could snow on a Carribean island and no-one would mention global warming.

In conversation with: Robert Englund (via Horrortalk.com)

2011-12-02T14:50:00.006Z

This article comes with massive thanks to horrortalk.com, who not only gave me the opportunity to carry out the following interview, but hired me as staff reviewer too. Show them some love, do.

At the inception of my love for all things horror, there was Robert Englund. Before I even knew horror was a 'thing', I was stood in a VHS rental shop with my parents, browsing the cassettes. Every time I visited a video shop, aside from all the Disney (hey, I was nine), it was the Freddy Krueger videos that always caught my attention. I would covet those Nightmare On Elm Street cassettes - with their gaudy, terrifying cover art - not even able to imagine the fateful nights when I would gleefully work my way through the Elm Street box set collection, from A Nightmare On Elm Street to Wes Craven's New Nightmare. In the corner of that video store stood a cardboard cutout of Freddy Krueger; the embodiment of my future of a horror fanboy. Years later, I watched Freddy's Dead, late at night, on TV after bedtime. From there, I was hooked.

Robert Englund is perhaps the biggest name in horror. The One True Freddy Krueger, Mister Englund is a genuine icon. His latest movie is The Mole Man Of Belmont Avenue, in which he plays a cranky tenant menaced by the titular Mole Man. I was lucky enough to speak with Mr. Englund. The full interview can be found at Horrortalk.com.

What can you tell us about The Mole Man of Belmont Avenue?

It's a low budget slacker Ghostbusters. I'm one of the tenants of a building inherited by two slacker brothers; and there's a creature that's eating all the pets. The tenants band together like vigilantes.

What attracted you to the project?

Both Mike and John's reputation preceded them – I knew they were a great comedy duo – and then I got the script and I loved it. I was laughing, I didn't put it down. I immediately called my agent up and said “I'd love to do this.” They had these incredible locations. They have such a great talent pool in Chicago that they can borrow from. I don't get to do a lot of comedy - it's always a gift when somebody lets me do it.

Do you look for anything particular in a role?

My rule has been, since Freddy vs Jason, that I will go where I'm wanted. The blessing for me is that horror and science fiction movies are huge internationally. I just finished a film in Bulgaria. And I was in your neck of the woods (England) in June. I just did a movie in the Shaun Of The Dead tradition called Strippers vs Werewolves.

Robert Englund everybody.

The full interview can be found at horrortalk.com, where I also talk to the movie's writer & director duo, John LeFlamboy and Mike Bradecich, and hear Mr. Englund's thoughts on horror comedies and details on a potential new franchise amongst other things. See Molemanmovie.com for more details on The Mole Man Of Belmont Avenue.

2. Jack Frost

2011-12-02T12:07:00.002Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Michael Cooney (1996)
Starring: ~~Michael Keaton~~, Scott MacDonald, Shannon Elizabeth
Find it online: IMDB

Tip for bastards: when selling your secondhand copy of Jack Frost, switch the DVD inside with a copy of the shitty Michael Keaton movie of the same name. And that, sirs and madams, is how you piss off a horror fan. And for equally hilarious results (actual hilarity may vary by degrees of your own stupidity) try the same trick in reverse. Because there's nothing more Christmassy than traumatising children with a rapey snowman horror movie.

Serial killer Jack Frost is transformed into a living snowman after being sprayed with some unnamed ‘genetic material’. Given his name, it’s pretty apt that he should become a snowman. It’s a piece of synchronicity rarely seen outside of a Batman comic. They might as well have called him Snowy McSnowman. We're introduced to him via a funny and cruel title sequence which describes Jack and his crimes in the style of a bedtime story (complete with traumatised child and terrifying narrator). It's the second best bit in the movie (the best bit, unsurprisingly, involves Shannon Elizabeth and a carrot) and really gets the whole thing going.

Jack is caught by a small-town sheriff named Sam Tiler (Chris Allport) a nice-guy family man who accidentally managed to arrest Frost when the killer was taking a pee. Sentenced to death, Frost vows unoriginal revenge. And even being turned into a giant plastic snowman isn’t gonna stop him. But, like most serial killers, he has to take his sweet time about it. Cue plenty of pointless interludes which see Jack murdering people for no reason and raping Shannon Elizabeth in the shower with a carrot. Also, and less good: too many scenes with the Sheriff and his twee family.

This should be funny – it sounds like it should be The Best Thing Ever – but Jack Frost is just too slow, too low-budget and not nearly dark or shlocky enough to work. The first couple of Child’s Play movies showed that cartoony killers can work, given the right tone and direction. But Jack Frost has neither of those things. It says a lot that this is the most prominent thing writer/director Michael Cooney ever made. The script is naff and the direction is as flat as Shannon Elizabeth's style of 'acting'. If only it were as voluptuous as her chest, yo ho ho.

Everyone agreed that Stifler's hilarious pranks were getting out of hand.

But alas, the biggest problem with Jack Frost is Jack himself. As Child’s Play proved, there’s nothing particularly wrong with transforming a serial killer into something cuddly and ridiculous, but the special effects here are just terrible. And not in a good way; it’s not even enjoyable on an ironic level. Jack’s design looks so horrible and fake that it’s impossible to be either scared or amused by him. He’s voiced with no real gusto by Scott MacDonald (who looks and sounds like a low-rent Jack Nicholson), and is all crap wisecracks and non-sinister threats. He’s no Robert Englund or Brad Dourif, that’s for sure. Likewise, the gore is pretty skimpy and there aren’t many standout kill scenes (Shannon Elizabeth aside). This is one movie that I wouldn’t actually mind seeing remade; preferably with a decent costume budget and some verve to the direction.

Still, a fun concept can cover a lot of cracks, and those less bothered by special effects and realism (realism in a movie about a killer snowman and Shannon Elizabeth? I hate me) will have a lot of fun with Jack Frost. Those with a sense of humour should entirely disregard this review and watch the film anyway. After all, Christmas is a time for watching shitty movies about talking snowmen.

BAH HUMBUG/5

The Horror Advent Calender: 1. Batman Returns

2011-12-01T21:21:00.002Z

It's your Horror Review Advent Calendar.

25 Christmas themed movies.

Ho, ho, ho.

Director: Tim Burton (1992)

Starring: Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer

Find it: IMDB

Following his (essentially) throwing The Joker off the side of a Cathedral, Batman returns to terrorise the criminals of Gotham City some more. This time he faces The Penguin (DeVito) and Catwoman (Pfeiffer) who join forces to discredit Batboob and turn Gotham against him. Love interests ensue when Bats' and Cats' secret identities fall for one another. Christopher Walken plays a man called Max Shreck (get it) who helps Penguin carry out his nefarious schemes.

Like many of Burton's films, Batman Returns feels very Christmassy. It makes for a better atmosphere than the first Batman, and allows Burton to get away with a lot of wintry Gothic scenes. It's an all around better piece than the first, freed from Jack Nicholson's scene stealing (although DeVito and Walken chew quite a lot of scenery) and the nonsense revelation that Joker shot dear old Thomas & Martha Wayne. It's more odd and stylized, still taking too many liberties with the source material, but feels more fluid and fun. Particularly enjoyable are The Penguin's Circus freak goons. Batman too gets more of a chance to flex his muscles.

Batman Returns was the first Batman movie this avid Batfan ever watched, so will always hold a very dear place in my heart. Sure, Batman straps a bomb to someone and throws him down a well, but how can one not love Michael Keaton's goofy charm? He's probably my favourite Batman (Adam West not withstanding). Regarde:

Compared with:

I rest my case. Images stolen from The Internets. I'm glad Michael Keaton had a second chance to shine before the more ridiculous Batmen took over. Meanwhile, Michelle Pfeiffer explains a lot. I'm pretty sure that Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is singlehandedly responsible for my transformation from child to sexual being. I grew several pubes whilst watching Batman Returns (I then lost them all during Catwoman and have been impotent ever since).

The Dark Knight may be the best Batman movie ever made, but Batman Returns is my favourite.

Green Lantern

2011-12-01T13:20:00.001Z

Director: Martin Campbell (2011)

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Peter Sarsgaard, Blake Lively, Mark Strong

Find it: IMDB

After being pleasantly surprised by his performance in Buried, I had started to worry that hunky aftershave salesman Ryan Reynolds might be a little too charismatic to play rube superhero Hal Jordan in Green Lantern. Rest assured cynical me, Ryan Reynolds is every bit as dull and uninteresting as comic book Hal Jordan in this adaptation.

After getting his ass kicked by a yellow fear monster, intergalactic space cop Abin Sur crash lands on Earth and proceeds to die all over cocky test pilot (is there any other kind?) Hal Jordan (Reynolds). With his dying breath, Abin Sur passes on his power ring to Jordan and informs him that he too must become a space cop. The other aliens take an instant dislike to Hal, because all aliens instantly regard humans as stupid and useless. To be fair, this movie almost starred Jack Black. I can picture a version of Green Lantern in which Jack Black creates a giant set of arse cheeks to fart green gas all over Sinestro, before conjuring up a guitar and teaching the uptight Lanterns how to 'rock'.

Under the tutorship of purple-headed grump Sinestro (Strong) and a giant with a name that sounds vaguely like a racial slur, Jordan trains to become a Green Lantern. In a thoroughly obvious character arc, Hal decides that superheroism is too much responsibility for the likes of him, and heads off back to Earth. He lasts precisely ten minutes before Hector Hammond (Sarsgaard) shoots a helicopter out of the sky with mind bullets. Eventually Hal Jordan saves the day because of course he does.

Ryan Reynolds is the perfect Hal Jordan. I can totally see this Hal Jordan getting his rube butt kicked in All-Star Batman & Robin. There are a few stupid jokes and wisecracks, but Reynolds is suitably charmless. The costume looks ridiculous, particularly the mask. It's a worse superhero costume than even Captain America's. And with hair as distinctive as Ryan Reynolds', it's utterly crap for keeping an identity secret.

Still, the film is enjoyable in the same goofy kind of way as The Fantastic 4 (hey, I enjoyed it) and boasts some fun action sequences. Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong and Tim Robbins bring a little gravitas to what is essentially Van Wilder: Green Lantern Liaison. Is Ryan Reynolds doomed never to have his own comic book franchise?

Daughter Of Darkness

2011-12-01T11:44:00.007Z

Director: Stuart Gordon (1990)

Starring: Anthony Perkins, Mia Sara, Robert Reynolds, Jack Coleman

Find it: IMDB

An uncharacteristically dull Hammer rip-off from the usually reliable Stuart Gordon. Daughter Of Darkness sends Katherine Thatcher (Sara) to the dingy underworld of Romania in search of her missing father. Because it's Romania, she finds vampires, terrified Gypsies and Anthony Perkins. Being British, I can't help but suggest that vampire-populated Romania is the perfect place for a woman with the surname 'Thatcher'.

Anthony Perkins pretends not to be Katherine's father, but he might as well wearing a Darth Vader helmet for how obvious it is. She is quite stupid though. At one point, vampire Anthony Perkins is chained to the floor in front of a window as sunlight (very) slowly burns him to death. She runs off for about an hour to get help. Not once does she consider, y'know, covering the window.

Like Sookie in True Blood, it emerges that Katherine is a very special breed of human that all the vampires want to do sex with. Katherine is capable of carrying vampire babies. Daywalker vampire babies, like Blade. And talking of Blade, the vampires in Daughter Of Darkness sort of resemble the Reapers in Blade II; instead of teeth they have a little thing (the technical term) that pops out of their tongue and does all the sucking. Well, most of the sucking. The film does quite a lot of the sucking too.

Predictable joke.

This little innovation aside, the vampires are pretty rubbish. Most of them speak in Romanian accents, wear capes and sleep in coffins. One of them even looks like Grampa from The Munsters. In this age of sparkling vampires, sexy vampires and little Castrato vampires, Daughter Of Darkness has not aged very well. The only amusement to be had is in seeing Anthony Perkins hamming it up with a silly accent. The cheerleader's Dad from Heroes plays a supporting role as a jerky love interest; he probably delivers the only decent performance in the whole film.

Daughter Of Darkness is a disappointing failure from one of my favourite directors. Jeffrey Combs doesn't even turn up, which is usually a given in a Gordon film. The story is passable and the direction competent, but the villains are stupid and the characters are all idiots. It's an interesting curiosity, but not much beyond that.

Neighbor

2011-11-28T14:42:00.009Z

Director: Robert A. Masciantonio (2009)

Starring: America Olivo, Christian Campbell, Lauren Rooney

Find it: IMDB

The title is something of a misnomer, since The Girl (Olivo) is nobody's neighbour; she wanders from street to street massacring whole households seemingly without cause. One fateful day she arrives on Don Carpenter's (Campbell) doorstep, ties the poor chump up and sets about violently torturing the guy. That's almost as far as Neighbor goes with plot, spending the rest of its time torturing Don and murdering his friends. There's a brief interlude in the middle that shoots forward in time - although it wasn't until afterwards that I realised this - I'd assumed that Neighbor had gone all avant-garde and just run off in a different direction.

At times the movie veers towards comedy horror, with the filthy script ("go eat a bowl of dicks") and madcap performance from America Olivo preventing it from being too serious. Even victim Don doesn't seem to be taking his situation too seriously. The torture scenes however, are anything but funny. While not all of the effects work (Don's plastic feet are terrible) enough of them do to make one think twice about bringing a mid-movie snack into Neighbor.

Thankfully, the decent effects are backed up by a funny script, a likeable set of characters and a mean performance from Olivo; channeling Freddy Krueger by way of Penny from off've Big Bang Theory. Young foul-mouthed male characters are usually the worst kind of characters, but Don and his friends are affable enough for their camaraderie to shine through. You really want to see them survive the onslaught of The Girl and her craziness. It's good that they're so nice. After all, everybody needs good neighbours.

Alas, Neighbor does drag towards the end, and never quite recovers from its own confusing midsection. The ending is predictable. Like every annoying neighbour, this one can't help but outstay its welcome.

Retreat

2011-11-27T00:28:00.006Z

Director: Carl Tibbetts (2011)

Starring: Thandie Newton, Cillian Murphy, Jamie Bell

Find it: IMDB

Locked away with their own misery at an island writers' retreat, Kate (Newton) and Martin (Murphy) find disturbed wounded soldier Jack (Bell) on their doorstep. He tells the pair that there's a murderous virus on the loose, and proceeds to forcibly lock down the cottage. But is there really a contagious disease in the air, or is Jack insane? All I know is that Jamie Bell is not a menacing figure, no matter how hard he tries to harass Thandie Newton.

Retreat is like Dead Calm set in a cottage. This low-budget psychological thriller has many familiar elements; the bickering couple grieving a dead child; the grim deserted windswept environment; the very British violin score. Martin's rise from weak husband to hardened hero feels too much like it did when Dustin Hoffman went through exactly the same motions in Straw Dogs. Even the ending is a complete rip-off of one of the greatest horror endings of all time.

Despite the over familiarity and air of predictability, Retreat is well-acted, its characters' plight sympathetic and the story interesting. There's a nice element of is-there-isn't-there to the plot, and even Jamie Bell does okay despite being terribly miscast and not at all scary or tough.

Resist the urge to Retreat; this is a movie that eventually proves itself worth watching.

L1, R2, Freddy's Coming For You...

2011-11-23T22:24:00.010Z

The only good thing Jackie Earle Haley has contributed to A Nightmare On Elm Street. And I'm pretty sure most fans will be pretending that they're playing as the Robert Englund Freddy anyway. I never thought I'd be writing this, but I'm glad I am: Freddy Krueger is available as DLC in the latest Mortal Kombat game. And as if that wasn't awesome enough (it is) God Of War's Kratos has come out to play too.

So the first thing I did after downloading Freddy was to fire up 'ladder mode' (a series of fights without any of that pesky cut-scene business) and commence slicing the shit out of the Earth Realms or whatever with Freddy's gloves. Yes, gloves. He's brought two, because he's serious about winning this Mortal Kombat malarky. There are about 12 rungs on the ladder mode, and I got Freddy's arse handed to me a bunch of times, but not once did I change character. Playing as Freddy Krueger in a Mortal Kombat game is even better than playing as Batman in a Mortal Kombat game. In fact, the only way it could have been better is if Mortal Kombat were to bring the Justice League back into the fold. I think I could probably die happy seeing Batman stomping Freddy Krueger's head unto Heroic Brutality. Once I wrote a fanfic comic book in which Batman fought Freddy. See, Freddy is bothering Robin's dreams, and the Dark Knight has to sort out the Dream Demon before it's too late. In the end, the Sandman turns up and banishes Freddy to nightmare hell. My own crappy fanfic is probably the closest I will ever come to seeing Batman fight Freddy Krueger. Whatever however, meanwhile, Kratos.

Obviously, it's hilarious watching Freddy slice the shit out of Kratos (and vice versa) but the most fun to be had in the game is in teaming the two together. A Freddy and Kratos sandwich, with some unfortunate soul in the middle. There's a 'tag team' mode, identical to the sort found in Marvel vs Capcom. It's better than Marvel vs Capcom in that the fighting is more visceral; every punch actually feeling like a punch. The best bit is in seeing Freddy take a beating and then, just as he's about to die, swapping him for Kratos. Like that bit in Freddy vs Jason where Kelly Rowland gets slammed into a tree.

Even if you're not going to play as Freddy or Kratos, Mortal Kombat is an enjoyable game. It's violent, addictive and incredibly gory. Following their disappearance from Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe (not even Mortal Kombat can convince stickler Batman to break his One Rule) the fatalities are back. And babalities too. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a 'babality' until now, but I LOL'd when Kratos did one. Although you might wanna keep an eye on Freddy if you're gonna have kids around. He's got skin like that for a reason, y'know.

The story mode is a load of cock though, full of unskippable cut scenes and people fighting for the flimsiest reasons. Play the Ladder instead; Mortal Kombat's story is dull, stupid and a chore to wade through. Neither Freddy or Kratos appear either. Shao Kahn is the final boss and says things like "it's official: you suck" and variations therein. With the apparent lexicon of an amateur blogosphere critic, I'm guessing that Shao Khan was in charge of deciding the title. "IT'S SPELLED COMBAT WITH A K, NOOBS. THAT MAKES IT SOUND EXTREME." Indeed. Otherwise, Mortal Kombat is extremely good.

Quarantine 2: Terminal

2011-11-17T11:24:00.008Z

Director: John Pogue (2011)

Starring: Mercedes Masohn, Josh Cook, Mattie Liptak

Find it: IMDB

Never work with children or animals, goes the old adage. And don't allow them anywhere near your zombie movie either. Children render Quarantine 2 nearly unwatchable, whilst animals make it ridiculous. Terminally so. Get it, because terminal means 'fatal' as well as being a place where you wait for your flight. Quarantine 2: Terminal is about a terminal illness (in a manner of speaking) and is set in an airport terminal. That title is the hardest work anyone put into writing Quarantine 2.

An aeroplane full of dipshits takes off from LA (where the first Quarantine was set) with a hold full of rage-infected gerbils in tow. One of the gerbils gets free and bites a passenger, unleashing human rabies upon the aeroplane. Panicked, the pilot lands the plane, whereupon the action spreads out onto a quarantined airport terminal. Quarantine 2 is a Die Hard 2 kind of sequel, except Die Hard 2 actually did its predecessor justice. Quarantine 2 does nobody any justice. Except for the [REC] films, which it makes look even better by comparison.

Unimpeded by the constraints of remaking [REC], this sequel is very much its own thing. Where [REC] 2 stayed within the confines of the zombie-ridden apartment complex, Quarantine 2 flees elsewhere and disposes of the handheld cameras. The former sequel explained the zombie virus in a fascinating, original way. The latter takes the cheapest, laziest route available. Human rabies indeed.

It also has you rooting for the zombies thanks to a collection of horrible, annoying characters. Choice of lead character is between a useless air hostess, the idiot who caused it all and a kid called George who looks like a chubby Justin Bieber. I actually had to watch the last ten minutes with the volume turned down, so bad was the acting. Quarantine 2 loses a Screaming Scream Queen thanks to the continued presence of George (Liptak) alone. Little fucker effectively ruins the film. [REC] wasn't afraid to eviscerate a child or two. Quarantine 2 take note; little fucking George should have been eviscerated as soon as the zombie apocalypse began.

The rest of the characters are a dull collection of stereotypes and assorted flavours of cannon fodder. There's the sweet old lady, the guy who just wants to get home to his kid, the asshole, the guy on his way to a job interview, the holidaying foreign couple and an old guy in a wheelchair. To be fair, it was funny when the rat jumped on the old guy's head. Talking of funny: the illness is passed on by a cat eating an infected person's vomit off've the floor. Also, there's an obese guy on the aeroplane who gets really really angry and starts foaming at the mouth:

Spoiler: he goes home and writes a really angry blog about it.

Quarantine 2 would be good if it wasn't for the horrible child and the stupid animals. There's some fun gore, a couple of decent shocks and some nice zombie effects, but you'd be better off by simply watching the [REC] films again. Quarantine 2 is bad. Terminally so.

Memory Lane

2011-11-16T17:14:00.008Z

Director: Shawn Holmes (2011)

Starring: Michael Guy Allen, Meg Barrick, Julian Curi

Find it: IMDB, Horrortalk.com

It's a low budget version of The Butterfly Effect crossed with Flatliners crossed with that bit of Constantine where Keanu Reeves drownes Rachel Weisz in a bathtub. Ex-soldier Nick (Allen) vows to avenge the death of girlfriend Kayla (Barrick) when he finds her dead. Also in a bathtub. Bathtubs are very important to Memory Lane. Costing a mere $300 to make, Memory Lane is as independent as cinema gets - but is far better than that low budget might suggest.

Returning home from the wars, soldier Nick meets and falls for Kayla, who handcuffs herself to him and steals his car the next day. Faced with such a catch, Nick is instantly smitten, and asks her to marry him, despite not even knowing her surname. Heartbreak and even more confusion is in store when Nick finds her dead in the bath, wrists slashed. When he attempts to take his own life as a result (again, in the bath) Nick visits a magical memory afterlife where he can relive past encounters with dear dead Kayla. There he learns that her death might not have been as self-inflicted as one would think. Upon his friends finding and resuscitating his lifeless body, Nick vows to piece together the clues and solve the mystery of Kayla's death. The problem being that he needs to repeatedly die in order to do so.

With a little help from his friends, Nick builds a bathtub TARDIS which he uses to kill himself. Again. And again. And again. And again, revisiting past events to look for signs he might not have noticed before. Can he piece together the clues to find Kayla's killer before he kills himself one time too many? Surely the after-effects of repeatedly stopping one's own heart can't be too pleasant. That recurring nosebleed would suggest as much. If we learned nothing else from The Butterfly Effect, it's that screwing around in one's own memories causes a nasty hangover. In Ashton Kutcher's case; that bit where all his arms and legs got blown up and he married Demi Moore.

For a movie that cost $300 to make, Memory Lane is nothing short of astonishing. It surpasses the limitations of its (ultra) low budget with good old fashioned writing and storytelling. It's a bit on the melodramatic side and the acting won't win any Oscars, but the story is gripping and the pace taut. Unlike most low budget thrillers, Memory Lane has ambition and heart - and times, more than the very moves which inspired it. It's refreshing to see an independent movie that's not about zombies or serial killers.

Memory Lane puts paid to the argument that a movie needs a large budget and expensive special effects in order to succeed. This is one Lane well worth visiting.

Who Can Kill A Child

2011-11-13T13:24:00.005Z

The second (We Are What We Are being the first) of my articles as published in Golf Sale magazine (available from all good retailers. And if they don't sell it then they're obviously not a good retailer, eh). This one is about paedophobia. Which is not what you think it is. I would urge you to buy a copy, but in lieu of that, you can read it here.

This August, England erupted with madness. A nation of prepubescents suddenly decided to re-enact the plot of The Crazies using their own streets as a stage. No bag of Basmati rice was left unturned and suddenly the library was the only safe place to be. Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham. Dublin, Dundee and Humberside seemed okay though. Sorry, that was both lazy and (given that Mr. Morrissey is hardly in vogue nowadays) in bad taste. But at least I didn't predict a riot, unlike half of facebook.

Watching the news, you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd accidentally switched onto 28 Days Later or the Dawn Of The Dead remake, with various sources crying “Armageddon” and demanding that the military rock up and start shooting. There were a lot of people of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, but one couldn't help but notice a lot of children and youngsters. 22% of the rioters weren't even old enough to drink. I suppose that would explain why Birmingham looters hoofed the window of a sweet shop in. A whopping 52.1% were aged 18 – 24 (thanks, The Telegraph, for turning this into 8 Out Of 10 Cats). Suddenly, a whole slew of movies proved themselves remarkably relevant and prescient. Hug these hoodies, Cameron.

Cinema has always enjoyed turning our children against us. It's a disturbing concept; your own children coming for you, bloody garden trowel in hand. And as anyone who has ever witnessed a child at play can attest, the young mind has a great potential for cruelty. When I was a child, I threw a Pepsi can at a swan's head. Just because.

Amongst the earliest kiddy horror flicks are The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned. Neither are particularly scary, certainly not nowadays, but the Village people presented us with classic blonde hair blue eyes movie imagery, and Bad Seed has its diminutive killer told that there are special pink electric chairs for little girls like her. Supernanny's naughty step, eat your heart out.

There's a little girl zombie in Night Of The Living Dead, who trowels her mother to death, and a little boy zombie in Pet Semetary. That little sod dispatches the great Herman Munster (Fred Gwynne) with a scalpel and an equally horrid cat. The idea is chilling, turning diseased child against devoted parent. Could you kill your own child come zombification? Not unless you go for Burial Ground: Nights Of Terror. The “child” in that film is played by a middle-aged dwarf and is infinitely more horrifying than any ruddy zombie.

The most famous bits of supernatural brat horror are classics like The Omen and The Exorcist. In both cases, it's the Devil's fault, with Damien being The Antichrist and Regan possessed by some sweary manner of entity. Both stand the test of time with genuinely unsettling scenes and potfuls of pea soup to pass around. Rosemary's Baby follows suit, with poor Rosemary giving birth to Satan's seed. Iffy eyes, apparently. It's easier, I suppose, to blame the Devil or Pacman or Child's Play for your horrible children than it is your own bad parenting.

Doing what it says on the tin is The Children, a gritty Brit flick in which holidaying adults find their toddlers suddenly turn against them. There's stomach churning violence involving a sledge, and surprisingly good acting from not only the children but a girl from Hollyoaks too. A virus might be responsible, but the film shows enough crap parenting and videogaming to cast doubt in our minds.

There's no sign of viruses, zombies or Satan in A Clockwork Orange, Eden Lake, Cherry Tree Lane or Ils, just horrible children. I would use Eden Lake to advertise condoms. It has Kelly Reilly and Michael Fassbender as a lovely young couple terrorised by a gang of truly horrible children – including a slimy Jack O' Connell and Thomas Turgoose. It emerges that the parents are as nasty as their children, and leaves you feeling sad and dirty inside. Ils is essentially the same, but more French and less cruel. Cherry Tree Lane takes the battle onto the adults' turf, being a home invasion movie in which the yobs steal Rachael Blake's duct tape, thieve her biscuits and critique her bourgeois DVD collection. They're waiting to give her son a kicking, only he takes ages to arrive. It's almost existential, like Waiting For Godot with hoodies. It's a thoroughly depressing movie, and makes me never want to answer my front door again.

F turns its hoodies into ninjas, silently dispatching the movie's ineffectual adults in increasingly violent and cruel ways. It's not very original or scary, although it does show how scared us Brits have become of our own young. I've seen all of these movies and more, but I find myself far more troubled by the likes of Kidulthood and those who would attempt to glamourise not speaking properly.

And you certainly don't want to go adopting anyone else's spawn, if Case 39 and Orphan are anything to go by. In the former, Rene Zellweger picks up a spooky child who ends up having Ian McShane murdered by animals. All she wants though, is to be loved, so I wound up sympathising with her. The latter is a thoroughly unpleasant movie in which the adoptee winds up being a thirty-year-old Russian crone. Both demonic daughters end up in the bottom of a lake, rejected by a mother they aggressively loved too much. Be they your own children or someone else's, cinema has taught us that children are horrible little fuckers who are not to be trusted.

The two most soul destroying books you'll ever read feature young children as villains. Mendal Johnson's Let's Go Play At The Adams' sees a gang of brats hold their babysitter hostage and keep her that way for the forseeable future. It's a visceral, miserable book. These children can't be reasoned with, and nor can those in Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door (subject to an equally depressing adaptation). The children are amoral and alien, with no thoughts other than childish destructiveness. Like they would wings off a fly, the children tear the victims of Adams' and Girl Next Door to shreds. Adams' Barbara hasn't a hope of escaping because she doesn't have that childish amorality. I'd recommend both books, especially if you enjoy crying and feeling sad.

In the worst case scenario, we'll end up with Children Of The Corn, where not even Linda Hamilton stands a chance against a society of ill-behaved little bastards. Who Could Kill A Child? Visit the Mediterranean and you'll find a small island where the kids have murdered their parents. Travel into space, and you'll find a planet populated only by children. This was one of the best episodes of Star Trek, with the crew of the Enterprise trapped on a planet full of hostile children. Captain Kirk saves the day by flirting his way out of trouble.

With their Sith hoodies, disgusting trainers and horrible taste in music, our kids have become the great 'other' – inspiration to horror writers and filmmakers everywhere. HP Lovecraft was scared of black people. We're terrified by our own offspring. The Daily Mail doesn't like either. Maybe it's because you're not allowed to punch your kids anymore. There's a feeling (mostly from The Daily Mail and those who read it) that since smacking and national service were aborted, children have grown out of control and become a completely different entity. Maybe that's true and maybe it's not. But all I know is, some of the most disturbing films I've seen have starred children.

To be fair, have you seen Justin Bieber? Children are far weirder than anything Cthulu. Never mind looting or rioting, I've seen Never Say Never.* Who could kill a child? Well, maybe that one...

* Statement made for comedic purposes. I have NEVER seen Never Say Never, and in this case I certainly can.

Missing

2011-11-10T16:17:00.000Z

Director: Sung-Hong Kim (2009)

Starring: Chu Ja-Hyeon, Mun Seong-Kun, Jeon Se-Hong

Find it: IMDB

Cruel Korean kidnapping with Missing, in which a girl goes on the hunt for her disappeared sister. She lies in the hands of crazy old farmer Pan-kon (Seong-Kun). Hyeon-jeong (Ja-Hyeon) manages to track her sister down to Pan-kon's village. When the kidnapping serial killer takes a shine to Hyeon-jeong it looks like she too is headed for trouble.

It's a more conventional thriller than those spoiled by such Korean gems as Oldboy, The Chaser and the seminal Man From Nowhere might maybe expect. It's based on the true story of a 70-year-old fisherman who killed four women over the course of two months in 2007. That these are apparently the "ingredients of a Friday The 13th" makes elements of Missing seem exploitative and uncomfortable to watch. Also, Missing is in no way like Friday The 13th. It has none of the ingredients of Friday The 13th. I hope they kept the receipt, because their Friday The 13th cookbook sucks.

'True crime' aspect aside, Missing has a very rapey vibe to it. Heavily modelled on such films as Wolf Creek, its heroines are abused and tortured in uncomfortable detail. A birthday cake is shoved up a poor girl's arse and then her teeth are extracted after she bites his knob during a bout of non-consensual oral sex.

This aside, Missing is tense, gripping and taut with a horrible villain, a pair of sympathetic heroines and some interesting side characters. The film makes use of a very nice yellow sticky tape in its choice of gag. There are elements of Hannibal in Pan-kon's feeding victims to farm animals. There are far better kidnap films out there (Missing isn't even the best kidnap film to be called Missing). If you decide to skip this one, you really aren't Missing much.

Porn Shoot Massacre

2011-11-08T11:14:00.006Z

Director: Corbin Timbrook (2009)

Starring: Robert Ambrose, Naomi Cruz, Shelly Martinez

Find it: IMDB

Sure, a movie called Porn Shoot Massacre was never going to win any Oscars, but that doesn't excuse the fact that no-one tried to make it even watchable. But then, I don't enjoy pornography, so perhaps it was lost on me from the start. In a bunch of barely connected scenes, director Malfini (Ambrose) tries to make a pornographic film whilst some sort of Jason Voorhees slash Leatherface rip-off wanders around offing his 'actresses' in the background. Twist: Malfini is in on the scam and is actually making a snuff movie rather than a porno. Which doesn't explain why half of the kills happen offscreen and without a camera present.

But then, Malfini sucks as a director. I doubt he's ever seen a pornography in his life, since what he does manage to film is softcore at best. And his snuff movie isn't much better. He's desperately ill informed as to the intricacies of adult cinema, dubbing his stars "Fetish Queen" and "Fetish princess", despite the fact they don't do anything remotely fetish-y. I didn't spot a single bare foot, mashed potato, gas mask or whatever it is people fetishize these days. He then hires a dominatrix to have her tied up and menaced. The dominatrix seems fine with it though, so I guess neither of them know what a dominatrix actually does.

The atmosphere is impressively cheerful, making Porn Shoot Massacre a hard film to truly dislike, despite its screamingly obvious flaws. By which I mean everything else. The acting is atrocious, the script consists entirely of clunkers, the music annoying and obtrusive, the special effects shonky and the nudity tiresome. Tiresome nudity is the worst kind of nudity. I did manage a cheap laugh at the midget with the dildo, though.

I watched Porn Shoot Massacre hoping for something as fun as One Eyed Monster (the Ron Jeremy comedy-horror) but instead got something as bad as real pornography itself.

The Ruins

2011-11-07T20:19:00.001Z

Direction: Carter Smith (2008)

Starring: Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey

Find it: IMDB

"Four Americans on vacation don't just disappear." How sweetly naive. Here in the movies, you rarely do anything but. Four Americans plus a German and a Greek are holidaying in Mexico. On their last day, they decide to leave the resort and visit the ruins of a remote Mayan temple. But once the kids reach the spot, they're surrounded by angry locals who kill one of their number and force the rest to climb the pyramid. They're left there until they either die of thirst of die of plants. The latter being a more likely prospect than you might think.

But first, Mathias (Joe Anderson) falls down a hole and breaks his back. From inside the temple, they hear a mobile phone ringing. Or at least that's what they think it is. It's actually the plants making mobile phone noises. I'd like to see a plant copy my ringtone. It's the Star Trek: Original Series overture. As the remaining youngsters panic about Mathias's shattered spine, they find themselves unprepared for the attack of some really nasty plants. Even worse than stinging nettles.

As the stupid tourists cut, bash, bludgeon and stab their own various body parts, they begin to notice vines moving around beneath their skin. Mathias's legs become completely overrun with flowers, like a dead old grandmother's unattended garden. They are pretty flowers though. Red, a bit like roses. Stacy (Ramsey) starts to lose her mind. Doctor Jeff (Tucker) insists that they need to do something horrible to save Mathias's legs. Amy (Malone) is really annoying.

The Ruins is far better than one might expect a movie about flowers to be. It's certainly a lot gorier and crueler than I'd anticipated. The Ruins is grim character-driven horror. It'll certainly make you look twice at those dastardly dandelions sitting at the side of the road.

I review some movies. But not here.

2011-11-07T14:03:00.005Z

In a bid to spread my bollocks across the web like some sort of porky whining margarine, I recently contacted HorrorTalk, begging for the opportunity to do some writing for them. They relented, and sent me a few screeners forthwith. Below are the reviews I wrote for them. Have a look, and keep your eye out, in case they let me defile their otherwise lovely website some more.

Panic Button

Mimic: Director's Cut

Evil Things

Of course, you'd know this already if you followed The Review Hole on Twitter or Facebook. So do that too. Your life will be ever so slightly better or worse for it.

V For Vendetta

2011-11-05T14:52:00.008Z

Director: James McTeigue (2006)

Starring: Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman, John Hurt, Stephen Rea

Find it: IMDB

Vivacious video violence in this otherwise vaguely vapid adaptation of the venerable Alan Moore's V For Vendetta. It's a more faithful retelling than I'd initially remembered, and is far better than the execrable League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but feels too polished and slick to do justice to the source material.

Hugo Weaving is V For Vendetta, which seems like a rather clunky name for a superhero to me. Unlike Batman or Spider-Man, V For Vendetta is all about bringing down the government. Which is why he wears a Guy Fawkes mask, referencing the cheeky chappy who sought to blow up parliament in 1605. Witty people will do that joke about him being "the only person ever to enter parliament with honest intentions." LOL, mass murder. Those same witty people can currently be seen occupying Wall Street and London and Birmingham, wearing plastic V For Vendetta masks. Mass produced masks, made in China. Based from off've a hit film. Which they bought legally. From a shop. Way to stick it to the man, dudes.

V For happens across Evey (Portman) who is out after curfew, being hassled by government officials. After speaking alliterative nonsense at them, Vendetta attacks them with his knives and a hand that falls off. He blows up Big Ben and a friendship forms between the two. It's like Spider-man and Mary Jane, except Vendetta kidnaps Evey, shaves all her hair off and subjects her to the sort of thing you'd expect to see in 24 or Martyrs, before they start the peeling. It's like the most horrible scenes in 1984 or Brazil, except the hero is the one doing all of the horrible things. To be fair, V For is the hero that London deserves, not the one it needs.

~~The Tories~~ The Norsefire party are running England, led by Adam Sutler (Hurt). V For Vendetta was written by Moore as a response to the government of the 1980s. It's no less relevant now (although Sutler is more classically evil than our Dave Cameron's plastic-faced brand of insidiousness). But it really doesn't translate that well to film. V For's mask is inexpressive (unless you like constant smug), like The Green Goblin in Spider-Man. Weaving is a great actor, but his voice is as smug as the mask looks. Everything else is too shiny, looking like a regular action/superhero film when it should be anything but. Stephen Fry is impossible to take seriously. Meanwhile, John Hurt turns his Sutler into a pantomime performance. Only Stephen Rea pulls it off, playing shabby copper Finch.

V For Vendetta is a fine film but a better comic book. This adaptation is prescient, relevant and clever. It's quite moving too; not hard to see why it would appeal to would-be protesters and rebels. It makes a nice change from hippies going around wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, but fuck me do those masks look smug. Whenever I see someone wearing a V For Vendetta mask, I don't think "ooh, look at that rebellious rebel," I think, "what a cock. I hope he doesn't try to talk to me." I'm allowed to say that, because I actually own a V For Vendetta mask. I write my smuggest reviews whilst wearing that mask. I'm wearing it now. The movie has ruined that beautiful bit of imagery and actually diminished V's power. V is not supposed to be Batman or Superman; V is a symbol, not a superhero. Knowing that V speaks like Hugo Weaving with a stick up his bottom has left me feeling as I did when I first discovered what a vagina actually looks like. Some comic books defy adaptation. Protesters, I beg of you: dress up as Green Arrow instead. He totally would have dug your cause.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November. But preferably, do it whilst reading the book and not watching this film. Definitely don't do either whilst wearing that horrible plastic mask.

Rubber

2011-11-03T22:18:00.004Z

Director: Quentin Dupiex (2010)

Starring: A tyre. Stephen Spinella, Wings Hauser

Find it: IMDB

A rubber tyre develops sentience and takes to rolling around the desert, squashing anything that gets in its way. Also, it has psychic powers and can make people's heads explode, like the only bit anyone remembers from Scanners. Rubber is an art-house rebuttal to those who say that films should always make sense and have things happening for a reason. We know that Rubber is such a rebuttal because one of the characters looks straight into the camera, addresses the audience and tells us as such. I did have to watch that sequence several times, with a subtitle track on though, because all I heard was "smug smug smug smug smug. Smug smuggity smug."

Rubber is a film of two halves; an entertaining half about a sentient tyre killing people with its mind bullets, and a smartarse half in which people say things like "it's only a special effect" and "time to go home now. The movie's over." One character digs the script out of his pocket and starts reading it like that. Just because you can have a character constantly breaking the fourth wall and talking about how crappy the movie is, doesn't mean you should.

Like so many movies these days, Rubber is a cute little concept that struggles at feature length. It makes for a far better trailer than it does a film. After the first ten minutes and despite some good head explosions and jokes, Rubber wheely is quite tyresome.

The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence

2011-10-31T12:40:00.002Z

Director: Tom Six (2011)

Starring: Laurence R. Harvey, Ashlynn Yennie, Centipede

Find it: IMDB

Of all the unintentionally funny ideas in The Human Centipede 2, the very funniest is the central conceit that someone could actually become obsessed with the first movie. Like every single other person who watched The Human Centipede, I found myself underwhelmed. It's a great idea, but not one that can carry a whole film. It works best as a trailer. Preferably one with Rick Astley singing 'Together Forever' over it.

Gone is the magnificent Doctor Heiter (Dieter Laser), replaced with a more realistic and terrifying villain. The actor behind Walter (Laurence R. Harvey) doesn't have a name like Dieter Laser, but he does have a terrifying face and looks (and sounds) like a man I used to work with. Martin works as a security guard in a car park, which is a standard career for this sort of movie psychopath. Clearly a man with problems mental and physical (he's frequently described as 'a midget' and 'a retard'), Martin is obsessed with the film The Human Centipede. Director Tom Six pre-empted the BBFC suggesting idiots could be influenced by the Human Centipede 2 by making a film in which an idiot is obsessed with The Human Centipede. It's quite meta, when you think about it.

When he's not re-watching The Human Centipede or scrapbooking The Human Centipede, Martin is in the process of building his own human centipede; kidnapping people and locking them up in his rented warehouse. The sequel is actually set in England, which is maybe why I found it a lot funnier than I should have. My favourite scene comes where one victim realises what Martin has planned. "It's a film!" He yells, "he's gonna stitch us up arse to mouth!" Cue gagged screams from the rest of Martin's captives. The word 'arse' should never be used seriously in a serious movie. 'Arse' may be a very British word, but it is not one that us British use on serious occasions. (True story, if you watch an American movie with English subtitles, a lot of Region 2 releases tend to swap the word 'ass' for 'arse' as if us Brits are going to assume you mean donkey). "He's gonna stitch us up arse to mouth!" Even if I had been one of those fellow victims, I still would have laughed. Arse. There's another occasion where a character says "stop those tears. You're just making daddy's willy harder." Even more so than arse, no English person has ever used the word 'willy' whilst trying to be menacing. Well done on doing your research, Human Centipede 2, but it's all about context.

The Human Centipede 2 is a hilarious movie. Even more so than its predecessor. A lot of it is unintentional, but some of it, Tom Six is doing with a wink. Look, he wears a stetson. You don't wear a stetson if you're the sort of person who takes yourself seriously. For all the furore, outrage and thinking of the children, The Human Centipede 2 is ultimately a piece about twelve people being forced to do ass-to-mouth. It's more seriously done here, but it is still not really a serious film. And when it does try to be serious, it fails in almost every way.

The only thing it does do effectively is the gore. It's a black and white feature (except for one use of the colour brown...), which might fool some into thinking it more arthouse than your average bit of torture guff. It is certainly not. A Serbian Film and Martyrs are titles thrown around in some reviews. But those films had a depth that The Human Centipede 2 does not. Fuck though, the gore. The Human Centipede 2 features the most repulsive tooth removal scene I have ever seen. The last half an hour sees less of the humour (intentional or otherwise) and a turn towards some truly horrible surgery scenes. Those scat-lovers disappointed by the lack of poo in the original will go away happy this time.

And this was only the cut version. Whilst I disagree with censorship of any sort, I don't feel I'm missing all that much by not seeing a man rape a human centipede with barbed wire wrapped around his bell-end. The cut version goes far further in terms of grue and bodily fluids than I was prepared to see. That said, I will be seeking out an uncut version. Not because I want to see it, but because the BBFC told me not to.

The BBFC posits that by presenting the film from Martin's perspective, his victims are objectified, his Centipede an aspirational figure. I would beg to differ. The things that happen in The Human Centipede 2 are impossible not to sympathise with. I don't need to know a character's life story - or even their name - in order to feel bad for him/her. On a similar note, I'm not going to start feeling sorry for Martin just because he's the main character. BBFC, stop talking out of your arse.

Many will hate The Human Centipede 2, lots will be outraged by it, some might even watch it. But nobody will like it. At least, nobody will admit to liking it. I found it amusing, disgusting (forego the mid-movie snacks during this one) and not at all inspirational or arousing. Maybe I have the BBFC's cuts to thank for that, but I like to think that it's because I'm just a nice guy who doesn't like rape or centipedes. Past the first hour, it makes for truly horrible viewing. Without the humour it becomes a tiresome slew of witless violence, bodily fluids and fart noises. It's not scary, nor is there any tension, thrills or intelligence. But nor was I outraged either.

"Well," I thought, "that was pretty nasty." Where the original Human Centipede should have been left as a trailer, The Human Centipede 2 should be left as a series of descriptions in horrified reviews and on the BBFC's website. Because that does The Human Centipede 2 more favours than the film itself. The Human Centipede 2 literally throws shit at the lens and calls it art.

The Non Horror Halloween Antispectacular.

2011-10-31T12:33:00.001Z

Halloween for the hardened horrorhound can, at times, be like Christmas for a North Pole Elf. Who cares? I watch horror every day of the week anyway. So Halloween is on TV for the umpteenth time; I watched it last week at my nan's birthday party. With that in mind, The Horror Review Hole decided to watch and review something a little bit different this year: 31 movies (and a TV show or two) that were definitely outside of our beloved horror genre. Happy Halloween.

1. Mean Girls

2. Enchanted

3. Scooby-Doo

4. Gulliver's Travels

5. Armageddon

6. American Pie

7. Mary and Max

8. Because of Winn-Dixie

9. Bridge to Terabithia

10. Twilight in Forks

11. Avatar

12. Titanic

13. The Tourist

14. Requiem for a Dream

15. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down

16. Babe

17. Batman Forever

18. Batman & Robin

19. Justice League of America

20. Catwoman

21. Stardust

22. The Bucket List

23. Elf

24. Grease

25. 3000 Miles to Graceland

26. Super Size Me

27. Star Trek: Generations

28. Star Trek: Insurrection

29. Dancer In The Dark

30. Queen Rock Montreal

31. Futurama: Jurassic Bark

2011-10-31T12:30:00.001Z

Director: Swinton O. Scott III, Rich Moore (2002)

Starring: Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio

Find it: IMDB

Mankind's single greatest achievement. The pinnacle of all animation, television and scripted entertainment anywhere. Jurassic Bark is the single greatest individual episode of any television series ever. No matter how many times I watch this episode (and I've seen it a lot) it never fails to reduce me to a blubbering wreck come the final montage. It is perfectly structured, written, acted and constructed. Jurassic Bark is the crowning episode for a TV series already overflowing with wit, intelligence and heart. Heartbreaking heart.

Delivery boy Fry visits a museum dedicated to the 20th Century. He is shocked to find the fossilized remains of his pet dog, Seymour, exhibited there. For three days he protests outside the museum, until they relent and give him the fossil. Professor Farnsworth discovers that a clone of Seymour can be made from the remains. Jealous Bender grabs the fossil and throws it in a pit of lava. Fry is devastated. Seeing his master's love for the dog ("I thought you were only pretending to love him to toy with my emotions") Bender leaps in the pit and retrieves Seymour. Just as Farnsworth is about to begin the cloning process, Fry has a sudden change of heart. "Seymour went on to live a full and happy life without me", he thinks. Concluding that Seymour would have forgotten all about him by the time he died, Fry violently aborts the operation. But did Seymour forget all about his beloved master after all? NO, NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST.

If you didn't find that video the most beautifully miserable thing ever, then you're an emotional husk. That final minute of the episode has affected me far more than any Requiem For A Dream, Bambi, Dancer In The Dark or death of Buffy. It is the perfect riposte to anyone who might claim that animation is shallow or childish. There are funnier and cleverer episodes of Futurama, but none reach the same notes. Some (The Luck Of The Fryish) come close, and others are heartbreaking for different reasons (Time Keeps On Slippin, The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings) but none have quite the sting (also a good episode) of Jurassic Bark.

The below score, by the way, is the highest 5/5 on the site. The below 5/5 is the standard by which everything else shall forever be judged.

30. Queen Rock Montreal

2011-10-31T12:20:00.000Z

Director: Paul Swimmer (2007)

Starring: Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon

Find it: IMDB

The greatest band of all time, live at their 1981 concert in Montreal. The greatest frontman and vocalist of all time rocks his way through the set, starting with 'We Will Rock You' (yes, they will) and finishing with 'God Save The Queen,' via the greatest songs of all time. Basically, Queen Rocks Montreal is the greatest movie of all time. That is all.

29. Dancer In The Dark

2011-10-31T11:00:00.001Z

Director: Lars von Trier (2000)

Starring: Bjork, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare

Find it: IMDB

Selma (Bjork) is a European immigrant relocated to America where she hopes to make a living. But life is not as happy as her cheerful outlook would deserve. She's suffering from a terribly degenerative disease that will soon leave her blind. And her young son looks to one day suffer the same fate. Earning a meager living, she's saving up for an expensive operation that she hopes will save his eyesight. All she has is a love for musicals and a really great singing voice.

Where I found the equally artful Requiem For A Dream to be dark, disturbing but overrated, Dancer In The Dark is completely successful in its aspirations to break your heart. I've never thought much of Lars von Trier, but this is his least pretentious and most genuine movie so far. The performances and direction are naturalistic, which makes up for some of the dodgy acting. Like Requiem For A Dream, it starts off reasonably light, but doesn't take long to build up to a crescendo of misery. Bjork is easier to sympathise with than Requiem's collection of desperate druggies. Also, she can sing something beautiful, which is more than Jared Leto can ever say for himself.

Whenever something terrible happens, Selma retreats into a fantasy musical world, and these are by far the most powerful and affecting sequences in the film. Von Trier makes the most of his leading lady's considerable talents, each of the songs achingly beautiful. David Morse and Peter Stormare join in with the singing too. They can't sing for toffee, but nor do they need to be able to. Dancer In The Dark is a realistic musical, its fantastical elements contrasting with the grit and realism of the story. It's quite a cruel trick by von Trier to have something horrible happen to lovely Bjork every time she starts singing.

The singing does soften the blow somewhat. Good. Because I certainly need comforting after watching Dancer In The Dark. This is what happens when you let Lars von Trier direct a musical.

28. Star Trek: Insurrection

2011-10-30T14:07:00.001Z

Director: Jonathan Frakes (1998)

Starring: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner

Find it: IMDB

This is what happens when you let Riker direct a Star Trek movie. Headless Data, stupid aliens, an even stupider plot and Mister Worf singing Gilbert & Sullivan. There's a theory that all of the even numbered Star Trek movies are good and the odd numbered ones are shit. Insurrection is indeed kind of shit and it does indeed follow a good installment (that'd be First Contact, also directed by Jonathan Frakes). However, Nemesis is terrible too, so stick that in your space pipe and smoke it. A better rule of thumb would be that the Next Generation crew are simply a bit dull.

The crew of the Enterprise discover a magic planet that helps its inhabitants to stay eternally young. Captain Picard (Stewart) and his merry band of space travellers discover a Federation plot to steal the planet from under its natives' noses. Picard being a massive space stickler, he decides to save the natives from the evil foreigners. Later, in the movie's most disturbing scene, Riker (Frakes) shaves off his beard and gets jiggy with Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) in a bathtub.

Insurrection is the Star Trek movie that most resembles an episode of the TV series. That's not entirely a criticism; it's a fun and funny film, as silly and inconsequential as it might feel. Whilst it's probably the weakest of The Next Generation movies, it's also the most fun. The cheerful, adventurous tone is preferable to the stupid, moody Nemesis with rapey Tom Hardy. But as a result, Insurrection is the installment least approachable to non-Trekkies. But hey, if there's one thing us Trekkies don't need, it's friends.

27. Star Trek: Generations

2011-10-29T15:08:00.006+01:00

Director: David Carson (1994)

Starring: Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Malcolm McDowell

Find it: IMDB

The first Star Trek movie to star the Next Generation crew. Film traditions being as they are, there has to be a passing of the torch moment. This comes in the (now rather chubby) shape of William Shatner's Captain James T. Kirk saving the day. This comes in a roundabout sort of way, with Kirk being sucked into a magic wormhole and disappearing, presumed dead.

Years later, Captain Picard (Stewart) and his crew receive a distress call from a solar laboratory. Everyone is dead, save for Doctor Tolian Soran (McDowell) who has some sinister plans for the Enterprise and its crew. He too wants to be sucked into Kirk's magic wormhole, an energy ribbon called 'The Nexus' where dreams come true. In Kirk's case, this is chopping logs and riding horses. McDowell outwits everyone on The Enterprise, which is not a difficult feat - The Next Generation's crew are a notorious bunch of halfwits - and manages to find his Nexus. He gets himself and Picard sucked in to live happily ever after.

Only not. With the help of Whoopi Goldberg, Picard escapes, enlisting the help of Kirk along the way. There's a beautiful bit where Kirk says to Picard "I was saving the galaxy while you were in diapers." To a Trekkie like myself, the meeting of Kirk and Picard was a big deal. Like, a Freddy Vs Jason or Avengers big deal. To this day, Generations makes shivers run down my spine. At least, until the final battle it does.

It goes to the great effort to bring Kirk back, and then visits upon him the crummiest death this side of Sayid in LOST. James Kirk - Starfleet legend and hero of years of Trek TV and film - dies falling from a bridge. It's even worse than Data's own demise in Nemesis. And then Picard leaves him on that distant planet, buried beneath some rubble and a rockery. Little wonder Shatner keeps trying to write himself back into continuity. Hopefully JJ Abrams' new Star Trek timeline will grant Kirk a more worthy death. That said, I would quite happily watch Chris Pine fall off a bridge, repeatedly.

Generations is otherwise a fine bit of Trek. It depends on one's tolerance for Star Trek, Whoopi Goldberg and The Next Generation crew, and requires some pre-existing knowledge of the characters, but I loved it. Well, apart from the bit where Captain Kirk falls off a fucking bridge and dies.

26. Super Size Me

2011-10-29T14:25:00.007+01:00

Director: Morgan Spurlock (2004)

Starring: Morgan Spurlock, Ronald McDonald

Find it: IMDB

What happens if you eat nothing but McDonalds' for a month? Shockingly, it makes you fat and ill. I would have thought it obvious, but I'm glad Morgan Spurlock did it anyway; it saves me doing it myself as the sort of stupid experiment I would do for the sake of it. Spurlock (Spurlock) decides that for a month he will eat nothing but McDonalds' takeaways for every meal. And if a staff member asks him if he'd like to 'supersize it', then 'supersize it' he must. It sounds like an extended Jackass stunt.

And at first, it plays like a Jackass stunt too. Upon indulging in his first super sized Maccy D meal, he promptly vomits it back up out of the window of his car. The physical (and a little bit mental) degradation of Spurlock over the course of Super Size Me is actually quite scary to witness. Fairly well educated in the importance of healthy eating, I found it somewhat obvious, but it's still scary to actually see it. Mind you, over here in England, we never had 'Super Size' meals. Probably a good thing. I always go for the biggest thing on the menu, regardless of how hungry I am.

It's a depressing state of affairs that Super Size Me has to exist at all; that people need telling that stuffing their face full of shit will make them ill. Following the film, the 'Super Size' option was discontinued and more healthy options were made available on McDonalds' menus. I feel about that the same way I feel about the BBFC censoring slash banning The Human Centipede 2: surely it should be my decision whether I fill my body and mind with that rot? Mind you, a diet of terrible food will actually make you ill, whereas The Human Centipede 2 won't. No matter what the tabloids or the BBFC or some dipshit who's never seen it tells you. Not that the absence of 'Super Size' meals will stop anyone truly determined to get their gut rot on either.

Super Size Me is a powerful, witty and amusing documentary. Unlike the work of Super Size meal abuser Michael Moore, you get the sense that Spurlock is generally telling the truth, and his humour actually funny. There's a great line about him punching his children in the head whenever they pass a McDonalds' restaurant. I'm going to punch my own children in the head whenever Michael Moore is on TV. Not to provoke a Pavlov's Dog style reaction, just because Michael Moore's face inspires violence in me.

I watched Super Size Me at the cinema with a friend, back in 2004. "Hey," I said, "wouldn't it be a good idea if we got Big Macs and ate them while we watched the film?" "Yeah!" As it emerges, that was not a good idea. Especially not during the liposuction scene.

25. 3000 Miles To Graceland

2011-10-29T13:49:00.006+01:00

Director: Damien Lichtenstein (2001)

Starring: Kurt Russell, Kevin Costner, Courteney Cox

Find it: IMDB

Elvis impersonators botch a casino heist when Murphy (Costner) gets greedy and decides to keep all the money for himself. Michael Zane (Russell) hits the road and steals the money. But he doesn't count on the annoying Cybil (Cox) and her even more annoying son, who decide to tag along, hoping to bag themselves a share of the cash. Murphy, meanwhile, is not a happy Elvis, and sets about hunting down Zane with a vengeance. Despite the fact that it's his own stupid fault that everything went all Pete Tong.

3000 Miles To Graceland is an entirely underrated, often mocked action comedy that has at least one of its stars at his very best (that'd be Costner, who is actually good as the villainous Murphy). Kurt Russell (who actually made his movie debut in a John Carpenter Elvis movie) is a great lead. Courteney Cox is thoroughly annoying, but there are enough fun performances elsewhere to detract from that. David Arquette is a highlight, as are Ice-T and Thomas Haden Church.

The action scenes are well directed, tense, gory and explosive. Costner's increasingly eccentric Murphy makes for an oddly sympathetic villain towards the end, and the wardrobe department is quite wonderful. Well, if you like quiffs and sideburns. But who doesn't like quiffs and sideburns? It does tend to drag a bit though - at 125 minutes, it's a lot longer than it really needs to be, especially where the annoying romance is concerned.

3000 Miles To Graceland is a movie which starts with weird chrome Scorpions battling in the desert and ends with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell dancing to an Elvis tune. 3000 Miles To Graceland, thangyewverymuch.

24. Grease

2011-10-28T14:32:00.003+01:00

Director: Randal Kleiser (1978)

Starring: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing

Find it: IMDB

The greatest musical film of all time. Yes, even better than South Park. Virginal good gal Sandy (Newton-John) falls for greaser Danny Zucco (Travolta) over the course of one dreamy summer. It happened so fast. They had themselves a blast. But as summer drew to an end, they found their dreams ripped at the seams. Oh, those summer ni-ights. But no, because Sandy and Danny run into each other at the start of the new term. Sandy notices a change in Danny though. When he's around his guy mates, he's kind of a dick. Can they rekindle their romance?

Of course they can, even if it happens via Sandy turning herself sluttish and dancing up a storm whilst Danny looks on, the chills running through his body practically electrified by the power she's supplying. Personally, I preferred Sandy as she was before the leggings and massive hair. Hair which can never hope to compete with John Travolta's beautiful quiff. If there's one thing that fuels a good man-crush in me, it's a good quiff. And John Travolta's is a very good quiff. Of all the movies I've ever watched, Grease made by far the biggest impact on my head (the rest, Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park).

Every single one of the songs in Grease is a party anthem, guaranteed to get me on the dancefloor; the best being 'Summer Loving', 'Greased Lightning' and 'You're The One That I Want'. Bring on the Grease megamix. It does indeed give me chills and they do indeed multiply. Quite simply, Grease is the word.

The Roommate

2011-10-28T00:13:00.008+01:00

Director: Christian E. Christiansen (2011)

Starring: Minka Kelly, Leighton Meester, Cam Gigandet, Billy Zane

Find it: IMDB

Within 12 seconds of its starting, I realised that I would probably hate The Roommate. 2 minutes later, I started to hate The Roommate. One of the earliest scenes takes place at a frat party, which is a very good indication of its quality. Its lead character is Sara (Kelly), a girl who names The Devil Wears Prada her favourite movie. Of all time. And the stalker character (Meester) looks up to this moron as a role model. They deserve one another.

The Roommate has the worst soundtrack I've heard in years, all softcore American rock and the sort of thing you might expect to hear on The OC. But that's fine, because it has the worst acting, worst script and worst wardrobe department I've seen in years too. The Roommate is Single White Female dumbed down for teenagers too badly educated to realise that Single White Female exists.

Whilst everyone and everything else about The Roommate is atrocious, it does have Billy Zane, which was a nice surprise. He plays Professor Roberts, a lecturer on our heroine's fashion course. Although she's a late entry, he lets her on the course because she has good fashion sense. Which wouldn't be particularly remarkable were it not for the fact that she has this on her head at the time:

Which would be like me getting on to an English Literature course even after telling a lecturer that Twilight is the greatest book of all time. The stupid hat is not relegated to just the one stupid scene. She wears it in a nightclub at one point. But even with her ridiculous choice in headwear, Sara manages to bag Ethan (Gigandet). Ethan introduces himself by telling her how he and his fraternity buddies use spiked punch to essentially date rape girls. Charming fucker.

Meanwhile stalker Rebecca menaces Sara's friends, beats up Billy Zane and murders a kitten in a washing machine. But there's no explanation as to why Rebecca should so quickly become fixated with Sara, especially given how utterly uninteresting Sara is. Some of Rebecca's loonier actions raise a smile (a tasteless tattoo, a sketchbook and a scene in which she beats someone up in the shower whilst wearing a waterproof jacket) but its every moment feels derivative and stupid. There's even the whole angle where Rebecca starts dressing like Sara, wearing her perfume and dying her hair like Sara's. She goes so far as to steal the hat. Imitation, I suppose, is the sincerest form of flattery. By that logic, Single White Female should be very flattered right now.

The Roommate is vacuous twaddle that should be of no interest to anyone who has seen Single White Female, Cable Guy, Play Misty For Me or any other stalker movie, ever. It's reminiscent of other such dumbed down toss like Swimfan and Homecoming. Single Shite Female, more like.

23. Elf

2011-10-27T13:26:00.010+01:00

Director: Jon Favreau (2003)

Starring: Zooey Deschanel, Will Ferrell, James Caan

Find it: IMDB

A human raised as an Elf (Ferrell) in the North Pole with Santa, Buddy heads to New York to find his real parents. His real father, Walter Hobbs (Caan) is a grumpy professional with no sense of Christmas spirit. Inbetween ruining his father's life and ripping off The Jerk, Buddy meets Zooey Deschanel and fools her into thinking him worthy of her love. Sigh.

Bearing in mind that The Jerk and Enchanted did this sort of thing so much better, Elf is a fine fish-out-of-water comedy. Will Ferrell is amusing as Buddy, as is Caan as his father. Peter Dinklage is a highlight, whilst Zooey Deschanel is in this movie. I don't like watching Elf because Deschanel's scenes with Ferrell make me jealous. Everything else feels vaguely predictable but hard to dislike. Even Will Ferrell's now overdone screaming childishness fits the role. Individual scenes are enjoyable, such as Buddy's snowball warfare expertise and his interactions with Dinklage.

As Christmas movies go, Elf is the one I would be most likely to watch. Well, unless I had a choice between that and Black Christmas or Silent Night, Deadly Night. I'll rephrase: Elf is the 'proper' Christmas movie I would be most likely to watch. And even then, I'll be spending most of the film thinking either about how awesome Zooey Deschanel is, or that one time James Caan got murdered by Santa in Santa's Slay.

22. The Bucket List

2011-10-27T11:17:00.004+01:00

Director: Rob Reiner (2007)

Starring: Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Sean Hayes

Find it: IMDB

More narration duties from Morgan Freeman, despite the fact that (a) it's his own movie, and (b) his character is supposed to be dead at that point. The implication being that there is an afterlife, and god has allowed Morgan Freeman to continue narrating from there. Although that's just one way of looking at it. I myself would suggest that Morgan Freeman's narrations are a force of nature, and now unbound by body, his spirit is free to go around mystically narrating things everywhere, always.

Carter (Freeman) and Edward (Nicholson) are two very different men from very different backgrounds. Carter is a working-class mechanic who knows a lot about trivia and smokes. The only way you can get away with showing someone smoking in a film now is if that same someone then spends the rest of the film dying of cancer. Edward is rich, owns hospitals and goes on dates with Michelle Pfeiffer. The two men are basically playing themselves in The Bucket List, only this time with cancer. They share a room in Edward's hospital and become friends. As they each receive a terminal diagnosis, they write a 'bucket list', funded by Edward's millions.

Together they travel the world, dining on caviar, skydiving and driving flashy sportscars. Evidently Edward's millions couldn't cover an extra body, since Carter leaves his wife, children and grandkids without a second thought. It's a wrinkly, cancerous bromance. In which they both die at the end. That's about as much a spoiler as my saying that the boat sinks at the end of Titanic.

The Bucket List, thankfully for my tear ducts, is not a morbid film. They're both dying and it looks very painful, but the movie is imbued with a celebratory, cheerful atmosphere. Tears will be jerked at the end, but not in a wallowing, Requiem For A Dream kind of way. But for all the cheer and boyish enthusiasm, The Bucket List is very predictable and not even very insightful. Every beat is telegraphed from the start, from Carter's reconciliation with his wife to Edward's with his estranged daughter. Furthermore, I was irritated by a scene in which Carter tries to 'convert' Edward atop the pyramids. If I went around forcing The God Delusion upon dying friends, there'd be an uproar. But because Edward is an atheist, it's perfectly fine to sneer at his views and tell him he should believe in god now that he's dying. Piss off. Edward's money he made at the expense (boom boom) of friends, family and faith. Money which he is using to drag your condescending Christian carcass around the world. That's gratitude for you.

The Bucket List is serviceable shmaltz, the movie equivalent of those facebook updates dedicated to victims of cancer everywhere, disapproving of the "99% of people who won't repost this". You'll go away with an "aw, how sweet" and maybe a tear in your eye, but it won't change anything. Although it did leave me wishing I too had a rich friend.

21. Stardust

2011-10-27T10:33:00.000+01:00

Director: Matthew Vaughn (2007)

Starring: Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mark Strong

Find it: IMDB

A very adult fairytale from the team that brought you Kick-Ass (director Matthew Vaughn and writer Jane Goldman) and a certain Neil Gaiman. Starring Mark Strong with a disconcerting amount of hair, the wonderful Michelle Pfeiffer as an evil witch and Robert De Niro in a dress. Naive young romantic Tristan Thorn (Cox) is in love with Victoria (Sienna Miller) whose heart he promises to win by retrieving a fallen star from a faraway land. Only the falling star happens to be an actual girl named Yvaine (Danes) who doesn't want to be anybody's gift. Evil witch Lamia (Pfeiffer) needs to eat Yvaine's heart to be young again, whilst Septimus (Strong) needs her to become king of the land. Phew.

An adult but not puerile fairytale, Stardust is a joy. It's so packed full of stars that the IMDB doesn't know who to list first. Especially so if you're British. A good 60 or so percent is made up of English actors and comedians, all of whom hit the spot. Unless their name is Ricky Gervais, whereupon it's a bit embarrassing. Stardust was made during a period in which Gervais would cameo in anything, his appearances becoming more and more cringeworthy. Ricky Gervais is 2007's James Corden.

Stardust is a lovely movie, designed to warm the heart as much as it is to thrill and amuse. The writing/directorial partnership of Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn is a strong one, and they bring us distinct, likeable characters as they did with the later Kick-Ass. Even the villains are sympathetic. I want a jacket like Mark Strong's. Michelle Pfeiffer looks just as hot now as she did in Batman Returns. Rupert Everett is thrown out of a window as a host of British comedians look on.

I even like the song by Take That. Which is not something one is supposed to admit in public; not unless you're a 40-year-old woman, anyway.

20. Catwoman

2011-10-23T21:46:00.005+01:00

Director: Pitof (2004)

Starring: Halle Berry, Sharon Stone, Benjamin Bratt

Find it: IMDB

Mild-mannered graphic designer Patience Philips (Berry) finds herself embroiled in the midst of a corporate conspiracy and is murdered. But not even by Christopher Walken, who at least knew how to murder in style. Nobody in Catwoman does anything in style, which is odd, considering that over half of the characters are supposed to be involved in the fashion industry. Patience is killed and then resurrected by cats, who endow her with super cat powers. Indeed. Looks to me like somebody decided to bypass reading any Batman comics and instead take Tim Burton's stupid Catwoman 'resurrection' as an actual thing that could actually happen. Myself, I prefer to take Batman Returns' Catwoman origin story with a grain of salt. She just banged her head and went a bit mad. She doesn't have nine lives, she's just a bit resilient. If anyone can survive falling out of a window, it's Michelle Pfeiffer. Halle Berry looks like she'd have trouble opening a door.

Resurrected with her super powers, Patience reinvents herself as Catwoman and sets about trashing some guy's house just because he won't turn the music down. Then, wearing a truly ridiculous costume, she foils a robbery in progress and goes around doing dodgy CGI over ceilings.

Daredevil breathe easy, you no longer have the stupidest flirt-fight (or flirticuffs, as I refer to it whenever I randomly start attacking women in playgrounds). Daredevil had its blind lawyer battling Elektra whilst jumping about on playground equipment. Catwoman does exactly the same thing with a basketball game and a hot cop (Bratt). Meanwhile, Catwoman's fat comedy friend (see also: Jon Favreau in Daredevil) is hospitalised by toxic beauty products. This signals the coming of the plot, which somehow involves Patience's boss and Sharon Stone.

Even aside from the fact that Catwoman has nothing to do with anything, it's a terrible movie. Maybe even worse than Batman & Robin. Halle Berry isn't all that awful though. She's as good as Uma Thurman managed to be as Poison Ivy, which is to say that her being shit is mostly the film's fault. Benjamin Bratt is likeable, whilst Sharon Stone is amusingly bad. Unlike everything else. Which is just bad. Cat-astrophically bad.

19. Justice League of America

2011-10-23T17:53:00.010+01:00

Director: Felix Enriquez Alcala (1997)

Starring: Matthew Settle, Kimberly Oja, David Ogden Stiers

Find it: IMDB

A superhero movie that even my fourteen-year-old self thought was shit. Well done Batman & Robin, yours is not entirely the worst superhero film of 1997. I mean, it probably still is, but The Justice League Of America is solid competition.

This is a Justice League without Batman, Superman or Wonder Woman. Its most recogniseable heavy hitters are Green Lantern, Flash, Atom and Martian Manhunter. Which, to be fair, isn't all that bad as far as line-ups go. Of course, every team needs a few to make up the numbers (hello Hawkeye and Black Widow) so the big guys are joined by Fire and Ice. They must have run out of DC heroes for their Justice League and had to make up a couple of their own. The League joins forces to defeat a mad scientist who has himself a weather manipulation machine which he's using to hold the world to ransom. Or something. All I know is that dipshit calling himself Green Lantern is not Guy Gardner. The Green Lantern of Justice League has Guy Gardner's name and costume but Hal Jordan's personality. Which is to say that he's perfectly bland, like everyone else in Justice League.

The Manhunter, meanwhile, appears in only a few shadow-bound scenes and then disappears. At least he's green, which is more than we can say for Green Lantern's costume. It's like an episode of Smallville, down to the cheap rubber costumes. Forget Batman and Superman, this is an iteration of the Justice League which even Aquaman wouldn't join. Little wonder Manhunter didn't want to stick around. Any superhero movie which has a supervillain whose grand plot is to control the weather, as a rule of thumb, is not a good one. Even Bond villains are ashamed to go there.

To expect too much from Justice League is perhaps a little unfair - it's not actually a real movie, rather a TV pilot for a series that didn't happen. Going on this, that's probably a good thing.