The Ruins

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.

26. Super Size Me

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.

22. The Bucket List

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.

The Human Centipede (the first sequence)

Director: Tom Six (2009)

Starring: Deiter Laser, Ashley C Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura

Find it online: IMDB

Well well well, it's probably a good thing that I didn't watch The Human Centipede before my gap year two shitty weeks in Europe. As if unwary travellers didn't have enough to worry about with torture hostels (Hostel/Frontiers) and crazy yokels (Every Urbanoia Movie Ever Made) Tom Six's already-infamous little movie posits a Germany full of perverts, annoying American travellers and, crucially, mad scientists.

And not just any Frankenstein/Moreau scientist either. Dr Heiter (Laser) has ambitions to create the world's first Human Centipede - essentially, three idiot humans sewn together ass-to mouth, with one shared gastric system. American tourist girls Lindsay (Williams) and Jenny (Yennie) stumble across Doc Heiter's lair after their car breaks down in rural Germany. He drugs them both and introduces them to poor Katsuro (Kitamura) - the head of Heiter's centipede. Ladies, say hello. You'll be swallowing his poop for the remainder of the flick. Well, not swallowing as such; sharing.

Yes. The Human Centipede is a movie in which two out of three protagonists spend over half of the running time with their mouths and noses buried up a butthole/arse-crack. Yummmy. As concepts go, it's as dirty as you can get. In fact, I've seen it advertised elsewhere as an actual porno. 2 GIRLS GO ASS-TO-MOUTH. All you coprophilia fetishists out there will have a great time with The Human Centipede. It's like 2 Girls, 1 Cup or a Dirty Sanchez segment dragged out to feature length.

Unfortunately, that concept is pretty much all you do get. Aside from an excellent performance from Deiter Laser, the first half hour is pretty much all but ruined by the trailer or the opening paragraphs of this review. Like Takashi Miike's Audition, this is a movie best seen with an open mind and no prior knowledge whatsoever. But you've seen the trailer, haven't you? You've probably even seen the Rick Astley remix. There's no tension to any of the stalk and chase scenes, because you know full well what's about to happen. At first, it feels like a faux-Grindhouse trailer dragged out to feature length - great in theory, let down by obviousness and a lack of anything else.

Until you get to the movie's second half, that is. No amount of trailer can prepare you for the actual Human Centipede in its full glory. Just the muffled groans of Jenny and Lindsay is enough to make your stomach churn. To be fair, I think Katsuro gets the best deal of the three, all things considered. And poor poor Lindsay, with a mouthful of ass and an assful of face. The potty scenes might just be the most disgusting thing I've seen since August Underground. For the love of mercy, if you value your appetite, watch it with the volume off.

That's a pretty good assessment for most of the movie, actually. Even when not chewing ass or swallowing shit, the girls are ear-blisteringly horrible. Bad acting is no unusal thing in horror movies, but Williams and Yennie are amongst the worst I've seen in a while. It's hard to bear any hard feelings towards them though. After all, they spend most of the running time sucking bum-cheeks. As the Centipede's voice, Kitamura fares a little better. Even aside from owning a supremely badass name and an awesome pair of sunglasses, Deiter Laser is the movie's trump card. He's scary, imposing and even a bit camp as Doc Heiter, and is easily the best non-Centipede thing in it.

Make no mistake, The Human Centipede is a movie that deserves watching. It's funny, gruesome and a little bit scary, but it's nowhere near the game-changer that the hype might proclaim it to be. Hopefully Six's forthcoming Second Sequence might have a few more tricks up its sleeve. Maybe even a Millipede.

Splinter

No, numpty. Not that one.

Director: Toby Wilkins (2008)

Starring: Charles Baker, Jill Wagner

Find it online: IMDB, Amazon UK, Amazon US

A vacationing couple find their camping weekend totally fucked up when they break the tent. (No joke and on an unrelated note: I work in a shop that sells tents. I seem to spend an eternity serving idiots like those in Splinter. The pole they were using was obviously the wrong one. That's what happens when you buy tents from Argos. Tttccchhhhh). Anyway, their tent broken, idiot couple decide to drive to the nearest motel. Only they find themselves carjacked by a loopy druggie and her shouty, sweary boyfriend. Stopping off for some gas and munchies (what would a hostage situation be without M&Ms?) they're suddenly attacked by a zombie-like creature, covered with splinters and in a very messy-looking state. What follows is a bit like The Thing, only set in a gas station and with no Kurt Russell.

Splinter is body-invasion horror with a bit of zombie thrown in. The villain of the piece is an unidentified infection; passed on from host to host via a prick of the skin, caused by the needles and spikes which emerge from the hosts' bodies upon infection. Despite the movie's relatively tight budget, it looks damn good and jolly gruesome. Splinter boasts a multitude of body parts being chopped off, people being ripped in half and lots of messy splatter. There's even a couple of Evil Dead 2 type scenes in which disembodied hands charge around attacking their owner(s). It's lovely, old-school stuff. And, best of all: no-one gets tortured.

You've probably seen much of it before, but Splinter does it with enough verve, gore and tenacity to make the story fun and interesting. That said, the ending is a bit of a letdown. The action is still plenty amped up, but it's a pretty bog-standard ending that could've used perhaps a bit more one-on-one fighting between the heroes and the nasties. Still, it's always nice to see a new horror movie with a properly horrible nasty at its fore. More of this sort of thing, please.