Independence Day

Director: Roland Emmerich (1996)

Starring: Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Randy Quaid

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

You betcha I'm gonna be that lazy. Independence Day is the Will Smith vs Aliens movie in which he doesn't wear a black suit or team up with Tommy Lee Jones. As befits its title, Independence Day is a fist-pumping America-saves-the-world movie that still manages to be good despite both its shonky science and the fact that it stars Will Smith being very Will Smith.

Much like they did under Tim Burton's supervision that very same year, aliens decide to invade. But if we're to examine Mars Attacks and Independence Day side-by-side, it's plain to see where the directors' respective loyalties lie. Where Burton's (superior) movie is a loving homage to B-movie cinema and trading cards, Emmerich's Independence Day is merely an excuse to blow up as much shit as possible and make Americans feel good in the process. Thanks to the likes of 9/11, Independence Day hasn't aged too well - one feels somewhat ill at ease seeing such great American landmarks destroyed within the blink of an eye - but is nevertheless a very entertaining movie.

There's that great iconic image of the Whitehouse being obliterated and grand scenes of carnage in the streets. A counter-strike is put together and Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum are employed to save the world. These being the early days of Will Smith's acting career, where he still rapped and nobody trusted him to save the world without a grumpy white man by his side. Meanwhile, Randy Quaid goes a little crazy and even President Bill Pullman lends a hand.

In a scene which utterly traumatised me as a child, Data (Brent Spiner) from off've Star Trek is murdered by one of the aliens. For all the unsubtle explosions and hoo-ha-ing, Independence Day has its moments of genuine creepiness and unease. It doesn't rely too much on special effects, unlike the director's most recent, duller works. Alien spaceships and slithering monsters are far more interesting to watch than John Cusack or Dennis Quaid pouting at earthquakes.

The finale is silly, anticlimactic and dumb, but I love Independence Day. It's something of a relic of more innocent times; the days when Roland Emmerich could blow the shit out of whatever he wanted without people feeling bad; the days when Will Smith was just 'that guy from off've Fresh Prince'; the days when Jeff Goldblum made summer movies and Randy Quaid wasn't (too) insane. Independence Day is the blockbuster movie at its best.

Happy Independence Day.

The Liam Neeson fanclub presents: DARKMAN

Director: Sam Raimi (1990)

Starring: Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand, Larry Drake

Find it: IMDB, Amazon, The Liam Neeson fanclub

What has Darkman to do with St. Patrick's Day, you ask? Well, gentle idiot, look no further than its leading man - a Mister Liam Neeson. You don't get much more Irish than Liam Neeson. A man so awesome he has this Tripod fanpage dedicated to his awesomeness, Neeson can these days be found badassing his way through such actioners as The A-Team, Unknown, Crash Of The Titans and that xenophobic one where he beats up half of France.

Such a massive loss :-(

There seems to be a lot of surprise at Neeson's rebirth as Mr. Action, but I'm not sure why. Neeson's badassery is hardly unprecedented. Never mind his roles in The Phantom Menace and Rob Roy (in which he played , um, a Scotsman), Neeson's awesomeness was cemented for me by the first time I saw Darkman.

Massive Sam Raimi fan that I am (even Disco Peter Parker gets teh LOLs), Darkman was my first experience of the director's work. It's his third best piece, and one of my favourite superhero movies of all time. Neeson plays Doctor Peyton Westlake, a scientist hard at work at the invention of a fully functional but laboratory-constructed skin. Just as he seems to be making a breakthrough, Westlake runs afoul of gangster Durant (Drake), who destroys his work, kills his assistant, blows up his lab and leaves Westlake for dead. Completely disfigured, Westlake becomes Darkman; a cross between The Burning's Cropsy and a really pissed off Batman. He uses his fake skin thing to create a variety of masks and disguises for himself, but the stuff can only last a few hours at a time before it melts. Oh, and a biproduct of his disfigurement leaves him unable to feel pain and liable to get really really pissed off with things.

Talking of teh LOLs...

Can Westlake rescue his love life and get revenge on the thugs what wronged him? And will there be a cameo from Bruce Campbell? All these questions and more are answered in Darkman. The movie is Sam Raimi on a form he wouldn't recover until Drag Me To Hell. There's black humour, ultraviolence and his brother Ted. Liam Neeson is brilliant as the conflicted hero, the underrated Frances McDormand makes for a sympathetic girlfriend and Larry Drake is reliably slimy as villain Durant. The action is extremely well done and the special effects do a wonderful job with Darkman and his shonky face.

Darkman is brilliant. There's a fight with a helicopter and Larry Drake cuts people's fingers off with a cigar cutter. Liam Neeson has a Nicolas Cage moment with a stuffed toy. There's plenty of Raimi's usual camera trickery. Darkman is a great film. Also great:

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT!!!

I can't say I'd ever thought about Liam Neeson's virginity. But now that you mention it... Also, I resent that jibe at the Irish. Also, do any jokes actually exist about fishing or acting? I'd definitely recommend visiting the Liam Neeson fan club. But not all at once, because you'll probably crash it. The joys of Tripod. The below score applies both to Darkman and The Liam Neeson Fan Club.

Shrooms

Director: Paddy Breathnach (2007)

Starring: Lindsey Haun, Jack Huston, Max Kasch

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

Because it's St. Patrick's Day next week, I'm half Irish, and also why not, now commences a week of Irish themed updates. Top of the morning to ye, and other utterances.

First up is Shrooms, a movie in which a gang of idiot kids travel to rural Ireland in search of shrooms. Shrooms, to the uninitiated, being hallucination-inducing mushrooms which make a crappy cup of tea but are good if you like talking to inanimate objects and cows. Whilst shrooms are fine in small doses and a controlled environment, no-one seems to twig that noshing on them in the middle of a Gothic looking forest is a bad idea. Also a bad idea, sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories about evil spirits. Unsurprisingly, the kids have a bad trip.

Not the least Tara (Haun), who accidentally eats the wrong type of mushroom and totally ends up with magic powers and puke all over herself. She now experiences premonitions and sees each of her friends dying at the hands of some mysterious force. I guess that's why they call them magic mushrooms. One by one, the kids are killed off. This movie didn't exactly deter me from trying shrooms so much as it did hanging around stupid people.

The fact that everyone is stoned lends itself to some trippy (HA) kill sequences and fun bits of cinematography. The movie's setting is its strongest suit, far better than the boring forests of Friday The 13th and Cabin Fever. If there's one thing us (half) Irish do well, it's gloomy wet forests. And getting drunk. Shrooms goes to the trouble of embracing its Irish roots in that aspect, but completely forgets to include any real Irish characters in the story. For some ridiculous reason, the American characters' tour guide is even an English hippy (Huston). But I digress. There are Irish people in the movie. They look like this:

Shrooms won't have the Tourism Board calling anytime soon. Not that I didn't find the Irish hillbilly brothers funny. A sequence involving a telephone is particularly amusing.

Other standout sequences include an imaginitive use of dogging and a scene in which Bluto (Robert Hoffman) talks to a cow. Otherwise, Shrooms is nothing special. The characters are irritating, the acting competent and the story is virtually non-existent. The premonition gimmick gets old fast, and the movie's twist is stupid. For a good movie about kids getting stoned and dead, I'd recommend The Tripper everytime.

But, y'know, Shrooms will do in the absence of that. In the same way that people only scoff shrooms because they don't have anything better to do.

Predictable Post of the Week: My Bloody Valentine

Director: George Mihalka (1981)
Starring: Lori Hallier, Alf Humphreys, Helene Udy
Find it: IMDB, Amazon

One of my favourite of the 80s' slasher movies, My Bloody Valentine sees a psychopath in a gas mask hack up a small mining village with a pickaxe on Valentines' Day. I think flowers were the most romantic gesture I've ever made, but Harry Warden and his pick know how to show a girl a good time. Saying that, I did send a girl a bloody heart in a chocolate box once. I'm sure she liked it, although I'm not allowed close enough to her house to ask.

In 1961, an explosion traps five miners in a shaft, thanks to the foremen leaving early to attend a Valentine's Day dance. Six weeks later, miner Harry Warden is rescued, having eaten his co-workers and lost his sanity in the process (Insert joke about Chilean coal miners here). Harry violently murders the responsible foremen and swears another killing spree if the town should ever hold another Valentine's Day celebration. Which is kinda how I felt after watching Valentine's Day. A few years later, and Harry and his warning have been all but forgotten. The town decide to hold another dance again, despite the town Sheriff's warnings. The Miner turns up and lots of people die. Violently. Or not so violently, depending on which cut of the movie you're watching.

Forget the passable but vapid remake (reviewed here & retrofitted for 2011), My Bloody Valentine '81 wears its sadistic heart (yo ho ho) on its sleeve. This is a cruel, occasionally gory slasher with not a hint of irony to be found anywhere. No bland Supernatural brothers to distract from the violence. No miscast Sheriff or Twilight Deputy to be annoyed by. Just dead bodies in washing machines and The Miner on a rampage.

My Bloody Valentine is the perfect antidote to the sentimental Valentines' bollocks that plagues miserable sods every year. Every year I'll settle down on my Jack Jones with a multipack of beer, crisps and sweets, and I'll whack My Bloody Valentine in the DVD player. Sometimes the 2009 version too. But usually not. If you're a bitter old shit like me, I suggest the same. It works remarkably. And it makes the pain and bitterness and lonliness hurt just slightly less. Just for kicks, I like to imagine the cast of My Bloody Valentine to be made up of my exes and those whores who rejected me and the High School arseholes who got all the attention and yeah, Harry Warden's gonna fuck you all up :-))

Ahem. I jest, I'm fine, really. The point being: girls come and go, but Harry Warden can be my Bloody Valentine any day.

My favourite movies of 2010

Happy New Year, blogosphere. Because I'm unimaginitive and lazy and hungover, here's The Horror Review Hole's official ten favourite movies of 2010. It's not all horror and I have terrible taste and there's some stuff I never got to see. I'm sorry, by the way. The Human Centipede is on this list. I seem to remember liking Daybreakers at the time, but in retrospect, it's not very good, is it? Actually, neither was the movie that kicks off this list. If only I'd seen Splice or Predators. I suspect this thing would have been a helluva lot easier to write.

10. The Expendables: For all of its not-good-ness, it has Stallone going toe-to-toe with Stone Cold Steve Austin and Jet Li kerfuffling with Dolph Lundgren. Also, Terry Crews. (Reviewed here)

9. The Crazies: Not quite as good on repeat viewings, but still a pretty effective zombie horror thriller thing with some good jump moments and lots of Timothy Olyphant. (Reviewed here and here)

8. The Human Centipede: I think I remember saying somewhere that 2010 was the year of The Human Centipede, so I suppose it has to be on this list really, doesn't it? (Look here)

7. The Taint: An incredible tour-de-force of violence, gore, spunk and everything that makes horror good. (It's over here)

6. Scott Pilgrim vs The World: A fun, funny, funky film with lashings of wit, charm, romance and great performances from some unlikely sources. The second most heartwarming thing you'll see all year.

5. The Disappearance Of Alice Creed: Made in 2009 but released (in the UK) in April '10. An extremely tense, uncompromising thriller with an impressive performance from Gemma Arterton at its heart. Almost makes up for Prince Of Persia. (Find Alice Creed here)

4. Inception: Christopher Nolan's Matrix mindfuck movie.

3. Shutter Island: Leonardo's second entry on this list. I guess Mister Titanic must be becoming good in his dotage. Scorsese does horror. Nuff said. The book's pretty good too.

2. A Town Called Panic: No Toy Story 3 here, no Sir Bob. A Town Called Panic is a low-budget little French feature which sees a Cowboy, an Indian and a Horse attempt to recover their stolen house from undersea thieves. Their journey takes them from Arctic Tundras to the centre of the Earth. The most heartwarming thing you'll see all year and quite simply all-around brilliant.

1. Kick-Ass: Kick ass. (Kick some more ass here and here)

Happy New Year all, and thanks for reading.

10 Scary Things of 2010

From the Horror Blogger Alliance, the first of our end-of-year special list things

10. Human Centipedes: For many people, 2010 is the year of The Human Centipede. Not a very good movie but a beautifully disgusting concept to be sure. The Human Centipede combines grisly torture guff with scat porn. I first sawCentipede advertised as a porno, actually ("2 GIRLS ONE GUY GO ASS-TO-MOUTH"). And now there is actually a Human Sexipede. It ne ver could quite live up to that reputation, but Director Tom Six gives it a helluva shot. Bring on the Full Sequence.

9. A Horse: A ha ha ha ha haaa, look, the 24-year-old man's scared of My Little Pony. Shut up and think about it. Last week I had the misfortune of being packed away to a works' weekend in the country. This involved barbeque, camping and orienteering excercises. Being an idiot, yours truly was quickly quite lost. Much of it resembled an episode of L O S T. I wandered around the woods for a good two hours, drenched by rain and under attack from smoke monsters (well, chain smoking idiot colleagues). And then there were the horses. During our misadventures, we ended up traipsing through a big empty field. Well, empty save for the fucking horses. Lots of horses with big horsey penises. I'm not ashamed to admit that the thought of death by horse rape crossed my mind. Until you've had the thousand-yard-stare from a horse, you don't know fear. One of them whinnied and I shat myself.

7. This Is England 86: Shane Meadows' TV sequel to his seminal This Is England movie, England 86 picks up the story ten years later and, episode by episode, emotionally devastates his audience. A man with an evil beard commits two of the most horrible rape sequences I've ever seen. Johnny Harris' Mick is, for my money, the best villain of 2010, and decidedly not in a good way. As much as it adds to the plot and aids Combo's eventual redemption arc, it's a little too overpowering and threatens to derail the whole thing. I actually feel dirty even thinking about it.

6. 2012: Not the movie, which was shitty, but the year. I read Lawrence E. Joseph's Apocalypse 2012 in September, and it actually terrified me. Until I realised that I don't believe in that sort of thing, closed the book and read something about superheroes instead. Still, I'm an idiot and I think I'm going to keep expecting the world to end all the way until 2013. Then I'll find something else to worry about instead.

5. Shitty movies: 2010 has been a bad year for horror. Take a bow Eclipse, 2001 Maniacs: Field Of Screams, Nightmare 2010, Vampires Suck and news of a Buffy remake. Even scarier is the amount of money (most of) those movies made. Really, humanity? This is just like that documentary I watched... Idiocracy.

4. My own mortality: My 2010 kicked off on a bit of a bummer with the tragic death of my brother (too tragic to joke about that one line there nearly rhyming, so don't) and the following funeral. Sorry to bring the mood down, but this site sucks anyway so it's not as if you're here for the shits and giggles. In fact, I don't think there is anyone actually here. Anyway, prior to losing my kid brother, I think I'd sort of assumed that I'd live forever. This year, I learned that I won't. Scary stuff. This one should be #1 on the list actually, but I'd rather not end it on such a downer....

3. The Taint: Simply put, ew. Every bit as disgusting and horrible as The Human Centipede should have been. Hands down my favourite bit of independent horror this year. And I'm not just saying that because they sent me a DVD.

2. Not Freddy Kreuger: So not-scary that it made #2 on my list of the scariest things of 2010. Did we need to see Fred Krueger wailing like a big girl's blouse as the vengeful parents of Springwood immolate him? No we did not. Furthermore, I could've done without that crappy makeup, unimaginative dream sequence and drippy blanket of a final fight. Nightmare 2010: so not scary that it's actually scary.

1. JUSTIN BIEBER: A Lovecraftian little fuck if ever there was one, Justin Bieber represents to me the dumbing down of pop, the mass stupiddening of teenage girls worldwide and the rise of a hairstyle phenomenon known as "the Bieber". And yes, the child does actually, physically scare me. Literally the only good things to have come from JB in 2010 are (1) That South Park skit (2) Someone throwing a bottle at his head (3) Him walking into a door and saying "ow". The scariest moment of the Bieber zeitgeist? When I heard a Galaxy FM presenter compare JB playing Manhattan to Elvis in Vegas. Fuck humanity.

What I'm Thankful For: a Thanksgiving special

Over here in the United Kingdom, we don't really celebrate or care about Thanksgiving. Being a blogger though, I do celebrate and care about any excuse I might have to share my witless opinion. And you get to read it. Although I know no-one actually reads this blog so I'm not sure why I said that. Or am writing this. Also, I'm an athiest and an ingrate, so don't like thanking higher powers for things. We'll forget all about that for this one post, as I take note of all the things I has been thankful for this year and also forever:

- I'm thankful that I live in a world where Machete, The Expendables and The Taint could get made

- I'm thankful that I exist in the same plane of existence as Zooey Deschanel

- I'm thankful for Timothy Olyphant

- I'm thankful for The Walking Dead

- I'm thankful to be seeing Meat Loaf live next month (don't fucking laugh)

- I'm thankful for that video.

- I'm thankful that enough people give a shit about music in England to sabotage The X-Factor by making this man potentially win it

- I'm thankful for Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare and chainsaws in Dead Rising 2.

- I'm not thankful for Jack Fucking Marston.

- I'm thankful for The Oatmeal

- I'm thankful for Bruce Campbell

- And finally, on a soppy note, I'm thankful for my family and friends, to the few of you that read this miserable blog and, well, did I mention Zooey Deschanel?

Shut up, I admit it: this article was nothing but a wafer-thin excuse to post pictures of Zooey Deschanel

An Easter Special: The Passion of the Christ

Spoiler: he comes back at the end.

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is the Aussie actor/director’s first foray into the area of torture porn. In fact, whilst many might credit Eli Roth with reinventing the subgenre for a modern, mainstream audience, Passion is proof that Mel got there first. And whereas Roth only had an annoying stereotypical gaggle of idiot teenagers being tortured, Gibson went and murdered head honcho Jesus himself. Talk about ambition. You gotta respect a man for that.

Still, and I digress. It’s wrong on so many levels to call The Passion of the Christ ‘torture porn’, since I you’d have to be a serious sadist Devil-worshipping motherfucker to get off on the torture of Jesus. Like I said, talk about ambition. And Gibson wisely manages to avoid most of the subgenre's overfamilar tropes. For one, there's no ballgags. And the bad guys aren't shady European types, but authentic Roman soldiers (or Jews, depending on how you take the movie's hard-to-miss inferred subtexts).

But whilst it may have Romans and the prolonged torture of a Mister Jesus Christ going for it, Gibson’s Passion is an otherwise pretty dull movie. There’s no plot, and it’s a story that’s been told many times before. Aside from some intense, cringeworthy gore, it’s hard to see what this movie could offer anyone. There’s not even any titties. Eli Roth would’ve included some titties. The Passion of the Christ is thoroughly lacking any decent titties, whilst there’s far too much male nudity. Who wants to see scrawny hairy Jim Caviezel in his posing pouch? They could’ve at least hired a looker like Timothy Olyphant. The Passion of the Christ is full of missed opportunities. They have a prostitute played by Monica Belucci, and she doesn’t even fuck anyone. Just what is the point? You'd expect a movie by Mel "sugartits" Gibson to be a bit more sleazy than this is.

And talking of missed opportunities, the hero here is supposed to be the son of God (and as such has a bunch of superpowers and can't die). The movie opens with him facing off with Satan before being betrayed by Judas (really? Gibson has his betrayer character called Judas? That shit’s nearly as lazy as ‘unobtanium’) and violently tortured/left for dead by the Romans. The stage is set for a Steven Seagal style showdown. Only not. Jesus just lets the fuckers torture and kill him. There’s no vengeance, no fight… nothing. What sort of message is that to send out to impressionable viewers? It's nihilistic and irresponsible. For proper handling of such themes, go watch Martyrs instead.

The Passion of the Christ isn’t all bad, just mostly so. The acting is good. Jim Caviezel and Monica Belucci can always be relied upon to give a good performance, and it’s no different here. And kudos to the pair of them for doing the whole thing in Aramaic (although Caviezel’s lines consist of little more than variations of “ow” and “aaaaaagh”, which is a bit of a cop out). Mel Gibson also gives a pretty good performance as a pair of hands, nailing Jesus to the cross. You really can’t tell that it’s Gibson, thanks to the fact that he’s not groping any boobs or clutching a vodka bottle at the time. It’s perhaps his best role to date.

But despite some good acting and groovy, gory special effects, The Passion of the Christ is really not worth getting exited about; let alone building a religion on. And as a remake of that Monty Python flick, it all out sucks. It gets 3/5 Screamers simply because it helped invent the modern 'torture porn' genre. And because Gibson had the sheer bollocks to do it with Jesus Christ himself. Happy Easter everyone.