Smell of Toast

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Star Trek: Beyond

Beyond what? A joke? That’s cheap, this is OK stuff, decent, fast paced entertainment that just doesn’t bear too close scrutiny. I’m late getting to it, I admit, because Star Trek never fired my phasers like it did some- Shatner as Kirk was smugly dislikeable even before the revelations about him actually being smugly displayable surfaced with the rash of ST autobiographies in the 90s, and Roddenbury’s vision of the Federation, whilst certainly something to aim at in a theoretical sense, always seemed like a bit of a happy-clappy cult to me. So, new Star Trek? Thanks, I’ll wait for a rental.

Anyhow, here it is, and it’s not bad. Not to say that it’s all good, suffering from a surfeit of plot holes and inconsistencies (Although not in the same league as Alien: Covenant), but at least it moves along at a frantic pace with action from a few minutes in and no forgetting that it’s here to entertain (Alien: Covenant…). One problem with these films is that, divergent histories and timelines aside, we know that this is an unkillable franchise and that the federation will prevail. In that respect, blowing the film up to two hours doesn’t alter the fact that our expectations are the same as watching an episode from a TV series.

So, essentially at the same time that everybody on the Enterprise is suffering from existential angst, Starfleet is suckered into sending the ship out on a faked rescue mission that sees the ship brought down by a swarm of single seat aggressor craft in a huge overuse of CGI. It also prompts the first WTF moment in that the Enterprise’s hull is repeatedly punctured but apparently seals itself to prevent massive instant decompression. Well, maybe. Anyhow, the ship is boarded by yer typical alien, i.e. standard bipedal bloke in a an armoured space suit, there’s a bit of action, the Enterprise crashes, the bridge crew are split up, the red shirts and extras are captured, and  it turns out that the bad guy, Krall (Idris Elba) is a federation hating psycho in search of a weaponised  McGuffin to wreak some kind of dastardly vengeance. There was a certain amount of  dissatisfaction with this casting, some reviewers saying ‘It could have been anybody under the prosthetics’. Well, yes, but you can say that about any alien part that requires similar makeup, why should this be different? Elba is a big guy with a  powerful physical presence and he uses this well, avoiding the Dr Evil campiness of so many Star Trek villains, and his body language, disjointed diction and delivery worked well for me, equally in the later (Spoiler here) scene where he is seen becoming unhinged in his video log. A waste of an actor? No, not unless there’s a reason I don’t know why he should always be recognisably Idris Elba. The only disappointment is that this film ends with a  fist fight, as Star Trek so often does, and unless there’s something we don’t know about little Chris Pine (Such as him spending 11 years in the Shaolin monastery), I think we all know who would win. One thing, though, space is definitely American. The Federations giant floating cult compound is the Yorktown, and in three movies we’ve had two British and one Australian bad guy- give us a break guys- and why isn’t the future a lot more Chinese?

The other good performance under a mask is Sofia Boutella as Jaylah, an alien version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and physically inhabiting her role with complete conviction as in, say, Kingsman, or even as a mute presence of projected peace and serenity in Monsters: The Dark Continent. The rest of the cast work through their impersonations of the original cast, to varying degrees of success, Karl Urban nailing DeForest Kelly’s lugubriousness nicely, as always.

There was a certain amount of comment and discussion about the depiction of John Cho’s Sulu as gay. George Takei himself thought it was unnecessary, bringing attention to same sex relationships as though they were still to be regarded as unusual, or noteworthy when society had presumably developed over the next few hundred years. Cho himself has gone on record as stating that it was a tribute to Takei himself, out, content, and respected. Personally, I thought it was sweetly done- Sulu simply meets up with his partner and there daughter on the Yorktown, and they go off, casually happy and at ease in each other’s company. No comment one way or another, natural and human. Back with the film, it lurches from one set piece to another, with the bridge crew, as ever, doing the grunt work, fighting  the alien soldiers (Drones, although whether mechanical or biological isn't explained.), zipping about on motorcycles, repairing a decades defunct spaceship in a couple of hours (The Federation really does build tough ships- this thing has been overgrown by forest for years, crashes through solid mountain peaks without a dent and still hits faster than light), working out that for all the sophistication of their opponents they blow up when The Beastie Boys are played at them, and crashing the salvaged Franklin into the Yorktown. The latter doesn’t result in the catastrophic damage that you would expect, and plays much like the similar seen from Into Darkness. That’s maybe the problem- so much of this is familiar, to one degree or another. It has plot holes, inconsistencies, but it entertains, except that at the end any of the imagination from the original is once again lots- sure, the original series looks hackneyed and low budget now, but we’ve had three movies of mad megalomaniacs with a grudge against the Federation, where are the giant space amoebae, the evil parallel dimension where everybody has a little Van Dyke beard, or the misunderstood subterranean creature accidentally killing mining colonists? Plus, how many times does Kirk get The Enterprise shot from under him before his superiors stop giving him ships?

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'This doesn't make any sense'

Which I believe is close enough to what one of the characters says about half way through Alien Covenant.

The Alien franchise is much like a school reunion, these days. You have some decent expectations but you get there and find out that everybody is a dick, and not only that, but they treat you as though YOU'RE the dick. Following on from the beloved-by-nobody Prometheus, Covenant attempts to straighten out the chronology and cause and effect of the series and bridge the gap between that and Alien. And it fails. Don't be suckered in by the generally positive reviews, it just really doesn't work, either in the series or as a standalone. It doesn't explain why there's a derelict Engineer spaceship on LV426, how come the Engineers themselves haven't evolved and appear to be living in some kind of Bronze Age citadel despite this being many thousands of years after they visited or seeded Earth, or why 90% of AIs, robots and androids are utter dicks. There seems to be some kind of choice that programmers of synthetic intelligences make in pretty much all science fiction films between the Kill Your Creator pole and the Stilted Prig Who Misunderstands Colloquialisms pole. Covenant doesn't address this, although it reintroduces Michael Fassbinder's malevolent android and attempts to give him some kind of motivation for his malicious sabotage in Prometheus.

Where the film falls down, basically, is that it is a lazy and uninvolving retread of themes and scenes that we've seen before from the other films in the series- the nervous, indecisive leader, the incremental mortality, the blow the alien out of the airlock moment, the half arsed idea of sending the majority of your crew and resources into an unknown situation, the utter lack of any kind of safety precautions ('Yeah, it looks like Earth. Go out there and suck the wildlife. Microbes? Nah, worrying about microbes is for losers.') and ultimately the resourceful if  emotionally bereaved chick-with-a-dick. Is it a coincidence that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is subtitled The Modern Prometheus, and this film resembles something stitched together from the dead parts of other films? That isn't the real issue, though, that's basically that it's no fun. I've sat through some leftfield rubbish in my time, some low budget dross, and haven't judged it as harshly as I do Covenant but this should have been more, from its budget and its pedigree. It's just not that entertaining.

Plus, what do the aliens eat to go from chest burster to a 300 pound seven foot monster in a matter of hours?

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I'm Kong Of The World!

Well, here we go again, another reboot or reimagining or partial remake or something, as though we wanted one. It's essentially the same, though- big, well intentioned monkey is misunderstood by venal man, saves the girl, aircraft are swatted from the sky, and so on.

And who cares? Well, I wanted to, seeing as how it's strongly cast, a dozen years on from Peter Jackson's version, and promised something different, but on the whole you'd be well advised to leave your hopes at the door if you've seen any of the previous Kong movies, either Hollywood's or the odd Japanese guest slots in their own canon of monster movies.

For no very good reason this version is set in the latter years of the Vietnam War, possibly to justify the involvement of Samuel L Jackson's aircav unit, but the period detail is largely limited to an overuse of Creedence Clearwater Revival on the soundtrack, and must have created some design and costume issues. The set up of an island hidden by constant storms or fog is unchanged, but the motive to explore here is less economic than geopolitical, although the characters played by John Goodman and Corey Hawkins are pursuing the existence of megafauna, MUTOs or just plain monsters as their own agenda- I spy a Godzilla tie-in coming if the take figures justify it. 

This being a  more enlightened age than that of the original Kong, the inhabitants of Skull Island aren't maiden abducting savages but peaceful folk who worship the protective Kong as a god. Well, that's an advance, obviously, but the casting seems somewhat box ticking- Tian Jing's geologist has no reason to be a named character, the precis, of a Hell In The Pacific style confrontation brings in the Japanese market as well and if Tom Huddleston is the star, I'm a monkey's uncle. In a hugely underwritten role he has little to do but look weary and occasionally point and say 'This way.' It's left to the screen veterans, John Goodman and Samuel l Jackson to play characters with some measure of moral complexity and John C Reilly to offer ostensible comic relief. The film staggers from set piece to set piece with whirling CGI like the worst of Jackson. The giant creatures, not dinosaurs this time, some are of unknown species and provenance, some simply huge but otherwise quotidian, are explained as creatures from the Hollow Earth. Er, well, it's rubbish, obviously, but it is at least some kind of explanation for why a small island can apparently sustain a breeding population of giant wyvern like creatures and eighty foot gorillas.

 By the end, you've sat through the fights, the explosions, the just deserts handed out by fate to the bad guys but the lack of much in the way of character development makes it hard to care. Not bad as such, but a lot of budget and technology, a lot of talent, went into this and it should have been better.

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A first!

And they said it couldn't be done.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: a polished turd! Yes, the film makes no sense, the acting is hammier than the bastard child of Parma and Wiltshire together, the cover art is a blatant lie, and the title you will rent- dear God, tell me that you won’t buy this steamer- is a lie but at least it’s competently shot, lit and scored.

  First off- it’s supposedly interactive but unless there’s a ‘press the red button for a decent version of this film’ I don’t see that’s going to help. Secondly, once you get past the cover art of a demonic SS officer and rampaging panzers, you find that the film that you thought was called Panzer is actually called Panzer Chocolate, which kind of takes the edge off. What’s next? Bolshevik Undead Mars Bar? Actually, if that was a low budget Japanese effort a la Dead Sushi or Zombie Ass, it would probably be great fun, but this movie aims for chills and significance and delivers tedium, chocolate or not.

  A historian at university in Barcelona is researching Nazi art thefts, has a lead to a suspected stash hidden in the Pyrenees at the end of the war and with the aid of her friends, and drawing lines on map of Europe between carefully chosen cities which- shock, horror- make a swastika if you squint a bit, tracks down a sinister, porcine academic who wibbles on about Atlantis and the Fourth Reich. We have gratuitous pole dancing from her female friend, and a gratuitous scene of kick boxing sparring from her male friend, for no good reason, there’s a McGuffin about pages ripped from a book about the Fourth Reich by the aforementioned piggy Nazi lecturer, and away we go to the Pyrenees where we find a hidden bunker, Nazi chocolate (Aaahh, that’s what it’s all about) and a mummified body, which later disappears. People run around screaming ‘fuck’ a lot, it turns out that the chocolate is laced with crystal meth, and by  the end the sole surviving main character, Melina Matthews’ Julie Levinson, is on the point of being sacrificed. So, leaving aside the bad script, acting and pacing, what else is wrong with the film? Pretty much everything. It can’[t decide whether it’s some kind of Odessa File Nazi underground thing, a supernatural thriller, a Nazi black science tale or what. The supposed guardian of the bunker, a giant stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster is apparently the reanimated version of the desiccated body found when the original four lead characters break into the abandoned complex but appears to be a foot taller and in much better condition when up and ambulatory.  Why the human sacrifice digression? Is it all a drug illusion? Pretty much nothing makes sense, nor do we care. I have to say, though, that it’s possible that I missed something. The dialogue was so inane and the padding shots so intrusive that I fast forwarded through much of the second half. I can therefore boast that despite the best efforts of the makers of this film, it didn’t waste 82 minutes of my life, more like 55. I still resent that, though.

  Oh, and if you wondered what I missed from the lack of interactive elements, have a look at this:

  https://theschlockpit.com/2017/01/13/dtv-junkyard-88/

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Things that we've learned from the movies...

Chief among which is: if you find yourself in the lair of a giant, carnivorous monster, don't steal its eggs/young/favourite gold cup, because that will REALLY piss it off, and inevitably you'll be pursued and probably eaten.

Which is a shame, because Ragnarok starts well, low key with a likeable cast of characters and a reasonable premise. Archaeologist widower Sigured (Pal Sverre Hagen) drags his children north to Norway's Finnmark in pursuit of proof for his pet theory that the Vikings ranged further north than previously thought, and finds himself on an island in a lake, known as Odin's Eye, in the no-man's land between Norway and Russia. Does Norway have lake monsters like Nessie and Champ? Well, this lake does, a giant serpent creature who we presume is Jormungandr, the Midgard serpent who will struggle against the Aesir during the battle that ends the old world. Not supernatural this creature, just a large, slobbering carnivore. Thrills, spills, and the most disposable member of the cast tries to make it away with a baby monster as proof. Well, you can guess the rest. The right people survive, Sigurd, his two children (That's going to be an interesting 'What I did in the holiday's' essay when they go back to school), and feisty outdoors lady Elizabeth (Sofia Hellin) in a nicely written role that makes her resourceful and practical without turning her into some kind of Lara Croft fantasy figure.

It's, well, so-so. Well enough cast and performed, likeably low key and using a  nice, location and culture specific basis for a monster movie. It's somewhat short, just about ninety minutes, which, after a well handled build up, doesn't leave much room for action or any sustained threat or danger, and sadly the monster itself isn't much above Scyfy production values. Kind of a B-, good effort, sort of movie but if you didn't see it, your life isn't lacking that much.

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They're not an evil empire, just ambitious...

Rogue One

In which the Star Wars universe gets its first film complex enough to appeal beyond a teenage and pre-teen universe, gets its first female lead that can act, and gets Donnie Yen into the bargain. Everybody’s happy.

After helming the interesting but flawed Godzilla, Gareth Edwards gets another large budget to play with, again with attendant spectacle and pre-existing milieu, and I have to say that he pisses all over J J Abrams’ Force Awakens. Sure, we can lay a lot of this at the door of the writers but it still remains that this is a neat prequel to your actual, genuine original Star Wars (A New Hope) and whilst as such it pretty much comes with built in spoilers, it still throws a few items into the mix that Abrams couldn’t.

In the first place, we are free of the tired family shenanigans of who is whose long lost brother/father/droid. With the exception of Darth Vader (guest starring briefly) and digitally recreated live Peter Cushing and young Carrie Fisher, everybody is new, with a brief amount of back story in most cases but enough to be getting on with. Thus: no baggage. Couple that with an element of moral ambiguity- good people do bad things for good reasons, bad people are just pursuing their careers- and it moves nicely on from the childlike wonder of the first movie, and the childish sequels ever since. The Rebellion here aren’t loveable, well moussed rogues, but scruffy, ruthless and middle aged. They assassinate, they conduct sabotage, they sacrifice their compatriots for the greater good, and one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. This doesn’t detract from the essential justice of their cause as we recognise it, but does make them more interesting, to me at any rate.

 There’s a lot of action and shifts of setting packed into the first ten minutes, with the location scouts obviously looking for places that wouldn’t be too recognisable to the core audience, and throughout, the film gives the impression that space really is kind of cramped, and that it takes ten or fifteen minutes to hop between star systems.  This time, though, whilst the rebels are bad asses, the Empire isn’t crewed entirely by cross eyed Stormtroopers and learner drivers in TIE fighters. There are gunfights, dogfights, bunfights, explosions, Donnie Yen beating the holy heck out of people with a  big stick (And why, WHY, did nobody give the guy a lightsabre?) and we get to see what a major zap from the Death Star looks like from the ground.  Oh, and there’s a sarcastic robot called D1L-DO or something, voiced by Alan Tudyk who seems to be cornering the market in these things.  It’s maybe not one for the kids, as the body count amongst the named characters is high, but if you’re a sucker for a heroic death (Other than your own) then it scores again.

And finally, Felicity Jones trumps Daisy Ridley from The Force Awakens by being both more convincing physically as a woman who lives by her wits and reflexes, but also not sounding as though she’s reading off an autocue just off camera

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In the country of the blind..

...the one eyed might think that this is a fine example of intelligent science fiction. Um, well, it doesn't feature flag waving fetishisation of military hardware and in its own way is positive and optimistic, but it isn't great by any means.

Essentially, aliens in giant space going coffee beans appear at random points above the Earth, a dozen scattered around the globe, hanging there, as Douglas Adams had it, in exactly the same way that bricks don't. Each nation seeks to communicate with the inhabitants, for its own safety or gain, or whatever. Amy Adams' academic linguist is called in, a form of visual or written communication is evolved, misunderstandings arise from the imprecision of these dialogue, it almost comes to organised violence, everything works out. Spoilers, here? Nah.

It's all very well touting this as a good lead role for a woman, and it's true that the script moves away from either the chick with a  dick warrior woman or arm clutching eye candy, but it does hark back to some belief that you can't define a female character except with reference to reproduction or nurturing- Sigourney Weaver finding surrogates for her lost daughter in Aliens, Anne Hathaway's new Eve at the end of Interstellar, Sandra Bullock's grieving mother in Gravity. Still, Adams is at least the lead, while Jeremy Renner is wasted, by and large, and Forrest Whittaker has to recite dumb assed orders to get a dialogue going and find out why these aliens are there. I'm sure that the most closed mind in any military would acknowledge that speaking to ab-human creatures from unknowable reaches of space was going to take years rather than days, but hey, Adams manages it in short order, things being necessarily compressed for running time.

That it doesn't end in gunfire is in Arrival's favour, but the details niggle- the speed at which the whole thing is resolved, the fact that the aliens don't seem to have visual organs for this written communication, that when asked what the aliens are like, a soldier answers 'You'll find out soon enough.' Well, surely if you were going to be introduced to ambassadors from another world, somebody would take you aside and tell you that they're twenty foot tall floating carrot-squid things, and you're Ok with that, aren't you? Minor points, but if a film sets out to present the genuinely alien and build a story around that, it shouldn't short cut itself. There are good ideas in there, the playing with Adams' memories and perceptions, and as we see the film through her, ours as well, is a neat trick, and the final reason for the arrival of the alien Heptapods as self interest for the future, is neat enough. Hell, it's light years ahead of Prometheus or Avatar, and for that we should be grateful.

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Strangely Underwhelming

This should have been better. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s actually quite enjoyable, it’s just it never really engaged. In the normal run of things, in the first film the origin backstory, takes up most of the running time, a little action is squeezed in after the exposition, and then the franchise picks up in the sequels. Doctor Strange bucks this by neatly flowing from the learning montage to actually making use of it in the action, the standard, common or garden, ho-hum, save the Earth from a force of pure evil kind of thing and in that respect it scores over the underwhelming, easily resolved plots of the first Captain America and Iron Man. The arc of the story is quite close to the latter- extraordinarily gifted but morally blank genius in his field enters his own Chapel Perilous, goes through a rite of passage and comes out the other side a better person, one of Marvel’s round table. From my point of view, Doctor Strange just edges it, in that I always felt that Downey’s Tony Stark was as much of an utter penis after his moral awakening as before, but that’s a personal thing.

When you look at the heavyweight, largely British, array of thesps it should be a quality product in terms of acting, but as it is Rachel McAdams puts in the most natural and affecting performance, maybe because it’s an easier thing both to portray as an actor, and for us to empathise with, being an exasperated and insulted ex-lover trying to get through to the decent core of a pig-head egotist, rather than being a super powered pig-head. Mads Mikkelson, with his unearthly, mask like features and unblinking intensity, is a natural choice for an implacable bad guy, even without his identikit panda-eyed cohorts, but for all of this it’s underwhelming. The action gets down to little more than people frowning ferociously and gritting their teeth to make the magic jizz that flows from their hands more effective coupled with the morphing and folding of the landscape that was the USP of Inception (And sorry, I thought that was a film that got dumber and dumber the more you looked at it). There are flashes of humour, the final show down is well handled and offers an interesting look at a conflict with an all-powerful super evil (Rather than just frowning even more ferociously) but call magic extradimensional manipulation and it’s still magic, and thus cheats us as viewers as at any point the tension can be undermined by simply junking the existing reality. Remember Iron Man 3? Suddenly giving us so many AI autonomous suits and writing down the pyromaniac bad guys’ invulnerability that the previous hour and a half of tense build up was wasted. You can’t set up limits and tension and then rewrite your own rules. Well, you can, but you know what I mean.

So, it’s OK. Maybe a sequel or a link in with the rest of the Marvel cinematic stable will ratchet things up a little, but when I heard of a magic Marvel Sherlock, I expected something special.

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All kinds of racism

When I was a nipper, there was a series of old films on the television, two or three months of old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan flicks, maybe followed by Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, and at some point, amongst all of this prolific B-movie herbage, there was a spate of Warner Oland Charlie Chan films, to such an extent that my old dad used to refer to me as Number One Son for a while. I was, oh, eight or nine then, and it was a different time. I didn’t think that the films were good as such, but they filled some time in of an evening and I didn’t see anything particularly wrong with them.

 A few months back I picked up a collection of Charlie Chan films in a spirit of nostalgia (And having read some of Earl derr Biggers originals in the meantime), and started watching them. First disappointment: it wasn’t Warner Oland as Chan, it was Sydney Toler. Second disappointment: they weren’t even B-movies, being a couple of letters down from that. Half a dozen sets, no consistency or tension in the plots, just an hour of formulaic time filling. Third disappointment: well not really, more a dawning realisation as to exactly how racist they were, something that my younger self would never have understood. Hey, it was a different time, as I say. Now, Der Biggers thought that he was striking a blow for diversity by presenting a cultured, shrewd, knowledgable Chinese-American character, even if, in the novels that I read, Chan is mostly a passive figure and most of the action and plot resolution is carried by a square jawed blue blood who falls in with him for the duration of the story. In the films, the Hawaiian Chinese Chan was always played by a Caucasian with taped up eyelids and a sickly smile. In the case of Toler, he marries this to a dull, stilted delivery that mangles the English language without attempting any kind of accent. God alone knows what the genuine Chinese Americans, playing his various offspring, thought about this.

Anyway, a feature of the films I picked up was the presence of one Mantan Moreland, playing Birmingham Brown, a taxi driver who regularly encounters Chan and eventually ends up as his assistant. Moreland was a short chap, middle aged by then and with receding hair, and his stock in trade character was the kind of thing that American society allowed for African Americans at the time- the laughable comedy relief. Thus, Moreland played Brown as a pop eyed, superstitious, cowardly clown, his speech full of malapropisms and ignorance. Watch it now, and your reaction should be either shame or anger, or both, depending on where you’re coming from. Now, the thing is that Moreland made a career out of this, and as far as black actors in very white America went, he did OK. What he thought of it is anybody’s guess, but he did better out of it than he might have done on the chitlin circuit, before tastes changed with the campaign for civil rights in the fifties. I’ve seen him in other things, although he was pretty prolific for a time and I can't claim to know his full body of work, and he parlayed the same character into other roles, other films.  The thing is, when you look past his roles, the man was  very, very good. Watch him in one of these Charlie Chan epics and he’s more at ease, more natural, more spontaneous than pretty much any of the goombahs on screen. He came up through vaudeville, and his timing, his talent, are there to be seen, obscured by the roles that (white) society was prepared to allow him. 

So, spare a thought for a man who did alright by the standards of the time, but in a time of greater justice and decency would undoubtedly have been top of the cast list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantan_Moreland

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I watch this stuff so you don't have to...

Maths lesson. Imagine a Venn diagram formed of three interlocking circles. One is labelled Bonkers, one is Insanely Violent, and the last is Striking, Stylish and Involving.

This is how we analyse the output of Takashi Miike.

So, for instance, 13 Assassins fits neatly into the intersection of Striking, Stylish and Involving and Insanely Violent, whereas The Happiness of the Katekuras is just plain bonkers. Yakuza Apocalypse, a title that could only be improved if the word ‘vampire’ also found its way in there, is somewhere between Bonkers and Insanely Violent. It defies any sensible description, any serious analysis. I’ve seen it described as a critique of the world economic downturn but really, Robbie Collins, shame on you.  Try this: small town Yakuza boss is a benevolent, Robin Hoodesque crime lord at the same time as a vampire, keeping a  stable of abducted (?) knitting citizens in a basement for food (?), until some rival hoodlums (?) blow into town and deep six him. We have a guy dressed as a C17 priest, with a  tiny coffin strapped to his back (He apparently doesn’t speak Japanese and can barely speak English), a kappa demon (Looks like Howard the Duck, stinks too) and that straggly silat master from the Raid films. At some point, everybody is infected with vampirism, a bloke in a green plush frog suit cycles into town and starts kicking the bejaysus out of everybody, intercut with shots of a giant, Godzilla-esque versuion of himself rising out of a volcano (?). There’s a bloody showdown between Yayan Ruhian and Hayato Ichihara and then it just kind of…ends. It has a weird fascination, but I can’t claim that it makes sense, or even that it makes best use of its loopy premise. Still, here’s a thought: according top IMDB, Miike has 100 credits as director. One. Hundred. And however bonnkers some of his stuff might be, however leftfield the references, the appeal, might be (Sometimes I’m forced to conclude that it’s a genuine cultural blind spot beween a European/westerner and the man’s own world view), he’ll never bore you.

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It's alive! No, wait, it's utterly stillborn.

How come Daniel Radcliffe has a career?

  A pertinent question to anybody who has watched Victor Frankenstein, a handsomely mounted and shot reimagining/prequel to the more faithful Mary Shelley adaptations. A film of good intentions and some nice set pieces made unsalvageable by our foreknowledge of the survivors and the casualties, and by Radcliffe’s constipated portrayal of Igor. I mean, he can remember his lines, but might as well be reading them off the scenery, and in the company of genuine actors who can bring life to a  character (Oh, the irony) such as James McEvoy and Charles Dance (and even Andrew Scott, channelling Jeremy Brett as McEvoy channels Benedict Cumberbatch), he’s a lumpen liability. Combine his lack of any depth, his wooden demeanour and his diminutive stature and you really wonder what the hell Jessica Brown Findlay would see in him.

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A Right Load of Camel Toe

Camel Spiders: the movie

Terrible acting, terrible effects, the same truck being driven in different places by different people as supposedly a different vehicle (It has the same frickin' registration number on the bonnet for chrissakes), exactly the same location doing duty as both Nevada and Afghanistan with no apology, no scares and certainly nothing like the poster above. The spiders themselves defy logic and consistency and are as badly realised as Sharktopus. Even the make up is terrible- the actresses make the average drag queen look restrained.

Camel Spiders: the myth

A trick of perspective. The body is a couple of inches long, they aren't poisonous, they don't run at 30 mph, nor do they hiss when leaping at your throat. You wouldn't want to be bitten by one, but you wouldn't want to be bitten by a Chihuahua either.

Camel Spiders: the reality

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More in sadness...

Ah, what a let down. I spotted this in one of the last HMVs left in captivity, thought it looked like cheesy crap and rented it for some schlocky extra chomping action. Sadly, I was wrong on pretty much every count.

The set up is fairly simple, and based in part on the various old (urban) legends of Devil's Footprints, reported from certainly Britain, apparently North America and probably half the other countries on earth. Mysterious footprints appear in snow, sometimes cloven hoof prints, running straight for hundreds of yards or many miles, sometimes up the side of houses, sometimes over roofs. This is explained in the film as the product of unknown humanoid creatures, known to legend and folk tale, disturbed by intensive logging and forced out of their natural habitat. Ah, sorry, did I not mention the spoilers? Shoot.

Much of the film is build up. It's shot with a blue filter for a melancholic or alienated look which can also be just plain off-putting as, frankly, the actors just look like Smurfs. What's more atmospheric is the generally small scale of the shots, and the implication of isolation- there are rarely shots or scenes with more than a couple of bodies in sight, and even when the snowstorm hits at the end the people who take shelter in the church are few enough to suggest vulnerability. Over the first hour- and this isn't a long film- there are off camera sounds, flashes of something moving rapidly away, missing domestic livestock, tempers fraying. This is the good bit. The build up is well paced and effective. Characters are for the most part sketched briefly but sympathetically, and the quality of the performances is many levels above the norm for this kind of thing- leads are Kevin Durand (Lost), Lukas Haas (Witness), Nick Damici (Writer of the estimable Stakeland) and the rest are equally competent.

Where the film disappoints is in the pay off, when the creature finally takes its bow. A combination of costumes and prostheses was used for the part body shots, and CGIs for the full Monty, but it's a tired visualisation, a giant lizard thing that doesn't look credible as a biological life form in that environment and despite fangs and teeth really isn't either convincing or scary. It seems to lose its speed and agility for the final confrontation and is too easily vanquished. Couple that with a cheesy title and promo material, and the fact that it relies on the tiredest horror movie trope of 'We're safe'- camera shot to second beastie, egg hatching, grave bursting open, you name it and ultimately you have a well made, tense and enjoyable film that runs out of steam way too quickly.

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Ban this filth

But not because it's a horrifying video nasty featuring foetus eating, death by cleaver and, oh, I don't know, face chewing or whatever. No, because it's the kind of film that has built up such a reputation since its 1980 release when it was initially banded as nasty, and was rumoured to be a gen-u-wine snuff movie, and that obscures the fact that it's rubbish. The acting isn't bad, especially for this genre, some of the effects are passable, but it's ludicrous to the extreme (Why the swimming POV shots? Is it because this guy has a SCUBA outfit, or because we've all seen Jaws? Did the cannibal kill an entire ISLAND and nobody did anything about it? Why the constant 'Let's split up'? And what the hell is with the music? It sounds like a cat walking over a cheap keyboard, a keyboard that was cheap even then). I watched it on fast forward after the first half hour, rewinding if, at any point, I might have missed something scary. And I hadn't. Oh, sure, there's a mook with half a face of bad pancake make up but it's inept in terms of delivering shocks or tension. It's quite illuminating how far we've become acclimatised to stuff like this now- release it today, there would be no problem and with modern f/x it would be a hell of a lot more convincing but as it is, pretty much anything in a similar genre released this century would give this film nightmares.

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What's wrong with this picture?

The answer is: it has very little to do with the film itself. No biggie, but in terms of false advertising it's way off the scale. Look at this picture, you might want to see the movie. So, in case you ever feel tempted, can I offer this friendly advice instead: lock yourself in a dark room, wrap several elastic bands around your head until you're a mass of bulging, deformed features, and then punch yourself in the crotch until you pass out. I've tried both, and the groin punching is a lot more fun, trust me.

 I'm still looking for the perfect Nazi zombie/occult/dark science movie- and I think that more of humanity than cares to admit it feels the same way- but this is heading off into Plan 9 territory. I didn't want to give it a kicking, I really didn't, because it starts off with good intentions, with uniforms that look as though they've been borrowed from an enthusiastic re-enactment group, an intention to paint the inhumanity of war and the disillusionment of the soldiers fighting it, but then I watched it and thought: nah, it's toss. Essentially, a very small unit of German soldiers is sent on a suicide mission to escort a scientist from the Ahnernebe into a forest where Himmler hopes to discover ancestral Aryan ubermensch to help him save the Third Reich. There are tensions with the sneering SS types who accompany them, they all die in various supposedly ironic ways, and there are unexplained apparitions, time shifts and so on. So what's wrong with it?

1. Terrible, terrible script. Clunky, stilted and occasionally straining for profundity and just about managing to make things even worse. The supposed good German soldiers contrasted with the cartoon murderous Nazi bastards is frankly insulting to the peoples of occupied Europe who suffered at the hands of both.

2. Terrible acting. I mean, really terrible. Delivery of lines is sometimes so wooden that it's as though the actors haven't seen the script before and are reading off a prompt sheet off camera.

3. Absolute lack of any consistency or internal plot integrity.

4. The magic tank that falls out of the sky as a paranormal manifestation and crushes a minor character.

5. The slavering Nazi scientist-bitch looks like Esther Rantzen. Not her fault, and I'm not criticising her for her looks, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching a Jewish television presenter playing Ilse Koch.

6. The characters can't even wear their hats straight. The SS guys are dressed for parade, the German squaddies don't seem to have packed for anything more taxing than a mushroom picking expedition, the noble but brutalised Wehrmacht major is chubby and looks as though he has peroxided hair and why is one German carried an American Thompson? Everybody speaks with their own accents, which is fine, but one of the SS actors tries a Herr Flick accent all the way through.

Is there anything good about it? Well, played competently it would have been better than many of the entries in the oeuvre (Bloodstorm, SS Doomtrooper, Nazi Zombies, War of the Dead) and the digital effects are competent. If you were in the mood, would you enjoy it?

You know what that is? That's the cast watching a pig fly over.

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Bear with a Rawhead Rex 1987.

Scared yet? Don't be. Forget this, it’s not a patch on the graphic novel of 1993. In fact, it’s not a patch on Scooby Doo.  A pre-Christian beastie, worshipped as a god in days gone past but more demonic, is unearthed from beneath standing stone in an Irish field and goes on a killing spree. Well, a bloke in particularly bad outfit roars at people and waves his arms at them, at which point they fall over.  This is what special effects looked like in 1987- a monster mask that doesn’t move, squirts of spiritual energy that look as though somebody has used a highlighter pen on the film print, and injury makeup that could be bettered by a party shop kitting you out for Halloween these days. If this had been done with some conviction, or even the economy of script and effort of the best British chillers of the 50s (Night of the Demon, X The Unknown) it could have been worthwhile. As it is, the characters are largely idiots, the gore unshocking, there’s no sense of a lurking prehumen menace and the acting is rep company. Oh, and there is a gratuitous booby shot, and it’s not even that kind of film. Apparently Clive Barker disowned this, and good for him.

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Well what was THAT all about?

Eraserhead is another one of those films that I tried to watch at the age of 14 or 15 or so, didn’t get on with, and frankly it gave me the willies to such an extent that I never went back to it. Many years on, here I am, revisiting one of the most individual, leftfield and downright disturbing films of the last half century, a film that has been given many tags. Horror movie being one of them. David Lynch has famously refused to illuminate what the film is actually about, and says that nobody who has ever ventured an explanation has ever got it right. I would guess that’s just mischief on his part, as it’s been fairly well deconstructed over the years. The most obvious, the easiest and the most tired thing to say about Eraserhead is that it has the quality of a nightmare, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The black and white cinematography (Do you dream in colour? Are you sure?), the leaps in internal logic and narrative, the horrible sense of powerlessness in the face of incomprehensible oppression, these all put it firmly into the dream category, and reinforce its assessment as a horror film rather than simply as a surreal piece. It is often regarded as a film that externalises the horror of adulthood and responsibility but equally can be read as body horror and repugnance at both sexuality and the consequences of it. The tiny roast chicken that bleeds when cut may stand for menstruation as much as injury to the surface, but whether that was intentional or not, Eraserhead offers a series of scenes that escalate uneasiness and alienation until finally any sense of reality is buried. It’s not easy to watch, but offers its own, slightly skin crawling rewards.