Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (2005)

Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, Helena Bonham Carter, Deep Roy, David Kelly, Noah Taylor, Missi Pyle, James Fox

Based on the novel by Roald Dahl

SYNOPSIS

Charlie is a young boy living in poverty with his parents and grandparents. Every birthday, he gets the same present - a chocolate bar from the Wonka factory, which is located near by. Nobody has seen Wonka for years, he lives apparently alone as a recluse, yet his factory keeps operating with nobody entering or leaving the building.

One day, Wonka announces that there are 5 golden tickets randomly included in his bars and the children who receive them will be taken on special tour of his factory, which is a very unusual and magical place indeed...

REVIEW

Despite being a much-loved children's classic and a favourite of many children, Roald Dahl reportedly hated the original adaptation of his classic novel, retitled Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. I can certainly see where he's coming from at point, though it's probably the best version of his story that could have been filmed at the time. There's something extremely strange and disturbing about Gene Wilder's portrayal of Wonka, and the music, and it has both a slightly cheesy and creepy aesthetic.

As the title suggests, this is a more faithful adaptation of the novel, though it falls somewhat short due to familiarity with both the source and Burton's work, while Depp's Wonka is no match for Wilder. Depp has clearly based his performance on Michael Jackson which, while creepy in a more overt way, doesn't really match Wilder's unnerving yet hypnotic performance as the eccentric Wonka.

That having been said, the movie does seem to stick to its aim of being as close to the book as possible and does a great job of it (at least, from what I can remember from reading it many years ago). From here, I suppose how you take the movie depends on your familiarity with not only the book, but also the previous movie and Burton's overall body of work.

For those familiar with both the book and Burton's other fantasies (as I am), it's a little disappointing as in there are few surprises. I know that I'm a long way from being the target audience, but I found the movie both visually impressive and rather predictable. The other thing worth noting is the Oompa-Loompahs, which are all here played extremely well by one actor, Deep Roy. It's quite impressive, though fans of the original don't seem to like the non-orange-faced look.

Overall, an enjoyable movie though younger kids will probably enjoy it much more than I did.

7 / 10

Hitman (2007)

Director: Xavier Gens
Starring: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thomsen, Henry Ian Cusick

Based on the video game series.

SYNOPSIS

Agent 47 is an assassin bred to be the ultimate killer, working for a shadowy agency named "The Organisation". However, he is betrayed and targeted by the same organisation and has to fight a political conspiracy in Russia.

REVIEW

Here we have another pleasant surprise, but not a massively spectacular movie. I had avoided this for a number of reasons, but mostly the history behind the movie. First of all, it's a movie based on a videogame, which rarely works once the script's been through the studio meat-grinder. Very few movies based on games escape as enjoyable pieces of entertainment in their own right, and fewer still manage to do so while bearing any resemblance to their models.

On top of that, there were a lot of stories about trouble on and off the set. Original star Vin Diesel (a perfect physical match for the game character) was replaced by Olyphant - an actor who annoyed me no end in Die Hard 4.0. He just seemed... wrong. On top of that, director Xavier Gens (whose Frontiere(s) I enjoyed quite a lot) was apparently fired from set and the studio ordered reshoots that caused major deviations from the source material.

So, I was quite surprised when I found myself actually enjoying this movie. Never above the level of mindless entertainment, but it kept me engaged and involved throughout. Olyphant isn't bad here and doesn't seem anywhere near as wimpy as I expected. While the storyline is pure connect-the-dots action thriller stuff, it has a nice wraparound and is focussed as much on an Interpol agent as it is on the "bad guys" and the protagonst.

Overall, not bad but it didn't set the world alight. But, compared to Uwe Boll videogame adaptations and similar cinematic atrocities, it's very good.

6 / 10

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2007)

Director: Ti West
Starring: Noah Segan, Alexi Wasser, Rusty Kelley, Marc Senter, Giuseppe Andrews

SYNOPSIS

In the first Cabin Fever, the last surviving victim of the flesh-eating virus managed to make it to the local river before dying. Unfortunately, an unscrupulous “spring water” factory is taking untreated water out of the river to sell to a local high school, just in time for the senior prom. One batch of punch and a few fatalities later, not to mention quarantine by the army, and things don't look good!

REVIEW

I had pretty low expectations for this movie going in, ironically because of its credited director's own statements. I was in London for Frightfest last year, and West did a Q&A while promoting his new movie House Of The Devil (a very good, if slow moving, film by the way). There, he answered a few questions about this sequel to Eli Roth's début, and essentially said that the movie had been taken out of his hands and re-shot, and that he was only credited because the traditional “Alan Smithee” credit was no longer available. From what he said, it sounded like this was going to be an abortion of a movie, edited down from his original splatter-filled vision.

However, it's not only pretty good, but also on the hardcore end of what you'd normally expect from a studio sequel. For a start, while parts of the movie are definitely played for laughs, it's nowhere near as uneven as the first film. The high school element helps fill up the cast with bodies for splatter gags, while the inevitable massacre of the prom is pretty well done, there's only so much a disease can do. So, we get a bunch of army guys with mysterious and nefarious motivations while Guiseppe Andrews returns as the stoner, cheerful but dumb and incompetent local cop who ties the events together.

There's pretty much it. I can't recall everything West said in the Q&A but I do remember him saying something about the opening and closing animations. They're pretty bad, I can see the style they were going for but they don't really work and stink of "we have plot holes to fill but won't allow the budget to shoot live action". The epilogue is also pretty tacked on and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and there are lurches in tone throughout the movie that do indicate tampering - especially as House Of The Devil is such a tightly constructed work, it's difficult to reconcile the messy work here as simply being West's own.

Overall, it's an enjoyable movie that, despite its many flaws, still manages to be a fun little movie that's better than most direct-to-DVD movies, though I would hope that a director's cut would become available at some point in the near future.

7 / 10

Dark Floors (2008)

Director: Pete Riski
Starring: Skye Bennett, Noah Huntley, Dominique McElligott, Ronald Pickup, Mr. Lordi, Kita, Amen, Ox, Awa

SYNOPSIS

A father and his autistic daughter are stuck in a lift along with a security guard, a nurse and a few other people at a hospital. The lift soon moves again, but they find the hospital suddenly deserted apart from some murderous, demonic creatures.

REVIEW

Dark Floors is a movie that's actually a hell of a lot better than its gimmick gives it any right to be. It's a movie showcasing Lordi, a band that made some waves a few years ago by winning the cheesy, middle of the road Eurovision Song Contest, a pop music content that pits all European nations against each other to see who can write the best song. Lordi made waves because they won despite being a Finnish heavy metal band who wore elaborate troll make-up and costumes. That obviously caught the eye of some movie producers, because this movie followed not long afterwards.

Happily, this isn't the mess it deserved to be from its inception. What we have here is a pretty standard “alternate dimension” story (the type that just allows large locations to be used for minimal budget) where a handful of disparate characters have to find their way out of the place they've found themselves accidentally transported to. Here, the characters are never particularly annoying (apart from one guy you just know won't see the end credit!) and are often quite interesting. The central dynamic between a distraught father and his autistic daughter is particularly unusual and helps speed the movie along its mere 90 minutes of running time.

What also helps is that Lordi are apparently a band with low band egos. Whereas many bands would demand every possible second of screen time and derail the movie in the process, their appearances here are kept to the minimum required for the story. We don't even see one of them until almost 30 minutes into the film,and their appearances are kept spread relatively thinly throughout. This is nice as it makes the movie a “proper” horror story rather than a simple ego trip, and keeps the film enjoyable even if you don't know or care who Lordi are.

Overall, not a record-breaking or ground-breaking story, but an entertaining horror story that surpasses its cheesy roots.

7 / 10

Transmorphers (2007)

Director: Leigh Scott

Starring: Matthew Wolf, Amy Weber, Shaley Scott, Eliza Swenson, Griff Furst

SYNOPSIS

In the distant future after a long losing battle against an invading force of giant robots, humanity has one last chance to regain the planet.

REVIEW

During the 50s and 60s, it was quite common for B-movie producers to rush to market with copies of upcoming Hollywood productions. Producers such as Roger Corman, who worked quickly and cheaply, sometime found that they could actually beat the major production to screens and siphon off some of the bigger production's market this way. One famous example is Rocketship X-M, which beat its expensive, painstakingly realistic model Destination Moon to screens, leading to lawsuits and many advertisements about which was the "real" movie!

During the 80s and 90s, this tactic fell by the wayside somewhat, as independent production companies such as Cannon fell by the wayside (ironically, partly due to several flop Indiana Jones rip-offs such as Firewalker and King Solomon's Mines) and Hollywood based their movies on expensive effects technology that the independents could not hope to replicate on their budgets.

So, fast forward to the modern day, and enter The Asylum. With digital technology, this direct-to-DVD specialist has found it easy to rush out what have become termed "mockbusters", harking back to the hucksters of old. You can see where they're coming from just by looking at a majority of their titles: Alien vs. Hunter, I Am Omega, Snakes On A Train, even a couple of War Of The Worlds movies since the source is in the public domain.

Here, we get the inevitable cash-in on the first Transformers movie ( a sequel to this was produced to cash in on the sequel to that film). However, it's worth noting that it's really as much of a rip-off of the future war sequences in the Terminator movies as anything made by Michael Bay.

Once you realise this, it's pretty much by-the-numbers stuff. We get a few battle sequences – mostly loaded in the back end of the movie due to the relatively expensive CGI required – surrounding “character” scenes. It's pretty much soap opera stuff, mostly typical of movies like this that have to fill time with dialogue rather than action, and it's pretty blandly directed. It's completely unaffecting, to the point that when one character has the revelation that he's actually a cyborg, it was met by eye rolling and “meh” from me rather than the intended shock.

That said, it's a passable time waster and it's probably the best of the Asylum-produced movie I've seen so far. Given that more than one of their titles has enabled me to get to sleep, that's hardly a recommendation though.

5 / 10

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

Director: Joseph Green
Starring: Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Leslie Daniels, Adele Lamont, Bonnie Sharie

SYNOPSIS

A brilliant surgeon has been experimenting with transplants on the edge of the possibilities of current medical science. Travelling back to the lab one day, he's involved in a car crash that leaves him unharmed but decapitates his girlfriend. Distraught, he manages to bring her head back to life and sets about finding a replacement body. She's not so convinced, however, and sets about using her new-found telepathic link with one of his failed experiments to get revenge on the man now imprisoning her.

REVIEW

This is one of those strange movies that acts as a kind of bridge between the different eras of horror movies, from the rather staid and dry '50s to the gory and hysterical late '60s B-movie. Originally shot in 1958 but not released until 1962, this would surely have been a rather shocking movie to those who saw it back then, and yet the set-up would have been familiar to most.

The story itself essentially combines two classic set-ups – the mad scientist with a living head or brain in the lab (see the novel Donovan's Brain and its many adaptations), and the attempts to restore a former beauty despite her will as in the French classic Eyes Without A Face. Here, we flash between the scientist's attempts to obtain a new body and his girlfriend's first lamenting of her condition and then plans for revenge.

Unfortunately, it's with both of these sequences that the movie starts to wear out its welcome. The scientist's travels might have been salacious back in the late 50s, but viewed today it's interminable padding. We see several nightclub sequences that amount to absolutely nothing, culminating in a dialogue exchange with a model “man hating lesbian” (who apparently became such after dating our “hero”) that's probably far funnier today than it would have been back then.

We don't fare too much better back in the lab. The surgeon's assistant, left with a deformed arm after an unsuccessful previous transplant attempt, seems to spend an inordinate amount of time *almost* catching the girl in her attempts to communicate with the mute creature behind a locked door (another failed experiment) and the shtick wears thin quite quickly. Ditto the voice-overs/monologues from the girl as she explores her new-found powers and then finally demonstrates them in a rather unimpressive show of power.

The movie does redeem itself and show its cult origins toward the end, however. I must admit I was rather shocked at the climax, which features 2 rather surprising displays of gore that wouldn't loom out of place in a movie made 20 years later had the movie not been in black and white. First, we see somebody get their arm ripped off. Not only is this surprising for the era, we also see an unprecedented sequence where the victim takes altogether too long to die, rubbing their bloody stump all over the place leaving a trail of blood. When the creature behind the door is finally revealed, not only does he bear an uncanny resemblance to Sloth in The Goonies, but he also has no problem biting a chunk out of someone's neck in full close-up, followed by a shot of the torn flesh that could come from any modern zombie movie you wish to name!

Overall, while the movie does wear thin at many points and feels like a 45 minute movie stretched to feature length breaking point, there's still much to recommend it. Not quite the lost classic many have claimed, it's a very useful movie to watch at least ones.

6 / 10

2019: After The Fall of New York (1983)

Director: Sergio Martino
Starring: Michael Sopkiw, Valentine Monnier, Anna Kanakis, Romano Puppo, George Eastman

SYNOPSIS

In the near future, following a nuclear holocaust, no children have been born for 15 years. With humanity on the brink of collapse, one man is given a mission: to go into the hostile ruins of New York and rescue a woman believed to the the one remaining fertile female.

REVIEW

So, does the above synopsis sound familiar? One has to wonder whether or not P.D. James watched this movie before writing the original novel of Children Of Men. OK, probably not! Inevitably, this movie isn't quite as classy or as innovative as the 2007 adaptation of that novel, though it has much to recommend it.

Directed by giallo master Sergio Martino, this is one of numerous New York based, post-apocalyptic movies that followed in the wake of both Mad Max 2: Road Warrior and Escape From New York. Among such company as Bronx Warriors and The New Gladiators, this is probably one of the better movies in the cycle, with Martino's direction being swift and the script imaginative on the typically low budget that keeps action relegated to sewers and warehouses for the most part.

The cast is reasonable for this kind of fare, with the main trio of heroes being very good and the always welcome George Eastman's appearance in the final act made me smile quite a lot - anyone familiar with video nasties and other Italian movies of this period will know his fact for sure!

Of course, it suffers in other ways typical of the period. The dubbing's fairly bad, the acting is passable at best with most cast members relying on charisma rather than acting chops. it all ends with some rather silly twists, but again no better or worse than similar films of the era.

Not Oscar material, but a great little movie if you fancy a no-brainer time-waster on a lazy afternoon...

7 / 10

Thick As Thieves (a.k.a. The Code) (2009)

Director: Mimi Leder
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Morgan Freeman, Radha Mitchell, Robert Forster, Rade Serbedzija

SYNOPSIS

A master art thief recruits a younger man to help him steal a rare set of Fabergé eggs from a highly secure building. However, his stepdaughter's romance with the man, his debts to the Russian mafia and an obsessed cop on his trail all threaten to derail his plans.

REVIEW

Well, file this one under "meh" for me, again... It's not a bad little thriller, the cast is great and the plot manages to pile on some decent twists toward the end, some of which were genuinely surprising. but, the movie as a whole just didn't really grab me as much as I'd hoped.

Maybe, it's just the weight of the clichés that put me off - I mean, how many movies are there now about master thieves and their proteges? Maybe it's just that Leder's direction doesn't grab me? Her two best-known movies (Deep impact and The Peacemaker) failed to grab me either, and she seems to have spent most of the intervening years producing and/or doing TV work.

That said, Freeman and Banderas are as likeable as ever, while the supporting cast do their job well (it's always nice to see Forster in a decent role). Worth your time, but definitely nothing special.

Destination: Moon (1950)

Director: Irving Pichel
Starring: John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers, Dick Wesson, Erin O'Brien-Moore

Based on the novel by Robert A. Heinlein

SYNOPSIS

Following a failed rocket test, an engineer turns away from the government he suspects of sabotage to a private company for his follow-up project – a flight to the moon.

REVIEW

Nearly 20 years before we actually made it there, this major movie shot over 2 years comes across as a pretty impressive achievement. While in production, it was hyped as being the most scientifically accurate science fiction movie in history and while some aspect of the movie differ from later realities (such as the use of a nuclear engine for the rocket and lack of a detachable lunar lander), it come across as an impressive achievement.

Looking back now, it's astonishing how much of the movie was gotten entirely correct, from the way the astronauts board the rocket, to the g-forces and weightlessness experienced by the crew. There are a few cheesy missteps (such as the magnetic boots worn by the crew, presumably to avoid costly weightlessness effects more than anything practical), but it's very close to reality in many respects.

Narratively, it's also a mixture of reality and Hollywood standards. We spend much of the opening third going into the way the rocket has to be funded, from a rejection of pure government financing to convincing private investors with a specially shot Woody Woodpecker cartoon(!), and hints of the inevitable failures along the way. However, when it's time to finally take off, it's a race against time and paranoid authorities.

There are also a few instances of pandering to Hollywood tropes of the time, such as the Brooklynite comedy relief radio operator, but thankfully these are kept to a minimum. Certainly, it's telling how seriously the overall project was considered when compared to its black and white rip-off Rocketship X-M. The latter was produced to cash in on this movie's hype (though actually released first!) and runs like a check list of the clichés of the time, from sexual tension with an otherwise superfluous female scientist to actually finding life on their unintended destination of Mars. Here, we get no such clichés, possibly to the movie's detriment (the latter movie is clearly much more fun) but nevertheless it's an interesting relic of the time before we made one of mankind's greatest achievements.

7 / 10

Komodo vs. Cobra (2005)

Director: Jim Wynorski (credited as Jay Andrews)
Starring: Michael Pare, Michelle Borth, Ryan McTavish, Renee Talbert, Jerri Manthey

SYNOPSIS

A group of environmentalists sneak onto an island being used for military experiments. They are faced with some of the gigantic creatures that have been created there – including a komodo lizard and a king cobra. Their only chance of survival is to get the two creatures to fight each other.

REVIEW

I'll be honest, I had zero expectations of this made-for-TV movie. I just needed something to pop in on the background while I did a few other things. Given that, it did the job and met my expectations...

Apparently a kind of pseudo-sequel of Curse Of The Komodo, this has everything you can expect from the kind of movie it is... not much in the way of gore or sex (in fact, the version I watched just cut away during the death scenes) but plenty of talking. It's not earth-shattering but it's competent and managed to keep some interest from me for most of its running time, although I suspect that I'd have been bored had my attention been focussed on it 100%.

So... meh. Maybe it's not fair to judge a movie when I wasn't paying full attention, but lets face it this isn't high art and I doubt Wynorski himself pays much attention to the things he's churning out!

Trancers 2 (1991)

Director: Charles Band
Starring: Tim Thomerson, Helen Hunt, Jeffrey Combs, Richard Lynch, Martine Beswicke, Alyson Croft, Megan Ward, Barbara Crampton

SYNOPSIS

Jack Deth has been living his life stuck back in the late 80s, but a new war with the trancers is expected, and he's wanted back. The first agent they sent – his dead wife, transported the day before she died – has disappeared

REVIEW

Back in the 1980s, Charles Band was a promising new producer and director whose company Empire Pictures was putting out low budget but enjoyable and imaginative movies like Re-Animator, Ghoulies, Troll and TerrorVision. Unfortunately, a few flops and reduced theatrical distribution for independent features led to Empire's collapse. Band soon bounced back however, with Full Moon Pictures, a direct-to-video label specialising largely in horror movies. The history of that studio soon becomes depressing, unfortunately, with a focus on merchandising and ever decreasing budgets led to a lot of filler and very bad movies, although the studio has its fans.

But, the start of its history was promising, combining movies like Puppet Master with film like this – a sequel to one of Empire's most successful movies. It's a reasonably entertaining sequel that manages to cram in a lot of ideas and well shot sequences despite clearly being on a very low budget. It has a similar light-hearted tone to the original, as well as retaining some of the most amusing aspects of that film (such as the “long second” watch, which allows a single second to stretch over 10 second for the wearer, to amusing results).

As well as a reasonably enjoyable script, there's an excellent cast. While only one actress (Hunt) managed to break into the big time, almost every cast members does a decent job. Genre favourites such as Lynch and Combs populate the lower ranks of the cast, while Thomerson does a great job as ever as our protagonist. The script does a great job of introducing concepts to new viewers, while retaining consistency for those who have watched the original. For example, when Jack's boss McNulty needs to travel back to see him, he once again has to use the body of his female ancestor – now 15 instead of 9 years old – while we're given a fairly reasonable reason why a physical chamber needs to be used to get Jack back this time and thus provide the McGuffin that drives the plot.

Overall, it's a fairly entertaining movie that won't blow any minds, but provides a good example of why the pre-Romanian filler material Full Moon will be sadly missed.

The A-Team (2010)

Director: Joe Carnaghan
Starring: Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson, Sharlto Copley, Patrick Wilson, Gerald McRaney

SYNOPSIS

A special army unit is sent on a secret mission to recover counterfeiting equipment that was to be used by an enemy force. They are tricked, set up and sent to jail after the mission goes wrong. Months later, the team escape from prison and set about clearing their names.

REVIEW

When this movie was announced I, like many, just rolled my eyes and though “yeah, another rape of my childhood”. The bloated, stupid reboots of franchises like Transformers and G.I. Joe didn't give me too much hope, either. Luckily, director Carnaghan (best known for directing NARC and Smokin' Aces - which I really didn't like) isn't a hack like either Bay or Sommers and so he's managed to create a highly enjoyable and faithful adaptation, although flawed.

I must admit I was worried about the opening, though. We're introduced to the characters as B.A. and Murdoch meet Face and Hannibal for the first time (the latter two already firm friends), by literally having Hannibal almost run into B.A. and Murdoch hired to fly them out. It makes no sense either narratively (it's completely superfluous) and raises a lot of questions (since Murdoch is clearly insane, why pick him?). It only seems to exist to open the movie with an action sequence and extend the running time beyond 100 minutes, though we can be thankful that it's not extended to the 2 – 2 ½ hours that some directors seem to need to pad their movies out to.

Luckily, this is just a blip. We're soon taken into reasonably good storytelling and action-packed territory and the movie redeems itself quickly. The rest of the movie is fairly well written and nicely directed, though it inevitably gets silly and won't do much to please hardcore fans of the original.

One of the things I was concerned about going in was the way that the characters were treated. Neeson didn't strike me as being a particularly great choice to play Hannibal, and while the rest were reasonable character actors, I wasn't sure of the match. All is good – Neeson does a great job, while all the other actors manage to riff on previous incarnations while adding something to make their work more than simple impressions of the originals.

Overall, while the script shows the problems with studio interference in summer blockbusters, it's an entertaining ride.

7 / 10

Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

Director: Hiyao Miyazaki

SYNOPSIS

A young girl is cursed into being an old woman by an evil witch after she gets involved with a young wizard named Howl. Stowing away in his castle, which has both magic doors and legs that allow it to move around, she joins a young boy, a fire demon and a scarecrow in trying to lift her curse and to discover the Howl's secret pain.

REVIEW

As a big fan of much of Miyazaki's previous work – especially Spirited Away and My neighbour Totoro, I was surprised to find this movie (an adaptation of a novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones) rather disappointing. I'm not sure whether this is due to over-familiarity with Miyazaki's typical tropes or something that simply got lost in translation from the source material, with which I am unfamiliar.

That said, it's still head and shoulders above most Hollywood-produced childrens' animation. The typical Studio Ghibli look is there – crisp, fluid hand drawn animation, excellent character design (I especially liked to mute, facially inexpressive scarecrow for some reason), a world that has a mixture of 19th century fashion and architecture combined with steam-driven technology and magic, environmental and pacifist messages, weird blob-like creatures and so on. The story is strange and lets you pick it up as you go along – no hand holding here, and it's charming all the time while it's being told even if there's no clear signposts as to where it's going.

However, I didn't feel that some of the magic was there this time around. My favourite Miyazaki movies are set apart by their true sense of childlike wonder and innocence. Perhaps because the protagonist is older this time (even before the curse), and the one small child in the movie is more familiar with the world than we or the protagonist are, this doesn't come through at all and makes the movie seem less fable-like and more, well, just strange. It's a shame, because it's definitely worth watching but lacks that spark that made previous movies more compelling.

Don't get me wrong, though, it's still very much worth checking out, especially if you're not as familiar with Miyazaki's back catalogue as I am.

8 / 10

Alien Raiders (2008)

Director: Ben Rock

Starring: Carlos Bernard, Mathew St. Patrick, Rockmond Dunbar, Courtney Ford, Jeffrey Licon, Samantha Streets

SYNOPSIS

Closing time at a supermarket in a small town is interrupted by a group of people who start shooting people, apparently at random. As the police close in, they discover that the attackers are actually scientists who need to stop an alien invasion before it can take hold.

REVIEW

Sometimes, being a horror and B-movie fan can be a long slog. Endless low budget rip-offs of Hollywood movies, cheap digitally shot movie by people who think that a zombie movie means getting your mates round for a weekend... the list of bad movies is endless. Then, there's movies like this one, a real hidden gem.

The opening few minutes are slightly worrying as the supermarket's closing routine is intercut with night-vision camcorder footage. But, no need to worry, this actually becomes integrated into the plot in a satisfying way. Meanwhile, the script effortlessly combines likeable, mostly realistic characters with a real building of suspense.

Refreshingly, the alien menace is kept to the background for the first act, with the audience being mostly kept in the dark about exactly what's going on. In fact, were it not for the title, the exact nature of the threat might have been a decent surprise! From there, we build through to a decent climax with nods to genre classics along the way (most notably John Carpenter's The Thing). The ending also has a decent twist.

I won't spoil too much, but it's refreshing to have a well-made, well-acted, well-written genre movie that manages to tread familiar ground while staying fresh.

8 / 10

At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul (1964)

Director: José Mojica Marins
Starring: José Mojica Marins, Magda Mei, Nivaldo Lima, Valéria Vasquez, Ilídio Martins Simões

SYNOPSIS

Zé do Caixão (roughly translated as Coffin Joe) is an cynical, amoral gravedigger who holds a strange hold over the Brazilian village in which he resides. He dismisses all of the superstitions and religious beliefs of the locals and thinks nothing of tormenting them by breaking their morals rules and traditions.

He does, however, have one overriding concern - since he doesn't believe in an immortal soul, he needs to have a son to continue his bloodline and thus achieve some kind of permanent legacy. He kills his wife, who is infertile, and then sets his sights on the local women, leaving death and destruction in his wake. But, there might be more to the ghostly warnings of a local gypsy woman than he realises...

REVIEW

Coffin Joe is one of those cult figures I've heard about many times but have never experienced before now, and what better way to be introduced to his work than his horror début? The first of an official trilogy (followed by This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse and Embodiment Of Evil, though there are many unofficial sequels with the same character), this actually represents the first ever horror movie produced in Brazil.

As such, it has a strange feel to the proceedings. Made on a very low budget, you can see some of the restraints that Marins was under to not go too far out of the mainstream (supposedly his later movies get very bizarre). You can also see the heavy influence of European and American cinema of the time, most especially Hammer and AIP. There's also some padding - some sequences go on way too long, especially monologues from the gypsy woman that start the film then continue at various points while Joe wanders round town with potential victims.

That's not to say that it's not accomplished, however. Marins manages to bring some uniquely Brazilian flavour to his work, especially during early sequences where he cackles while eating a leg of lamb on a holy day where meat is not allowed (and later forces a poor peasant to do the same). There's also a surprisingly high level of gore for a 1964 movie - at one point, a finger is cut off with a broken bottle, later eyes are gouged out, all on screen (albeit in black & white).

Overall, it's a decent movie that promises an interesting career and one that I'm looking forward to catching up with in the near future.

I managed to catch this over at archive.org, but it's also out on DVD. I have the official trilogy coming on DVD now, though, and I'll review them as I watch them.

7 / 10

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

Director: Wych Kaosayananda (a.k.a. Kaos)
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Gregg Henry, Ray Park, Talisa Soto

SYNOPSIS

Jeremiah Ecks, an FBI agent, and Sever, a rogue assassin, come to blows after she kidnaps the son of the head of a secret organisation. The child carries a piece of nanotechnology that could be used for untraceable assassinations if it falls into the wrong hands. Ultimately, the two battling agents have to put aside their differences and work together.

REVIEW

I have some interesting tastes when it comes to movies, and every so often I like to sit down to something absolutely terrible. Not mediocre, not boring, not offensive - the type of movie that leaves you shaking your head wondering how anybody could have let that person behind a camera.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever promised to be one of those movies. IIRC, it spent a long time near the bottom 100 on IMDB. It cost an estimated $70 million, but only returned $7 million, becoming a notorious flop and killing its director's career (according to IMDB, he's done nothing since). It even has a terrible title, that makes just as little sense after you watch it (the title characters spend relatively little time fighting each other before they team up) and before (who are these characters and why should I care if they're "vs" each other?).

So, I was mildly surprised and disappointed to learn that the movie isn't that bad. Oh, it's not a particularly good movie by any means. The plot is simultaneously simplistic and overcomplicated, with plot twists thrown in for no reason and forgotten about seconds later. The performances are universally mediocre to terrible, the direction flat, the soundtrack intrusive and the editing mistimed. But, it's a passable time-waster.

In fact, other than the terrible title, the only real reason why this has become as notorious as it has it because of the budget. There's nothing on screen to indicate that this cost more than $30 million to produce. This would be yet another forgotten direct-to-DVD movie has it cost that and gone that route. But $70 million? Wasted. To put that into perspective, Banderas' assured 1995 modern action classic Desperado cost just $7 million...

4 / 10

And Then There Were None (1945)

Director: René Clair
Starring: Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Louis Hayward, Roland Young, June Duprez, Mischa Auer, C. Aubrey Smith

Based on the novel by Agatha Christie

SYNOPSIS

A group of people are gathered together at a house on a deserted island, only to be confronted by a recording accusing them all of murder... and a mysterious stranger killing them off one by one according to an old children's rhyme.

REVIEW

Despite its influence on modern horror and thriller genres, And The There Were None (or to give its original, highly non-PC title - Ten Little N*ggers or Ten Little Indians) is a novel I had never gotten around to reading despite owning most of Christie's novels. That's something I hope to rectify very soon, as this is an excellent little mystery thriller.

The movie essentially starts with some hoary old clichés - probably already clichés when Christine first wrote the novel. We follow as characters are introduced to each other, then they find out that nobody is as they seem and the group starts to fragment as they accuse each other of murder. There's a couple of dull moments near the start, but it soon picks up as we discover that not only is everybody in the group guilty of something, but the killer also has an ornament with 10 figures that get broken off as people die. Therefore, somebody in the group must be the killer...

Some sources point to this film as being the first slasher movie, and it's easy to see why - people killed off in different ways by a mysterious killer whose identity remains secret until the end. However, what really struck me here is how funny the film was at times. Sure, it's a macabre type of humour, but whereas most movies of the period would have shoehorned in an annoying comic relief character, the humour is shared among the group. With some interesting third act revelations, the movie keeps you guessing till the end, and has some great and memorable sequences.

If that intrigues you, it appears that the movie is now in the public domain, so you can either buy the DVD or download the movie free and legally from archive.org.

8 / 10

Megashark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)

Director: Jack Perez
Starring: Deborah Gibson, Lorenzo Lamas, Vic Chao, Jonathan Nation, Sean Lawlor

SYNOPSIS

Following the test of a top secret military weapon under the ocean, a whale is found with gigantic bite marks on its body. Meanwhile, a Japanese facility is attack by something monstrous. Scientists are shocked to discover that not only has a prehistoric Megaladon shark appeared but also a giant octopus.

REVIEW

This is a classic example of a movie that looked good on paper, but falls very short of any expectations. It's produced by The Asylum, a company that specialises in direct-to-DVD knock-offs of big budget Hollywood movies (such as I Am Omega or Transmorphers). For this movie, they seemed to be heading in the right direction - a cheesy concept, a few nutty ideas that low-rent effects would struggle to completely ruin and a couple of "names" (90s direct-to-video star Lamas and 80s pop star Gibson) to justify a couple of extra bucks. Unfortunately, they completely fail to capitalise on the concept.

The problem become apparent during the opening sequence, where Gibson is a research scientist studying marine life under the Arctic ice while a military helicopter prepares to unleash a sonic weapon. The scene goes on way too long, causing a couple of reasonable effects shots to be blatantly repeated several time. It also ends in the dumbest way possible, with the helicopter above water being cause to crash and explode, while the underwater character right near the weapon escape unharmed.

From here, we're in dialogue-heavy cliché land. Gibson loses her job after being too inquisitive, then meets up with her old professor who wants to help her uncover the truth. They recruit a Japanese scientist 9who gets romantically involved with Gibson), go through the motions of a few doomed plans to stop the creatures, battle again moronic military leaders, then save the day. It's all very silly and sleep-inducing.

Fortunately, there's a few out-there sequences that help save the movie to some degree, although nearly all of them are mishandled. The best of these it probably to sequence where the shark jumps out of the water and attacks a passenger jet in mid air! It sounds better than it really is, due to some shoddy editing and ropey effects. In fact, the editing is the biggest problem here. Dialogue scenes are way too long and poorly paced, while any hint of action is accompanied by a completely mistimed and inappropriate use of white flashes. Used sparingly and correctly, these can be effective, but here they're totally wrong.

The movie has been successful, however, and there's a sequel currently filming according to IMDB named Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. Weirdly, Gibson is going to be joined by fellow 80s pop icon Tiffany, while there's a fairly accomplished director behind the camera this time - Mary Lambert, who managed to make the decent Pet Sematary movies before descending into direct-to-DVD hell. I doubt the budget will be there for her, but hopefully she'll rescue some dignity for a strong idea gone bad.

4 / 10

Bay Of Blood (1971) (a.k.a. Twitch of The Death Nerve)

Director: Mario Bava
Starring: Claudine Auger, Luigi Pistilli, Claudio Camaso, Anna Maria Rosati, Chris Avram

Taglines: "They came to play, they stayed to die."

"13 Characters, 13 Murders"

"Terror Flows Deep"

SYNOPSIS

An old woman is murdered, although the killer has made it appear to be suicide. Soon, friends and relatives are battling against each other not only for the inheritance but also against a gloved killer who is murdering anyone who gets in their way.

REVIEW

The Italian giallo genre is often cited as being the inspiration for the American slasher genre. However, you'd be hard pressed to see it among many of the genre's bigger movies - films like Bird With the Crystal Plumage only bear a relationship with the slasher in the sense that they contain murders. However, Bay of Blood really represents the first movie that can be called a slasher template - to the point where several of its murder sequences were lifted wholesale for Friday the 13th Part 2!

The movie opens as it means to go on - or at least as it should have gone on. After a slow title sequence, we see not just the old woman killed, but her killer is also murdered directly afterwards! It's a masterful sequence and should have set the stage for what's to come. Unfortunately, Bava then dials down the pace. We're introduced to different sets of characters - tenants of the bay who have their own petty grievances, the old woman's family and a group of random teenagers who just happen to be in the area. Any one of these groups may have been interesting on their own, but throwing them all in together just makes the movie messy and rather annoying as we get a lot of pointless dialogue. This is punctuated by some interesting POV shots from the woods (which could literally have come from a Friday the 13th movie), which add some atmosphere.

But, like the slashers that eventually borrowed the template, we're only really here for the murders. Here, Bava delivers in spades. Axes and machetes, shotgun blasts and spears are all used to great gory pay-offs to the murder sequences - a couple of shots are as good as anything Savini did in the Friday series. However, like many of the later slasher cycle - the film is upset by a couple of bizarre revelations and a shocking/silly final twist.

Overall, a decent movie but one which - unlike Bava's masterpieces Black Sunday and Blood And Black Lace - I can't see myself re-watching.

7 / 10

The Satan Bug (1965)

Director: John Sturges
Starring: George Maharis, Richard Basehart, Anne Francis, Dana Andrews, John Larkin

Based on the novel by Alistair MacLean

Tagline: "The price for uncovering the secret of the satan bug comes high - YOUR LIFE!"

SYNOPSIS

A top secret government facility is broken into just days after scientists perfect a biological weapon codenamed Satan Bug. Federal agents race against time as there is no known antidote and if released into the atmosphere, the bug could wipe out all life on Earth in a matter of weeks.

REVIEW

The Satan Bug is one of those thrillers that dominated the box office in the 60s and 70s. It's slow-moving by today's standards but there's a lot of intriguing elements to hold the viewer's interest. From the break-in (which uses what's now terms social engineering to break past the high-tech security) to the often hopelessly bleak investigation as our heroes lose clue after clue, it's filled with interesting sequences. The plot can be rather contrived at point (such as the villains' use of a chemical weapon to dispose of investigators rather than simply shooting them - allowing one to escape, of course!) and the villain is ultimately revealed to be a slightly pathetic James Bond villain wannabe. But, it's a great little movie to watch on a boring Sunday afternoon.

I recently caught this movie on TV (sadly, there doesn't seem to be a current DVD release), and I'm glad I noticed it as it helped clear up one of my movie watching mysteries from childhood. I vividly remembered a sequence partway through the film where a different biological weapon is used in Florida, leaving the camera to pan around crowds of people who have just collapsed dead in the street. it was a striking image, but for many years I though the movie was Bug, William Castle's final film. I was disappointed to find out that this was not the movie, but now I'm glad to have found this memorable film again!

7 / 10

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, José Lewgoy, Miguel Ángel Fuentes

SYNOPSIS

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (known as Fitzcarraldo by the locals) is an entrepreneur licking his wounds after a failed attempt to build a railway in Peru. The small village where he still lives is poor, but his newest venture of selling ice seems to be going nowhere, partly due to the local resources being monopolised by rubber barons who own most of the land.

Fitzgerald also has one overriding obsession - opera. After the famous tenor Enrico Caruso visits Peru, he decides that he needs to build an opera house in the jungle. To do this, he manages to lease a dangerously inaccessible tract of land with the intent of exploiting the rubber available there. This will involve, among other things, carrying a giant three storey steamer across the patch of land separating two rivers...

REVIEW

Fitzcarraldo is one of several legendary collaborations between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski. Kinski was simultaneously Herzog's muse and his worst enemy, and there's a documentary named Burden Of Dreams that documents their stormy relationship on the set of this movie (I'll have to catch up with that sometime!). Apparently, Jason Robards was originally laying the part of Fitzcarraldo, but he was taken ill and the movie re-shot completely with Kinski.

Like many of Herzog's early German productions, Fitzcarraldo is a slow-paced human drama that hinges on a dynamic central performance. Kinski is the centre of attention throughout, and his bug-eyed reactions to his fate are what holds the movie together. While the steamer sequence is the most commented and most famous part of the movie, it really only consists of about 10 minutes toward the back end of the film. However, when it's on screen, it's very impressive.

Overall, this is a great movie for those with patience, though it takes some time to get going. It's well worth the effort, however, and it's a great reminder that Kinski was able to give a great performance, as he was rarely allowed to do outside of Herzog's direction.

8 / 10