She at least starts off looking very sweet and innocent..

A very bizarre film which sort of sits on the cusp of vampire erotic and zombie gore fest.

A young lesbian is date raped by a guy at a party (ok the mysoginist fantasy there is not lost on me) and catches what she thinks is an STD, this turns out to be something far worse as her body starts to develop all sorts of horrible rashes and generally starts to deteriorate to the undead state.

Well by the end of the flick she is a full blown zombie attacking people and doing all sorts of gross things. Probably the most memorable thing about this film is the girls diseased looking eyes!

An interesting German cold war piece about a doctor called Barbara who works at a regional hospital. Life is unpleasant for Barbara as she has at one time been interned for some type of crime against the state, which means now her home is regularly searched by state officers. What makes this worse is they also insist at each visit upon a cavity search, seemingly to little end other than to break her spirit.

Barbara has however a plan to escape to the west with a Western businessman she has fallen in love with and she works towards this whilst showing concern for the patients she tends from the local internment camp. This ultimately brings about some cause for reflection on her part and a noble sacrifice.

Whilst not exactly a cold-war espionage thriller as it was pitched to me (more an exploration of the coldness and ugliness of state socialism in Germany in the fifties) a very worthwhile film with excellent performances by all.

You may have seen a recent film with Nicholas Cage called Bad Lieutenant, well that was actually meant to be the sequel to this Harvey Keitel masterpiece (the later film being a not-masterpiece!)

Keitel plays a corrupt cop who spirals downwards into illegal gambling and lots and lots of drug taking. This guy is precisely the sort of guy you don’t want being in charge of public safety.

The film remains very controversial with its explicit central case surrounding the rape of a young nun in a church. Whilst by today’s standards (after crime erotica like CSI special Victims et al) it is fairly tame, it still retains the bite that garnered it both the praise of critics and the swoons of wowsers when it was released in 1992.

An often dull and slow moving drama about some poor white folks who take to a life of crime which ends up in a shoot-out with the police and an officer being wounded. Mr Boyfriend takes the blame for the shooting (sparing the pregnant girlfriend who actually shot him) and starts a 25 year stretch.

The story sort of gets interesting when that same deputy starts doing the romeo job on the girlfriend..unaware..well you can guess the rest.

What could have been an interesting movie had me yawning quite a bit, so I’d give it a miss unless you are absolutely stuck for something to watch.

Whilst I have mildly enjoyed the X-Men series of films I think this latest instalment is milking the franchise somewhat.

The film had all the spills and thrills of its predecessors, despite being something of a Hong Kong action film (set in Japan) but it somehow failed to really get really very interesting….

Of course I would say that because super hero films are not really my scene, so being fair if you enjoyed the previous five films, you will thoroughly enjoy this one and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about!

The Wolverine goes to visit a dying friend whom he saved from the Nagasaki Nuclear blast during WWII and suddenly starts to feel weak, like he’s almost losing his super powers…No its not from surviving a nuclear blast (that’s kids stuff) its a sinister plot which the film spends the next two hours or so unravelling.

A very interesting film from director Stuart Connelly. Two African-American university professors conduct a sociological experiment in small towns of America to see whether local law enforcement will simply arrest the first black man they find.

To conduct this one of them robs a bank while the other wanders into town as the obvious perpetrator and then the psychological mind games begin. After they collect their results they move onto the next town and repeat the process. If you think I have just ruined the entire film for you, then think again because their turns out to be a lot more to it than just the experiment!

This looks like it might have been a stage play at some point, it contains lengthy and intricate dialogues that flesh out the central themes of the film which make it very much a presentation piece despite it having a quite tricky and twisting narrative as well.

The East is a very interesting flick about a group of eco-terrorists who commit large scale acts of sabotage against large corporations who pollute the environment.

The film is not very sympathetic towards them and for the most part tends to paint as villains people who a lot of the world might actually agree with, although perhaps not their methods. Instead the film through its main protagonist suggests that simply talking about these things will stop the same corporations from destroying the planet over and over again.

All in all a very interesting flick sure to raise a lot of discussion in your household, my only criticism of it was probably the casting of Ellen Page beside the tall lanky Alexander Skarsgård, at times it made Page look sort of like an angry puppet!

This is a not-too-bad exploitation film about a girl who comes to America from Russia to variously kill the men and women who enslaved and then murdered her sister. The sister of course believed she was coming to the west to work as a cleaner.

When this movie begins the term “B Grade” sort of leaps into your mind, but taken purely as an action flick it was mildly entertaining. Shera Bechard is absolutely beautiful and a pleasure to watch, even if she does commit one or two rather grisly murders.

Oh poor sweet Natalie, if only you knew the misery you’re in for!

A brilliant film starring Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, Splendour in the grass follows the teen romance of Beatty and Wood and its eventual breakdown with Natalie ending up in a mental hospital (Ok I did think that was a bit over the top, but if you accept that Natalie was maybe a bit disturbed to begin with it makes sense).

The film attacks the age-old question of teen girls “going to third base” and boys dumping them for girls who will. It offers few solutions and is probably summed up by the boys doctor who says “I can’t really advise you on that”.

My only criticism is probably that in contemporary times the film is somewhat confusing as it constantly alludes to people having sex, which is fine because the censorship of the time would have expected it to only allude, but it gets a bit difficult in 2013 to work out exactly who is and isn’t actually doing it in the film.  Lots of fades to black and subtle hints, possibly if I was a girl in the sixties some of the whisphery meanings might have been a bit more apparent!

With this very issue being of prime importance to the narrative, the confusion creeps in. The characters do make blunt statements about who did what eventually which helps, but along the way you are left guessing sometimes. Which leads me to wonder whether the director deliberately left such matters ambiguous to make us feel just like the confused teenagers the film portrays.

If you liked Rebel Without A Cause you’ll love this one.

You may recall that I said once before that Australian films are either very good, or very bad – Scorched is a very good Australian film..

It follows fires that engulf Sydney which rage out of control due to a dwindling water supply. Whilst not intended to exactly mirror actual events, the film draws heavily on the political problems of drought and desalination plants of the time.

Of most note was a very credible performance by Cameron Daddo, who has obviously been attending acting school since the earlier days of his career. Indeed all in all pretty much all of the performances were very memorable and maybe Australian actors and scriptwriters have finally found their niche in disaster films.