Looks good..too bad it stunk!

If you are a fan of the original two movies Pitch Black and Riddick, you will like me find this movie to be the complete load of rubbish it is. Ok so the craze these days is to build a franchise and milk an idea for every dollar its worth, but you do at least have to make decent sequels for this to work!

Using a CGI landscape reminiscent almost of Amiga graphics, Vin Diesel grunts his way (on a green screen) through a few hours that seem to not make much sense. For some very obscure reason he wakes up on a planet left for dead then has to fight his way off it..

Along the way he kills various people and fights alien monsters. That’s about it. This film lacked most of the originality or interest of the previous movies and the Riddick character should have been left on DVD. Of course having said that, I know like me you’ll watch it just because you enjoyed the original films. This one is the Highlander II of the series I’m afraid!

Buffy (Sarah Michelle) stars in this psycho thriller which presents itself as something of a supernatural horror flick. For most of the film it lives up to these expectations. Only in the end do we realise its just a plain old stalker film.

I don’t think it was a very notable film, in fact in most places I found it very slow and dull. It was however a remotely interesting idea so probably worth putting at the bottom of the pile for a maybe watch at some point.

Essentially two brothers have a car smash and supposedly switch personalities. The wife thinks the brother she used to hate is now the husband. As you might have guessed (as its a remotely interesting idea) this is a remake of the Korean Horror film Addicted. If your up for a few subtitles, I’d go for the original as it was much better though.

You just had to know something is wrong when these two hook up..

Sweet little Ellen Page of Juno fame is decidedly not sweet in this man-hating symphony of violence and excruciating excess. I should have known that it would not be exactly very nice when I read this was a revenge flick before watching it..

Page hooks up with a man twice her age over the internet (she plays a 14 years old) and agrees to meet him. Now already I was beginning to wonder if this movie was not somewhere amiss at this precise point. Then they go back to his house and alarm bells are still going off for me.

Some drugs in the drinkie poo later and the man is tied to a chair ready to face Page’s vengeance against anyone she deems to be a paedophile.  Alright I will not ruin it for you anymore if you haven’t seen it, but strong stomachs are called for and don’t expect to be left feeling uplifted or improved in anyway – unless you believe paedophile’s deserve to be tortured, in which case you’ll probably love it! Personally its one of those movies I wish I could just un-watch like The Human Centipede and other unnecessary hate-fests.

A sort of elf who helps protect the magic stick.

Ok for a telemovie this was not nearly as awful as I thought it would be. We follow the fairly standard story as laid out by Bram Stoker with a few interesting variations thrown in for good measure.

Van Helsing makes an appearance with a magic stick that is the only magic stick that can kill Dracula (and theres me thinking any old stake through the heart would do it). We follow the journeys of the stick and the people around it trying to kill Dracula.

Not bad special effects and production values for a TV jobbie, nothing greatly original, but not exactly a waste of a couple of hours.

Bright happy smiles..but not for long!

A rather interesting British film about a group of party-going young Brit girls in Majorca who meet up with a group of equally young guys and go off on a private yacht for some fun.

Lots of drugs and graphic sex takes place until something goes horribly wrong..then Donkey Punch turns into something of a slasher flick with one tense moment after another.

Some very impressive performances by the young cast, in particular Ray Winstone’s daughter Jaime of kidulthood fame for whom this would have been a very early role.

Yes he does look pissed off!

If you like westerns with a bit of horror thrown in you’ll like Dead in Tombstone. Mickey Rouke plays a very rotund Devil collecting souls of dead outlaws as they descend to hell, the rest of the cast are fairly inconsequential except for Danny Trejo who gives a reasonable performance.

Essentially a bank robbing gang turn on one of their own and kill him. He makes a deal with the devil and returns to try and kill them all in revenge in one day in exchange for his own soul.

Lots of the usual sort of gunfights ensue and blood and guts fly through the air. The film reminded me somewhat of the 1999 film Purgatory without it quite being as good.

Abducted is a very strange film that looks to have been made on a fairly restrictive budget. The plot sort of goes: young couples are being abducted from a particular park and find themselves in dark cells with strange medical experiments being performed on them.

As if this is not bad enough the plot unravels into implications for the very planet earth itself…no not some sex-crazed psychopath collecting them as you might think!

Not exactly the best movie ever made, but then not the worst either.

Parkland was an interesting take on the whole JFK assassination. Not a who dunnit or a conspiracy theory flick as you would think, but a film that deals with the impact the shooting had on the people around the events.

The film pretty much says that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter (sorry conspiracy folks) and looks at the medical staff that tried to revive Kennedy, the Secret service that cared for his body and the families of the central characters. Most of the characters are left with their own personal mark by the event and its aftermath.

What could have been a shameless sobfest for American filmgoers is actually a very sensitive piece that even looks at the impact on the Oswald family after the assassination. Note quite the “important” film I think its director would like it to be, but nevertheless an interesting piece of history.

Damon all tech’ed up to even the score..

A rather interesting piece of Science Fiction, rather timely in terms of the current political feud in America over Obama-care.

Director Neill Blomkamp (with the help of Matt Damon and Jodie Foster) paint a picture of a bleak future where hi-tech medicine is only available to the very wealthy who live on a space station orbiting the earth. The earth itself is a complete dump (looks rather like Mexico not surprisingly) with mass overpopulation and problems galore. The space station Elysium is a paradise of nice tidy houses and beautiful people.

I found some interesting parallels in this film to Sleep Dealer, with a working underclass that supports a smaller wealthy one. Of course the obvious comparison is Metropolis, but then how can a film be bad if it is anything like Metropolis! I won’t spoil it for you anymore, definitely worth a look.

Jason Statham stars in this remake of the classic Charles Bronson film. To be honest I was expecting beforehand to completely hate this purely because it was a remake of something so good, I was delightfully surprised…

This remake pretty much followed the original with a bit of modernizing and extra twists and turns dropped in for better affect. In a lot of ways it was a standard Statham action fare, but if I am being completely fair he did do the original work justice.

As I like to do with a lot of remakes, you just really have to ignore the fact that this is a film based on another film and look at it as a separate work. Whilst you can then still see glaring similarities, you will also enjoy the extra interpretation the new director adds.

In some ways this approach worked for The Mechanic, but you could also not get away from the fact that Statham captured brilliantly the broodiness and detachment of the Bronson character in the original. Frankly it is hard to ask the question “was it as good as the original” as the new version of The Mechanic is such a good film in its own right.