Submarines..you wouldn’t get me in one!

A friend who is crazy about submarine flicks gave me this film to watch and what I found was a very interesting horror film based around a WWII American submarine. As the film begins the submarine picks up 3 mysterious strangers from a ship wreck and then things start getting strange.

The confined atmosphere of the submarine adds a lot to the tension of this film and unlike your standard sort of Ghost story, the haunted can’t just pack the family Truckster and runaway to a Motel 6 in the Middle of the night!

I won’t ruin the film for you by telling you how it ends, but it stands up to the Horror test very well.

This is a very funny film about a man who loses his job and ends up inadvertently working as a Hit Man for the local mob. Along the way he meets a traveller who he persuades to do the actual killing for him, as he can’t quite stomach the job.

Not exactly The Godfather but a very quirky and well written film with some delightfully funny scenes.

Leonardo was “Great” as Gatsby but what was with all the Nasty sounding Hip Hop?

I was always very affected by the F. Scott Fitzgerald book of The Great Gatsby, although when I first read it at 14 I thought it was a tale of undying love, now middle-aged I think it was more about what a mega-bitch Daisy was!

I was looking forward to this big budget film. I was a little disappointed with the film made of the book in the seventies starring Robert Redford and expected this “Titanic” production would redeem Hollywood’s treatment of the book.

The film itself was absolutely brilliant and captured every subtle nuance of the book. The characters were just as I had always imagined them and the acting performances were superb.

The film was utterly ruined by a dismal choice of music for the soundtrack. In the first hour the films brilliance was soiled by completely inappropriate nasty sounding hip hop, not a tune from the era as you would expect, but some gangster rapper chanting away about killing someone or other. In the second half of the film for some reason this seemed to stop and the score actually fitted the movie. Now don’t get me wrong, I quite like hip hop, but it was completely out of place in this film. Maybe they realised this in the second hour? Very strange.

I buy a lot of DVD’s and this is certainly one I “would” purchase, but they will have to get rid of the ridiculous music soundtrack first. I am hoping for a DVD with a “nasty rap off” option.

Ok this movie is scary! Don’t watch it late on a Saturday night in the wee small hours as I did and make sure the cat is put to bed and not going to  suddenly leap on your lap at the most frightening part…

Based sort of on the true lives of Paranormal Investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, the film follows one of their most famous cases of a house haunted by several malignant spirits. I’m not exactly buying into the whole ghosts-exist-this-really-happened argument, but the investigators featured in the film were at least real.

This film resembled Poltergeist in a lot of ways and I have a feeling the original film was also based on this case. Basically a large family move into a large old house and then start being terrorized by thumps in the night. We learn the house has had a terrible history, you know the standard sort of thing!

A scene from A Soft Touch

A very funny and interesting Scottish film which tells three loosely connected stories.

In story number one Boab is having a bad day. He gets kicked out of his football team, his parents ask him to move out, he loses his job and his girlfriend dumps him for another bloke. Suffering from his bad day Boab sits in a pub drowning his sorrows and runs into god complete with Scottish accent and colourful swearing. God decides he’s had enough of him just letting everything go bad for him without trying to stop it and turns Boab into a fly. Boab uses his new fly-guise to wreck havoc and revenge.

In story number two we meet A soft touch and follow his marriage falling apart due to his  unfaithful wife. In the end he of course just gets back with her, despite her having him beaten up and variously humiliated.

Story Number three is by far the weirdest: in a bolt of lightning a LSD addled young man swaps places with a new born baby and wakes up in the mothers arms. After keeping his peace for some time he finally speaks up (the baby is a very cute puppet) and tells his new mother he’d like to go to the pub instead of going to the park!

When I first received this review title I thought it was some sort of weird Stars Wars porn flick (ie. Skywalker ranch)! But then I discovered it was something quite different.

I don’t know..are we sick of these “found Footage” films yet? This was not a bad film, maintained tension well, turned out quite interesting, but I don’t know..I’ve seen it all before.

When such films were first being made (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Gamera..I mean Cloverfield etc.) it was a way of generating extra tension and making us watch the screen intently as tapes dropped in and out. I am slowly starting to just find it cheap and irritating, almost like the film maker was too lazy to make a film properly.

Not a bad plot and the final discovery will have you clutching your chair and all that of course, just wish they’d made the same movie in a traditional narrative style.

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.