Open Water (2004)

A hard hitting documentary about an innovative new approach to couples therapy.

Open Water is a 2004 thriller directed by Chris Kentis and starring Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis.

I love studio marketing strategies. Occasionally they hit the mark, but more often than not they make hilariously little sense. Open Water was marketed as “The Blair Witch Project meets Jaws”, I assume because it’s filmed on a digital handycam and there’s sharks in it. But it’s there that the similarities end.

Open Water is in fact a pretty effective thriller. I guess the other thing it has in common with Jaws and Blair Witch is that it was made on a very tight budget, and like Jaws, employs the ‘less is more’ approach to building tension. The ‘enemies’ of the piece, the sharks, are glimpsed only briefly as they surface near the stranded couple or brush past their legs. These jump scares are very effective. I particularly liked the moments when Chris and Susan put their scuba masks on and peer below the water. At first, it seems like only one small shark is lurking down there, but each time they peer beneath the waves there are more sharks gathering below.

This film plays into a fear of mine – being stranded in the middle of the ocean (especially the scenes at night). I’m not a strong swimmer, so I wouldn’t last long having to tread water for hours on end.
The lighting during the scene at night is brilliant. It’s pitch darkness punctuated only by flashes of lightning. It amps up the tension perfectly – they can’t see, so neither can we.

I also really like the efforts the film makes to make a statement on human nature – the couple, growing desperate and exhausted, begin to uselessly blame each other for their predicament. I couldn’t help but laugh at the moment where Susan yells “I wanted to go skiing!”

It occasionally goes a little deeper into their relationship, which I also liked. There’s a great moment where Chris, in sheer frustration begins to scream at the ocean around him. I love Susan’s reaction to it – she looks both understanding and annoyed. You know she feels the same way, she is just handling it differently.

I always love films that show the cruel irony of nature – Chris and Susan are dehydrated but surrounded by water they can’t drink. And the film is terrifying because it’s so real. There’s no big Great White menace circling slowly out in the darkness. There are just scores of smaller sharks (I don’t know about you, but if I was stranded on the ocean miles from rescue and running out of hope, any species of shark with its eye on me would have me shitting myself). I love that the sharks bide their time – they simply swarm beneath the couple, waiting. They know they are the top of the food chain in this particular situation.

Unfortunately the film has some stuff working against it. For one thing, the soundtrack is really odd. During a couple of scenes that are supposed to be quite tense and desperate, the film makers use this Polynesian choir that is almost upbeat. It’s so out of place it’s almost comical.

And I don’t like the way the film cuts back to goings on back in Hawaii. At times it’s just random shots of lizards on rocks or palm trees swaying in the breeze, but we also get scenes back at the boat, where the diving guide discovers Chris and Susan’s belongings and realises they are missing. I can only assume the film makers did this to trick us into thinking that maybe the couple will be rescued, but I found these scenes unnecessary primarily because they break the tension. The film would have been far more effective if we the audience were trapped with the stranded couple.

Anyway, after one of the final cuts back to the couple we see that Chris has died due to blood loss from a small bite from one of the sharks. It’s a really nice moment from Susan as she begins to cry and pushes him away. I then love the final reveal – Susan once again puts on her scuba mask and looks into the water, and we see scores of sharks circling right below her. I love that she simply resigns herself to her fate, and slowly removes her scuba gear and sinks beneath the water. It’s a chilling moment that is again somewhat ruined by that stupid choir music. It’s like the film makers weren’t confident enough to simply let the scene play out in silence.

And the epilogue is really bizarre. We see a freshly caught shark being carved up with a knife – it’s fins are cut off and it’s then gutted. It’s supposed to again be some kind of statement about nature, but it comes across more like “Hey you murdering little bastards, you may have won this round...but I feel a hankering for shark fin soup tonight! Mwahahahahaha!”

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

What the hell does Ridley Scott have against horses?

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a 2014 epic directed by Ridley Scott and starring Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver.

This film has got to set some kind of record for most violent acts against horses. I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to any kind of film violence, but a couple of scenes in this had even me shaking my head. I don’t mind big battle scenes where men on horseback charge each other and both men and steeds are killed in the ensuing chaos. I don’t mind it because I’ve seen it in so many movies it barely even registers anymore and my reptilian brain knows it’s all just foam latex and CGI.

But there’s two scenes in Exodus that feature horses getting slaughtered for no apparent reason. The first is the tidal wave that comes to swallow up Pharaoh’s army after Moses has parted the Red Sea. For some reason, Ridley Scott decides to have a horse bolting away from the wave, and we see the damn thing get washed away quite brutally. Was this to show the force of the wave? The height of the wave? It’s a goddamn tidal wave. We know it’s big and powerful because thirty seconds later we see a freakin army get swamped by it.

The second is Moses’ horse after he’s been swamped by the wave and Moses washes up on the beach. For some insane reason he looks out into the water and we see his horse being ripped apart by sharks. The scene is not overly gory, it’s just maddeningly unnecessary. It serves absolutely no purpose in the film.

Anyway, unexplained gratuitous equine violence aside, on to the film. Ridley Scott is my all time favourite director. I think he’s brilliant, unique, extremely talented and makes interesting, thought provoking and entertaining films.

So it pains me to say that I didn’t enjoy Exodus: Gods and Kings. Aside from some brilliant production design and some few-and-far-between moments, for the most part the film is confusing and dull.

Although it clocks in and over two and a half hours, it seems like a 4 hour film that’s been massacred in the editing room. Characters make unexplained decisions that make little sense, transitions between locations and scenes are sometimes jarring, an early plotline goes nowhere...the list goes on. The entire second act of the film is just a jumbled, confusing mess. No sooner could I latch on to the story and settle in, thinking it was finally going to make sense, the film would transition to something else and never resolve the thought it began. Watching the film is sort of like trying to carry on a conversation with someone in the latter stages of severe dementia. They can’t keep a train of thought, trail off in the middle of sentences and tell stories that don’t have points or conclusions. The film had four screen writers, two of whom did rewrites, and it shows.

And, it’s like Ridley Scott has a deal with the studios – they get him to whack a big set piece battle at the beginning of his films, and then once that’s out of the way he’s free to make the film he actually set out to make (see Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood). The battle at the beginning of Exodus is easily the best part of the film, unfortunately aside from setting up a sort of rivalry between Ramses (Joel Edgerton) and Moses (Christian Bale), it has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It’s completely abstract from everything that follows. What’s more, it doesn’t even set up the rivalry all that well. At least in films like Gladiator and Robin Hood the battles at the start had some place in the overall story. They made sense.

Not much in Exodus makes any sense. As I’ve said, it seems like a much longer movie that has had huge chunks of exposition excised. Probably the most jarring example of this is Moses’ wedding. In the space of about ten minutes of screen time, he’s gone from being exiled in the desert, to being taken in by the villagers, to being madly in love and married. It’s incredibly rushed and doesn’t allow you to invest at all in his wife’s character or his relationship with her.

Slightly less jarring but nonetheless confusing is Ramses sudden decision to not trust Moses after Moses has returned from Pithen with the Viceroy. At least during this scene Moses seems as confused as I was that he was suddenly ejected from the room with all the servants leaving Ramses and the Viceroy to scheme and plot his exile. I get the basic gist of it, but again, the whole sequence leading up to Moses exile to the desert seems horribly rushed.

The film has some good points. As we’ve come to expect from Ridley Scott, the film is visually stunning and extremely well made. Everything about the film is polished – the production design, the costuming, the special effects. It has some superb stunt work and stunning visuals involving large scale battles and sandstorms. And of course the plague of locusts, the Nile turning to blood, all that stuff looks awesome. The panoramic shots of Alexandria and Pithen are an incredible blend of model work, practical effects and CGI. I really struggled to tell where the real and the fake merged. Ancient Egypt has never looked so amazing, and so real. It’s really brought to life.

The performances are mostly good. Christian Bale has become adept at playing characters who are batshit crazy yet relatable and that we can sympathise with, and he does that to its full effect with his portrayal of Moses. Joel Edgerton is also good. He’s not among my favourite actors, but he plays Ramses as scarily intimidating yet childishly pathetic. It’s a nice performance. And John Turturro is fantastic as Seti. He’s not in the film very long, but he’s a joy to watch in every scene he’s in.

Another performance worth mentioning is God-kid. Firstly, I loved that Ridley Scott went with neither man nor woman to portray God. He threw a kid in there. This could have been laughable, except that the child actor is incredible. He’s by turns menacing and benevolent, often both in the same breath. I really can’t do the performance justice here, the kid is simply brilliant.

Ridley Scott dedicates the film to his brother Tony, who tragically committed suicide. Knowing this at the end, the scenes between Ramses and Moses suddenly took on a deeper meaning. I wish he had of spent more time on the relationship between these two men than on trying to make a Biblical epic in the vein of The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur. This was two and half really disappointing hours.

Noah (2014)

Russell Crowe gets drunk on a beach, Logan Lerman has the shortest relationship in cinema history and Anthony Hopkins goes on an epic quest to find his favourite berries.

Noah is a 2014 film directed by Darren Aranofsky and starring Russell “I’m finally in an epic not directed by Ridley Scott” Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone and Anthony Hopkins.

Darren Aranofsky is one of those directors critics fall over themselves to praise. It’s like they’ll lose their status as ‘important’ if they fail to use words like ‘artist’, and ‘visionary’ when describing his films. Ever since his debut, Requiem for a Dream (which is a terrible film) he’s become one of those directors that can do no wrong. Every film he makes is ‘bold’, ‘unconventional’, or in some cases yes even a ‘masterpiece’. But aside from The Wrestler, which has some merit (and coincidentally is considered his most ‘conventional’ film), his movies are fucking awful. Requiem for a Dream is not a savagely realistic portrayal of drug use and its consequences. It’s a pretentious director’s view of drug use and its consequences. Likewise, Noah is not thought-provoking. It’s a confusing mess of bad acting and clichés masquerading as a film featuring great acting and unexpected twists.

I did enjoy Russell Crowe’s performance. He spends most of the film going increasingly insane, and I always enjoy an actor that can pull this off. He plays Noah like a delusional zealot, utterly convinced his ‘Creator’ has entrusted him with this vital mission to save the innocent creatures of the Earth from a cataclysmic flood. In fact I would have enjoyed the film far more if it had of all been in his head, with him building this giant ark only to have no animals show up and no flood and then just descend into complete insanity. It would have been far more enjoyable.

As it is, the film is played deadly serious by all concerned and it ends up being fairly unbearable, clocking in at close to two and a half hours. I often refer to films as the cinematic equivalent of migraine headaches (pretty much any Baz Luhrman film). Noah is more like the cinematic equivalent of constipation. It’s uncomfortable, even painful at times, but you know that eventually, inevitably, it will come to an end.

And for a film about saving all the animals on the planet, it’s odd that the animals are pretty much an afterthought. There’s only really two scenes featuring them – the first showing all the birds arriving at the ark, the second all the land animals. But once they’re on board, Noah and his wife put them to sleep with some sedating herbal concoction and they’re never heard from again.

Besides Crowe, the performances are all pretty average. It’s like he’s the only one who realised he was in a bizarre film so adapted his performance accordingly. Jennifer Connelly, who I normally really enjoy, seems to spend half the film looking morose, the other half in hysterics. Her whole performance is just off. And Ray Winstone, another actor I really like, couldn’t be hammier if he were covered in a cherry glaze. But far from that making his performance enjoyable, he just comes off as irritating whenever he is on screen.

My biggest gripe though is simply that everything about the film is incredibly dull. The story is just as drab as the colour palette and the whole mess just drags on way too long. A pretty rotten way to spend two and half hours.

Lone Survivor (2013)

Training to be a Navy SEAL looks really freakin hard, Eric Bana pretends to be American again, and Mark Wahlberg misses a golden opportunity to kill a guy with a duck.

Lone Survivor is a 2013 war film directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster.

Since the American wars in the Middle East began in earnest way back in 2001, Hollywood has regularly churned out films reminding us of just how heroic American soldiers are and what Terrible, Evil Monsters those Muslim extremists are. It’s no giant secret that the US military provides funding support to Hollywood films it believes will act as effective recruitment ads. In the same way that Navy enlistments went through the roof in 1986 after Top Gun, I reckon it’s a fair bet that Lone Survivor will have beefed up young guys falling over each other to become Navy SEALS.

However.

When I take my Pretentious Armchair Cynic glasses off, Lone Survivor is one hell of a good film. It’s got solid performances, a fantastic score, and balls to the wall action scenes that pull no punches. Once it gets going the tension level doesn’t really let up until the final frame.

Lone Survivor is the true story of the doomed ‘Operation Red Wings’, during which a four man SEAL team’s mission to whack a Taliban commander went horribly wrong because of a herd of goats. I’m always amazed when reading true war stories at how random, seemingly harmless things can throw enormous spanners in the works of intricately planned military operations.

One of the best scenes is early on. Two of the SEALs, (played by Taylor Kitsch and Emile Hirsch) challenge each other to a foot race. It’s a small, almost throwaway moment in the film, but it’s one that stayed with me. The music during this scene is beautiful, and the scene shows, without using any dialogue, the camaraderie between these men and the way they push their bodies to the limits without hesitation. It sets up how tough these guys really are for later, when we see the real punishment begin to be inflicted.

Another great scene is a little later. After the SEALs’ mission has been compromised by a bunch of goat herders stumbling across them, they are desperately trying to contact their commanding officer to get advice on what to do. They can’t reach the base on their secure radio so they try an unsecured satellite phone, but it keeps dropping out. What I love is that it’s another example of something minor becoming a major problem for these highly trained and supposedly technologically advanced warriors. A secret mission that probably took months to plan and cost millions to execute comes undone because of a lousy phone connection - it’s because they can’t reach their commander that the SEALs make the decision that will ultimately kill three of them – they let the goat herders go.

Another great scene comes shortly after this. Because their mission has been compromised, the SEALs need to get the hell out of there. They hike to the top of a mountain to try and get a better phone connection to call for evacuation, but find it’s a ‘false summit’ and they still can’t get the phone to work. It’s too late anyway as they are surrounded by Taliban fighters, so they dig in and wait. I love that they try and delay the inevitable for as long as they can. They know that once the first shots are fired they are pretty much fucked. It’s an incredibly tense scene. I like the claustrophobic way Berg uses the SEALs looking through their gun scopes to show the Taliban fighters closing in. There’s a fantastic little moment right before Mark Wahlberg’s character fires the first shot, where the Taliban whose head he is aiming at appears to look right at him for a split second. I was literally holding my breath.

I also love how quickly the situation then descends into chaos. The SEALs do their best to go for precision head shots as they are faced with a barrage of fire from all sides. They fire a few shots and then quickly move to try and keep their location hidden for as long as they can. It’s an amazing scene and shows why these guys are considered the cream of the crop of the US military; they’re not guys you want to fuck with.

But this doesn’t last long as the Taliban fighters close in and the SEALs find themselves backed up against a cliff.

This leads to another amazing scene as they realise they have no choice but to jump. The following 30 seconds are a brutally effective piece of stunt work. We feel every cracking bone and thudding skull as they tumble down a rocky hillside, smashing into trees and rocks and each other. This is such an effective stunt that I wasn’t surprised to read that Mark Wahlberg’s stunt double ended up in hospital with a punctured lung.

Not surprisingly though, it’s when the film begins to do away with realism in favour of drama that it begins to falter. After Mark Wahlberg’s character is rescued from certain death and taken in by some Afghan villagers, we get some fairly cheesy scenes where he befriends a young boy (who eventually saves his life again by handing him a knife as he’s being strangled by a Taliban fighter) and becomes the inspiration for the ‘good’ Afghan guys to engage in a prolonged firefight with the ‘bad’ Afghan guys. None of which apparently really happened. He was indeed taken in by the villagers but there was no dramatic show down and last minute US army helicopters to the rescue. It’s exciting film making, but it rings a little false given that the rest of the movie leading up to it is so damn brilliant partly because it sticks very close to the facts.

Although this bit does contain a scene that is hilarious, and is a much needed comedic respite after the emotionally draining brutality that makes up 90 per cent of the film. As Mark Wahlberg is resting in the village, he asks the young Afghan boy for a knife so he can remove some shrapnel lodged in his leg. The boy nods enthusiastically and runs off, only to return holding a duck. It’s a wonderfully absurd little moment made even funnier when the boy’s father comes in and mistakenly thinks that Wahlberg is asking for a knife so he can kill the duck so the guy goes to cut its head off. I love the way Wahlberg frantically yells at them not to kill the duck.

But what the hell is with Hollywood making actors who play Middle Eastern characters wear black eyeliner? It’s really weird. The guy who plays the boy’s father wears so much eyeliner he looks like the pharaoh from The Mummy.

Anyway, this is a really solid film and I’ll definitely watch it again. The final moments are particularly good – a short montage showing the real Navy SEALs the film’s story is based on. It’s a visceral reminder that this film is based on real guys who died far too young and left families behind. Two emotionally draining hours well spent. And I’m really glad the duck survived.

Fury (2014)

Brad Pitt is still ripped, Shia LeBeouf seems to think crying a lot will get him an Oscar, and lots of Nazis get killed. Lots and lots and lots of Nazis.

Fury is a 2014 war film directed by David Ayer and starring Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena and Shia LeBeouf.

The violence in Fury makes Saving Private Ryan look like a doddy old Aunt’s home movies.  It’s frequent and it’s brutal. In the opening minute or two we witness a guy being repeatedly stabbed in the face. Repeatedly. In the face. And it just gets worse. People are shot, stabbed, beaten, burned and blown to pieces regularly throughout the film. The American GI’s in Fury are not a Band of Brothers. The film is set during the closing days of the war, as the American forces are closing in on Berlin. The American troops here are battle-weary, dirty, shell-shocked and angry. They don’t want medals or promotions. They just want the Germans to hurry up and surrender so everyone can go home.

The fanaticism that existed in Nazi Germany has always fascinated and horrified me. None more so than what existed as the Third Reich was in its death throes. In Fury we see this madness all around – children in army uniforms, ‘traitors’ hung from telegraph poles, Waffen SS troops fighting to their last breaths even as they are run over by advancing American tanks.

Fury employs some war movie clichés and stereotypes, but it does it so well I didn’t mind too much. It’s sort of like director David Ayer wanted to make the classic war movie he grew up watching, but an updated version, a more accurate version. A version that lets you know what it really looks like when a decomposing body gets minced under the treads of a tank. It’s pretty fucking ugly.

Anyway, in Fury we have the battle-hardened Sergeant (Pitt), the religious guy (Shia LeBoeuf), and the ‘new guy’, (Logan Lerman). One of the film’s more disturbing scenes is early on. As his initiation, the guys make the new guy clean the inside of the tank. He basically has to scrub the remains of the guy he’s replacing off the seat he will be occupying. As he scrubs the blood away he comes across the remains of the guy’s face, which has sort of been peeled off like a mask. It’s a fairly horrific image.

The story revolves around Pitt’s tank crew as they set out on missions to secure a couple of towns and crossroads. Since that is what pretty much every World War II movie is about, Ayer wisely focuses on the action and the characters rather than the details of their mission. He also wisely doesn’t go for the ‘big battle’, there’s no heroic charge towards enemy lines or massive tank battles that get confusing and lost in spectacle. The action all revolves around their tank (which they’ve named Fury).

The film reminded me a little of The Hurt Locker, in that it is basically made up of several set pieces, with a few connecting scenes in between. The first is a fantastic tank battle that pits Fury and three other American tanks against some German ground troops with anti-tank guns. It’s clear early on that Pitt’s crew know what they’re doing. It’s all by the book, and brutally efficient. They spot the enemy, zero in, and fire. Rinse, repeat, and advance.

My favourite of these set pieces is one that sees Fury set out with the other three tanks again, but this time instead of ground troops they encounter a far superior German ‘Tiger’ tank. At the beginning of the film we’re told that the German tanks were much better armed and armoured than the American tanks. This is made very clear when the Tiger makes short work of the other three tanks and their crews, leaving Fury all alone. What I love about this scene is that it comes down to the skill of the tank crews rather than the machinery. Pitt’s character masterfully uses the American tank’s superior speed to manoeuvre around behind the Tiger and attack its weak spot at the rear. I can’t do the suspense of the scene justice. I was literally gripping the arm rests.

As brilliant as the battle scenes are, the stuff that connects them is the where the film starts to falter. There’s a scene in a house in a ruined town where Pitt and the new guy meet two German women. The new guy shows his sensitive side by playing the piano and then gets laid. The scene is played out like tough-as-nails Pitt is going to rape one of the women, but of course he doesn’t, he instead gives her food and cigarettes and they share a meal together. The scene is not bad, it just rings false. Plus, it’s woefully predictable. The new guy befriends the German girl and promises to write to her, so of course she’s going to die. And sure enough, no sooner do all the American guys get safely out of the building, it gets shelled and she dies.

And I can’t bring myself to like Shia LeBeouf. His acting range is extremely limited. In this film he spends half his screen time crying. He seems to permanently have a tear rolling down his muddy cheek. Seriously, I’ve never seen someone cry so much in a war film. It gets really irritating. It’s like he figured that because he was in a war film he needed his lines to be heartfelt, so he says them all while teary-eyed. He's about as deep as a fucking contact lens.

And in his earlier film Harsh Times, which was also about the dehumanising effect of exposure to wartime violence, David Ayer at least gave the main character some motivation. We saw how his experiences in the Gulf War shaped his behaviour throughout the film. Fury doesn’t have that, so when we see Brad Pitt make the decision to stay and fight against impossible odds rather than abandon his tank, we have absolutely no idea why. It makes the final ‘Custer’s last stand’ scene a bit ridiculous. They could have abandoned their crippled tank and made it back to the American lines, regrouped, and lived to fight another day. Instead we get a silly scene where they all heroically band together behind their Sergeant and decide to fight to the death. 

This scene is even more puzzling because earlier in the film Pitt tells new guy that he made a promise to his men when they first met – that he would get them through the war alive. And that he failed in that promise when the gunner that new guy replaces ended up dying. What the? Is he just so intent on not doing things by halves that he figures now he’ll just make sure the rest of them die too?

I couldn’t help but feel with this scene that maybe Ayer was making a statement about the fanaticism on the German side by having the Americans show the same sort of nihilism.

Maybe. But it turns what is a brutally realistic war film into a sort of 300 Spartans against the Persian army stand off. It even has a vertical camera pull back showing the smouldering tank surrounded by dead Germans, an almost identical shot to the closing shot of Zack Snyder’s 300.

And as well filmed as the scene is, it stretches belief far too much. So many times in war films we see a tank taken out by a guy simply dropping a grenade through the hatch. I struggled to believe an entire battalion of Waffen SS troops wouldn’t have thought of doing that to an immobilised tank. A couple of guys actually do open the hatch, but all they do is peer inside and wait to be shot in the face. Plus, when we see the German troops advancing, Ayer makes the point of showing half of them carrying anti-tank rockets. Yet during the prolonged shoot out that follows, these weapons are mysteriously nowhere to be seen.

Another thing bothered me. New guy’s character (his name in the film is Norman). Norman starts out as the wet-behind-the-ears recruit who deplores violence. By the end, he’s happily machine gunning Nazis left right and centre, at one point even declaring that he’s started to enjoy it. I understand this is supposed to be some kind of comment about him becoming desensitized yadda yadda, but I just didn’t buy it. I would have preferred something less predictable.

I mentioned before that Ayer seems inspired by war films he’s seen. I think that is ultimately what keeps this film from being great. It seems to chop between being a visceral look at war time violence, (ala Saving Private Ryan), a dense character study on the mental trauma of war (ala The Thin Red Line) and a gung ho macho war flick (ala pretty much any pre-Platoon war film). Oddly though, it reminded me a lot of the Sam Fuller war film The Big Red One, albeit with slightly less likeable characters.

Small gripes aside, Fury is an excellent film. Brad Pitt is superb in it. He's matured into a far better actor than I ever thought he would become. The production design is beyond good. It's awesome. Saving Private Ryan may have set the bar for realism, but Fury leaps right over it. Everything about the film works.

It goes without saying that real WWII veteran Fuller did it better (no scene in Fury has the emotional impact of Lee Marvin carrying the dying girl around on his shoulders), but David Ayer has made a gritty wartime drama that has some of the best action scenes ever committed to film. This is just over two hours very well spent.

Alien (1979)

An alien mistakes a towing vessel for the Contiki cruise ship he was booked to go on, gets tormented with flame throwers and cattle prods, and is then blasted out into space. That’s what you get for booking through cheapholidays.com.

Alien is a 1979 sci fi horror film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, and Ian Holm.

It didn’t surprise me to read somewhere that the original idea that sparked Alien was a recurring nightmare one of the writers experienced. The whole film plays out like one. And it’s excellent.

Alien succeeds at being a fascinating science fiction film and a superb horror film all at once. It’s a great example of ‘less-is-more’ (the Alien itself has very little screen time, but every second is wonderfully effective), and employs the lost art of the long, slow build up, amping up the tension of several scenes to absolute breaking point. The film scared the beejesus out of me when I first saw it as a kid. I still get squirmy during the last half hour when Ripley is alone on the ship being stalked by the Alien.

This film is an early example of what Ridley Scott does so well – establishes a believable world. This is far from the clean universe of so much of the other science fiction that existed in 1979. Scott’s universe is grimy and lived-in. The Nostromo is like an oil rig – we have a dishevelled, working class crew and machinery that seems old and worn down. These people aren’t out bravely exploring new worlds; they are company workers eager to get home after a long-haul and keen for a meal and a paycheck. This makes them so much more relatable than cardboard characters in jumpsuits. And thus the film is so much scarier when we start to see them get picked off one by one by the Alien.

The Alien itself is a wonder of design and special effects. Ridley Scott masterfully overcomes the limits of costume design and budget by keeping the Alien in the shadows for most of the film. This makes it all the more terrifying, and makes the jump scares work perfectly when it lashes out from those shadows. But what I love most is how the creature is explained by the Company android, Ash (Ian Holm). Somehow his admiration of the Alien and his description of it just make it all the more horrifying. I love his line about the Alien’s “structural perfection… matched only by its hostility.” And I love his parting thoughts to the rest of the crew about their chances of survival: “You have my sympathies.”

And I really love the slow build up. It’s over an hour into the film before the Alien makes its first kill.

This first kill is undoubtedly my favourite, though they are all so effectively done I had a hard time deciding. But I just love Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering through the ship looking for the cat. This scene employs what has become a very tired (and often parodied) horror movie cliché – the character who gets separated from the group. Once Brett wanders off by himself we know he’s fucked. But Ridley Scott knows that we know. So he teases out this scene to an almost unbearable length. And when the Alien finally does emerge, I love that the killing is all off-screen. I love the way the focus is instead on the cat watching Brett being killed. The cat has this wonderful look on its face – sort of a mix of stunned curiosity and utter indifference.

Another almost uncomfortably tense scene is where Dallas (Tom Skerritt) goes into the air ducts to try and flush out the Alien. Again, we know how this will end, so we get another long, drawn out sequence where Dallas crawls through narrow, claustrophobic tunnels, the only lighting the flickering flames at the end of his flamethrower. It’s a wonderful use of light and shadow. But what I love most about this scene is that Ridley Scott keeps pulling us out of the action and showing us the other characters watching a ‘motion tracker’ device. Instead of cutting to shots of the Alien stalking through the tunnels, the only thing we see is a blip on a monitor showing it slowly advancing on Dallas.

As much as I love the Alien and the claustrophobia, my favourite part of the film is actually the first hour, where the Nostromo’s crew is awoken from cryosleep by a distress call that sends them down to the surface of LV-426 to investigate. Again, it’s the slow build up that I like. And again, it’s the android Ash’s dialogue during this sequence that makes it all the more creepy and effective. While Dallas, Kane and Lambert are going off to explore the derelict ship the signal is coming from, Ripley discovers that what they thought was a distress call might actually be a warning, a beacon someone set up to tell people to stay the hell away from the planet. I love Ash’s cold, calculating reaction to this: “the time it takes to get there…they’ll know if it’s a warning or not, yes?”

That said I’ll always have a soft spot for the film’s final sequence, where Ripley is finally alone with the Alien on the ship. She sets the Nostromo’s self-destruct so that she can escape in the shuttle but then hears the cat’s frantic meows over the PA. So, with strobe lights flashing she goes back and tries to reverse the self-destruct sequence, but it’s too late. What makes this scene so utterly terrifying is that she now has to run around the ship, not knowing where the Alien is. And she no longer has any help to call on. She’s alone. So you know the Alien has no one left to stalk except her. My favourite bit in this scene is right at the end, when she finally spots the Alien. In her panic she’s dropped the cat carrier and goes back for it, but the Alien has beaten her to it. I love the way the Alien stares at the cat in the cage. Again, it’s the way the two creatures regard each other with that curiosity that only animals possess that I like.

And the closing moments of the film will always be among my favourite scenes in any film, ever. Ripley has finally escaped in the shuttle and blasted the Alien out into space. She’s about to put herself into cryosleep for the journey home, but she stops to record a final message on the ship’s log. It’s a wonderfully reflective, quiet moment to close an incredibly tense film. I love the way she tiredly says, “This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo…signing off.”

Two terrifying hours extremely well spent.

Aliens (1986)

Ants don’t live in hives, Hudson, you stupid redneck. Bees have hives. You got that? Bees!

Aliens is a 1986 sci fi action film directed by James Cameron and starring Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn and Paul Reiser.

There’s about 25 minutes in the middle of Aliens that remains one of the most nailbiting sequences in any movie I’ve ever seen. What makes it all the more compelling is the slow build up to it (which is lessened somewhat in the director’s cut, but I’ll get to that later). It’s the part where the marines, overconfident and cocky looking forward to their ‘bug hunt’, are methodically working their way through the deserted space station looking for any surviving colonists. The ‘motion trackers’ are a brilliant bit of movie-making. The whole sequence is incredibly tense.

I love the way it eventually explodes when the aliens first appear and start to make mincemeat of the gung ho marines. The frantic retreat to the APC is a brilliantly executed action sequence. Everything about it is perfect. And the bit following it, where the survivors realise they are trapped on the planet facing an enemy they can’t defeat, is wonderful.

This brings me to one addition to the director’s cut that has always bugged me. It’s the bit showing the colony before the alien attack, where we are first introduced to Newt (Carrie Henn). What made the marines’ search through the colony so suspenseful in the original cut was that sense of the unknown – the mystery as to what happened there. That suspense is ruined in the director’s cut. It also slows the pace of the film’s first half – it simply takes too long to get to the first appearance of the aliens.

And I think the theatrical cut clocks a far better pace. I appreciate the extra scenes in the director’s cut, but I can also appreciate why they were taken out in the first place. Unlike the massacred Alien 3 theatrical cut, the scenes in the Aliens director’s cut were cut for reasons of pacing. As such, I do actually think the theatrical cut is the better version. But, I do think that the scene where it’s explained that while Ripley spent half a century floating in space, her daughter died should have been left in. It goes a long way to explaining Ripley’s later relationship with Newt.

The theatrical cut has the same kind of pacing as James Cameron’s earlier The Terminator – relentless. The director’s cut sacrifices some of that for the sake of a bit of added character development and some nifty shenanigans with remote sentry guns.

Anyway, I could go on all day about the director’s cut vs the theatrical cut. My small gripes about pacing aside, Aliens is a very near perfect film. It’s certainly a textbook example of what a great sequel should be – it pays homage to the original while building on the alien universe and taking things in a new direction. Where Ridley Scott’s Alien was a tense, brooding horror film, James Cameron’s sequel is a brilliantly executed action film that stays true to the horrific elements of the first.

What’s so brilliant in Aliens and what I love about these earlier James Cameron films is the allegory. Aliens draws parallels with the American war in Vietnam – a technologically superior military force gradually worn down and slaughtered by an enemy that may not be technologically superior, but that utilises its environment better and has overwhelming advantage in numbers. There’s also the disconnect between the Lieutenant watching the combat unfold on a monitor, and the grunts in the field. I love the scene where he uselessly barks orders into a headset while they are being slaughtered.

Just getting back to the way that James Cameron builds on things from the first film, I love the Weyland Yutani company android in this film. After Ash in Alien, we expect another evil Company plant. And at the beginning Ripley treats him accordingly (side note – I first saw this movie before I saw Alien, so I couldn’t understand why she was treating him like this, I thought she was just being mean). But Bishop (Lance Henriksen) turns out to be one of the film’s most memorable characters and one of the most heroic.

That’s another thing I love about this film – the memorable characters. Far from being mere cannon fodder, all the ‘grunts’ have distinct personalities and believable relationships – you have no trouble imagining these people have fought together before and come to trust each other.

But my favourite character is actually Newt. I dig a survivor and she is that and then some. A lot of the time I find kids in movies irritating to say the least. But Carrie Henn is no whining, screaming Dakota Fanning. She plays the haunted Newt brilliantly. I love her vacant stare when Ripley first speaks to her. I also love the fact that she is not awed by the marines, and doesn’t immediately feel safe around them and their guns. She has seen firsthand what they are facing. I love it when Ripley tries to reassure her, telling her the marines are highly trained and well-armed. She simply replies “it won’t make any difference.”

But I also enjoy the more subtle stuff with her character. I like the way she gradually warms to Ripley, and slowly begins to drop her guard and become a little girl again rather than the hardened survivor we first meet. The tiny moment at the end when Ripley rescues her and she unconsciously calls her “Mommy”, breaks my heart every time.

Another brilliant way that James Cameron expands the alien universe is the introduction of the Queen. It’s a masterpiece of special effects design that also succeeds in being a believable character. This is extremely well done in the scenes between Ripley and the Queen where Ripley threatens to torch her eggs. I like the way the Queen conveys her message with simple moves of her head. And I love that this final fight basically comes down to two mothers protecting their young. 

Aliens firmly established James Cameron’s reputation as a very talented director. Whatever version you prefer, the film is a perfect blend of action, horror, and science fiction. Two (or two and a half) hours very well spent.

Alien 3 (1992)

A dangerous alien wreaks havoc on a remote prison planet as a desperate band of survivors struggle to kill it before a murderous corporation can take it back to Earth. But all this is unimportant. The real issue is, Sigourney Weaver shaved her head!

Alien 3 is a 1992 sci fi horror directed by David Fincher and starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S Dutton and a rubber prop that looks like Lance Henriksen

A lot of people hate Alien 3. It unapologetically kills off three of Aliens’ beloved characters, and the original theatrical cut of the film is sometimes a confusing, choppy mess. But I love it. For me, I liked Alien 3’s complete reversal of James Cameron’s sugar coated happy ending to Aliens. I like that the series returned to the bleak hopelessness of the original film. And I also liked the confusion of the big chase-through-tunnels set piece in the theatrical cut. Until I saw the ‘assembly cut’, I mistakenly thought the choppy editing was on purpose, and I applauded the film for being deliberately incoherent.

I’d go as far as to say that Alien 3 is actually a better film than Aliens. Don’t get me wrong, Aliens is a superb action film and it holds up far better than most action films of that decade. To watch it now, you’d never know it was made over 20 years ago. But Alien 3 is a tighter film (when compared to the Aliens director’s cut) and is far more atmospheric. It’s dark, it’s threatening and it’s brilliantly bleak.
Also, Alien 3 was my first exposure to David Fincher, and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. His stylistic touches and directorial flourishes, though in their infancy (he was 26 when he directed this) are unmistakable here.

What I also love about this third instalment is that is deepens the role of the mysterious, shadowy Weyland Yutani ‘Company’. The Company seems to be this all-seeing, omnipresent threat which I thought was a great compliment to the immediacy of the threat of the alien itself. You figured that even if our heroes managed to destroy the xenomorph, the Company was still out there, endlessly pursuing this biological weapon for their nefarious, capitalist purposes.

Another unfair criticism of Alien 3 is that the characters are one-dimensional. This seems to be simply because they all have shaved heads. When I hear this complaint I always wonder if the reviewer watched the same film as me. Yes, there are some peripheral characters that are ‘cannon fodder’ and are fairly unremarkable, but the main characters are all played by fairly accomplished British actors who are far from cookie cutter and are all memorable. There’s Charles Dance as the doctor. He has precious few scenes but he steals them all, especially his monologue about how he came to be the doctor on an isolated prison planet. His joking-but-serious “at least I got off the morphine” is a great line and he delivers it superbly.

And Paul McGann is brilliant as the unhinged prisoner driven mad after witnessing the alien killing one of the other prisoners. I was glad to see his role fleshed out in the ‘assembly cut’. In the theatrical cut he mysteriously disappears –he’s confined to the prison infirmary, and then we never see him again. In the ‘assembly cut’ what happened to his character is finally explained and as such explains a massive chunk of the film that was utterly baffling in the theatrical cut.

Charles S Dutton is also brilliant as the de facto leader of the prisoners. I love his hand-to-hand fight with the alien – he lasts longer than any other character in the entire series and to make it all the more enjoyable, he gives the alien shit as he’s doing so “is that all you got?” He has the film’s best dialogue. His speech to the other prisoners is a highlight, as is his back and forth with Ripley where he explains why he won’t indulge her wish to take the easy way out and have him kill her. It’s a nice call back to her first meeting with him where he tells her he is an inmate because he was a “murderer of women”.

And Sigourney Weaver is of course great in her third outing as Ripley. I particularly liked her quiet reaction to Charles Dance explaining that they found “a mark…a burn” at the scene of one of the prisoners having an unfortunate ‘accident’. And I love the scene where she is going over the ‘black box’ of sorts (the remains of the android, Bishop) and discovers that an alien crash landed with her. It’s a hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment, and it’s brilliant.

And the film also has some nicely poetic moments. The cremation scene in particular is brilliant. Charles S Dutton’s dialogue is superb, Elliot Goldenthal’s score is hauntingly emotive, and the way it’s juxtaposed with the alien birth is just fantastic.

Just getting back to the ‘assembly cut’ and the Company – I also like the race-against-time element that is introduced in the extended version when we find the prisoners actually did manage to trap the alien in the toxic waste silo by burning it out of the tunnels. The Company man informs them via message that they have the alien trapped and requests permission to destroy it. We then get the wonderfully predictable ‘No’ and the reply message that the Company is on its way. I love how this feeds into the other added scenes of the insane Paul McGann setting the alien free. On the one hand, we loathe him because now the alien is on the loose again after they fought so hard to trap it. But we also applaud his actions because we know it would have fallen into the Company’s hands and the Company considers the prisoners expendable anyway.

And the ending is another thing critics of the film moan about. Not only do they do away with Hicks, Newt and Bishop, they go and kill off Ripley as well! The nerve! Even when I first saw this film at 13, I thought it was a brilliantly ballsy move and a fantastic full-circle ending to the series. I loved Ripley’s ultimate sacrifice. I loved that there was a small part of me watching the film thinking ‘she has an alien inside her…how they hell is she going to get out of this one?’ and I loved that the film didn’t deus-ex-machina or find some other cop out miracle medical procedure to remove the alien. I loved her cynical look when the Company rep tells her all they want to do is remove the alien from her and take her home. It’s a brilliant piece of acting. She knows he is full of shit but there’s a tiny shred of hope in her eyes.

My only gripe is not actually with this film. It’s simply that the franchise didn’t end here. This is two hours well spent.

Tora Tora Tora (1970)

Ben Affleck single-handedly wins World War Two while Kate Beckinsale thinks he's dead and...hang on...aw crap I hired the wrong movie!

Tora! Tora! Tora! is a 1970 film directed by Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda and starring way too many people to name here.

It’s a little ridiculous to make a comparison (given that one is a serious attempt at a war film, the other basically a bad romance novel set during a war), but I can’t help it: I’d take this film over Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor any day. One has interesting characters, exciting action, and a well-told story. The other has a love triangle made up of two nitwits and an airhead. One has some unintentional humour. The other would be humorous if it wasn’t so god-awful. One attempts to paint a reasonably accurate picture of a horrific act of aggression. The other one is a horrific act of aggression.

Films today rarely do what Tora Tora Tora does so well – the long, slow build up to the action. I mean basically for the first 90 minutes you watch people sitting around talking. Now, I have a reasonably short attention span, but I wasn’t bored for a minute. Because all the talking perfectly sets the scene for when the action does happen. It’s set up so well that every explosion during the film’s last 40 minutes makes sense. “See, he told you not to park all those planes so close together!!”

There are a few unintentional laughs that I love. There’s a war room where the Americans are using a code breaking machine to decipher Japanese radio traffic. I really dig the guy’s explanation for how the code-breaking machine works. It’s very scientific: “We feed the code in here, it goes round and round in there, then it comes out here.” Brilliant!

And I find people having doors closed in their faces very comedic. The code-breaking guy does this to his secretary a few times over the course of the film – she has this bewildered expression as he barks an order and then slams the door on her. It’s almost spoof-like in its goofiness.

There is also the scene with a Japanese officer describing the plan of attack while shirtless and sweaty, his eyes closed and slowly rubbing his head as he speaks. I love the way the guy behind him slowly backs out of the room and closes the door, and I love that he just continues talking once the guy’s gone. The whole scene is delightfully odd.

It’s the intentional humour that doesn’t work as well. Like the two morons who mistake a Japanese bomber for an American plane: “Get that guy’s number, I’m going to bring him up on charges!” And the military band conductor - as he strikes the last note of the US anthem, the ship beneath him explodes. The comedic tone of the moment is woefully out of place.

And I always admire the logistics of such vast productions. It must have been an incredible task to put this film together. And the film, for the most part makes an effort to tell a balanced story. I like that the Japanese are never depicted as the “bad guys” - you see the cause-and-effect of the political and military decisions that led to their disastrous decision to attack the US naval base. And they are not just the faceless enemy – each of the main Japanese characters is just as fleshed out and interesting, if not more so, as the American participants. Yes, the film has some pro-American sentiment - the most obvious is Yamamoto’s “Americans are a proud and just people” speech, but it’s not always that cut and dried. Mostly it depicts a series of events leading to an inevitable conclusion. The film knows that we know how it ends – so it makes no attempt to hide this and that means that even during it’s slowest scenes, it’s never uninteresting.

In fact it’s the slower bits that I find the most compelling. The Pearl Harbor attack is an incredibly well-staged set piece, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen in other war films, and how it plays out is a no-brainer to anyone with even a passing knowledge of WWII. I like the closed-door discussions and the foreboding series of events leading to the attack – the combination of ignorance and hubris among the US military brass, and the massive ideological divide between the military and the diplomats on the Japanese side.

Plus it ends with possibly the best war-time quote of all time, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto’s famous: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Two and a half hours well spent.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

A giant cheese grater and that William guy who always plays a bad guy do battle with four giant turtles and a rat while that guy from 30 Rock tries to crack onto Megan Fox. If this doesn’t spell ‘good time had by all’ to you, you’re dead inside.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a 2014 film mercifully not directed by Michael Bay and starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, and some voice actors.

When I heard ‘Ninja Turtles’ and ‘Michael Bay’ in the same sentence I wanted to crawl into a hole and hibernate for a thousand years. The Turtles getting the Transformers treatment? I figured it spelled death. But being an insane Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, I went along to see it. And despite the 3D (3D makes me feel like my eyeballs are drunk but the rest of me is sober) I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie.

But let’s get the bad out of the way. Megan Fox as April O’Neal. No. Just…no. I know mental giants who can’t keep their hands off their dicks think she’s hot, but she’s just a nitwit. She brings nothing but a C-cup and her trademark lack of discernible talent to the role. And there’s a really nonsensical moment just after she first meets the Turtles where she doesn’t realise that four giant talking turtles wearing coloured bandannas are the same four turtles she raised in a genetics lab when she was a little girl (and painted the same coloured dots on their shells). She’s not even supposed to be playing an airhead in this movie. The moment is so badly written it’s cringe worthy. Nobody could be that stupid.

Anyway, aside from a few missteps like that the film is incredibly enjoyable. Internet fan boys moaned about the ‘look’ of the turtles here, but I think they’re fine. They are bulked up as per every other superhero movie out there at the moment, but they have distinct personalities and the voice acting is, with one exception, spot on.

The Shredder is also great (though I could have sworn it was Ken Watanabe when he first appears). He is suitably badass and his voice is really creepy.

I also like that this version omits the Casey Jones character, and instead the turtles fill the roles of New York’s ‘vigilantes’. One thing did bug me. Raphael was always my favourite. I identified with the ‘brooding loner’ thing. So I was a little disappointed that in this iteration he is actually the least interesting of the four. His voice also makes him sound like a huge black guy. It’s strangely out of place. It momentarily jarred me out of the film every time he spoke. Maybe it’s just that his Brooklyn wiseguy accent in the 1990 live action film was so perfect I was just expecting something different.

Anyway, it’s a pretty minor complaint. Leonardo and Michelangelo are probably the most fully realised of the bunch. Mikey steals every scene he’s in. Thankfully in this film he’s not relegated to the wisecracking moron role. While some of his jokes fall flat, most really appealed to my juvenile sense of humour and a scene in an elevator is worth the price of admission twice over.

Most of the fight scenes, although really well staged, are filmed in that Bourne Supremacy-jerky way that is off-putting enough in 2D, but this time had me wrenching the 3D glasses off intermittently and blinking like a mental patient to avoid a seizure. Thankfully the major set piece – a fight scene atop an out of control semitrailer hurtling down a mountainside - is superbly filmed and so exciting it had me bouncing in my seat like a hyperactive toddler.

And although the film ends with the expected ‘these days we don’t do movies, we do franchises’ moment (the Shredder is not really dead…wow, didn’t see that one coming), it’s forgivable because it’s such a short snippet of footage you could actually miss it, and the film does work as a standalone movie.

The 1990 live action film remains the best adaptation of the Laird/Eastman comic book foursome, but this film is brief, engaging, and humorous. It’s lots of fun. 100 minutes well wasted and 100 minutes I will gladly waste again.

Carrie (2013)

Babe is slaughtered by some drunk teenagers, Julianne Moore takes the Bible way too literally, and an angry girl destroys a gorgeous cherry red 1971 Pontiac...and some other stuff.

Carrie is a remake based on a Stephen King novel, directed by Kimberly Peirce and starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde and Ansel Elgort.

I’ve lost interest in remakes to such a massive degree that I didn’t even know that this one existed. It was only that my girlfriend hired this one for us to watch one Friday night that it even came to my attention, otherwise I probably would never have even been aware of it.

The original Carrie was quite shocking for its day. This remake tries to up the ante, blood-wise, which is not a bad thing but it never really succeeds in being as creepily effective as the Sissy Spacek version. It’s not a bad film though. I particularly liked the opening. Julianne Moore is a fine actress, and she plays Carrie’s religious fanatic mother. She’s great in the opening scene that sees her torn between a motherly instinct and…plunging a giant pair of scissors into a newborn. Christian fundamentalist bullshit scares me more than horror films ever could, so I found most of the scenes with Carrie’s mother quite disturbing.

The performances are actually all quite good. As good as Julianne Moore is, my favourite though was probably Carrie’s bully, Chris (Portia Doubleday). She pulls off the sociopath thing so believably I have to wonder what she’s like in real life. The character is well written and relatable, I mean every high school in the world has a girl like this lurking just a few lockers away down the hall poised to start screaming and tearing other people’s hair out when she doesn’t get her way.

And Chloe Moretz is good as Carrie, but I had one problem with her. She’s too pretty. The original Carrie character worked so well because Sissy Spacek was ‘girl next door’. She wasn’t one of the ‘beautiful people’ at her school. It’s a minor issue yeah, but I just had trouble believing a girl that good looking would struggle to get a date to the prom.

I was also really impressed with Ansel Elgort as Tommy, the hapless jock who is talked into taking Carrie to the prom. He’s not a bad actor. As long as he stays away from the personal trainers and grilled chicken, I think he’ll turn out some pretty decent performances. In this film, he’s a genuinely nice guy. I kept waiting for him to do something bastardly, but he’s a gentleman all the way. It made me all the more sympathetic to his demise – he gets clocked in the head with the blood bucket and this, for some weird reason, kills him. I can’t remember if this was in the original, but it’s both pathetic and hilarious.

Anyway, Carrie’s revenge scene is just as satisfying in this version as in the original. You know you shouldn’t be cheering for her (she’s basically slaughtering a room full of innocent people) but you can’t help but relish in the moment as much as she does. Points to Moretz’s performance for that. She doesn’t quite cackle like a witch, but it’s definitely in her eyes.

And the events leading up to it are actually very well directed – the scenes of Carrie making her own dress for the prom, and waiting for her date, are really well done and make the ‘you know it’s coming’ bucket of blood moment all the more effective.

The ending is cheap and predictable (can I even use that term when talking about a remake?) but considering what’s come before it, it actually works. This film has renewed my faith that remakes of classic horror films can actually be worth checking out. 100 minutes well spent.

Crazy Love (2005)

Wow, I never realised having a crippling, debilitating mental illness could be so much fun!

Crazy Love is a 2005 film starring Reiko Aylesworth and Bruno Campos and directed by Ellie Kanner.

My opening line there refers to Bruno Campos’ character, Michael, who is said to suffer from severe paranoid delusions due to schizophrenia and has been institutionalised for much of his adult life. In this film, he is portrayed as a loveable prankster who is quite charming and harmless as long as he remembers to take a little pink tablet every day. He hangs out in a psych ward with some other cuckoos who are little more than derivative cardboard cut-outs. They sit around watching Groundhog Day and taking bets on what disorders newcomers are suffering from.

The film starts and ends quite well. What’s in between is cliché-riddled, sappy horseshit. The story is about Letty (Reiko Aylesworth) a well-intentioned but highly strung school teacher who seems to have a mild case of obsessive-compulsive-disorder (she labels all her kitchen products, sorts her underwear by colour and sets 3 different alarm clocks in the morning). She has come up with a fun way to help kids learn maths which leads to a stressful meeting with the school administrator, and on top of that she has to host her divorced parents for dinner (with her father bringing his new wife). Well all this stress is bound to tip Letty over the edge, and does so in spectacular fashion during my favourite scene in the movie that I refer to as “The Olive Meltdown”. This is a great scene – I like the way the lighting and subtle music is combined with increasingly frantic camera movements to build the tension until finally Letty breaks and begins hurling jars of olives at people.

Letty’s mental state is not helped by her narcisstic and condescending partner. And this creates the film’s first sticking point for me. You see, the relationship between Letty and her fiancé would have been so much better if the writer hadn’t made her fiancé such a colossal dipshit. He’s just not believable. He’s such an inconsiderate prick that he crosses the line from character to comical.

Anyway, after the meltdown Letty awakes in the above mentioned psych ward and unfortunately until it finally picks up at the end, the majority of the film is predictable shit. If I’d known all it would take to ‘find myself’ would be to chuck a few condiments at a security guard and hang out with a bunch of fruit loops in a mental hospital that seems to see patients masquerading as doctors as just a harmless bit of fun, well fuck me I’d be the most well-adjusted person on the planet.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh on this film but it's just too...I don't know...'self helpy'. Michael and Letty are just two lost souls who find each other over sneaky pizza and cigarettes in the linen closet. The film just never steps outside its comfort zone. And I really have trouble imagining the writer has ever known anyone with a serious mental illness – the subject is just never given the gravity it deserves even for a lightweight rom com. Michael’s character is the worst example, he’s said to suffer severe psychotic breaks from reality but seems to just get a bit paranoid if he forgets to take his meds. And as I said before, the other patients at the facility are just assortments of caricatures taken from other movies set in mental hospitals. I almost expected one of them to break out a Simpsons-esque: “Actually, I’m just here voluntarily.”

The film does pick up at the end. I liked that it doesn't go for a ‘happily ever after’ ending – Michael and Letty accept that they will not work as a couple and go their separate ways. I like that the film decided ultimately to be about Letty’s happiness and I liked that she decided she didn’t need her fiancé or Michael in order to find that happiness. It's far from the worst way I can think to spend 100 minutes, but it's further from the best.

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

A poor man’s Luke Skywalker jets around space in a giant cow recruiting a rag-tag bunch of pilots to help him defend his planet from John Saxon who wants to blow it up for no apparent reason! Excellent!

Battle Beyond the Stars is a 1980 sci fi film directed by Jimmy T Murakami and starring Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn and John Saxon.

Let’s start with the premise, which is not only flimsy, but hilariously moronic. Our villain, such as he is, is Sador played by John Saxon. He suffers from some bizarre affliction that makes him lose limbs, which he replaces by chopping off other people’s limbs and grafting them onto his stumps. Anyway, needless to say Sador is a bit of a narcissist, and so over-confident that he shows up at planets he plans to vaporise and very helpfully informs them that he plans to return in a week to vaporise them, giving them the perfect opportunity to, oh I don’t know, mount a defence?? He’s got to be the most considerate villain I’ve ever seen. It’s like showing up on someone’s doorstep and announcing you have copied their keys and plan to return in a week to rob them, then being miffed when you show up a week later and the locks have been changed.

Not wasting any time, the peace loving inhabitants of…some peaceful planet I can’t recall the name of enlist their own Luke Skywalker, Shad (Richard Thomas) to save them. He takes to the skies in the weirdest spaceship I’ve ever seen – I’ve never quite been able to figure out what it is, but to me it looks like a giant brown cow with tits.

Roger Corman was undoubtedly the king of B-grade films. That’s not an insult, by the way. He had a great knack for taking whatever the latest blockbuster was, and making a really cheap knock off of it (like 1993’s Carnosaur – arguably a better movie than the one it’s knocking off - Jurassic Park. I don’t recall any scene in Jurassic Park that was even a shade as entertaining as watching some Leftie vegans tie themselves to logging equipment only to be devoured by rubber dinosaurs). In this case, the blockbuster was Star Wars. So he took the idea of The Magnificent Seven (itself based on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) and made a B-grade sci fi film out of it.

Shad’s first port of call is to go visit a scientist on a space station who might be able to provide help. Unbeknownst to him the ageing scientist has gone a bit loopy and is now just a head attached to a Dalek-style robotic body. The costuming is so cheap it’s hilariously obvious it’s just an old guy sitting in a plastic bucket, but that’s part of the film’s charm. Anyway, I like that the scientist becomes fixated on keeping Shad prisoner on the space station to bang his daughter because – God love him – he wants grandkids. I like that she’s so horny and desperate she falls for Shad after he mumbles some bad pick up lines about ‘wind’ and goes trekking off after him when he escapes. He is a damn good citizen though, I’ll give him that. If it was me faced with the choice between criss-crossing the galaxy in a sass-talking giant cow or staying aboard a comfy space station to repeatedly bang a hot blonde, I think Shad’s people would be doomed.

Anyway, Shad proceeds to recruit an assortment of characters to round out the ‘seven’, all of whom are surprisingly memorable. The most interesting, I think, is ‘Nestor’ – a kind of collective consciousness whereby whatever happens to one is experienced by the rest (that would save hundreds on the weekly alcohol budget). But they are all pretty cool. Probably my favourite is the lizard guy who hates Sador (his planet apparently didn’t take Sador’s advanced notice seriously) and shrieks a delightfully obnoxious war cry at every available opportunity. He has these two sidekicks called the ‘Kelvins’ whose only way of communicating is through degrees of heat (get it? ‘Kelvins’?) and this makes for one of the films many odd moments of humour when the other characters use the Kelvins to cook hot dogs.

The one member of the rag tag bunch who is supposed to be the coolest actually winds up being the least interesting. It’s Robert Vaughn basically reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven. He plays a mercenary who is apparently so wanted throughout the galaxy that he’s unable to spend any of his ill-gotten riches so he just sits in a chair and broods. He comes along for the ride but doesn’t really do anything other than occasionally remind all the others about how tough he is.

Of course it’d be remiss of me not to mention Sybil Danning as the Amazonian warrior woman with an inferiority complex due to the fact that she’s small. Her coping mechanism is admirable though – she just wears tight-fitting outfits that emphasise her enormous breasts. Nice.

Anyway. Our seven heroes return to Shad’s homeworld just in time to launch the heroically suicidal defence against Sador and his wannabe-Death Star (hey, it destroys planets and I forget what it’s called) so we get lots of blue-screen effects and ping-ping laser sounds. They also use some kind of Dune-like audio warfare to sink trenches to prepare for the ground assault. Why Sador sees the need for a ground assault when he has a laser than can vaporise planets is never explained but just adds to the film’s enjoyable loopiness. I guess he just gets a kick out of the hands-on approach. But it does afford me one of my favourite moments in the film – when the Kelvins take out a tank by standing in front of it and turning their heat up to maximum – burning themselves out like light bulbs in the process. My heart always breaks for the little guys.

In true sci fi style our outnumbered and outgunned heroes manage to save the day and destroy Sador and his minions. The peace loving Shad finds his inner warrior, gets the girl, and saves the entire planet. Not a bad way to spend 90 minutes.

The Wraith (1986)

A stranger arrives in a small Arizona town and sets his sights on local girl Keri. The same day a mysterious black turbo shows up to take on Keri’s insane stalker Packard Walsh’s gang of drag racers who terrorise local drivers and force them to race for pink slips. Is there a connection?

The Wraith is a 1986 film directed by Mike Marvin and starring Charlie Sheen, Nick Cassavetes, Sherilyn Fenn, Randy Quaid and Clint Howard.

The stranger is Jake Kesey, who bears an uncanny resemblance to murdered teen Jamie Hankins (who mysteriously disappeared one night while getting his gear off with Keri (Fenn)). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the stranger is the Wraith, a spirit back from the netherworld to wreak vengeance on Packard and his gang for murdering him and subjecting Keri to Packard’s unwanted and psychotically creepy advances (Packard’s idea of a romantic gesture is slicing open his palm with a pocketknife and pronouncing he and Keri ‘blood lovers’ – I guess he tried flowers once and it didn’t end well).

Packard and his ‘gang’ (I use the term loosely – explanation below) control the small Arizona backwater. This is sort of implied rather than obvious – it’s not really clear why he and his boys are so threatening, other than it being necessary for the plot. Whatever.

Anyway, I guess gang members in small desert towns are in short supply, because Packard’s ‘road pirates’ are a fairly lacklustre bunch. First into the meat grinder is Oggie, who seems to think mid-riff tops, black fingerless gloves and kimonos constitute a tough guy wardrobe. For such a camp villain he has a fairly nice car though – a 1986 Daytona Turbo Z.

Speaking of Oggie’s car, for a gang of drag racers their rides leave a bit to be desired. From Minty’s Trans Am with an entirely decorative supercharger (watch the air intakes as he revs the engine – they don’t move), to Packard’s ‘style-over-substance’ Corvette (the speedometer only goes up to 70MPH). Then there’s the fact that they all seem to think shifting gears in cars with automatic transmissions somehow makes them go faster. I’m surprised they ever had, as Rughead (Clint Howard) says: ‘the edge’ over any other street racers. Although having said that, the first drag race we see pits Packard’s Corvette against a stock 1987 Daytona, so maybe the competition doesn’t exactly warrant forking out hard-earned cash for twin-turbos.

All that is topped by the fact we find out that Packard likes his burgers with ‘mayo and thousand island dressing’. Packard should be a lot more concerned than he seems to be about the risk of being sent to prison – with a lunch order like that, there’d be guys lining up to shank him.

The comic relief is provided by the Skank/Gutterboy duo, one a glue-sniffing punk, the other a jumpy moron. I mention them only because Gutterboy delivers what has to be the greatest offhand remark in the history of movies. If you’ve seen the film you know the comment I mean. If you haven’t, there’s no way I’m going to spoil it here.

On the case is Randy Quaid as the Sheriff, Loomis. He gets to deliver some great insults and all his deputies seemed to be named “Murphy”. I’m still not sure which one is actually Murphy because Loomis calls one guy Murphy early in the film, then during a chase one of the deputies pursuing the Wraith car is referred to as Murphy, then in that same scene you see the first Murphy leaning over a car with a shotgun (yes, I’ve seen this movie way too many times).

The film’s cult status was unknown to me until I purchased the special edition DVD to replace the cheapie I had. In a lot of ways the film’s making-of and history is more interesting than the film itself. The Wraith was almost single-handedly responsible for a complete overhaul of the way films like this were made, due to the extremely unfortunate death of Assistant Cameraman Bruce Ingram when a camera truck rolled off one of the winding Arizona mountain roads the car chases were filmed on. It’s also the reason director Mike Marvin, who does an adequate job, was pretty much never heard of again. Having a crew member die on one of your shoots doesn’t look good on a resume. The methods used here, while making the car race scenes actually quite thrilling, were an accident waiting to happen.

What also cemented the film’s cult status was the infamous Dodge/Chrysler M4S Turbo featured as ‘the Wraith car’ the film revolves around. It’s lovingly filmed – and with good reason – it’s a fabulous-looking vehicle. And a technical wonder too, sporting a 4-cylinder supercharged engine that could apparently do 0-100kph in 4.1 seconds. That was equal to the acceleration of a Lamborghini of the same era.

Watching the film now, the limited budget is on fine display. Limited money for extras means the entire town seems to be populated by cops and teenagers. Even when a car rolls in spectacular fashion on a main street, no one seems to poke their heads out of any windows to take a look. It’s clear, and pretty understandable, that the bulk of the film’s finance went toward the cars they race and smash up at every opportunity. This is the days before CGI and digital enhancement, so the car stunts were filmed at fairly high speeds and the explosive conclusion to the first one still makes me raise my eyebrows in appreciation every time.

My favourite stunt though is not one of the main ones. It’s the small moment with the roadblock, just after the Wraith car has done away with Minty (fake supercharger guy) and the sheriff’s deputies think they’ve got the black turbo cornered. The whole sequence is done really well, but I love the bit where the Wraith car simply smashes through the roadblock and skids to a stop for a moment, before accelerating away. I like that after he’s just obliterated two police cars he’s not in any great hurry to get away.

Another thing to touch on, obviously, is the soundtrack. I say ‘obviously’ because the soundtrack features so prominently in the film that even the DVD cover lists the songs (by 80’s stalwarts like Motley Crue and Robert Palmer) as one of the film’s chief selling points. As you can imagine, besides the one requisite love song, the rest are pumpin’ 80’s rock ballads. As a child of that decade a lot of the tracks were familiar to me even when revisiting the film as an adult. I was pleasantly taken back, to the strains of Ozzie Osbourne, to a time when music was more about the hair, and there’s something to be said for the unapologetically egotistical lyrics of a lot of 80’s rock. This was the era before Kurt and Eddie ushered rock into its ‘brooding teenager’ phase. To accompany the tunes, there’s actually a score hiding in there that is not half bad. Blink and you’ll miss it though.

Anyway, I realise I’ve gotten to the tail end of this thing and haven’t even mentioned the main actor. That’s because he actually has very little screen time. The Wraith features prominently. Charlie Sheen does not. Depending on your tastes that’s either a selling point, or a deal breaker. Sheen pretty much sleepwalks through his few scenes anyway and, bizarrely, during the scene where he gets it on with Sherilyn Fenn, I swear it’s a body double standing in for Sheen (look at the hair – it’s a lighter shade, and a completely different cut).

I’ll end with my favourite character in the film – burger boy Billy Hankins, the brother of Keri’s murdered boyfriend Jamie. For starters, he’s the only person in the entire town who has the balls to stand up to Packard and his gang (even though he gets his ass kicked for doing so, he doesn’t have a badge to hide behind like Loomis, so he gets my respect). And given the town’s other citizens, he’s a pretty decent contender for bachelor of the year in this burg. He also has a remarkably poignant moment at the end of the film when he realises the Wraith is actually his brother.

There are loads of better ways to spend 90 minutes but if you’re a fan of car films (or for some bizarre reason you are interested in Charlie Sheen’s back catalogue) the Wraith is well worth a look.

Reanimator

A story of forbidden love, life and death, and how to peel someone's head like an orange.

Reanimator is a 1986 horror film based on a HP Lovecraft short story, directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott.

A classic gem of B-grade schlock horror, Reanimator is one of the best examples of the genre and stands the test of time remarkably well.

Med student Dan Cain (Abbott) advertises for a roommate, only to have the mysterious Dr Herbert West (Combs) answer the ad. Despite Dan’s girlfriend Megan’s (Barbara Crampton) objections, Dan is persuaded by the wad of cash West shows up with.

Megan objects for good reason – no sooner has West stepped through the front door, he asks to see the basement, and after seeing it, says “yes, this will do nicely!” I’ve interviewed a lot of house mates, and I can safely say anyone getting excited by a basement would immediately be scratched off the ‘maybe’ list.

West has come to town to study death at Miskatonic Medical Hospital. Dan doesn’t really like death. This is evident by his stubborn attempts to revive someone at the start of the film. So when West declares he’s ‘beaten’ death, Dan is understandably intrigued. You just know the two are going to get along, that it’s all going to end badly, and that it’s going to be ridiculously awesome.

Not one to do things by halves, West demonstrates his victory over mortality by reanimating Dan’s cat. Twice.  Not only does the unfortunate feline die once, West injects it with his glowing green reanimator juice only to have it go nuts and try to kill him. So he kills it again and then reanimates it a second time to prove to Dan that his serum works. This movie is extremely messed up.

Director Stuart Gordon wisely keeps the film brisk and steers it way off into ‘absurd’ territory, thus keeping the emphasis on humour. Lovecraft intended his short story to be a bizarre parody of Frankenstein, so it makes sense that this adaptation aims to be humorous. Whether you find it so or not depends on your sense of humour. Personally, I just can’t go past a film that features a severed head going down on a woman. That’s right up my alley.

The film is undoubtedly demented, even by today’s standards. But it’s not nearly as bizarre as it could have been – they left out the bit from the short story where a giant reanimated black guy shows up at their front door gnawing on a baby’s arm. That’s probably a bit much, even for me.

Anyway, West thinks big, and requires ‘fresh’ specimens to conduct his experiments on. In fact one of the film’s best moments for me is the way he complains that a corpse they used wasn’t fresh enough. The way he slithers the word "fresh" is just fantastically unhinged.

This insatiable need for fresh corpses of course leads him to the hospital morgue and into trouble. Because while his serum works, the subjects return from death a little bit worse for wear.

One of the most bizarre and funny bits in the film is where the Dean (Megan’s dad) is reanimated, but no-one except Dan and West know he’s a reanimated corpse, so they just figure he’s gone crazy. This leads to a scene with a zombie in a strait-jacket confined to a padded cell. Again, right up my alley.

No discussion of this film would be complete without mentioning David Gale who plays West’s nemesis Dr Hill and who spends half the film carrying around his own head. Gale brings a weirdly Shakespearean gravitas to this bizarre role and his slimy demeanour throughout the film, particular his unwanted attention towards Megan, is just a joy to behold. He’s deliciously evil and makes a superb villain.

This also brings up another favourite moment of mine – Dan’s weird description of Dr Hill’s obsession with Megan– he tells West that Dr Hill has a file on her, filled with hair clippings and other things, and that he thinks Dr Hill has projected “some sort of psychotic need” onto her. I love West’s reaction to this; it’s sort of bemused condescension. Really, Jeffrey Combs is an extremely underrated actor.

Stuart Gordon ignores the links to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and I think that’s a good thing. It would have made the story needlessly complicated. As it stands, we’re just left with the notion that reanimating dead people is probably not the greatest idea and that death is inevitable and we shouldn’t play God. Works for me. This is 90 minutes very well spent.

Avatar

An mining company’s plans to bring a prosperous economy, schooling and employment to the inhabitants of a distant world are hampered by a delusional war veteran and his love for a giant blue chick who cries a lot.

Avatar is a 2009 sci fi film directed by James Cameron and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana's CGI tears, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver.

When I was a kid I used to make this milkshake-type thing by combining every chocolate substance I could find with some milk. I used to throw it all in a giant glass – chocolate syrup, milo, powdered hot chocolate, chocolate ice cream, even sometimes chocolate milk. Then I’d stir it up, often with great difficulty because by then it had ceased to be a liquid and turned into a kind of extremely sugary sludge, and drink it. It’s a wonder I made it to high school. I did it because at the time, it seemed like a great idea. Combining every single delicious thing I could think of seemed like the best way to enjoy them all. Moderation was not something I understood the concept of.

In Avatar, James Cameron takes all the great concepts from his other films, which were fantastic and thought-provoking in moderation throughout The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and combines them all into one giant sugary sludge of a film that is so bogged down in ridiculous pseudo-moralising it forgets to be entertaining and becomes irritating. Yeah Jim, I know that you hate that America bombs other countries back to the stone age on a whim. But if you want me to be anti-violence, show me someone being smashed over the head with a sledgehammer. If you smash me over the head with it, the only result will be that I'll hate you.

And if you want to make some kind of allegorical statement about a US administration that coined the phrase “we will fight terror with terror”, maybe have your villain use a phrase other than “we will fight terror with terror.”

I am making a joke there, but I am also being serious. In the theatre I saw this film in, that moment, which should have been thought-provoking, elicited a mix of chuckles and groans.

Anyway. Quite often in movies, I cheer for the bad guys. I can’t help myself. Villains are often way cooler than the heroes. Avatar was no exception. When the evil corporation sends in the giant helicopter things to blow up the blue dorks’ sacred tree, all I could think was ‘this is gonna be sweet’, while absently humming Ride of the Valkyries. The bad guys are led by a scenery-chewing military stereotype who calmly sips coffee while dishing out the pain. He has cool scars and a Texas drawl. Seriously, the guy is hard to dislike. The giant blue dorks are led by some shaman-chick and are some weird cross between every single Native American character you’ve seen in Dances with Wolves and Last of the Mohicans, and a hippy commune from a 60’s documentary. They sit around in circles moaning about nature and their rallying for war is supposed to be very poignant but because they are giant lanky blue aliens dressed like Mohawk Indians it just ends up being comical.

I am sounding like I hate this movie. I don’t, I actually enjoy it quite a bit. I just enjoy it for the wrong reasons. I enjoy the pyrotechnics when the Naavi are blown off the face of the planet. I enjoy Giovanni Ribisi’s character (he’s basically Avatar's Carter Burke – the corporate sleaze ball you’re supposed to hate), especially his ability to say the word ‘Unobtainium’ while keeping a straight face.

And I really enjoy the film’s first twenty minutes or so. The whole shuttle trip down to the planet, over the massive mine and into the military base. And Sam Worthington wheeling across the tarmac and passing the giant mining truck with arrows embedded harmlessly in its thick tyres is a beautifully subtle moment that speaks volumes.

It’s just a shame that’s where the subtlety ends. These days, as a relatively mature adult I realise that throwing a lot of sugary shit into a glass doesn’t actually end up tasting very good. I wish James Cameron had realised the same thing.