Last movie watched...

[SmallBlueThing]

Beeks, yeah, do it. It's absolutely no phantom menace- nor is it 'the fog' remake (which still smarts), or 'the wicker man' (which doesnt, as ive grown to like it as the demented extension of nic cage's personality that it is). And most importantly, it's not steve miner's 'day of the dead' either. You can watch it without feeling like youre punching carpenter in the face, which is more than i could when watching miner piss all over romero.

SBT

[Professor Bear]

The Fog remake just made me feel sorry for Tom "Smallville" Welling more than anything else.  I don't mean that in a mean or sarcastic way, I mean that I thought he would end up carrying the can for the film even though he wasn't anywhere near the worst thing about it.

[SmallBlueThing]

'Roger Corman Presents CAMEL SPIDERS'

A fiver from HMV this morning. One day, someone will put together all the fantastic myths about these fearsome little beasties and make an excellent little horror film that will seriously disturb many people. However, this isnt it.

What this is, is a very generic killer-spiders movie, with some okayish cgi critters accidentally brought back from Afganistan by some US military types, who then chow down on the residents of hicksville. All blood is cgi, nothing explicit is shown, and if you do watch it dont invest anything in the four teens who hole-up in the deserted house. Because unforgivably, their story is never finished. In a move of shocking incompetence, their story runs parallel to the main plot, they eventually make a break for freedom, the main plot ends... and the two never entwine, and the characters are last seen screaming in a car, with no closure whatsoever. Horribly, even i cant recommend this, much as i dearly wanted to.

SBT

[SmallBlueThing]

The Fog remake just made me feel sorry for Tom "Smallville" Welling more than anything else.  I don't mean that in a mean or sarcastic way, I mean that I thought he would end up carrying the can for the film even though he wasn't anywhere near the worst thing about it.

And then he DIDN'T get the role of Supes in the new movie. How much legwork does a man need to do to get a job?

SBT

[Beeks]

First time watching Escape From LA on ITV4

Jesus Wept

Why?

[Van Dom]

First time watching Escape From LA on ITV4

Jesus Wept

Why?

You're mouth is full of wrong! Escape from LA is awesome! Camp as all get-out but stilll....awesome!

[DeFuzzed]

First time watching Escape From LA on ITV4

Jesus Wept

Why?

You're mouth is full of wrong! ....

I love that response! My very first laugh-out-loud moment of the day, thanks for that And also, totally agree with you.

The Fog remake just made me feel sorry for Tom "Smallville" Welling more than anything else... 

And then he DIDN'T get the role of Supes in the new movie. How much legwork does a man need to do to get a job?

SBT

I was actually more upset with Michael Rosenbaum not getting the Lex Luthor role. His Lex was the only one I could realistically see becoming President and the common folk blind to his BTS menace, sincerity and charm oozing out of him. Every other Lex came across as sleazy, wouldn't trust them at all.

And talking of Supes, saw the poster on the bus for The Cold Light of Day and the man and the name didn't ring any bells, and yet he was first billed over Weaver and Willis. And then I went ohhhh and realised he was the new Superman. I could be totally out of the loop and the majority is familiar with him, which is possible since I rarely make it to the movies (my last was Dragon Tat and MI4) and catch up on shows years after everyone else (currently watching SGA for the first time) - but still, can't help thinking its box office would be better if released after Supes. Unless Supes sucks, of course.

[brendan1]

I am guessing this is a slight dig at the man with the worst taste in everything, small blue thing.

Except women, comics and books.  All the important things.

I don't have time to indulge any of those three as much as I'd like. At the moment I'm reading and watching Game Of Thrones, 2000AD is the comic of choice, I'm playing Mass Effect 3 and that's about it for "fun".

No new comics, not even keeping up with The Walking Dead. As for music, fuggedaboutit.

Apart from Man vs Food. there's always time for Man vs Food.

[Tiplodocus]

Mrs Tips is away so I went for a horror "cabin in the woods" double bill of DEAD SNOW and TUCKER AND DALE VS EVIL.

Both of which purport to try and subvert a few of the genre cliches - TUCKER & DALE doing a better job of the two but neither of which manage to be clever or funny enough (TUCKER & DALE sets out it's stall as a comedy quite early on whereas DEAD SNOW seems to come to the decision to be funny quite late on it's running time).

I think DEAD SNOW's biggest problem is that it doesn't know what it's monsters are. They clever and fast and use tools and obey orders and use tactics which pretty much takes them out of zombie territory but given that one character calls them zombies, what else are we meant to think of them as?  They are effectively Nazi Hillbillies (or the pirates returning from the grave a la THE FOG). The film also lacks an internal logic (phones work and don't work depending on how scary/funny it is and exactly what have the zombies been doing/eating for sixty years?).

TUCKER & DALE on the other hand just outstays it's welcome despite likeable performances from the titular characters. It would have been a great hour but stretching it to 90 minutes brings some unwanted repetition.


KABOOM.  Polysexual goings on amongst hot students who never study.  Again, the out and out comedy doesn't come to the fore until quite late on and it jars with the earlier stuff. Ridiculous amounts of basil at the end and it still doesn't make much sense and the ending is about as big a cop out as you can get (and spoilered by [spoiler]the film title[/spoiler]).  Actually, there is a worse ending they could have done "The whole thing is just a bad trip" which is possibly one way of reading it.  Wasn't impressed but I guess I'm not the target audience.


In the end my marathon got down to a choice of Jenny Skavland or Hayley Bennett? (Mmmm. Off to the underware thread)

   

[DeFuzzed]

Four Lions, much more funny than the 'drama' around its release lead me to believe. Felt guilty sometimes, laughing in some places, but I think it was more because I felt I should feel guilty rather than because they did anything wrong. Because they didn't. They handled the subject matter amazingly well and I am honestly surprised by that, didn't think that was possible at all.

And their run with the bags reminded me so much of the Monty Python walk, in a mirrorverse maybe! Anyway, fun, well-written, well-acted and also, surprise!Sherlock aka Benedict Cumberbatch.

[GordyM]

The Darkest Hour.

The Big Waste of an Hour (and a Half) is what it should really be called. Rubbish invisible aliens vs young and stupid people in Russia. I strongly advise giving it a wide berth.

[Professor Bear]

Darkest Hour is from the makers of Apollo 18 and Right At Your Door, so I would argue you deserved everything you got if you still went to see it with that pedigree.

Seattle Superstorm - a SyFy original movie which seems pretty terrible from the bits I was paying attention to for the first half hour or so, but then I started daydreaming about what Enterprise would have been like if they'd cast Ronny Cox or Lance Henrickson as the captain.  I think it would have enlivened things even if the scripts were still sub-par.  Then I left the room, got distracted, then went shopping, which makes Seattle Superstorm the second film - after Just Married - which I have walked out on when it was playing in my own home.

Frenzy - much-maligned later Hitchcock outing about an impulse killer, though I thought it was decent enough, especially the sudden turnaround at the end which has you going "haha" until you realise that someone has been raped and murdered offscreen.  There's a an onscreen rape scene where the rapist/murderer is saying "LOVELY!" with each thrust, which sounds exactly like the old adverts for the Sun they showed on telly and played on the radio where they'd say what was in the latest issue and a cockney bloke would say "LOVELY!" after each item, which I think says plenty about The Sun that they would latch onto this as a catchphrase.

Moon 44 - an early Roland Emmerich outing, cited in some quarters as one of the worst movies ever made.  It's not that by a long stretch, but it's not great either, with some particularly bad acting from Dean Devlin, who probably made the right decision when he chucked in the acting lark and took up writing and producing instead - and given he wrote and produced Godzilla and Independance Day, that gives you an inkling what his acting is like - but leading man Michael Pare is pretty wooden and charmless, too.  I gather this is a low budget affair, but the effects - occasional dodgy model shot aside - and set design are pretty impressive even if the traditional sight of the rulers of the galaxy taking meetings in a room the size of a hotel greets you far too often, though the setting is not convincingly sold by the sets, effects, direction, acting or editing, with claustrophobic corridors and dorms undermined by constant distant shots and poor lighting, and external establishing shots unwisely dropped in where unnecessary.  Not sure what the story was supposed to be about, either, or who the enemies actually were, or why it was so important to hold Moon 44 when they lose it at the end but then say "we'll be fine if we have the shuttles", and I would say all in all that it was pretty bad, but grudgingly, because - sleepwalking lead actor aside - there's palpable effort on show here from all concerned that makes me really want to like Moon 44 even if the end product falls short as a whole.

[Colin YNWA]

Alien - It's still got it.

Aliens - Its still got it BUT not quite as much.

Used to love this film so much, its still good but has dated a little.

[Evil Pants]

My review of Cabin In The Woods!

http://fourcoloursandthetruth.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/movie-reviews-my-entirely-spoiler-free-review-of-cabin-in-the-woods/

[Van Dom]

Human Centipede 2. Showed up on Netflix so I had to, didn't I? This may have been discussed here already. It's a truely horrible piece of film with no redeemable features.Well, I suppose the guy who played Martin did a bang-up job with a horrible role, he actually did look like he was going to keel over and die on a number of occassions (I hope that was acting, at least). And yeah I guess it did out-do the first one in terms of sheer grossness and puk-acity, if that was the intention. The mutilation bits were pretty hard to stomach. The major problem with it was that it didnt have any protaganist. It was just a series of horrible acts, and the recipients of these acts were either total assholes or complete nobodies, so you didnt even care what was happening to them. Even bringing in the girl from the first movie as 'herself' didn't work as she only got about a minute of screentime before being relegated to human-prop material. With the first film, although the protaganist females were played by fairly poor actresses, you did at least empathise with them and sympathise with their plight. You did want them to escape somehow. You rooted for them. You dont get that in this version, with any character. And this kind of movie really needs that, or you just get bored watching random people suffer.

Also, the shit scene was truly rank.