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Saying that, if they were ever going to make another Dredd game then now would be the time to do it, the sleeper success of the movie probably has the franchise in the public awareness a lot more than it perhaps was when Dredd vs Death came out.

For "sleeper success", read "a fan unable to write the word failure".

Early 90s. Kind of Viz-y (but with less comic strips, as I recall). One of the front pages said "Norman Wisdom in Oral Sex Shocker" - referring to how clever French people are at such sexual encounters.

Am I going mad? Or does anyone else remember this?

Among my friends I've got a reputation for watching lots of films. Certainly a lot more than they do, and this is why I've seen manic cop 2 when they haven't even heard about the first film. Tonight I've watched iron eagle 2 and now I'm on to Punisher War Zone. As much as I love 2000AD the Punisher was the first comic I got into and I'll always have a soft spot for frank Castle but I still don't understand why every film about the Punisher has been shit yet there has still been three of them.

They've all been pretty good, I think. The newest one is perhaps the most OTT action movie ever (someone gets decapitated before the opening credits) and the Thomas Jane one was good fun too. I'm bummed neither of them got sequels, to be honest.

Can you spoiler the news?

Duchovny wrote a novel: *shuddders* *reads synopsis* *shudders again* Has anyone actually read it?

I thought for a minute you were on about the in-character novel that "Hank Moody" (Duchovny's character in "Californication") published a few years ago - which is about as good as you'd expect a Californication tie-in novel to be.

But no! It doesn't sound too bad, really. I'd get it out of the library and have a read of it.

[Highlander 2: The Renegade Version]

Highlander 2: The Renegade Version

In 1995, Russell Mulcahy (the bloke who directed the first two) got some money together to get the rights to "Highlander 2", and re-edited it, added a few new scenes and so on. He turned what's one of the worst films ever into something which just sort of sits in the bottom half of all films ever.

I liked that Highlander 2 was so strange and had so many bad choices go into making it - this removes all the alien stuff, but replaces that with "they're all from the distant past", which is even stupider. Still, it's got Michael Ironside as an excellently bonkers villain, so you've still got that to look forward to.

[Survivor]

Survivor - no-budget offspring of Hunger Games and After Earth.  Unlike most cash-ins it manages to use what's to hand and even makes an effort on occasion, but it's still trash that's as cheap as it looks and then some, further hampered by the presence of Kevin Sorbo, who we now know is a racist dickbag whose presence will now mean that whatever you are currently watching is ruined.  The lead actress' main claim to fame comes from starring in Osombie , Snow Beast, and Hunger Games fan-movies, yes - movies plural, so she's had plenty of practice doing this kind of thing for buttons, and it's mostly her running about stabbing Tusken Raiders for eighty minutes, but occasionally she stops and has a think, or Racist Hercules talks to her over the space phone offering encouragement that we sadly now know he wouldn't be offering if she was played by a black actress.  Fuck that guy.
It's alright, though.  It really does look super-cheap and the trailer does it no favors at all, but it passes the time pleasantly enough.

Damy you Sorbo! I'd been pondering a re-watch of Hercules and Xena, but knowing what a moron he is will make it more difficult to enjoy.

Death Race 2000

I'd put this in the top (number) of films from the 70s. It's really really good.

and I wish deeply the outside world (outside our nerdsphere) would do the same and gave equal credit to the other quite brilliant works that were being done at and around the time of... well certain deified works (can you deify a comic? Well since when did I worry about the specifics and detail of language huh!?!). Fandom doesn't help itself by not being exposed to, or not really pushing the exposure to really significant works like this and so we go around in the same bubble thinking... a certain writer... is the only true great thing that happened to comics and people look in and see us saying that and don't bother to look any further.

Its a really short sighted view and really to the detriment of the medium as a whole.

Agreed - at the end of the day, Watchmen is a four-colour superhero comic.  We know it was produced by two great creators who graduated from 2000AD, but if you're one of those 'normal' people then you won't look much further than the surface.  Comics like Maus or Persepolis are much more accessible to the general public.  Not sure how the recent rash of superhero films (mostly Marvel) may have changed this, if at all...

I think plenty of comics get that treatment, just not the ones we want. "Jimmy Corrigan" won a bunch of awards, for example. "Maus" and "Persepolis" even more.

Ultimately, we don't know what people who read "Watchmen" went on to read. We should be pleased that something so completely and utterly brilliant has gotten out there to the extent it has; ultimately, it'd be wonderful if more people read "Bacchus" (or whatever), but it shouldn't affect our enjoyment of either. When was the last genuinely brilliant prose novel to really become a public hit, anyway?

And according to the MPAA, Mad Max - Fury Road will be rated a hard R here in the US.

Didn't realise they'd changed the R rating system? It's just "R", right?

While trying to maintain my feminist credentials, boy howdy is Ruth Negga beautiful. And good at acting, thankfully.

[Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama]

Just watched best of the best. It hasn't become a good film in the years since it was made, but there's something about it I like. The best thing is that with a bit of cheating I can add best of the best 2 to my list of"sequals where the hero from the first film is killed off in the second one' it's cheating because Chris Penn isn't the lead character in botb2 but I've been waiting years to add a fil to iron eagle 2 and maniac cop 2.

Halloween 5, 6, and "Resurrection" all feature the death of the star of the previous movie within the first 15 minutes or so of the beginning of the new one. I think, I might have got one of those numbers wrong. And "Best Of The Best" is amazing, even if the sequels are the Philip Rhee show (he can't act worth shit).

Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama
After some bad Troma experiences with misleading titles, this at least has sorority babes, a bowl-o-rama and some slimeballs. What it doesn't have is anything worth watching. Unless you love 80s boobs; given that the director is (I think) gay, he was perhaps trying to hide it at the time. Or he really loved long shower scenes.

I wouldn't broadly dismiss all of Russia Today as lies

I didn't, I hope? I was reading about the lunatic they're replacing, who apparently did some stuff about how Russia was wrong to invade the Ukraine. And I know it's really easy to mock these news places, but Al-Jazeera produces stories the Western media would run to avoid, as it criticises their paymasters.

The Ventura family has good form with conspiracy theories, even becoming the subject of a few when the only episode of their tv show to be banned in the US was the one looking into the barmy idea that HOHO! the American government was funneling military supplies and training into domestic police forces in preparation for the institution of a police state and the suspension of democracy.

While I'm as guilty as anyone of watching these sort of shows for a laugh every now and again, I just worry that there's so little critical thinking taught to people these days that shows like this aren't laughed off the air after the first episode.

I tried the first three episodes of "Black Sails" and despite having read several books about the era beforehand ("Villains of All Nations" is amazing), it bored me to tears. It tried too hard, I think. But I might dip back in.

Truth-lovers will enjoy Russia Today, the Russian government's definitely-not-propaganda TV station. They've just hired Stone and Ventura, sons of Oliver and Jesse, to present a show; they've previously done a series on the internet which basically says everything ever is a false flag operation. So I'm looking forward to this!

I bought a mini gaming PC off eBay - probably £50 more than buying the parts and doing it myself, but then I didn't have to buy the parts and do it myself. Fits nicely under the telly, XBMC and Steam are on it, sorted.