Sunday 23 February 2014

Nymph()maniac

 
A rich conversation between the body and the mind that touches on fishing, Poe, Bach, gender, censorship, religion, mathematics and fucking.
Best seen in one go.
 

Jigoku [Hell/The Sinners Of Hell]

 
Had a plot so complex my brain was swiftly reduced to just popping and farting every time something weird happened.
 

God Told Me To [Demon]

 
Somehow manages to find a route from cops & snipers to a crazed, religious alien meltdown with the added bonus of a very calm man in a chair delivering the most horryifying scene of Joefest.
 

Angst

 
A psychotic's calm internal monologue is shown to be constantly at odds with his manic activities as he goes about his daily business.

Saturday 22 February 2014

Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde [Dr. Black And Mr. White]

 
Couldn't decide if this was a poignant commentary on race in the seventies or just an excuse for somebody to white up and punch the shit out of people.
 

Rabid

 
Cronenberg's transparent attempt to vilify the 'free hugs' movement.
 

Horrors Of Malformed Men [Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû/Horror Of A Deformed Man]

 
Amongst all the malformation, rampant bonking and incest perhaps the strangest thing on offer here is the unusually competent cop character, who not only understood everything but was able to explain it so that I also understood everything.

Feed

 
Promised to be a queasy view and then frequently delivered on that promise.
 

Thursday 20 February 2014

The Monster Squad

 
Zipped by in a rush of snappy dialogue and neat FX moments climaxing with Van Helsing giving me a thumbs up. It's always nice to have your existence validated by a fictional vampire hunter.

Dead Of Night

 
A superb compendium of stories that still chill sixty years on.
 

The Thing From Another World

 
A series of fast conversations, usually between scientists and soldiers, that are often interrupted by a scary silhouette bursting through a door.
 

Nosferatu The Vampyre [Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht]

 
Faithful remake of the original, only now also bleak as fuck.

Do You Like Hitchcock? [Ti piace Hitchcock?]

 
A film student suspects that a local murder has been inspired by the plot of a Hitchcock movie, he then tediously wanders about an Italy populated by English people and refuses to have sex with his girlfriend until he's proven right. Well done, film student.
 

Rome Armed To The Teeth [Roma a mano armata/Assault With A Deadly Weapon/Brutal Justice/Tough Ones]

 
An episodic series of altercations between Punchy Cop and Crime that, although individually brilliant, never actually knit together to form anything coherent.
 

Stagefright: Aquarius [Deliria/Bloody Bird]

 
The shoddy dialogue and the irritating characters who take bloody ages to do anything are ably compensated for by the crazed owl waving power tools about.
 

Night Train Murders [Don't Ride on Late Night Trains/L'ultimo treno della notte/New House on the Left/Second House On The Left/Torture Train/Xmas Massacre]

 
A serviceable Last House On The Left replica with some very dodgy gender politics.
 

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Goodbye 20th Century [Zbogum na dvaesetiot]

 
Seemed to be trying to say something profound but I didn't understand fucking anything. Not the incest, not the bloodshed, not the farting granny, nothing.
 

Detention

 
Three generations worth of pop culture references and roughly five movies worth of ideas all squashed into one loud technicolour scream.
 

Clive Barker Presents Saint Sinner

 
Expected stinker turns out to be fun, campy nonsense with one truly excellent defenestration.
 

Soylent Green

 
Charlton Heston plays a man thirty years younger in some hideous chauvinistic future where old men get excited about root vegetables and police captains haven't changed one bit.
 

Monday 17 February 2014

The Last House On Dead End Street [The Cuckoo Clocks Of Hell/The Fun House]


A whole bunch of seedy, grimy, misguided attempts at artistic statement butchered into incomprehensibility.

Rabies [Kalevet]

 
A riot of bad decision making leads to a wildly inventive interpretation of the Slasher movie. Impressive for a debut, but even more impressive as an entire country's first horror film.
 

Dressed To Kill

 
An unusual blend of eighties whiz-kid sleuthing and Argento stalk 'n' slash that begins with wanking in a shower and ends with a teenage boy grinning warmly at his new whore mum.
 

Visiting Hours [Get Well Soon]

 
Has a few splendid moments of madness but refuses to fully commit to any of them.
 

Runaway Train

 
Roberts is appalling. DeMornay is appalling. Voight ends up just yelling and shouting at everything in a weird voice. The train was pretty good.
 

Ebola Syndrome [Yi boh lai beng duk]

 
A psychotic, rapey version of the incredible hulk gets pissed on (both literally and metaphorically) before giving everybody Ebola. By no means a good film but a fucking ace way to start Joefest.

Cruise Of The Gods

Rob Brydon acts like a twat to everyone and then has the revelation that actually he's a bit of a twat. I expected better from all concerned.

Saturday 8 February 2014

The Lego Movie [3D]

 
Frequently hilarious. Constantly inventive. Absolutely brilliant.

John Tucker Must Die

 
A weak Mean Girls.
 

Mr. Peabody & Sherman [3D]

 
Fun.

Thursday 6 February 2014

Dylan Dog: Dead Of Night

 
I spent most of this trying to come up with something pithy to describe how astonishingly shit it is, but failed due to constantly being distracted by how fucking awful Brandon Routh is at acting.
 

Monday 3 February 2014

The Case Of The Bloody Iris [Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?/What Are Those Strange Drops Of Blood On Jennifer's Body?]

 
A fashion model is trying to distance herself from an ex-husband who is the head of a sex cult (sample dialogue: "I don't want to sleep with other men, that's why I had to leave you"), so she and a friend move in to an apartment where the previous occupants have been recently murdered.
She must then avoid being killed whilst tangling with the predatory lesbian next door, the old lady down the hall who reads gory horror comics and a police detective who loves stamp collecting.
Mental.

The Seventh Continent [Der Siebente Kontinent]

 
Haneke's feature film debut immediately establishes his template of drawn-out, detached imagery culminating in a moment or two of shock. Excellent.
 

Sunday 2 February 2014

The Blood On Satan's Claw

 
A fever dream of flushed servant girls and indistinguishable curly haired lads succumbing to the devil, here represented as a cross between a capybara and Skeletor.