Sunday 31 January 2016

Goosebumps [3D]


Great kids adventure full of all the right horror movie references. The teenager lost her shit over the ventriloquists dummy which proves the film's inherent creepiness and also that I should never show her Dead Of Night or she may go catatonic with fright.

Sunday 24 January 2016

The Girl Who Knew Too Much [La ragazza che sapeva troppo/Evil Eye]


A light romantic caper that Bava clearly didn't want to make so instead he furiously nods at both Hitchcock and Agatha Christie, jams in plenty of sinister moments of his own and in the process accidentally sketches out the outline of Giallo's more whacky tropes.

Saturday 23 January 2016

Ride Along


Ice Cube looks constantly pissed off, presumably because casting him in it is the only joke in the entire movie, and Kevin Hart is consistently more irritating than that weird upper case G in the title.

Wednesday 20 January 2016

The Revenant


If in the next series of 'I'm A Celebrity In A Jungle, Why Are You Watching?' they forced contestants to slowly drag themselves through snow to get to the part where they eat unusual parts of animals, then they'd be part way to being just like The Revenant. Throw in a bit of half-hearted mysticism and some mutterings along the lines of 'Ooh, weren't white folk naughty to those Indians' and they'd be almost all the way there. Make the whole thing an example of empty technical virtuosity and they'd have nailed it.

Saturday 16 January 2016

Nightmares In A Damaged Brain [Nightmare/Blood Splash]


A combination of brutal death and graphic sex wreathed in a constant aspiration to not be the grubby piece of sleaze that it most enjoyably is.

Thursday 14 January 2016

The Hateful Eight


Eight films in and Tarantino has begun poaching from himself, specifically Reservoir Dogs. Unfortunately he doesn't steal the thing that makes his debut stand out as unique in his ouvre, the economic use of screen time and snappy pacing.

Sunday 10 January 2016

300


On repeat viewing I still found this to be a visually stunning yet ultimately empty mess, amounting to little more than men shouting juxtaposed with men stabbing each other really slowly.
The teenager said she liked the historical story behind it but everything else was boring.

Thursday 7 January 2016

Joy


A history you never knew you gave a shit about enriched by O. Russell's usual loveable, dysfunctional family schtick.