2016 Over

2016 eh? Bunch of stuff happened didn't it? Yes, that and there were some great movies released this year. There were a lot of shit ones too but then everything's a balance.

This year I chose to do twenty movies to demonstrate the good health of cinema but mainly due to the high form of stuff I caught at Frightfest clogging up the top ten, they showed some proper shit too but then there's that balance again.

The rural multiplex didn't fair so well with only three out of the top ten getting a showing over the road. It is no surprise that the rural multiplex showed some serious shit as well though, everything's a fucking balance.

Here's twenty films that if you haven't yet seen, find a moment and see them. Then there's ten you can comfortably avoid as well, they are poor as piss.

20 Favourite New Films That I Saw On A Cinema Screen

20: Deadpool
Ryan Reynolds finds the perfect role allowing him to ruthlessly quip to his hearts content whlst his overbearing smugness is thankfully hidden behind a mask. Further notched up the list by appearing at just the right time and skewering the po-faced seriousness that now drowns many superhero movies.
(Trailer)

19: The Girl With All The Gifts
An excellent book, trimmed down to the barest character motivations to communicate a brand new angle on zombie infestation. Not just a 28 Days Later clone but does take a lot of what makes that brilliant before romping off down it's own unique path.
(Trailer)

18: Goodnight Mommy [Ich Seh Ich Seh]
An exercise in chilling Haneke style minimalism. The ending is too garish and clearly broadcast for it to truly stand next to such a master but echoes of his cold devastation can be found throughout which is why it's here.
(Trailer)

17: The Ghoul
Sits so comfortably within the incredibly restrictive confines of its budget that you stop noticing the basic sets and instead focus on excellent acting and a moebius strip script that begins as police procedural, heads towards mental illness and finally ends somewhere most unexpected, most welcome and with a distinct whiff of Alan Moore's work about it.
(Trailer)

16: Captain America: Civil War
Marvel change up a gear calling on their untouchable expertise with episodic story structure, swift and immediate character introductions (one panel with a funny quip in a comic book, one scene and a funny quip in a film, and they're in!) and regular moments of constantly inventive spectacle. Handles so much world building whilst ruthlessly clinging to its own story throughout, it's easily leaving any attempts to compete in the dust.
(Trailer)

15: Nocturnal Animals
Packed to the brim with existential angst, nasty relationship fallout and grim emotional catharsis. But mainly makes it here because Michael Shannon's delivery of the line 'fuck off' is the best I've seen all year.
(Trailer)

14: Midnight Special
Shannon once again on fine form as an intensely unhappy man shepherding a glowing faced boy toward awe filled conclusion. With added bonus of consistently excellent supporting cast.
(Trailer)

13: The Nice Guys
Shane Black has now honed his only movie, a witty bickering duo caught in a maelstrom of dark action-comedy, to a near diamond level of perfection.
(Trailer)

12: Free Fire
Ben Wheatley leaves behind disorientating editing and experimental abstraction for an exercise in pure form that zings with both insults and bullets, managing to maintain momenutum even when everybody's dragging themselves around the floor on their elbows.
(Trailer)

11: Man Underground
Another low budget gem anchored by superb performances, this one dabbles in alien conspiracy, flawed human relationships and amateur film making.
(Trailer)

10: Green Room
A tightly controlled siege movie with intermittent explosions of violence presided over by a quietly terrifying Patrick Stewart. Slowly shifts from generating stomach churning disgust to being hideously cathartic.
(Trailer)

09: The Arrival
Less a film, more two hours of slow dawning realisation.
(Trailer)

08: The Witch [The VVitch: A New England Folktale]
A fantastic journey into puritanical brutality and harrowing devil manifestation that would probably get this far on the talking goat alone.
(Trailer)

07: Under The Shadow
Set against the Iran war of the eighties so plenty of room for political statement, though none of this ever gets in the way of the truly brilliant traditional ghost story at its core contrasting fictional chills with the very real horror of humanity's squabbles.
(Trailer)

06: Hail, Caesar!
The Coens continuing to just calmly shit out masterpiece after masterpiece.
(Trailer)

05: Found Footage 3D
Uses the 'rules aware' horror tropes of Scream to highlight the daftness ingrained in the Found Footage genre. Yet at the same time is also a perfectly executed Found Footage horror movie. All filmed in 3D. Which is as totally idiotic as it is totally brilliant. It's very brilliant.
(Trailer)

04: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
The Star Wars movie full of darkness and moral ambiguity that everybody really wanted when Force Awakens was released turned out to be a really good film. Really fucking good in fact, though I'm glad Force Awakens wasn't this because now we have both.
(Trailer)

03: The Neon Demon
Winding Refn responding to 'style over substance' accusations by sculpting a fantastic homage to substance free exploitation cinema from a huge solid chunks of pure style, demonstrating that the phrase 'style over substance' need not necessarily be shorthand for shit.
(Trailer)

02: The Similars [Los Parecidos]
Sets its stall out early as Twilight Zone pastiche, then piles on the weird by constantly finding new inventive explanations for just what the fuck is going on. Frequently made me laugh just as hard as it freaked me out.
(Trailer)

01: The Greasy Strangler
Endlessly quotable. Endlessly stomach turning. Endlessly perverse. Endlessly hilarious. Endlessly insane. Enlessly greasy. Endlessly brilliant.
(Trailer)

10 Shittest Films That I Saw On A Cinema Screen

10: X-Men: Apocalypse
After making the one amazing X-Men movie we all knew Singer still had in him he went on to show it was the only amazing X-Men movie he still had in him with this insipid CGI particle spunkfest.
(Trailer)

09: Suicide Squad
A hopeless muddle of characters doing very little other than expressing various attitudes and waiting for a plot point that will require their ability. 'There's water? Well I'm a fucking crocodile, let's try and actually do something!' Though this never happens for Captain Boomerang because who needs somebody whose best special ablity is not being able to act in a film?
(Trailer)

08: Don't Breathe
Inconsistency and everybody being a wanker leaks all the tension away and then it ends with a turkey baster moment that's somehow worse than when Sunset Beach did it in the nineties.
(Trailer)

07: The Conjuring 2
Crosses a fine line that seperates genuinely unexpected scares from laughable Where's Wally style ghost spotting. 'Where's it going to jump out from? Where is it? Oh. It was the dog. It was inside the dog? What the fuck am I watching.' etc.
(Trailer)

06: Blair Witch
A textbook rendition of everything that is wrong with modern found footage movies. So many glitch-cut jump scares even the characters started complaining about it, people doing inexplicable things for the sake of maintaining a running camera (I almost had a hernia from laughing at the girl trying to get a drone out of a tree with a broken ankle) and forgetting what made it work so well in the first place by having a shabby old lady jogging about the last twenty minutes.
(Trailer)

05: Without Name
Made it's lead character such an unlikeable prick, it made the entire film into unlikeable shit.
(Trailer)

04: The Legend Of Tarzan
Shows absolute contemptible disregard for the source material, geography and basic physics.
(Trailer)

03: Blood Feast [2016 Remake]
Remakes are unecessary at the best of times but remaking a legendarily bad film then packing it full of terrible lines, hopelessly inept acting and a woman in her late thirties playing a teenager isn't funny, it's bollocks.
(Trailer)

02: Passengers
Tries to pass off a particularly nasty stalker tale as a love story in space, tainting everything that happens and making Chris Pratt an irredeemable prick no matter how many spaceships he fixes or fucking trees he plants.
(Trailer)

01: Cell
An atrocity on every level from direction, script and special effects right the way through to what the fuck is everybody wearing? Cusack and Jackson visibly could not give a fuck about what's happening around them and it has three endings and the clever thing is they're all shit.
(Trailer)

Thanks. Next!

Nightmare City [Incubo sulla città contaminata/City of the Walking Dead]

Zombies made all the more terrifying by being able to run, use anything they can as a weapon from knives and axes through to machine guns, form co-operative groups to do things like break in to buildings or cut power sources, operate all manner of heavy machinery and fly themselves in to the city in the first place in a giant plane.
King.

Scarecrows

Contains an outlandish setup involving a team of criminals on the run with millions of dollars in a massive cargo plane piloted by an innocent father/daughter combo who presumably own a massive cargo plane for shits n giggles. Then due to an unexplained betrayal the plane is forced to land next to a field packed full of supernatural scarecrows, although due to budgetary limitations only a maximum of two of these ever move at the same time. The scarecrows clearly take a dim view on the avaricious tendencies exhibited by the criminals and summarily stab them all which is something to do with a photo on a wall that is shown repeatedly but never explained.
Despite all this, still manages to be a 'good effort'.

Die Hard 2

Yes, it's a pale imitation of the far superior original but given the wide range of Chrismas shit the teenager could have chosen I was quite happy to spend Christmas Eve in the company of OTT explosions and a sweary Willis.

Passengers

In twelve months time Jennifer Lawrence appears to have gone from playing the strong willed, independent Joy in David O. Russell's film of the same name to portraying a vapid rendition of feminity that has no purpose in life until she becomes somewhere to put Chris Pratt's dick and forgives his outrageously heinous transgressions because he's good at fixing things.
Spectacularly mishandled bollocks.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [2D]

Second time around, still a really good movie set in the Star Wars universe. Still not a Star Wars movie.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [IMAX 3D]

Is definitely set in the Star Wars universe, perfectly recreated down to the minutest detail. Is definitely not a Star Wars movie in the traditional sense. Is definitely fucking ace.

Swiss Army Man

A rumination on societal norms, loneliness and the human condition via farting corpses, erections and bear attacks.

The Inside

Quite literally Found Footage in that a man picks up a camera from a pawn shop and finds a tape full of barely watchable camcorder footage of people endlessly shrieking and running about as they endure unecessary rape, demonic possession and people appearing suddenly in doorways. He then sits down to watch this atrocity in a bar full of people and I spent the entire film wondering why he didn't just turn it off whilst quietly ignoring the fact that I could be doing the same.

Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them [3D]

JKR: I've got this lovely tale about a wizard who loses some monsters in New York and has to round them up again.

WB: That's nice, it needs more story.

JKR: No, I don't think it does. It will focus on the awe and wonder of these mystical creatures with a bit of glib characterisation from a few sidekicks along the way.

WB: We have amazing cast lined up for the inconsequential roles that more story will generate. Big names.

JKR: More cast would just get in the way surely, and an extra story would be an unecessary distraction from the funny tale about the wizard and his exotic menagerie.

WB: (slams fist in to table) WE WANT SEVEN MOVIES OUT OF THIS DAMN IT!

Arrival

Gently segues from a slow burn 'Well this is bloody dull' into a slow burn 'THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME' with no discernible join between the two states.

Baron Blood [Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga/The Torture Chamber Of Baron Blood]

Classic gothic horror forced to rub up against crass modernity.

The Bloodstained Shadow [Solamente Nero]

Long-winded mystery that contains a comedy accordian, an old lady getting thrown head first in to a fire and an overlong convoluted final monologue that explains every weird detail that happened, except for why the old lady got thrown head first in to a fire.

Doctor Strange [IMAX 3D]

Iron Man origin story + Cyriak music video = Another feather for Marvel's crowded cap and a glorious excuse to explore multi-dimensional insanity in future episodes.

Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief

A series of interviews that attempts to understand something which seems just a little bit crazy and in the process of doing so discovers that it is.

My Scientology Movie

Louis Theroux makes a movie about making a movie about Scientologists who are making a movie about Louis Theroux making a movie about making a movie about Scientologists.

The Greasy Strangler

It's so rare to see a film as compellingly unique as this. The closest comparison I can draw is that it's a bit like a Russ Meyer horror movie with less tits but that doesn't come anywhere close to describing the astonishing levels of insanity, hilarity and stomach churning disgust generated by this absolute gem.

May

An excellent central performance by Angela Bettis gets battered about by what looks to be some quite extensive script re-editing.

Smiley

I actually really liked the reverse Candyman idea at the centre of this. Good thing I did otherwise there would've been no hope of me making it through the rest of this limp toss.

Free Fire

Six films in and Wheatley shows absolutely no signs of slowing down in the excellence stakes. This one is far more straight up than the others but ably compensates with a bunch of cracking performances, consistently deft humour and a fuck-tonne of bullets.

The Ghoul

A dizzying swirl of shifting narrative and insidous weirdness. Loved it, but then this kind of thing is so far up my street it goes all the way round the globe and ends up back at the beginning of my street. That clever bit of praise works much better once you've seen the film, go watch it now.

Without Name

A loathsome twat takes a massive quantity of hallucinogens and as his ego melts away he discovers that even when divorced of his concious self he's still a loathsome twat.

Phantasm [Remastered]

I've watched so many horror films that there's not many considered classics that I haven't seen by now. This is one of them, I can easily see how it gained its classic status and now there's even fewer left to watch.

The Void

Good ideas stolen from other people's much better movies slapped together in haphazard fashion. I did like the chap with the messy face who kept headbutting a metal pole jutting out of a wall though.

Trespass Against Us

An attempt to take a sympathetic look at an often demonised sector of society. Surprisingly subtle for a Chemical Brothers music video director and contains by far the best vernacular you'll find in the cinema this year.

Nocturnal Animals

A superb trio of narratives entwined into a rope of seething hatred. Sometimes it's hatred for the lives being led, sometimes it's hatred of the people involved in those lives or in the case of Michael Shannon it's a compulsively watchable hatred of fucking everything.

Last Girl Standing

Attempts to distance itself from shitty slasher movies by examining the aftermath of a campsite massacre and the psychological fallout endured by the only survivor. Until a hamfisted attempt at a twist that is, at which point it uncomfortably wedges an entire shitty slasher movie into the final ten minutes.

After.Life

Needs a serious re-editing to get even remotely close to what it's trying to achieve.

Stalled

Zombie film set in a toilet. And the review writes itself.

The Return

Sarah Michelle Gellar uselessly ambles about somewhere she's never been before having freaky flashbacks to things she's never seen before, all building to a twist that finally makes her relevant but hinges on the unlikely notion that nobody, not her best friend, not even her dad would ever mention to her that she was in a car crash when she was eleven.

Before Dawn

Slow-burn relationship disfunction that gently segues into a feverish zombie struggle.

Borderland

Bland.

Rasputin: The Mad Monk

Dispenses with any allusion to historical accuracy allowing Christopher Lee to hit full badass mode as he uses evil hypnosis to drink, shag and dance his way to power.
King.

Curtain

H.P. Lovecraft via Frank Henenlotter. Loved it, obviously.

Silent House

Shot for shot remake of a one shot movie.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children

Adapted from a book already best described as Tim Burton's X-Men. Which means with the heavy lifting done for him he can focus on making a film that is both his best since the nineties and that odd rarity, better than the book.
When I asked the teenaager if she liked it I got both a dismissive shrug and a 'yeah'. Whatever that means.

Night Of The Living Deb

Features the best slow/fast zombie gag in all of horror cinema. The rest is a good example of how a decent, witty script can easily carry a zero budget feature.

The Girl With All The Gifts

Successful adaptation of a book that somehow manages to infuse a sense of awe and wonder into a fairly regular zombie outbreak.

Blair Witch

One day I'm going to write a book about Found Footage horror movies, I'll devote the first chapter to the genius that is the game changing, shit yourself terror of The Blair Witch Project and the final chapter will detail the myriad faults of this disappointing pile of piss. For now this paragraph will have to do.

Don't Breathe

Awful misjudged bollocks that gives the impression the director has never made a movie before which, given his previous film was the Evil Dead remake, is technically true.

Sausage Party

For fans of persistent swearing and extremely literal humour. HA HA HA THE DOUCHE IS A DOUCHE HA HA HA NO WAIT HE'S A FUCKING DOUCHE HA HA HA etc.

Mechanic: Resurrection

So. Much. Stupid.
In fact, too much for one film to comfortably contain.

Train To Busan [Busanhaeng]

(Frightfest Day 5)
Doesn't add anything new to zombie cinema, but does what most of the others do better.

Found Footage 3D

(Frightfest Day 5)
How to revitalise the wheezing, dying Found Footage sub-genre? Stick it in 3D then solidly rip the piss out of it. Easily makes it into the slim ranks of truly excellent Found Footage movies.

Director's Cut

(Frightfest Day 5)
Fantastic nest of contradiction. It has moments that are as funny as they are unsettling, the film looks as polished as it often looks amateur, it rips the piss at the same time as it expresses undying love for the movies and most impressively it fucks wholesale with form as it presents itself as a DVD extra at the same time as being the main feature.

Man Underground

(Frightfest Day 5)
Beautifully understated film that purports to be about aliens but really it's about humans. Excellent.

Under The Shadow

(Frightfest Day 5)
A haunting befalls a mother and daughter smack bang in the middle of the Iraq/Iran war. Real life and fictional horror battle with each other to see which can be more chilling. Absolutely fantastic.

31

(Frightfest Day 4)
It would appear that Rob Zombie put some time in to coming up with some scary clown names and a vague excuse for them to be killing folk, gave it to his production design team to run wild with and then did fuck all else.

Realive [Proyecto Lázaro]

(Frightfest Day 4)
Frankenstein set in the future, but equipped with a fully aware mind transplanted from the past, makes for an excellent slow burn meditation on all the big existential issues.

Broken

(Frightfest Day 4)
An assured debut that builds naturally to a nasty sting as it examines tetraplegia, damaged psyches and the put upon life of a carer.

Johnny Frank Garret's Last Word

(Frightfest Day 4)
Starts with a title card explaining that this is a fictionalised version of a documentary about a perceived curse. This coupled with its serious tone gives it the feel of a Channel 5 true story. Then when the curse kicks off and the seriousness gets juxtaposed with the usual stylised genre trappings (fast edits, loud noise, bleeding faces etc.) it just ends up feeling a little bit tasteless.