Saturday 27 April 2019

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2


Hooper goes for a very different tone with this one, pushing all the demented insanity of the original to far more outrageous extremes, which in turn makes for an absolute riot of a movie. King.

Phantom Of The Paradise


Tries to be Phantom Of The Opera, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Faust, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Valley Of The Dolls and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls all at the same time. A big mess of a movie.

Thursday 25 April 2019

Madhouse [There Was A Little Girl/ Scared To Death/ And Then She Was Bad]


A vague Argento attempt that goes laughably over the top every time somebody has to hack up a dummy full of animal guts or the glove puppet dog has to rip a rubbery neck to shreds, which happens a lot.

Avengers: Endgame [IMAX 3D]


Delivers. In spades.

Monday 22 April 2019

Guinea Pig: The Devil's Experiment [Ginî piggu - Akuma no jikken]


A notorious Japanese nasty, legendary for its gruesome intensity and extreme scenes of torture. So I was surprised at the fairly lengthy sequence of the girl being spun around in an office chair 200 times to make her really dizzy. And the bit where she had maggots gently sprinkled on her to create mild discomfort. And the bit where they just threw tripe at her and laughed for fucking ages. It often felt a bit like a weird arty Asian Jackass.

Sunday 21 April 2019

The Forest


About twenty minutes of shitty story stretched to eighty minutes of shitty movie by padding out every instance of travel with agonising detail, the only advantage to this being if a character set off from one side of a room I could have a ten minute doze and wake up as they arrived at the other.

Saturday 20 April 2019

Clerks


25 years old and has lost none of its charm. A remarkable bit of film making.

Wednesday 17 April 2019

Goodfellas


After watching Green Book the teenager stated that she really liked watching movies with Italian gangster characters in them and she wanted to watch more, so...
After watching Goodfellas the teenager stated that it was just a load of Italian gangsters doing whatever they wanted and this was boring.
Being a teenager is a minefield.

Tuesday 16 April 2019

Elizabeth


A historical biopic, apparently essential viewing if you're doing a History GCSE, set across many years. Although the only way to know this is by Elizabeth's changing hairstyles as nothing else appeared to really change, presumably there will be a question about this on the exam.

Wednesday 10 April 2019

Pet Sematary


King's most nihilistic novel tamed, given a modern horror polish and turned into a spooky jump scare movie.

Sunday 7 April 2019

The Sister Of Ursula [La sorella di Ursula]


A silhouette with staring green eyes interupts a number of women, usually involved in some sort of softcore sex action, and murders them with a crude wooden dildo. Whilst this is going on the only other character with green eyes spends the entire movie telling people what the killer is going to do and everybody assumes this is because the character in question is pyschic rather than a murderer who's crap at keeping shit to themself. Awful.

Saturday 6 April 2019

Police Story [Ging chaat goo si]


A dazzling compendium of outrageous stuntwork, outrageous fight choreography and an outrageous number of people being thrown through every conceivable breakable object.

Friday 5 April 2019

The Burning


A sleazy Friday The 13th clone with a leering, ogling approach to its female characters made all the more insidious by subplots that try to normalise sexually aggressive behaviour and dismiss sex pests as harmless, which in turn is given an even darker edge by an opening credit that states this was all created by Harvey Weinstein.
All of which is overshadowed by having to watch George from Seinfeld in his early twenties playing a teenager. With hair.

Monday 1 April 2019

The House By The Cemetery [Quella villa accanto al cimitero]


Fulci's innate inability to handle story, subtlety or logic actually works in his favour as every character behaves unusually, creating weird atmospheres that then frequently explode into an excess of gory stabbing. King.