Idiocracy

Starts with full on belly laughs at a startlingly prescient vision of the future and ends with a small shake of the head and a weakly muttered ‘that really should have been a better movie’.

Rigor Mortis [Geung see]

Everything that was awesome about 90s Hong Kong ghost movies - curses, hopping vampires, mad action sequences etc. - made even more awesome by modernising it all and situating everything in a grimy tower block. 

Totally King.

Impetigore [Perempuan Tanah Jahanam]

I was quite often very confused as to just what the fuck was going on, and I couldn’t decide whether this was down to cultural differences or bad film making. Except for the very bad cgi child that tears its own skin off, that’s just bad film making.

Furie [Hai Phuong]

Vietnamese martial arts movie that’s a bit basic most of the time, and anything but when a fight kicks off. Needed more fights.

Spider-Man 2

The teenager wanted to know why the excitement for Doc Ock in the latest Spidey trailer, so we watched this and discovered a myriad of subtle changes that have occurred in superhero cinema over the last two decades, between this and now. We also discovered that it’s still the best live action Spiderman movie and Tobey Maguire is still the shittest Spiderman.

The Night House

Jump scare horror movies aren’t quite passé yet as this proved by making me seismically shit myself. Twice.

Hope Lost

Italian trash that manages to cover sex trafficking, rape, torture, snuff movies and Michael Madsen’s angry acting technique (he throws things at people to punctuate each syllable that he speaks).

The Adventures Of Hercules 2 [Le avventure dell'incredibile Ercole]

An impossible to describe movie, on the one hand it’s shit, there’s simply nothing you could point out and say ‘that’s pretty good’. But on the other hand it’s brilliant because the shit is at such an absurd level it pulls forth belly laughs pretty much throughout.

The Amiga Years: From Bedrooms To Billions

Given the amount of Amiga history that is left out versus the incredible detail it goes into over both individual software packages and the idiosyncratic demo scene, this is less a documentary and more of a love letter that will only really resonate if you were there at the time.

The Green Knight

A lot of arthouse films come off as long, ponderous and dull due to the meditative approach they often take toward their subject. Somewhere along the way this has been confused into the notion that in order to make your non arthouse film ‘arty’ you just have to make it long, ponderous and dull and i’m sorry but shit absolutely does not work that way.

Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood

After the opening trilogy firmly established Vorhees as an unstoppable slaughter machine, the Tommy Doyle trilogy then established him as an unkillable, unstoppable slaughter machine. Part 7 begins the ‘what the fuck are we supposed to do with this character now’ trilogy by pitting Vorhees against a girl with telekinetic powers, once he’s dispatched his usual quota of partying teenagers of course, and it’s absolutely shite.

Ring 0: Birthday [Ring 0: Bâsudei]

A prequel to Ring that fills in the gap between the two Sadako flashbacks from the first movie. To achieve this Sadako has now been split into two characters - one fairly normal lady who gets a story about being in a play, and one creepy ghost lady who turns up for the jump scares and provides everything with an ending. Better than either of the sequels.

The Suicide Squad

There are some people who just get how comic books work, how to get the best out of the format, how to communicate plot and character detail efficiently and how to make it both funny in the right places and awesome in the other places. James Gunn is one of those people, and as a bonus he knows how best to make their stories work on a cinema screen too.

Spiral [Rasen]

The original sequel to Ring, based on the same novels and filmed back to back with the original, allows you to see just how important the changes that Nakata made to the source material were in making his masterpiece because this one is much more faithful to the original books, and is utter bollocks with Sadako now appearing as a sexy ghost trying to be reborn because she’s got a hyper uterus that can clone dead people using their DNA. It’s very, very clear why producers hastily got Nakata to make them a new Ring 2.

Ring 2

Minor characters from the first film scrabble about in any available left over back story not yet explored in a desperate attempt to find a new story, despite the fact they’ve already got a very good story about a cursed videotape that they could just keep on telling instead.