Die Hard

This year the teenager learnt the festive joys to be had from watching John McClane engage in quippy swearing with ruffled German terrorists and then tug jagged chunks of glass from his lacerated feet. At the end she asked 'So in which one does he lose his hair?'

A Christmas Horror Story

Clearly made as a portmanteau movie with three directors but then weirdly edited in to one long narrative that fluctuates wildy in pace and tone. Best described as shit.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens [IMAX 3D]

FUCK YEAH!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens [2D]

Fuck. Yeah!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens [3D]

Fuck, yeah.

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith

Lucas finally manages a decent Star Wars movie, he still drops a few clangers but overall he gets to the point and delivers.

The teenager declared it her favourite of the prequels, her best reaction was probably when the huge double lightsabre battle finale swung into action and she calmly pointed out that everybody involved was in the later movies, therefore nobody died and there wasn't really anything to worry about.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker

Another stand alone story unrelated to the rest of the series, this time about a toy maker called 'Joe Petto' and his son 'Pino'. Despite the main twist being given away by character's names it still manages to build to an admirably deranged finale with a genital-less human size doll dry humping some poor actress before having a bad time on the end of an axe.

Santa Claws ['Tis the Season]

The co-writer of Night Of The Living Dead directs this tawdry excuse to vent his old man's obsession with young ladies revealing their chest area. The killer's weapon is laughably ineffectual, no fucker can act and everything looks like it's been framed by somebody taking a series of extremely shit Christmas holiday photos.

Krampus

Eighties throwback that is most enjoyable when it's invoking the manic energy of Joe Dante at his finest. Unfortunately it's unable to invoke Dante's skill at navigating the weird grey area that exists between being a kids movie and being a grown up one, resulting in the occasional jarring flat note.

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack Of The Clones

Two films carelessly plaited together. The first is an OK story about Obi-Wan doing a bit of spying, the other is a breathtakingly shit tale about Anakin Skywalker and the woman who falls in love with him despite his constant demonstration that he's an emotionally stunted psycopathic twat.

The teenager spent most of this one alternating between complaints about Anakin and queries as to how much was left to watch.

The Good Dinosaur

I'm at a loss as to how such disparate elements can still carry Pixar's emotional heft. It's a Western only with intelligent dinosaurs as the main characters, the landscapes are breathtakingly photorealistic whilst the dinosaurs themselves are basic, plastic cartoons. Whether it works is in no doubt however, as at the end I turned to find the teenager reduced to a blubbering wreck forcing the words 'Saddest kids film ever' through a substantial quantity of snot.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

The flaws run too deep for this to ever be considered a good movie but only the most committed of cynics can deny that it's likeable, at the end of the day for every 'Yippee!' there's an awesome lightsaber moment.

Charlotte's reactions this time round were mostly incredulous, i.e. "THAT'S Darth Vader?" or "Why would somebody's mum let them go off to certain death in space? They have a nice home already" or "Is that thing going to be in the whole movie?" at Jar Jar.

Although when she acted indignant at the idea that young Anakin could destroy an entire spaceship with one shot, it did give me the opportunity to tell her that the shot was one in a million and he is a kid.

Inseminoid [Horror Planet]

The large crew of a spaceship, that looks suspiciously like some caves in the UK, are killed by a woman who has been raped by an alien with a giant glass tube for a penis and who then goes on to give birth to two oversized Kinder Egg toys.

The Hand That Feeds Death [La mano che nutre la morte/Evil Face]

A very Italian attempt to create a gothic horror tale about graphic skin transplants using a series of incongruous props, costumes and sets clearly left over from an old Western movie.

Anguish [Angustia]

As the end credits rolled I found myself watching an audience, who had watched a film about an audience getting seriously freaked out by an exaggerated, tripped-out version of Psycho, a large portion of which involved a madman terrorizing an audience as they watched a film about dinosaurs.
King.